FOALS THE GUITAR INTERVIEW
It’s safe to say 2019 has been a banner year for Foals. In March, the Oxford four-piece released their fifth album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1, which hit No. 2 in the charts and garnered them their third nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. But they’re not done with 2019 just yet. October sees the band drop their second album of the year, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 2 and with talk of a 2020 Glastonbury headline slot heating up, it feels like 2019 will be remembered as the moment when the band ascended to the heights their 15-year graft has merited.
Not that guitarists Yannis Philippakis and Jimmy Smith have any plans to scale back the hard work. We catch up with them before a headline show at Moscow’s Adrenaline Stadium, at the tail-end of a mammoth world tour to support Part 1, which will kick off again once Part 2 has been released: “Yeah, it’s a lot,” admits Yannis a little wearily. “We’re doing 130 shows, I think?”
But Foals are used to mammoth undertakings – after all, this is a band that came off the touring cycle for 2015’s What Went Down and decided to make two albums in one go. But that wasn’t always the intention… “There wasn’t a pre-considered plan,” says Yannis. “We just we had quite a bit of time off after What Went Down and that ended up in us just having a lot of material that we wanted to work on.” Jimmy explains: “The big whiteboard in the studio has always got something like 20 songs on it – and usually that’s knocked down to about 12…”
“IF EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST – PART 1 WAS MORE CONTEMPLATIVE AND CONSIDERED, PART 2 IS MORE AN EXPRESSION OF RAGE AND FRUSTRATION”
“For a long time, we didn’t know whether we would finish all of
