Good day to you, and thank you for gearing up for another daily upload on One Track At A Time. I’m Jacob Braybrooke and I’ve got another eventful daily track in store for you on the blog, since it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! Typically, I only tend to have around 7% of my week’s energy left in me on a Saturday morning like this, and so a new track with the title of ‘Wake Me Up’ could be the caffeine pill that I need to keep me motivated today. It comes from the Oxford-formed rock band Foals, who are commercial heavyweights in the UK, who are led by Greek-born vocalist/guitarist Yannis Phillippakis. Foals won ‘Best Live Act’ at the Q Awards in 2013, as well as ‘Best British Group’ at the BRIT Awards in 2020, and they have toured internationally for over a decade. They also performed a surprise set at Glastonbury in 2019 and their discography includes a staggering number of 27 singles at time of writing. The last time we heard from Foals was when they released ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1’ in March 2019 followed up by ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 2′ in October 2019, which was Foals’ first album to reach the top of the UK Albums Chart, and it doesn’t feel like a gap of two years at all. Those bodies of work matched political and ecological themes against daring Dance-Rock and their trademark Indie Rock sound that made heavy albums like 2015’s ‘What Went Down’ hits in the mainstream. Last September, keyboardist Edwin Congreave decided to leave the band to pursue a postgraduate degree in Economics and, now as a trio, the rest of the band have been writing and producing their new album with Dan Carey (Sinead O’Brien, Black Midi) and John Hill (Carly Rae Jepsen, Bleachers) in Peckham, with the album due for a release at an as-of-yet undetermined point during 2022. Our first tease of it – ‘Wake Me Up’ – is below.
Described by frontman Yannis Phillippakis as “Our version of a dance or disco record” with lyrics which “transport oneself out of the oppression of lockdown and the bleakness of last year”, in a press release, ‘Wake Me Up’ is Foals’ first track since they lost a member to find them experimenting with different elements of Psych-Rock and revisiting the interlocking nature of the grooves and the guitars architecturally that have made Foals a household name in recent years, with Phillippakis concluding that, “With ‘Wake Me Up’, I just wanted to write a song about transporting yourself to a better, idyllic situation”, in his lengthy press statement. Kicking off immediately with a shimmering lead guitar riff that is met in the middle by an energetic drum section and some very intense percussion, Phillippakis awakens us with “I’m walking through a dream/I’m walking through the finest place I’ve ever seen” as the opening hook, encouraging the listener to make a swift return to reality after spending ages sitting at home due to the law’s enforcement. Punchy refrains like “I’m kicking down the doors, I’m climbing up the walls of the house that’s yours” keep the fiesty rhythm of the drum’s brisk cadence intact, while a later verse goes for more of a chant-along style with a light call-and-response format that will likely find large summer festival crowds repeating lines like “Deny your own expression, deny the things you now” and “I’m deleting all the codes, no I’m not that man you know” back at the band, with brief lyrical explorations of masculinity that add some nuance to the band’s musings of their experiences during various lockdown periods, with the ideas of independence and seeking your own path back to joy each coming through the most strongly throughout the overall tone of the new single. There’s an 80’s tinge to the Synth-enhanced guitar chords, and the upbeat lyrics are likely to relate to a wide crowd of listeners. Foals’ sound is certainly appealing to a lot of crowds including Radio X’s target demographics, football fans who play FIFA on their favourite gaming consoles, and large festival crowds who gather around for a good time for the weekend’s shows, and so I can understand why they have found popularity by connecting with various communities. Yanis’ voice is as powerful as ever on ‘Wake Me Up’ as he builds up a commanding presence through his vocals that don’t overlap the flexing style of the instrumentation all too much. Overall, I felt that ‘Wake Me Up’ sounds very solid. It’s not something that feels hugely original and it’s not unexpected from Foals, but the joyous vibe of a Disco ball with a flavour of good old rock and roll is welcome and it sounds cheerful, thus putting me in a good mood. I enjoyed the more Synth-driven electronic dance sound that was hidden in prior singles like ‘Exits’, and the 5-minute showcase of ‘In Degrees’ more specifically, quite a deal – but this dance-rock style is simply made more obvious by ‘Wake Me Up’ in my opinion. A fun and immediate comeback that carries their ‘greatest hits’ while feeling (just about) refreshed enough.
That leaves me with nothing much left to write other than to thank you for checking out my latest blog post as I finally draw my musical musing of the day to a natural conclusion. ‘Scuzz Sundays’ is back tomorrow, as always, however – and we’ll be remembering a guitar-oriented rock band from Leytonshire, East London for this week. They only released two albums before splitting up in 2008, but they developed a strong cult following that still praise them to this day and they opened up the Radio 1/NME stage at Reading and Leeds Festival in 2005. Although disappointing second album sales and a lack of label marketing led to a short lifespan, they re-united for two gigs in Oslo, Hackney, London in 2016. They also performed on ‘Top Of The Pops’.
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