For many of us, Foster The People soundtracked our teenage years. Released in 2011, the band’s debut album ‘Torches’ — which included the viral hit “Pumped Up Kicks” — thrust them into the spotlight and set them apart as melodic masterminds with an arsenal of earworms under their belt. Their third LP, ‘Sacred Hearts Club’, saw the four-piece make some adjustments, with longtime touring members Sean Cimino and Isom Innis being officially added to the lineup and credited in the creation process.
A self-produced effort between Tenessee-based Innis and LA-based leadman Mark Foster, the release saw the band tackle a tumultuous political climate with an encompassing mantra of joy as a weapon — a sentiment channelled through cross-genre grooves, meticulously constructed hooks, and fluid song structure.
Following back-to-back Europe and North American tour dates, Foster The People were recently on Aussie shores to bring in the year with Falls Festival and a string of headline shows. Tennessee-based multi-instrumentalist Isom took time out to chat about the progression as a band, the impact of streaming on music tastes, and the unlikely influence of J. Cole‘s Dreamville Records on ‘Sacred Hearts Club’.
Best Before: Hi, Isom! How are you? Are you back in Nashville?
Isom Innis: Yeah, I am, actually. We’re spending a couple of days here. We’re happy for a very late Christmas celebration.
You guys were away from home for a huge chunk of this year. You wrapped up your North America tour not long ago. How did audiences respond to the new material live?
When we wrote ‘Sacred Hearts Club’, we had playing festivals and playing live in mind. This is our third record as a band – the first record we put out, we’d never toured the world, and in the wake of ‘Torches’, we had the blessing of being able to travel across the world and play festivals and that’s this never-ending idea that gets planted in your brain. When you approach writing music in the wake of that, it changes the way you record, because we’re focused on not only trying to crack the code on a song and changing our instincts but wanting to write something that we’ll be able to play on stage really for as long as people want to come to our shows.
I saw that you played in the Czech Republic for the first time. Even though you’ve played hundreds of shows, do you ever get nervous when you’re performing somewhere new for the first time?
Playing a new place, when you have no preconception of even the geography of the city – you might have a little idea of what it’s like in your head, but when you step on stage, you get to take a new audience with you. It’s one of the best things about being in a band. We’ve been to a lot of places all over the, for us, it was the first time we’d ever been to the Czech Republic and it was amazing.
“After we had finished, we were all silent, and Mark brought up the elephant in the room and was like, “Guys, this isn’t done yet.””
On this record, you’re not only recognised as a touring member but credited as a band member and Mark (Foster) says you’re responsible for a lot of the beats this time around. What was your approach to creating the beats and the grooves that underscore ‘Sacred Hearts Club’?
For me, I have this neverending obsession with J Dilla, and as a band, we all have such a profound love for hip-hop music and dance music, as well as post-punk. We really have such diverse tastes in the band, but for me, I’m kind of always sitting and making beats. In the band, we’re all really producers and writers. For this record, a lot of these songs came from ideas I would send Mark when we’d be sitting in the studio, or sometimes I’d e-mail him if we were on other sides of the country. A lot of these songs started as beats, and Mark would hear and he would respond musically. “Loyal Like Syd And Nancy” was one of the early songs that I feel captured what we knew we wanted the record to sound like. Prior to that song, we had been writing more band-oriented organic tracks.
I played Mark this atonal dance music beat, and he took it and responded musically — he has such a strong voice as an artist — not only as a vocalist and a lyricist, but as a musical writer. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, so he hopped on it with an analog synthesiser and played this orchestral crescendo, and that’s really the last thing that you would expect to hear on an atonal dance track. One thing about working with Mark is, he’s going to move the opposite way. It was such a drawn-out process, but I would show him more avant-garde, J Dilla-esque beats, and we laid the foundations of the records.
Well “Loyal Like Syd And Nancy” is actually my favourite track off the record.
No way!
Those influences you’re speaking about definitely come across on the “Pay The Man” remix with Saba and J.I.D. How did that collab come about?
Oh, yeah! “Pay The Man” and “Loyal Like Syd And Nancy” was mixed by Ali, whose a guy that I’ve been following for really eccentric record drops. I’ve followed his career. This guy is a genius – he’s a sonic mastermind. He had a couple of his friends in the studio, while he was mixing it – one of them was an artist from Dreamville named Bas, who I discovered after the fact, is a really incredible up-and-coming artist. But it came through just being aware of Dreamville – J.I.D. — we discovered him, and he’s just such a profound upcoming voice in hip-hop, so it was an honour that he would jump on the remix, and also Saba. One of J.I.D.’s producers is a guy named Christo — they just put their own spin on it. It’s so exciting that it came out a couple of days ago.
It must be really cool to hear the song have a new life.
I’m glad that you checked it out – I mean, that track’s super fresh!
It’s a really unexpected collaboration, but I think it works really well and still has that strong beat driving it.
It’s funny – sometimes release day is always exciting because you can troll the Internet for better or for worse. You can’t really get a lot of love without getting a lot of hate, these days. I wasn’t anywhere near my computer when the track dropped the other day, so at the end of the day, I called my manager like, “Hey, how did it go?” He was saying that we actually had quite a crossover – surprisingly, a lot of Foster The People fans, are also J.I. D. fans, and they’re loving it. And vice versa.
It’s really interesting to dissect how that works.
That’s what I love about listening to music in this day and age. I think we’ve all moved on from iTunes playlists, and now it’s all about streaming and Spotify. If you look at someone’s top five streamed songs, it’s like people are listening to Pusha T, and Vampire Weekend – people have such eclectic music tastes, and they aren’t listening to just one genre. It’s a really inspiring climate to get to create a record and create music.
“[Mark] hopped on it with an analog synthesiser and played this orchestral crescendo, and that’s really the last thing that you would expect to hear on an atonal dance track.”
Well, most of this record was self-produced, between you and Mark. I read that you remastered it three times and then added on two tracks. How did you know when to step back and agree it was finished?
We actually remastered the record five times! The first time was in February. We have this ritual, where we finish a record, we all get together in a room in a studio – it happened to me in my studio in downtown LA. We had just got the first master back, and we pulled it back and listened to it. We poured a couple drinks, we were all chilling out in the dark, just focusing on the sequencing – which song would come first, second third. After we had finished, we were all silent, and Mark brought up the elephant in the room and was like, “Guys, this isn’t done yet.” At this point, we had been working on it for three years. I was so excited for it to almost be done, to have a finished album after so much time.
But he was right – the record was over an hour long, some of these songs had three-plus verses. It was a very bulky record. It took us five passes of going back in, and really condensing the arrangements and cutting fat on the album. We still grew up in the album era, where when we’d buy someone’s record, we’d listen to it all the way through. It was really important for us that ‘Sacred Hearts Club’ flowed in one continuous listen. It took us another five times of trimming the arrangements and really deconstructing songs to where you could digest it in one listen. That’s when we knew it was finished – when we were able to sit to it top to bottom, and it sounded natural.
We’ll it’s great to have you back in Sydney.
Australia is one of our favourite places in the world to play. Really, Triple J broke the band worldwide. Australia was the first place to latch on and support us, so it’s been an exciting experience. We came over in 2011 and we were playing small club shows. Each time we come back, I feel that our gigs get a little bigger.
Check out the social media-tapping video, comprising clip submissions from fans worldwide, for “Sit Next To Me” here: