Foals have admitted that they need "violent change" on their next record to avoid "extinction".
Foals
NME has reported that the band's frontman Yannis Philippakis opened up about their progress on writing their follow up to 2015's LP 'What Went Down' and said the musicians are confident they will be able to evolve and stay relevant in the charts by ensuring their next offering is unlike its predecessors.
Speaking during their show at Oxford University's student union on Friday (20.10.17), he said: "What we need to do is go through some sort of violent change and make sure, whatever the next record is, it's not friends with the last two... We've built a wide palette that we can draw from. It would be a shame not to keep pushing that. It's evolution vs. extinction."
Yannis joked that their early drafts of their future tracks don't "sound good yet" but they are excited to be back in the studio.
Discussing their break from writing after their last tour, NME reports that he said: "We've just started writing the new record. We've taken a year out - we needed it. We'd been on tour for a long time. It was fun, but sometimes the more fun a tour is, the more of a toll it takes on you.
He continued: "Me and Jimmy [Smith, guitarist] have come up with some sketches and some early ideas. We're actually writing on the road at the moment. It doesn't sound good, yet ... "
The band - also made up of Jack Bevan, Jimmy Smith, Walter Gervers and Edwin Congreave - admitted earlier this year that they were gearing up to give birth to a new record.
Yannis said: "We're in the marinating stage of thinking about getting onto the next record. We have a couple of bits written but it's in the very early stages. We're in the conception stage, we're not pregnant yet, we're just trying to have the kid.
"I think it's good to be hungry and want to make big leaps between records and keep things surprising and keep it unpredictable and to grow. It's important for bands to evolve and I think it's one of the reasons that it's still exciting for us after having done four records."
Foals' new album will be a follow up to 2015's 'What Went Down'. They previously released 'Antidotes' in 2008 followed by 2010's 'Total Life Forever' and 'Holy Fire' in 2013.
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