We’ve written about Brooklyn’s Foyer Red several times in recent months, first with single ‘Flipper’ which “[swung] wildly between sugary sweet and strikingly strange” and then more recently the track ‘Pickles‘. An encapsulation of the band’s singular “fuck-you crayon rock” which captured depressive stasis with offbeat energy. Their idiosyncratic style was furthered by the track’s immersive nature. “Delve a little deeper and the sense of escalation makes sense,” we wrote in a preview, “the rising momentum reflecting not the exterior stasis but the building pressure within. The gradually dawning sense that things are unbearable, so trapped you feel you might explode.”
Having now signed with Carpark Records, Foyer Red have released brand new single, ‘Etc’. Every bit as playful as we’ve come to expect from the band, it’s a springy and elastic pop song straight out of the left-field, Eric Jaso’s mesmerizing bassline setting the odd but infectious tone. But beneath this exuberance lies something darker and more complex, exploring a mismatched relationship of indistinct philosophical musings and robotic computations.
“My character in ‘Etc’ finds themselves in a dysfunctional relationship in which gender informs internal struggles of power and control,” lead Elana Riordan explains. “Instead of addressing the problem they state it plainly while asking vague and broad questions about the nature of the world. Rather than seeking a new system they find ways to play into that system to ultimately get what they want in the short-term.”
On the other hand, the character played by singer & guitarist Mitch Myers takes rationality to the extreme. As Riordan explains:
“Taking a note from Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, they are fixated on the optimal stopping problems, seeking to maximize the reward of a great parking space and minimize the cost of distance from the front doors and time spent circling around holding out for a better spot. The syllables are so stiff and stressed at unnatural points in the last verse to exemplify how mechanical the whole process has been, where the character is in their head crunching data to guarantee satisfaction with the outcome.”
‘Etc’ is out now via Carpark Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.