Foals give update on new album and tease "lots more music" for 2022

5 November 2021, 13:07 | Updated: 5 November 2021, 13:35

Yannis from Foals give update on new album and "stomping" new tunes

By Jenny Mensah

Frontman Yannis Philippakis has spoken about the progress of the band's new album and revealed we can expect it to drop next year.

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Foals have given us a timeframe of when to expect their seventh studio album.

The band released their comeback single, Wake Me Up, this week and frontman Yannis Philippakis revealed how far along they've come with their new record.

Asked if they had a title and release date, he told Radio X's George Godfrey: "We're not quite at that stage yet. We're close. We're close. That's what I can say.

"We're kinda messing around with titles. We're actually still messing around with what the album is actually going to be and we're doing the final stages, but there'll be lots more music coming out next year and there will be an album out next year."

Asked about the inspiration behind the single, the frontman revealed that it was written in lockdown in order to celebrate "the re-emergence of the world" and a time when everyone could be together again on the "dance floor".

"The song is for the dance floor, really," explained Yannis. "For our idea of the dance floor. We wrote it during the second lockdown and we were in south London and we had access to a little small studio.

"And obviously as everyone knows, it was a pretty bleak time and it was kind of depressing and we didn't really want to add to any of that heaviness.

He continued: "We just wanted to selfishly for ourselves write music that would cheer us up. You know, so that we we'd go into the room, we'd such the door and we could just be transported to somewhere else and transport ourselves to an imagined future where us and our mates would be back on the dance floor and people would be having house parties and you could go to the pub and all of the stuff that we were missing."

"So basically, the tune was kind of written for that it. In a way it was written for the re-emergence of the world."

FOALS - Wake Me Up [Official Music Video]

The tune wasn't always called Wake Me Up, nor was it immediately considered a single. However, Yannis explained how playing it at festivals under the "working title" Nova this year spurred them on to complete and release the track.

"We played it three or four times over the summer.

"We'd been working on new music up until those shows, so we thought, 'let's try something new' and also we just thought it would be the perfect kind of song for people getting back together again for the first time and it went down a storm, so then that kind of pushed us on to get it finished and get it out."

He added: "We can't believe how quickly it's come round. There was a period where we were writing and we thought we would never get back on tour, so we're just chuffed that things are getting back to normal."

Watch our full interview here: