Amos Barshad

Foals — a brawny, dancey, heartfelt rock band — came up in the late 2000s playing hometown house parties and South London squats built out of abandoned hostels. “Chaos,” said Philippakis, 33, gleaming-eyed when asked what he remembered from those days. “And a kind of beautiful naïveté. And, like, I never felt tired.” He smiled. “There was one gig where a whole wall got demolished by fire extinguishers and everyone was on ketamine.”

Philippakis recalled this, over many cigarettes and one sparkling water, on the roof of a Paris venue overlooking the Notre Dame cathedral, a few hours before a recent Foals show. Last week, the band released the second half of a two-part album, “Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost,” that explores the apocalypse by way, abstractedly, of the climate crisis. “The hedges are on fire in the country lanes,” Philippakis broods over spare piano and synths on “I’m Done With the World (&amp; It’s Done With Me),” “and all I want to do is get out of the rain.”

It’s an earnest, audacious project. And it’s right on brand. In the decade-plus since they were playing druggie house parties, Foals have grown into a very specific modern-day anomaly. They’re signed to Warner Bros. and Q Prime management, home to Metallica, Muse and Disturbed. They’ve also been nominated for Britain’s esteemed Mercury Prize three times. They are now one of a spare handful of contemporary, critically acclaimed and commercially viable rock acts.

They didn’t always seem destined for wider audiences. For their 2008 debut, “Antidotes,” Philippakis said he wanted to make techno with guitars: “I almost set out a manifesto. No chords, everything played staccato, really clean.” The result was a wonderfully strange collection of stop-start bangers. Back then, he sang with the microphone facing stage right. Finally, a manager intervened: “You’ve got to start [expletive] facing the crowd.’”

But looking back now, the band always had ambitions. “I was really worried that we were going to have a taste of it and it was going to be taken away,” Philippakis said. “We’d seen a lot of bands in the U.K. get pumped up by the NME and then implode.”

By their second album two years later, “Total Life Forever,” they’d moved away from the obliqueness of their debut and smoothed out the staccato. Soon enough, Philippakis said, “I felt like we couldn’t be erased.” Albums in 2013 and 2015 followed, before this year’s double release. Now they’re gunning for the top slot at the Glastonbury festival. (SkyBet has them as a 7/4 favorite, alongside Paul McCartney and Fleetwood Mac, to headline next year.)

Their live show is purposefully boozy and shambolic. Philippakis likes to clamber onto balconies and other high-rise structures, or to float his way to the bar and slug a shot. “It needs to be almost shamanic,” he said. “The show is a chase: We’re chasing that transcendent moment. You’re getting yourself to the edge of yourself — and then, ideally, losing yourself.”

The guitarist Jimmy Smith, 35, explained how they get there. “Yannis drummed it into us from a really early stage: Play every show like it’s your last,” he said.

There have been times, the 34-year-old drummer Jack Bevan said, that the show got so out of hand, he stopped playing altogether: “I felt like, ‘If I keep four to the floor, he’s going to kill someone.’” Congreave, 35, said their frontman can even wander away from the song: “Sometimes Yannis is doing a solo and he’s kind of — in another world. He’s — playing cosmically. And he’s playing — the wrong notes.”

In the last few years, Philippakis’ climate-change anxiety has started to keep him up nights. Channeling that into the music, he explained, was about trying to engage beyond the immediate concerns of his romantic or filial relationships, the stuff that powered the previous albums.

Philippakis wrote the lyrics for these new albums in a furious month and a half, almost entirely in pubs. He wanted the lyrics to pour out of him. He hoped to archive, naturally, “the insecurities and perils” of what it feels like to be alive today.

Congreave, the band’s in-house cynic, said he’s glad Foals are talking about climate change but added, “We should be running around screaming, not having conversations.” Philippakis, though, said he tries to avoid nihilism and “oh-dear-ism.”: “I’m always looking to convert life into music.” And it’s true; someone has to write the songs that people listen to while they feel bad that the world is falling apart.

