Foals’ forthcoming album ‘Life Is Yours’ gets an exclusive animated zoetrope picture disc release via Blood Records, limited to 5,000 copies. This represents the band’s first ever zoetrope release and each side features a different spiralling pattern of roses, which have made for a striking visual motif throughout the album.
Foals take a fresh, thrilling new direction on with this new work. Life Is Yours is the follow-up to the triumphant, two-part Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, which proved to be a pivotal pinnacle in the band’s story. Not only did it result in the band’s first ever UK #1 album, but the ambitious scale of the Mercury-nominated album saw Foals win their first BRIT Award for Best Group.
Life Is Yours feels like a natural evolution for Foals, its disco-tinged guitars, tight syncopated rhythms and punchy, insistent hooks echoing their roots as purveyors of rambunctious house party chaos. Thematically, it’s escapist, transportive and in rapture at life’s endless possibilities. It’s a record that’s perfectly in tune with the prevailing atmosphere of this moment in time – a life-affirming celebration as the world is reunited.
‘Life Is Yours’ immediately establishes its tone with the bright beam of optimism provided by its title track, its ambience and exuberance showing no sign of slowing down as it is followed by the two recent singles. There’s a unity to the sound, whether Foals are bouncing into the Balearic beats of ‘Looking High’, experimenting with West African guitar grooves on ‘Flutter’, or simply savouring the prospect of playing live together again within the dance dynamics of ‘The Sound’.
It’s also a consistently transportive experience, at times conjuring images of the Pacific Northwest or St. Lucia, at others directly set in the peppy nostalgia of the recent past. It all comes full circle with ‘Wild Green’, which simultaneously celebrates the rebirth of summer with an existential tinge that all beautiful moments are inevitably fleeting.
