The St. Louis-based, indie-rock torchbearers Foxing sound lush and lively on their ascendant, subtly triumphant new album Draw Down The Moon, out this August through Hopeless Records and the band’s own Grand Paradise.
Cascades of shimmering, quietly majestic instrumentation flow across Draw Down The Moon, balancing contemplation and strength. With warm, inviting tones, the often relatively briskly moving album feels engaging, building tumultuous, emotional states into an entire musical world. The songs across this record prove expansive, with a blanket of elevating, ethereal atmosphere overlaying the sometimes refreshingly punchy instrumentation.
Foxing first wheel out heavier elements of Draw Down The Moon as album opener “737” draws to a close, and the record also features pulsing synths on “Go Down Together,” along with impressive groove on the title track, and even some dance vibes on songs like “Bialystok.” Meanwhile, vocals from the group’s Conor Murphy follow right along with the album’s mountainous trek, moving from gentler singing into majorly intense parts and conveying a poignant breadth of expression.
Especially lately, Foxing have seemed particularly difficult to pin down within an overly specific genre, and that trend continues here. At times, Draw Down The Moon even seems at least subtly theatrical because of the wide-ranging musical vibrancy. In short, there’s a lot going on across the record, which features consistently full-sounding mixes.
Although the sonic range is formidable here, on what is Foxing’s fourth full-length album overall, the transitions are smooth, uniting the driving record with bracing passion. The broad dynamics outlining the journey suggest something like sonic storytelling— instrumentally speaking, these songs burst with teeming energy.
Ultimately, Foxing prove ambitious. Draw Down The Moon’s propulsive, inward force combined with its bright overlay makes the music feel like an expression of some mystical, smoldering life force.
Below, check out what Foxing frontman Conor Murphy has to say about the new record, including the inspirations of comedian Joe Pera and musical theater. Murphy performs with drummer Jon Hellwig and guitarist Eric Hudson on this album.
Foxing have been making music for some time now, and there have been a wide range of stylistic flourishes in your songs over the years. How did you guys approach expectations that may have weighed on you surrounding this new record’s writing process? Are expectations something that you guys grappled with?
This has really been something that has been like a thorn in our side throughout our career, but we always really try to abandon the idea of […] trying to make songs that we think people like as opposed to, for lack of better words, trying to innovate our own sound and innovate within the genre that we come from. We at least try to do that—I’m in no way saying that we accomplish it, but that’s always kind of our mission statement. Our goal is to build, and innovate, and bring something new to the table, as opposed to capitalizing on what’s trending or popular at any given time.
So, that being said, that has always been something that we’ve been really fortunate to experience with the fans of our band, because there’s always the live experience. Even if we release music that people are like: Well, I like the last album better, we still know that a lot of people, when they experience it live, they’re like, I didn’t get it until I saw it live, and now I’m into it.
We’ve just known this about ourselves forever, that we’re a better live band than we are recorded. We really hone each of our songs when we actually end up playing them live more so than when they’re released as recordings. So, I think that with this album, it got really hard with expectations to go like: Well, this is only going to be released as recordings for the time being. Especially early on, we were like: I don’t know if this is ever coming back. And even now, I am hopeful that we are able to play live, but also trying to really keep hope on a leash here and not plan for it.
But it’s really that—the expectations that we have to bring down to earth are that we’re relying on the thing that we know isn’t our best quality. We put everything we have into recording music, but at the same time, we just know, over the course of 10 years of playing in this band, that it’s always so consistently the number one thing, is that people say: You gotta see it live, you’ll like it a lot more when you see it, and then go listen to it recorded. So, I think that that is something that we’re really trying to solve for right now, which is really weird.
The record seems to have a lot of rich drama within it. There was also some real brightness in there. Would you say that you intentionally wanted the songs to sound bright, or soaring, or dramatic, or even theatrical, in a way? Are those kinds of vibes something that you guys were going for?
By all means, there are moments on the record where we try to kind of make something very intimate, and honest, and raw. But at the same time, I think what we’re always more drawn to is taking raw, emotional ideas and applying them to something dramatic and hopefully bigger than ourselves.
We refer to all of the themes of the record as these mundane themes. They’re not necessarily boring, but I think of age or death—they’re mundane ideas. They’re not like these hyper-specific things as much as one person’s feelings about general, big ideas, and so we try to take those, and lyrically try to make them as honest, and emotional, and raw as possible, but dress them in a very grandiose, larger than just me, or Eric, or Jon way.
We look back at artists like Queen […] as a really great example of taking a pretty simple idea—I want to ride my bike—and turning it into this giant, operatic thing so that you still have this feeling of intimacy, but it’s dressed in this very rich tapestry. That was a huge goal for us the entire time. I very much enjoy really raw, honest recordings, like Alex G songs, or Phoebe Bridgers music, or Conor Oberst or something, but it’s like—I think that that’s not exactly something that we’re trying to chase, as much as trying to make something really dramatic and theatrical, with foundationally honest ideas.
Would you say that the album ends up, at least in the end, somewhere bright and cathartic, like at a sunrise, metaphorically speaking? Is that something that you think the album reaches?
The goal that I want people to have in listening to it is sort of like an enlightening pessimism to things. That might be a really bad way of putting it, but to me, I think the goal lyrically at least, and thematically, is trying to be a parallel of the last couple years, or year and a half, especially in the pandemic, of really being this thing of like: Wow, we’re doomed. The world is ending around us. We’re kind of fucked here.
