Foxing – Foxing

★★★★☆

Released September 14th, 2024 on Grand Paradise and Miscellaneous Recordings with Many Hats Distribution

There’s a special curse out there for bands who make a definitive statement with their first record. On one hand, yes, you have set the stage. You are a Darling of the Scene, and the crowd is clamoring for your bold take on a familiar sound. On the other, any growth you have beyond that first sound is often compared critically to your origins, and large parts of your fanbase will grumble about any perceived changes in path.

For Foxing, that album was The Albatross, a debut that, in 2013, was a guiding light in the fourth wave ’emo revival’ movement that also contained Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor, The Hotelier, and The Wonder Years. Every step they’ve made since then, for good (Nearer My God) or else, has been held up to that album and, for a lot of their original audience, found wanting. For the scene kids who never grew out of the scene, their amalgamation of pop gestures a la Arcade Fire and Portugal, The Man has been grumbled over. They need to get back to their old sound, they say. That’s when the music was real.

Well, the Hold Steady could tell you a lot about the music, and how your experience with it changes as you age and the scenes you held dear decay and get druggy and get ugly. Foxing, the band’s fifth album in eleven years, shows that you either change or die, and they have chosen to live deliciously. This is a mixture of fourth wave, damaged art rock, radio pop, and the kind of real-world blastbeat mining that would make Sunbather-era Deafheaven proud. Every time you think you get a bead on where they’re going, they change it up, only to come back to the original idea later, when you’ve long since reconciled yourself to change. Sometimes all of that happens in three glorious minutes, as on “Dead Internet.” The first four songs are a solid set, but don’t skip “Kentucky McDonald’s” either, as it’s probably the best part of this whole thing.

Stephen King, in “The Langoliers”, has this great bit about fish that live at great depths in the ocean who are used to living under large amounts of pressure, and when they rise and that pressure decreases they explode. I feel like Foxing exists at great depths. They chase new movements and new angles to keep the pressure on or, like so many other bands before them, they’ll explode. Foxing sends them down into the Marianas Trench.