Foyer Red

Brooklyn’s Foyer Red makes sweet yet abrasive songs that careen into delightfully unexpected places. They bounce between time signatures, boast bass lines and guitar riffs that clang and shimmer, and feature vocals that seamlessly crisscross over each other. The band started as a trio with singer and clarinetist Elana Riordan, drummer Marco Ocampo, and singer/guitarist Mitch Myers. The three would email each other song ideas and record the ones that stuck. In 2021, they started playing music together in the same room and immediately came out with the Zigzag Wombat EP, which earned high praise from outlets like Stereogum, BrooklynVegan and Pitchfork, who said, “they make fuck-you crayon rock. At its best, their debut is a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny.” Though they had been a band for only a few months, their self-recorded and charming debut proved that they had hit the ground running almost fully formed with a distinct, tongue-in-cheek, deconstructive take on indie rock.

Instead of sticking to their guns and retreading similar ground, Foyer Red reinvented itself as a five-piece, adding singer and guitarist Kristina Moore and bassist Eric Jaso, and became a fixture of the NYC scene in 2022, sharing stages with artists like Cola, Empath, Babehoven, Why Bonnie, Peaer, Momma, Mamalarky, and Diane Coffee, and embarking on their first tour with New Orleans’ post-punk outfit Lawn. This year has also seen a procession of singles from the band that have explored a broader spectrum of ideas as the groups new members have become part of the songwriting process.

Like some of the band's other recent singles "Etc", which was co-produced by Jonny Schenke (Dougie Poole, The Drums) feels like a conversation. Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers both embody characters interacting (or in this case failing to), and this is mirrored on a compositional level, as musical ideas interrupt each other and collide as the bands five members seem to be independently exploring a musical space together.

"My character in 'Etc' finds themselves in a dysfunctional relationship in which gender informs internal struggles of power and control," explains Riordan. "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. Echoing the stark sonic changes in the song, Mitch’s character is on a different page entirely. 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."