Foals take a fresh, thrilling new direction on with their upcoming album Life Is Yours, which will be released on June 17th via Warner Records. 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 bands story. Not only did it result in the bands 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, its escapist, transportive and in rapture at lifes endless possibilities. Its a record thats 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. Theres 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. Its 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.

Yannis Philippakis says, I feel that with Everything Not Saved we touched upon all of the facets of our sound up until that point. This time we wanted to find a new way to express ourselves. We wanted to refocus and do something that shared a DNA throughout the songs: a physicality, a danceability, and with energy and joyousness. Its definitely the poppiest record weve ever made.

Foals completed by Jimmy Smith and Jack Bevan started the project within the dark, windowless confines of their south London rehearsal space in the midst of the winter lockdown. Feeling contained and tethered, they were drawn towards spirited sounds that looked to a brighter future, not only in terms of climate but also in terms of the unreplicable thrill of performing live. By the time the process reached its conclusion, the verdant summer surroundings of Real World Studios near Bath matched the albums ardent atmosphere.

The band also experimented with collaborating with a tapestry of different producers (often working within different configurations) on various tracks. The albums varied creative voices include John Hill (Portugal The Man, Florence + The Machine), Dan Carey (Tame Impala, Fontaines D.C.), Miles James and A.K. Paul (co-founder of the Paul Institute with his brother Jai Paul). Much of the album was subsequently mixed by ten-time Grammy Award winner Manny Marroquin (Post Malone, Kanye West, Rihanna), with several tracks mixed by another multiple Grammy Award winner in the shape of Mark Spike Stent (Coldplay, Muse, Kings of Leon).

Foals take a fresh, thrilling new direction on with their upcoming album ‘Life Is Yours’, which will be released on June 17th via Warner Records. ‘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. It’s hardly the cure for anything but Antidotes, the debut album from Oxford’s Foals, is a strong addition to the eternal tradition of dance-friendly art rock most recently exemplified by Franz Ferdinand and Klaxons. The five ex-public schoolboys that make up Oxford’s Foals are hardly lacking self-confidence-comically cocky frontman Yannis Phillipakis could annoy for the nation and the band rejected producer David Sitek’s original mix-but Antidotes is anything but pony. After spending their youth in rigorous “math rock” outfits, Foals started out in 2005 with the stated intention of having fun. Rather delightfully, this amounted to the discovery that audiences are well disposed to acts they can dance to. A clutch of well-received singles and a guest spot on popular sixth-form satire Skins sealed their popularity. Their origins in academic rock are sometimes obvious, but fine drummer Jack Bevan keeps things moving throughout. Opener “The French Open”, with it’s gleeful chanted vocals (in French) and fashionable Afrobeat tinged guitar lines, evokes Talking Heads’ dada nonsense classic “I Zimbra”, itself older than any Foal. First top thirty hit “Cassius” saw jazz-punk back in the charts for the first time since that perennial football crowd favourite “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag”. “Olympic Airways” is a charming if oblique tale of escape that couldn’t be further from the bus stop/chip shop style while “Red Socks Pugie” already sounds like a single in waiting. The lyrics might charitably be described as impressionistic and Phillipakis’s voice remains nondescript. But with better tunes than Bloc Party and a self-conscious precision that recalls Mogwai in their pomp, the effortlessly pretentious Foals are unmistakably the sound of 2008.