But that being said, in these moments, if you really focus inward, and focus on the connections between yourself and the people you love, and try to learn more about yourself and about those people, and these kind of philosophical ideas that you really are attached to, then you can truly find happiness and contentment, even though the world is kind of burning around you.
That’s a little bit like what we were trying to do. It’s kind of this idea of the world is on fire, and looking up into the sky, and seeing this pristine moon and these stars that are untouched by man and being able to find contentment just in those things, and [in] looking up into the sky.
And the feeling of complete insignificance, taken on as a: We are significant in our connections to other people, and to these ideas, and to these themes. So that’s kind of the feeling that I hope for with our record when people listen to it, is that it’s fun and bright. At times it gets dark and overwhelming and theatrical, but really, when it comes down to it, you leave it feeling like: Okay, it’s time to go and take on myself.
What were some of the creative sparks, the thematic inspirations, and the things that kind of snowballed into making this new record?
The biggest source of inspiration, like the kind of lightbulb, spark moment, was watching Joe Pera Talks You To Sleep. I love Joe Pera a lot, and I was watching it, and he has this whole bit about Stephen Hawking, and how Stephen Hawking cheated on his wife, and the idea that, like: Look at it from Stephen Hawking’s perspective. He spends all his days looking up into the sky and thinking about how insignificant we are, so what does it matter if one man cheats on his wife?
And he says, but following that same train of thought, if the universe is so vast, and we are such small specks, if you find somebody that you love, shouldn’t you do everything in your power not to hurt them? Because you found one other speck in this grand vastness.
And I’m paraphrasing all of that obviously, but, like, the second I saw that, I called Eric, and I was just like: I think this is the album. I think this is the idea of the album. It’s funny, and it’s comedy, but it’s also—I thought that it was a very profound idea, and wrestling insignificance and truly your cosmic significance would be an interesting thing to tackle, but also kind of something that I felt like was important at this time in my life to write about.
And Eric, when I told him about it, was just like: Yeah, that sounds great; let’s go full-force into it. So that was pre-pandemic, and I think that in being at home and truly taking stock of what are these things that are the most important, it really refined each song in that way. There’s 10 songs on the album, and I tried to make it ten themes that all explore this same central theme of cosmic significance.
There’s a lot of emotion that shines through in your singing on this record. Are there particular things that weighed on the way that you approached your vocal performances for this record? Is there a particular way that you wanted to sound?
A weird thing, but my girlfriend really likes theater and musicals, and I, for so long in my life, was very averse to musicals. I was like: Ah, I don’t see the appeal. I don’t really like musical theater. I finally came around to musicals and Broadway performances, and I think the biggest influence that they had on me—there’s one song from the musical “Gypsy” where Bette Midler sings “Rose’s Turn” that really stuck with me really hard. I put it on a lot of playlists at this point.
But it’s really just the idea in musical theater where it’s like—you’re singing everything. You’re not speaking lines. But you’re conveying emotion in each movement of every song you’re doing. When a part of a song is hopeful, it’s not just your face that’s hopeful, it’s your singing that’s hopeful. And when you are distraught, or scared, your singing becomes trembly. And when you’re angry, you’re really yelling.
That was a huge thing to me—trying to think really hard about, OK, so in this part of the song, lyrically I’m very desperate and trying to match the tone of the music with the way that I’m singing the parts. So, it was very much like, I want to treat this as if this is a musical, and I’m trying to convey the emotions, even if the lyrics were just like a Sigur Rós gibberish […] or like if somebody didn’t speak English and was listening to the album, they would kind of get the emotions that I was trying to portray in some way.
Where do you hope to go from here with the record in particular, and with Foxing in general? Shows are no doubt high priority for the short term, and other emotional themes kind of lead the way for the listening experience—so is there anything else that comes to mind?
Obviously, we want the record to come out and kind of see what happens and how people react to it, but I think looking forward—I’ve had these long conversations with Eric about, what are we doing next? And I think a huge thing that we really want to do is allow ourselves time to really support this album, considering how much work we put into it. And also, to kind of disconnect a bit from creating the next album, so that we’re able to actually look back at the records and go: What do we actually want to do next? What do we hope to accomplish the next time around?
We want to do something completely different every time we do this, so my gut reaction right now is: I want to make the heaviest thing that we’ve made, but at the same time, it’s like—that might not be the right call. We just need to give ourselves time to actually think about what we are going to do next.
The next thing that we really want to do in the future is really take on everything ourselves, whether it be recording the album ourselves, releasing it, etc.
There are these lyrical and thematic things that I hope come through, but I think, to be perfectly honest, what I actually really hope comes through is the amount of work that we put into the album. Whether it’s the actual recording or the release of the album, we put an insane amount of time into it.
And we kind of have gotten to this point, where at a lot of steps along the way, we hated this album, and we hated music and each other. We had to keep reminding ourselves: We’re doing this, and we all care about it, and that’s why we’re so angry about it. I think that even if people don’t enjoy the album itself, I do sometimes just hope that people kind of go like: Well, the one thing about it is they put a ton of work into it. Maybe that’s a selfish thing to hope for.
This interview has been edited, mostly for length.
Watch the video for “Draw Down The Moon” here:
For more from Foxing, find them at their official website.
Photos courtesy of Foxing and Elena de Soto.
