Review Summary: So now, I shut it down and lock it up
When Foxing stake their name to something, they fucking
mean it. There’s no way to delve into the band’s self-titled, self-produced album without immediately discussing how heavy and unhinged this thing is. It’s arguably the most powerful and complex record I’ve heard since mewithoutYou’s masterful
[Untitled] career finale, and it’s also the most off guard I’ve been caught by a release’s sheer
fury since ‘Vices’ barged down the doors to
Daisy. This is the kind of company I’d place
Foxing in: it’s an immediate tour de force that goes full throttle instantly and unrelentingly, battering listeners with its sheer intensity. Remember how 2018’s
Nearer My God oscillated between panicked, earth-shattering climaxes and emotive anthems on its way to establishing itself as the band’s de facto classic? Consider this:
Foxing is
Nearer My God in even fuller crisis, with no guard rails, wavering on the brink of complete mental collapse. It’s the best release I’ve heard – regardless of genre – in at least half a decade.
Welcome to Foxing’s real magnum opus.
There’s an evil here
You can feel it beginning
It's clear from the opening seconds of ‘Secret History’ that something very special is brewing. Conor Murphy distantly mumbles to himself about how his dreams have been utterly destroyed until he’s joined by a brass horn, and you can sense the calm before the storm. It’s at this precise moment that we hear the click of a cassette tape, and all hell breaks loose. Everything comes crashing down, obliterating expectations with a wall of sound that makes
Draw Down the Moon’s ‘737’ sound like an exercise in pop. Conor screams, and I mean
screams, like you’ve never heard him before – and it’s enough to send a shiver up your spine: “Sold the dream for arms and legs – to work, to eat, to sleep, repeat”. His diatribe against existential fatigue eventually subsides, ushering us into brooding verses (“Sharpen those dead dreams, pay them violently / Write them quietly”) before the epic crescendo loops back with a huge melodic hook layered over the top. While all of this is happening, an avalanche of downright psychotic drumming absolutely pummels the sound board. It’s sheer decimation, and a mere four minutes into the record,
Foxing has already asserted itself as an unprecedented force.
The best thing about
Foxing is that ‘Secret History’ is no anomaly. The entire experience is marvelously experimental, blending post-emo with noise, ambient, and even industrial influences – and then refracting it all through fire. ‘Hell 99’ somehow escalates the chaos, with guitarist Eric Hudson shrieking in complete despair (“this is all there is, this is all there is! / fuck! fuck! fuck!”) while accompanied by a breakdown that is akin to a more furious version of Thrice’s ‘Between The End And Where We Lie’. The raw beauty of that moment is then laced with an eerie, high-pitched synthesizer which intertwines with the guitar notes and pushes the atmosphere from tortured over the edge into
demented. By now it’s clear just how bleak Foxing’s worldview has become, with lyrics that reduce life to a sickening corporate algorithm: “Throw out all the joy and show me metrics for my failures, I live in modern times give me a modern sense of worth / I told myself there has to be a better quality of suffering, there has to be fatigue worthy of something but there’s nothing." As ‘Hell 99’ slows and fades, a diabolic guitar riff taunts us from afar while the madness transforms into sedated indifference, almost as if to represent the narrator’s spiral into exhaustion and, ultimately, defeat: “It was never more than this…oh it’s fine, oh I’m fine”. ‘Secret History’ and ‘Hell 99’ combine for a terrifyingly urgent overture, and they represent the band at its absolute peak. It’s a mesmerizing, unflinchingly abrasive, and utterly extraordinary moment to behold.
As
Foxing continues down the slope of questionable mental health, reprieves are few and far between. Most of the tracks here fuse subtle harmony with much bolder experimental chaos – enough so to continually liken
Foxing to something of an angrier, messier
Nearer My God. There’s a moment on ‘Kentucky McDonald’s’ that slyly alludes to the thematic parallel – just as long time Foxing fans will recall how ‘Gameshark’ sampled “Nearer My God To Thee”, they will encounter that moment’s more deflated reflection here: “A titanic end, fiery wreck, something magnificent / Over it, nothing to bend, pablum extant to something significant.” It’s a post-
Nearer My God sense of disaffection…whereas the band’s third record was full-blown armageddon,
Foxing finds itself emerging from that wreckage with little left to fight for. It’s brilliant imagery on Foxing’s part that serves as a microcosm of the record’s post-apocalyptic atmosphere – or, as Conor reiterates on the aloof ‘Dead Cat’: “Feels like I missed the real end, I must live in the index / The universe is mumbling: ‘Buy a gun or something?’”