Both the double album and the overtures to the climate crisis can also be seen another way: as a grander statement, a shot at a wider relevance. Peter Mensch, a co-founder of Q Prime, has worked with stadium rock bands since the 1970s, and is candid about the band’s place in the firmament. “We’re standing on the SS Her Majesty’s Ship the Album and we’re bailing water as fast as we can!” he shouted over the phone. And while he doesn’t want Foals to change, he believes they can still access a bigger audience.

“There’s a whole bunch of people who are obsessed by Foals,” Mensch said, “and there’s a whole bunch of people who don’t know who they are.” He said he’d love for Philippakis to write a hit. “Chances are that it won’t [happen],” he added. But he wants the band to reach megastardom, “And I will literally die trying.”

The Paris show, an underplay to a 700-capacity room, was packed full of young people. Some were, consciously or otherwise, cosplaying as Philippakis, in loud, short-sleeved button-ups and thin gold chains. They shouted along with him and followed all his commands, including one to crouch down to the floor mid-breakdown on “Inhaler,” then pogo back up.

At the end of the set, Philippakis abandoned his guitar and waded into the crowd. With one hand he held his microphone; with the other he clasped hands with a fan. From between the crush of bodies it was hard to tell if it was for balance, or for that extra oomph of communion.

This article originally appeared in

Foals Are Writing the Soundtrack to an Apocalypse

PARIS — The Foals keyboardist Edwin Congreave met Yannis Philippakis, his future frontman, at an ice cream shop in the English town of Oxford. Congreave had just been hired, while Philippakis was cheekily returning to a scene of a crime: He’d been fired a few weeks earlier for incinerating the shop’s mascot, a polystyrene toy cow, in a toaster oven, to impress a girl. Both also briefly matriculated at Oxford University. “I dropped out because I was an idiot,” Congreave said. “But with Yannis,...

Chatten had to kill the better part of the next 24 hours, waiting for the next flight. He passed the time, he said, by “drinking bad Guinness until it tasted like good Guinness.” In the air, he kept going with plenty of free wine. Eventually, Chatten made it back to Dublin and to his parents’ house — or “gaff,” as he calls it — where he lives between touring.

Later that day, in an interview with his bandmates at a pub near the studio where they rehearse, Chatten had a rolled cigarette in his hand and a Flann O’Brien novel in his overcoat pocket. He recalled that he was still drunk when his dad came to collect him at Dublin Airport. But the old man wasn’t upset at the boozy state of his son, Chatten said: “He joined in when we got home!”

The vagaries of rock band road life may not pair naturally with filial domesticity, but that’s just where Fontaines D.C. is at right now.

A tour for the band’s debut album, “Dogrel,” released in April, has taken Fontaines D.C. all over Europe and the United States. The summer has been a blur of major festival dates, plus a punchy performance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and a nomination for the Mercury Prize, a major British music award.

Fontaines D.C. is an anarchic guitar rock band in a bleep-bloop present. And unexpectedly, it’s become one of the biggest Irish breakout acts in years.

The emphasis is on Irish. The band references Ireland’s famed literary tradition — from the works of giants like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats to lesser-known figures like the poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh — as inspiration. They don’t seem afraid of how unhip that might sound in 2019.

The formula on “Dogrel” is simultaneously timeworn and specific: over guitars and drums, Chatten delivers oblique, compact poems about Dublin. “You know I love that violence that you get around here, that kind of ready-steady violence,” Chatten singsong shouts on the track “Liberty Belle”: It could be a hand sweep toward Ireland’s bloody history, or a nod toward a rough night out in the city.

The band’s five members, all in their early 20s, met as songwriting students at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in Dublin, and initially bonded over their shared love of those lions of Irish words. The band grew, naturally, out of their friendship and shared interests.

For a few years starting from 2016, they ambled about playing local gigs and shuffling through sartorial phases, they said: In one, no matter the weather, they wore Echo and the Bunnymen-inspired long coats; in another, it was all women’s crop tops.

They spent as much time rehearsing as they did writing verse, bassist Conor Deegan recalled. They’d go to pubs and pass a shared notebook around the table; they self-published chapbooks and slipped them into bookstores. They put on readings with other writers, including a soap salesman-poet they met in Sweny’s, the drugstore that features in Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“We pounded each other down to our bare emotions,” Chatten said, remembering those times. “And that’s why we’re friends for life. And enemies for life.”

