Scottish post-punk quartet Foreignfox have have released a new single “The Long Jump.” That’s the title track of a forthcoming EP by the same name, which is due out in December, but doesn’t have a set date yet. The EP is a prelude to a new LP due to follow in 2022. If your musical preferences include big guitars, gut-punch honesty, soaring choruses, and a little darkness, this might be your cup of tea.
If you don’t know Foreignfox yet, welcome, and you’re not alone. In 2019, they were, to me, an inexplicably obscure band on the verge of a well-deserved breakout. Enter COVID, and said breakout was postponed until now.
I caught up with singer / guitarist / songwriter Jonny Watt via email for five questions about the new tunes, lyrical inspiration, mental health, tour, and teacakes. You can check out that interview underneath the new single below.
Matt: While COVID is nowhere near past tense, it seems that we are slowly nudging towards some sort of sustainable “new normal.” How has the band survived—or thrived?—during the unprecedented challenges of the last year and a half?
Jonny: Thriving would be a bit of a push to be honest, but we made it out the other side relatively unscathed. The lockdown in Scotland was really quite strict and lasted for what felt like forever, so all the places we would normally play, rehearse and record together were shut down. Zoom just wasn’t cutting it.
We managed to finally get out, with our good friend and director Rory Cowieson of Tongue Twister Films, for what was deemed as “essential media work,” to make the short film for “Fractions” in beautiful locations all around Scotland. The empty streets really added to the end of the world vibe we were going for.
I think the best thing that came from it was that we had time to write and re-evaluate who and what we are as a band. It also gave us time to reflect on everything we had done so far together, reminding us to take the time to appreciate it when we finally all got back in the rehearsal room.
It’s a privilege to be able to play music with your mates, we won’t forget that in a hurry. Other than that though, it was a lot of booze and developing terrible eating habits.
Foreignfox has moved towards a more expansive sound with the forthcoming The Long Jump EP. Is this a calculated move—a function of finally having the time and resources needed to pull off such deeply layered recordings—or something more spontaneous?
There was so much we wanted to get out lyrically with shit that had happened in and around our lives that it kinda demanded a more expansive composition.
I think some artists favour the composition or the lyrics. I’ve always found, for the style that we play anyway, when the two intertwine it can make a track greater than the sum of its parts.
One line from a song can tell an entire story of emotion with the context given to it by what the instrumentation is doing.
Because we had the time, we were constantly thinking “This isn’t as heavy as it should be” or “this isn’t kicking me in the face like it could be”, so we experimented A LOT, and this is what came out.
Lyrically, most Foreignfox songs are written from a first-person perspective. At times, this has entailed adopting a persona of sorts, such as in the song “Birthday Flowers,” which was inspired by a friend’s traumatic loss. But generally speaking . . . do you find it preferable to be “in” your lyrics, or instead to translate others’ experiences? Stepping in someone else’s shoes seems like a monumental poetic responsibility. Let’s hear a bit about how you navigate your storytelling.
Wow, great question and something I’ve not really thought about in depth before.
I think it helps me to write from a more visceral place if I put myself in the shoes of the protagonist. It was a trick I learned after listening to the debut Glasvegas album when I was a teenager, and I remember reading an article about how James had found inspiration from a news article about some tragedy that meant a dad leaving his kids behind.
He spoke about putting himself in the shoes of that kid, and it helped him to empathise with the situation and delve deep into what he would feel in that situation.
For this EP especially, it’s a reflection of feeling isolated and coming to grips with being your own company, so it’s written from the viewpoint of being trapped in your own head. I’m sure we’ll see this evolving and opening up with future releases, reflecting reality. I’m big into the whole art imitates life imitates art thing.
So, what are the band’s plans for 2022? And is there any hope of some U.S. dates in the not-too-distant future?
We’re hoping to hit the ground running in 2022 with a UK/EU tour, music releases, accompanying visuals and to get out and reach as many people as far out as we can.
A US tour has been a dream of ours for the last few years—we’re constantly looking for ways to fly across the pond and play some shows. It’ll be interesting to see how everything works now that the world is opening back up.
If any cool US bands are looking for four Scottish boys to tour with them and provide Tunnocks tea cakes & patter for days, hit us up!
What do you wish someone would ask right now—so you would have the opportunity to share about it? Q5 is all yours.
Aw man, I’d just like to wax lyrical about all of the great work organisations like SAMH (Scottish Association for Mental Health), Tiny Changes and Andy’s Mans Club are doing to help de-stigmatize mental health and save peoples’ lives in the process.
Not long before the pandemic, and even during, there were so many lads around our age, people we had grown up with, worked with, partied with, that decided life was no longer worth it. It has had an immense knock-on effect in the area we live, and it doesn’t stop until organisations like these help to break the cycle.
There are obviously deep-rooted socio-economic reasons that it will take massive political will to help rectify, but in the meantime, these people offer more than a plaster (band-aid) for these issues.
They’re really helping people, and that’s what life’s all about, isn’t it.
