Foals, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost review: Rock band dissect modern mess on part one of their spectacular new record

It’s a dystopian vision becoming all the more real with every February heatwave

(Alex Knowles)

In a decade that, musically, has shunned distinctness and defied definition, Oxford’s Foals are arguably the band that best encapsulates modern alternative rock. Their tone is amorphous, intangible future synthetic, their marrow pulsing and organic. They embrace the possibilities of new technology with the same boffin mentality as they reanimate old tropes with electric bolts of fresh ideas. Their songs are polyrhythmic next-gen rock that make most other guitar bands seem as obsolete as a Nokia 3310 charger. They sound boundless.

The perfect band, then, to dissect the ultra-modern mess that is 2019. The two-part album they release this year – Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – might be named after the best advice you could give someone using Word 2016, but they promise to tackle the most confusing and divisive issues of the age: Trump, Brexit, climate change, the rise of the machines. Although they could be debating pineapple on pizza for all you’d know from this first instalment – the impressionistic lyrics and misted delivery of singer Yannis Philippakis initially mangles much of the message, unless your ears are attuned to underwater sonar vocals.

Concentrate, though, and it transpires that Philippakis’s voice is shrouded in the smoke from society’s wreckage. Lead single “Exits”, six scintillating minutes of Eighties “sledgehammer” pop that lumbers into view like a heavy artillery vehicle covered in sequins, concerns the one percenters building underground cities to escape global warming. “Syrups” has Yannis howling a passionate post-apocalyptic vision of robot invasions and sand-clogged towns over a corroded Gorillaz dub that builds to a motoric charge as global panic sets in.

“On The Luna”, a spectacular chunk of angular punk disco originally titled “End Of Days”, is the mayday call from Trump’s doomed planet that you can dance to, and by the end of the album the Earth is literally on fire: “Sunday” imagines future generations living, loving and ultimately raving amid the ash of burning cities (“Our fathers run and leave all the damage they’ve done behind…The birds are all singing ‘it’s the end of the world’”), while “I’m Done With The World (& It’s Done With Me)” is a gorgeous piano lament to a pastoral scene aflame. It’s played, from the sound of it, by AI angels.

It’s a dystopian vision becoming all the more real with every February heatwave, and Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 is a fitting vehicle. Merging their asymmetrical early math pop with the deep space atmospherics of Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, plus added innovations – ambient rainforest throbs on “Moonlight”, deadpan EDM on “In Degrees”, Afro-glitch Radiohead on “Café D’Athens” – they’ve created an inspired album of scorched earth new music that, in all likelihood, will only really be challenged for album of the year by Part 2.