Foxing gaze inward for answers to this growing void, only to continually come up empty-handed. The winding eight minute soul-searcher ‘Greyhound’ is a prime example, combining a sense of lost identity with asphyxiating sadness: “I’ve been feeling like I can’t come up for air for these last ten years, what’s wrong with me? / I’ve been feeling like my peak is in my past…like I ain’t got nothing left to give.” Delivered atop the song’s drum/guitar barrage and prolonged ambient segue, it serves as a highly intricate and beautifully layered gut punch. It also introduces a motif when Conor ironically muses, “There’s nothing I can do but laugh, so I laugh at my telephone / Look at how beautiful the telephone can be” – an allusion to our collective detachmentment from reality in the digital age. A similar sense of emptiness pervades
Foxing, such as when Conor confronts his own mortality amid the swirling synths and blistering guitars of ‘Looks Like Nothing’ (“I blend the lows and the highs, until they all become one lie”) and the battering deluge of screams on ‘Kentucky McDonald’s’ (“I stared at the glow until I saw I’m mediocre, and there’s nothing worse”). On ‘Gratitude’, he laments what he calls a “fugue state” and desires something more meaningful out of existence amid relentless shouting and disorienting ambience: “I want to hear God yelling at me, I want to live my life like a memory / I want to sow rage into my brain, I want wrath written into my DNA”. There’s a deep desire here to be awoken from this grayscale day-to-day mundanity…to
feel something and know that it is both impactful and real. Murphy reaches desperately for anything to grasp onto, but the air keeps slipping through his fingers.
When Foxing aren't navigating despair through visceral, cathartic screams and instrumental hellfire, they're delivering some absolutely heart-wrenching moments. There is more than one allusion to a deceased pet, and while it’s best not to draw conclusions, Conor sounds totally broken at times here. On the bare and desolate ‘Cleaning’, he cries out: “I swore I heard his nails clicking on the kitchen tile / I know the broom is so heavy, but I don’t think I’m ready / Not yet…don’t clean the floor just yet / Don’t sweep him all away.” Then, on the spry and melodic ‘Barking’, he sings, “I heard my friend barking today / I could have sworn on his grave.” The raw emotion in Murphy’s voice is convincing and tear-eliciting.
Foxing may possess the harshest aesthetic out of the band’s entire catalog, but tender moments like these serve as the eye of the hurricane – this calm, vulnerable center around which the destruction swirls.
By the time we arrive near the conclusion of the record, we’ve already effectively been dragged through hell, experienced the sting of death, and despaired at the prospect of a futile existence. In a way, the final two songs are there to wrap you up like a warm blanket. ‘Hall of Frozen Heads’ is this sprawling, gorgeous anthem brimming with elegant pianos and pristine guitars – a six minute monument that feels like vintage
Dealer-era Foxing. The closer, ‘Cry Baby’, is an emotional wrecking ball of a ballad that seems to be an ode to Conor’s newlywed wife – “If I could, I would live my life twice / In the next, spend each second at your side / Drain our days dancing every inch of the house / Until we’ve all but worn our shoes and hardwood down.” There’s an air of finality to the track, as it samples voices discussing how the music is progressing in a way that feels symbolically uplifting: “I don’t think this song’s as good as it could be, but it’s coming along.” In the background, a melody that vaguely mimics Smidley’s ‘Do You Still Love Me’ becomes faintly audible and then poignantly surges. Serving as a pure and lush gem against
Foxing’s cold, bleak backdrop, ‘Cry Baby’ absolutely shines. Just as love has a way of healing deep emotional cuts, this album’s curtain-call soothes all of this album’s preceding turmoil with the simple idea that one person can truly change your outlook on life: “But there’s you smiling when I come home / Yeah there’s you on the other side of the phone / So now I shut it down and lock it up.” It’s a breathtaking song and a stunning gesture that concludes
Foxing perfectly.
With Foxing’s self-titled album, their reputation has been all but cemented as one of the greatest current acts in alternative music. In their discography, they’ve navigated the bristly emo-rock of
The Albatross,
Dealer’s moonlit vignettes, the frantic paranoia of
Nearer My God, and
Draw Down the Moon’s eclectic art-pop. Throughout their illustrious and ever-changing discography, the one constant has always been a hint of something much darker lurking just beneath the surface. With the group’s fifth full-length LP, Foxing has finally unchained the beast. As it turns out, it's not some mythical creature or biblical horsemen – it's what happens inside of our own minds, day in and day out as we balance our demanding jobs with our families, attempt to ascertain hope from an inherently hopeless world, doom scroll, and become overwhelmed with outrage and exhaustion.
Foxing may be a cacophonous, unhinged symphony of chaos, but it's also one that quietly encourages us to look at what's already around us, open our arms, and embrace it while we still can...to reach out and touch what is real. It is one of the most dissonant, powerful, legitimately
terrifying, and ultimately uplifting pieces of music I've ever heard – and one that makes this particular reviewer happy to sign off on such a fulfilling note.
I’ve been harboring resentment
Meant for lack of eventfulness in divine sense
I wanna be Saul to Paul in Damascus
Awakened above the masses
The last gasp of God before the rapture
Chariotted high above a glass Earth
But instead
I’m tiptoeing the fractures
Obsessed with “what if it shatters?”
Or doesn’t matter…
What does it matter?
That’s a good boy
