It’s been some time since Foster The People made their mark with breakout debut album Torches, three years in fact, but now the LA-based indie pop trio are ‘Coming Of Age’.
The ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ hit-makers have announced details of their sophomore album, titled Supermodel, and ahead of its release on 14th March, Foster The People have released ‘Coming Of Age’, the brand new single lifted from the album.
Though it is fans’ first taste of Foster The People’s new LP, the track was actually the last completed for Supermodel, as titular frontman Mark Foster reveals to Triple J.
“This song was the last song that we wrote for the record,” Foster told Triple J Breakfast hosts Tom & Matt after they premiered ‘Coming Of Age’ on air. “We were in the studio recording and this song was conceived in the middle of the recording process,” he adds.
“The song, to me, is kind of like a moment of clarity. It’s about the moment when you wake up and you look around you, and you realise that you’re somewhere where you didn’t realise you were. For me, it’s kind of like a confession: it echoes a lot of lyrical vulnerability on this record, which is a little bit different from our first album.”
The time-lapse music video for ‘Coming Of Age’ depicts the creation of a seven-storey tall mural plastered to a building in downtown Los Angeles that recreates the artwork of Foster The People’s second studio album, a surreal image of a model reciting poetry in front of a crowd of fans and paparazzi.
Foster also explains to Triple J that the song’s vulnerability and yearning chorus of “feels like/feels like I’m coming of age” reflects a change of maturity during 2013. “It’s not the record that people are gonna expect us to release…”
“I went through a lot of changes last year – I guess it was the quiet after the storm, when we were touring and when the band was growing, everything happened so far, so for a lot of it I had to ignore my feelings and focus on what was in front of me,” Foster says. “So when everything quieted down, I started to get some perspective on the things that maybe I didn’t see before.”
The tracklisting for Supermodel reflects a similar line of self-questioning, including the record’s opening one-two of ‘Are You What You Want To Be?’ and ‘Ask Yourself’.
Work on album number #2 began when Foster and producer Paul Epworth set up a studio in Essaouira, Moroccomo at the tail-end of 2012. “We didn’t have any rules. We just created as much as we could in seven days,” the frontman recalls in a press statement, “And in the spirit of wanderlust and discovery we ended up stumbling on the musical identity of what this record was going to feel like.”
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Foster says he “[wanted] to do something more organic and human, because the first record was so electronic and synthetic,” adding: “It’s not the record that people are gonna expect us to release second. It’s definitely an evolution for us, and it’s a more polarizing record for us, so I’m excited to see how it’s received, for better or worse.”
Foster The People’s 2011 debut album Torches was a huge hit with Australian audiences, hitting #1 and reaching Platinum status while selling nearly 2 million copies worldwide, along with multiple hit singles including ‘Helena Beat’, ‘Houdini’ and the 6x Platinum-selling ‘Pumped Up Kicks’.
Supermodel is out 14th March via Sony Records
Tracklisting:
1. “Are You What You Want to Be” 4:30
2. “Ask Yourself” 4:23
3. “Coming of Age” 4:40
4. “Nevermind” 5:17
5. “Pseudologia Fantastica” 5:31
6. “The Angelic Welcome of Mr. Jones” 0:33
7. “Best Friend” 4:27
8. “A Beginner’s Guide to Destroying the Moon” 4:39
9. “Goats in Trees” 5:09
10. “The Truth” 4:29
11. “Fire Escape” 4:22
12. “Tabloid Super Junky”
