Foyer Red

Foyer Red’s debut LP, Yarn the Hours Away, plays out as a collection of short stories, each with its environment and protagonist(s) meticulously crafted by the band, with lead singer, vocalist, and clarinetist Elana Riordan at the helm. Foyer Red’s debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, showcased their playfully chaotic arrangements, which bridge art-punk, math rock, and sweetly sung indie with a dash of the zoomies. The band synthesizes their homespun take on magical realist indie rock that was centered on their EP with their varied musical influences; taking cues from the otherworldly melodies of Cate Le Bon, Yucky Duster’s jangle-filled crayon rock, and the organized chaos of Deerhoof’s iconic polyrhythms. The songs that makeup Yarn the Hours Away are fantastical, surrealist stories that hinge on contemporary, post-digital life.

The lead single “Etc” captures this dynamic perfectly. Anchored by Eric Jaso’s hypnotizing bass line, the song unfolds with off-kilter call-and-response vocals between Riordan and Kristina Moore, their stilted deliveries bouncing around the mix. The track is searching but discontent with the algorithmic and claustrophobic realities of daily life: singer/guitarist Mitch Myers throws the song for a loop singing, “gathering information / will set you free once you’ve reached / 37 percent / of the database.” While there’s paranoia and cynicism undergirding the lyrics, the song itself is a thrilling and playful listen.

The songs on Yarn the Hours Away are uniformly exciting and compelling; each track feels distinct and sometimes even in direct conflict. The peppy opener “Plumbers Unite!” belies its themes of gamification of our daily lives and delves into the science fiction and fantasy songwriting of Foyer Red’s debut EP. Centered around a relentless rhythm section, their dueling vocals never abate; Moore and Riordan’s honey-sweet but getting more frantic as the song progresses, while Myers’ erratic talk-singing culminates in one final frustrated scream. Juxtapose this with “Gorgeous,” a lovely song about Riordan and drummer Marco Ocampo’s relationship that sees the band slowing their pace into a blissful sway. Riordan coos and sighs over the track while recalling “Marco-isms”; botched colloquialisms that Ocampo uses.

“Gorgeous” shares little in common with “Pocket,” a loose lamentation on late capitalism that touches on time travel and human evolution. Moore and Riordan’s exclamations are chopped up and used as rhythm instruments, layered over the intricately frenetic guitars of Myers and Moore. Foyer Red thrives on these extremes and contradictions. Where their first release was self-recorded, this LP found them in Figure8 Studios with a deadline. “It was really liberating,” says Jaso. “We're all just kind of throwing in our own voices and challenging each other to make the songs better.”

Yarn the Hours Away comes from a lyric on the closer “Toy Wagon.” The song that first marked the time Moore and the rest of the band worked together, a promising spark of a thrilling collaboration to come. “It harkens back to all of us coming together and spending the hours together in music,” says Moore. “There are few moments where you get to relax and exhale,” adds Riordan. “It's what happened when the five of us got together and started writing. We just wrote all of these out there songs and we didn't see a reason to dial that back. Its natural form is in its chaos and layered craziness.” 

Brooklyn’s Foyer Red makes sweet yet abrasive songs that careen into delightfully unexpected places. The group’s potent art rock embodies a spirit of collaborative exploration, as a seemingly endless supply of ideas accrue and collide as part of a spirited musical conversation between the band’s members, a sensation that is heightened by the often literal conversation occurring between their three principle vocalists. 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. 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 re-treading 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.

Recorded with producer Jonathan Schenke (Dougie Poole, Parquet Courts) at Figure8 Studios in Brooklyn, Yarn The Hours Away, is a striking next step for Foyer Red that makes good on the promise of their heralded debut EP in characteristically unexpected ways. It’s an ambitious album that blends masterful left-field pop songwriting with absolute chaos, a collection of surrealist indie rock that is structured like a book of short stories, and stands as a testament to Foyer Red’s unshakable bond and obvious chemistry.

There's a giddy atmosphere across the record, with the band’s members constantly caught up in the thrill of discovery as they explore the musical environments they are creating, and the sense of navigating unknown territory is often mirrored in the lyrical content of the songs. This is true of the lead single, a winding tangle of harmonies and jagged musical mis-direction that singer Elana Riordan describes as being sung from the perspective a character in a video game and was inspired by her childhood fear of angering her (possibly sentient) gamecube.

Riordan explains:
"My first few lines in this song reference a predetermined goal and the act of running in place; it places the character in a side-scroller video game. It’s the everyday grind taken literally but augmented in the context of a game with objectives, points, a finite amount of lives, etc. When the day is done however, the protagonist exits the simulation and ponders the sentience of the console, feeling strange about the possibility after several hours of manipulation. When I was little I was obsessed with my gamecube, but after entering cheat codes on my Harvest Moon game, I felt sooooooo guilty. I impulsively deleted my game data and later had recurring nightmares about my gamecube’s anger towards me, something I knew was unrealistic but felt so creepy and real."