'There's A Reason Why Music Is Important': Foals Are Anxious About The Environment Too

Since the touring cycle for 2015’s What Went Down, British rock band Foals have felt a mounting level of eco-anxiety – worry or agitation caused by concerns about threats to the natural environment. “The perils that we face environmentally were just speeding up towards us,” frontman Yannis Philippakis begins.

That concern for the environment comes through strongly on both parts of their latest project, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost. The first record, Part 1, came out in March this year, earning the band their third Mercury Prize nomination. Part 2 is released this week. 

It feels serendipitous that the album should drop less than a month after the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, and as Extinction Rebellion protests gain media coverage across the globe.

Phillippakis says that it’s not a “coincidence” that these themes came to the fore when the band were writing the records last year. 

“I really wanted to try to express a sense of anxiety about the environment and about things being precarious."

“It’s obviously burst into a bigger consciousness, it's become more public, partly because of Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion,” Philippakis continues. “It's just built, hasn't it? Awareness has built and people are getting more and more concerned, and they're right to be. It's not like a coincidence. We've been thinking about that stuff for a while, like a lot of people have. It just so happened some of it's in the record.”  

Each part of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost explores the end of the world – but does so by drawing upon the realities of our lives now, where the threat of climate catastrophe looms, technology encroaches upon our lives, and our political landscape becomes increasingly divisive.

For Philippakis, the albums are set in London, a place which, like Europe as a whole, is “in decline, and the great days are behind, and it’s haunted by its own past”.

“I really wanted to try to express a sense of anxiety about the environment and about things being precarious. And also anxiety about technology. And about just where things are headed. I guess I really wanted it to express that kind of confusion and feeling of insecurity.”

Writing the lyrics in London pubs over the summer helped him to remain focused and tap into a kind of shared sense of anxiety. With his headphones in, he’d look up at peer groups and people from different generations talking to each other. “I would just be looking at a kind of microcosm of society.

“[Writing in pubs] kept me looking outward in a way where I don't feel like I've done that before. Normally, I kind of get lost in myself and end up with lyrics that might be slightly more abstract. Whereas by writing in the pub, it was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to write about that, I'm going to write about the invisible glue around us.'"

Last year, founding bassist Walter Gervers left Foals, the band becoming a four-piece – Philippakis on lead vocals and lead guitar, Jack Bevan on drums, Jimmy Smith on rhythm guitar, and Edwin Congreave on keys. Philippakis and Congreave now share the bass role, the former writing the parts, with Congreave playing on the album. Everything Everything bassist Jeremy Pritchard has been playing live with the band. “The roles in the band became more fluid,” Philippakis says.

For 2013’s Holy Fire and 2015's What Went Down, the band recorded in a small studio in their hometown of Oxford. There, they would “make a racket basically for a couple of months, and then at the end of it, you’d have those songs, after much fighting and whatever”. “This time we couldn’t do that, and it didn’t feel good going back to Oxford, so we sacked that off," Philippakis explains.

Instead, the group found a studio in Peckham, southeast London, where they started recording right from the offset, this time leaving improvisational jams like the one on Neptune on the final product. “This time we were more interested in trying to capture those early stages on record,” Philippakis says. 

Part 1 of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost ends with the fire imagery of Sunday, and the hopeless feeling of I’m Done With The World (& It’s Done With Me). The Runner, from Part 2, is a song about “picking yourself up and trying to keep going through the wreckage”. 

If Part 2 is about “find[ing] a sense of purpose”, and pushing onwards in the face of a dramatically different world, how does Foals, the band, also constantly move forward? 

Philippakis says that they’ve always had “a healthy disregard for our own sound”: “I feel that we could've done Antidotes a few times over.” 

But that was never of interest to the band, who first rose to public acclaim as part of the mid-‘00s British math-rock scene. “I think we really have pushed ourselves quite far between each record and we've taken some risks,” he says. “It has been a decade, so we've had time to do it.

“I feel there are so many things we'd like to do and could do, but it's about actually limiting possibilities.” 

In the past, Philippakis would have been reluctant to say he, as an artist, has any obligation to use his music to grapple with issues facing the world today. But he’s since changed his mind. 

“I think we do assume obligation when you've got like the political changes that have occurred in the last five years where it feels like we've regressed into some strange parallel reality where like truth has no meaning and facts are irrelevant. There's that and then there's the environment.

“There is an obligation to do a bit more [now] – even if it's in a small way. I just think if somebody reads an interview or feels a sense of solidarity with us because we're on the same page politically, then these small connective things are important.”          

Still, these serious themes are balanced by the music – Part 2 has a “rockier” edge than Part 1, but at their core, the songs are made for dancing. Philippakis notes a Foals album was never going to be “lecturing”. 

“I'm not the kind of lyric writer where it will ever be really, really political in a sort of capital P, slogan sense. We're never going to become The Clash.

“I think partly with this record I felt the music had such energy to it, and often was quite uplifting or was physically gratifying, so that it could withstand some of the heavier themes. The lyrics would balance out or would just go well with the music.” 

"There's a reason why music is important, it gives people motivation and consolation and hope and all of these things."

Perhaps all we can do now is dance to a Foals album while the world burns. Philippakis scoffs politely at the proposition.

People can look after themselves in an increasingly fraught world, he suggests, by attempting to live sustainably. 

“I think it's really important for people to go out and to try live sustainably where possible,” he says. “Obviously, it is hypocritical coming from somebody who tours.”

Still, he does see the power of music in troubling times, and what musicians can contribute to a global political effort. 

“There's been Extinction Rebellion protests in London over the last few days, and there's been so many musicians playing there. There's a reason why music is important, it gives people motivation and consolation and hope and all of these things. I think music's no less important because things are bleak outside.”