That kind of open intensity and proud sensitivity might explain why a traditional white-dude rock band has hit a nerve, when the world seems to need anything but more white-dude rock.

“I certainly don’t think that there’s any element of machismo” to Fontaines D.C., Chatten said.

“We’d just sit and read books and drink pints and think fancifully,” Deegan added.

Mesmerizing early 7-inch singles like “Chequeless Reckless” and “Hurricane Laughter” caught the attention of the U.S. indie label Partisan Records, which signed Fontaines D.C. in November 2018. Then “Dogrel” was released, and the band’s lives were upended. They were living on rice and Tabasco not that long ago, Deegan said; nowadays, he added, the label worked them to the bone with festival dates.

The band’s last chance for a vacation, a few precious days in Mexico City, was stolen by the offer to play “The Tonight Show” in New York. Their next chance for a break, Conor Curley, a guitarist, mumbled, could be taken away “by a [expletive] gig on the moon or something.”

But the hard work was worth it, Chatten said: Fontaines D.C. wants to give the world a view of Ireland that neither accepts antiquated clichés nor rejects the past.

Even so, the band’s love of Joyce and Yeats is unusual; young punk-adjacent bands aren’t supposed to love dusty books you get assigned in high school. A fellow Dubliner, Sally Rooney — perhaps the most famous young novelist in the world right now — has taken shots at her literary forebears. “I hate Yeats!’ she told the Irish Independent newspaper in 2017. “How has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man?”

But Chatten said Ireland was “sitting on a gold mine of history.”

“For us to pretend it doesn’t exist is for us to become a whitewashed, faceless country, which means we are essentially robots with particular accents,” he added.

His deep interest in Ireland’s history and culture went back to coming from somewhere else, the singer said. He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, though he was raised in Ireland from the age of 9 weeks. “I was insecure about my Irishness,” Chatten said. “I wanted to achieve an understanding and a verification.”

Another band Chatten likes that fixates on Irish things is Girl Band, he said, a Dublin trio whose song “Um Bongo” revolves around a mundane local street snack. “For Girl Band to scream the words ‘chicken fillet roll’ over and over again — it’s so poignant,” he said. “Not all romance has to belong to the past. And if we can accept that as a society, I think we might be happier.” Or at least more romantic. Eventually, the band had to leave the pub. They were meeting with their record label, the drummer Tom Coll said: There was “anxiety-inducing” 2020 business planning to attend to. Before they got up, Chatten took a last gulp of his Guinness, then reached through a forest of empty pint glasses for a takeout menu from a Moscow cafe that was lying on the table. He’d scribbled down some scraps of verse on it during the tour. “I don’t know if you want that,” he said, handing it over.

On the back were scrawled fragments about a “salvaged life to live again” and “heaven through the fog,” “Irish mind” and “Irish eye.” It was a romantic thing to do, to hand over a note covered with half-baked poetry — and perfectly on brand for a band so unafraid of seeming naive.

“Later Sam,” Chatten said to the bartender as he strolled out.

“Yeah,” the bartender answered. “See you on the TV shows.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/arts/music/fontaines-dc.html" id="a73bb8ed-6385-3993-a73a-cb7e78df051d">The New York Times</a>.

Irish Band Channels the Spirit of Punk, and James Joyce

DUBLIN — In one week in July, the Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. went from the Glastonbury Festival to Copenhagen to Barcelona to St. Petersburg to Moscow. At the airport on the way back from that last stop, the frontman, Grian Chatten, wandered off to buy some headphones while the rest of the band got on the plane.

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

Explore categories

Checkout our authors for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone |  Pulse Uganda

Authors | Pulse Uganda

| Pulse Uganda

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Breaking News & Top Stories | Pulse Uganda

Read the latest news across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone. 

Pulse Uganda

Search for the latest content across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Search Results | Pulse Uganda

Watch the latest videos across entertainment, sports, business and more. Be first to receive exclusive updates with your free subscription straight to your phone | Pulse Uganda

Amos Barshad

Articles written by the author

Foals Are Writing the Soundtrack to an Apocalypse

Irish Band Channels the Spirit of Punk, and James Joyce