Foals Guitarist Talks New Album Ahead of Mission Ballroom Performance

Foals guitarist Jimmy Smith considers “happy” a bit of a dodgy word. But happy is how any listener would describe the indie rock band’s infinitely danceable seventh record, despite the fact that Life Is Yours was written during the pandemic lockdowns in a gray, wintry London.

“It was pretty bleak — a sort of unknown time,” Smith recalls. “It was a little bit scary, but I was writing some music on my own, and so was [Foals singer and guitarist Yannis Philippakis], and it was largely positive-sounding.”

They decided to flout the stay-at-home rules a bit, walking down to a rehearsal space in the miserable weather to just play for eight hours and then go home. It was a blast, and kept the blues away. “I’m just so glad that existed in my life, because without it, I wouldn’t have had any human contact with anyone,” Smith reflects. “It really was quite, quite, quite grim, and also back then, we didn’t know when it was going to endn either.”

But despite the state of the world, the Oxford-born trio, which also includes drummer and percussionist Jack Bevan, found itself gravitating toward the more positive-sounding material in its repertoire. “It was way more fun to play,” Smith explains. “So we were like, ‘I think we are going to make a positive record.’”

Playing upbeat music may have been incongruous to the morose atmosphere of the outside world, but they ran with it. The result doesn’t constitute a radical departure from the band’s previous output, by any means, but Life Is Yours does possess an overall sonic cohesiveness that its predecessors did not. Smith says Foals usually touches on numerous styles throughout the course of an album; Life Is Yours feels like one piece of music broken up into eleven tracks.

“They are all from the same family,” Smith says. “It doesn’t feel like as much of a journey as the other records, which is cool. We wanted an easygoing simplicity to everything.”

The sentiment is reminiscent of the Madchester scene that developed in Manchester, England, in the late 1980s. That music has been known as upbeat and made for dancing, but the people were making it to escape from their surroundings in the then-grim industrial town. “Now it’s been gentrified,” Smith says of Manchester. “I imagine back then it was super post-industrial, very poor, like a lot of people out of work. It was a pretty brutal time in Britain. … I think that was probably a really tough time, especially as a musician.”

Making music at home and sneaking off to a rehearsal space was what Smith considers a “Get Out From Depression Clause.” Aside from that, he played video games, talked on the phone and smoked weed to pass the time. “The U.K. government missed a bit of a trick there,” he says. “They should have legalized weed. I imagine them sitting around a boardroom being like, ‘What can we possibly do to keep everyone happy?’”

Life Is Yours is the band’s first record as a trio after the departure of bassist Edwin Congreave. Smith says the band’s core songwriting has generally come from him, Bevans and Philippakis, so the lineup shift didn’t impact the composition all that much. He adds that he did miss Congreave’s “very good critical ear” in the studio.

“If I play a song I’ve written to him, I’ll be like ‘This is the dog’s bollocks,’" Smith says. “He’s like, ‘No, it isn’t because of this.’ He was really good at pointing out stuff that you’d never even think of, so I missed that.”

Smith says that maybe it’s a bit shallow to put it this way, but Life Is Yours is meant to be a fun dance record. But it’s in no way a forgettable dance record; the trio put a lot of work into imparting some depth to the sounds.

“The fundamental principle is we had the shittest time of all time,” he says. “Let’s go have a bit of fun.”

Foals plays Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street, at 8 p.m. Monday, November 7. Tickets are $36-$75.