{"id":755277,"date":"2026-02-10T16:07:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T16:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/755277\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T16:07:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T16:07:14","slug":"the-true-story-behind-foals-greatest-riff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/755277\/","title":{"rendered":"The true story behind Foals\u2019 greatest riff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Foals<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Foals \/ Press)<\/p>\n

Tue 10 February 2026 6:00, UK <\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t all that apparent just how mammoth Foals<\/a> would grow across the alternative music world back in the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n

Formed amid the decade\u2019s indie roll around in jammy post-punk and alt-dance stylings, the Oxford outfit\u2019s debut Antidotes album and preceding singles carried much of the gang\u2019s predecessor band Edmund Fitzgerald\u2019s angular mathiness, before sonically loosening up with deeper fluid textures on sophomore Total Life Forever.<\/p>\n

But to longtime fans, it\u2019s 2013\u2019s Holy Fire that saw Foals step forward to a more strident and pivotal creative path, recruiting the production pair Flood and Alan Moulder behind the likes of Nine Inch Nails<\/a>, Depeche Mode and U2\u2019s most significant and creatively confounding records.<\/p>\n

Overseeing the album\u2019s sessions at the duo\u2019s own Assault & Battery studio in London, Foals sought to deploy novel recording techniques and Svengali leftfield happenings to coax a more personal, primal, and fundamentally organic third LP than had been conjured by the band yet.<\/p>\n

Amid rumours of studio interns gathering animal bones for mystical percussion sessions or Flood capturing rehearsals on the sly to glean takes at their rawest, Holy Fire surrounds a band eager to dwell somewhere vastly removed from their former indie planes. The first clue was its lead single. Dropped three months ahead, \u2018Inhaler\u2019 presented a shinier yet beefier side to Foals, all sexed-up funk and anthemic art-rock stir scoring frontman Yannis Philippakis\u2019 starkly anguished lyrical confessions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about feeling under attack,\u201d Philippakis told NME. \u201cI tapped into that feeling of rush-hour claustrophobia, wanting to scream everybody away and gain space for myself. On a more personal level, it\u2019s about wanting to push away at people and at everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such thematic disquiet hung in \u2018Inhaler\u2019s air. While follow-up single \u2018My Number\u2019 flashed the old Foals indie-pop spark and would score the BBC\u2019s coverage of 2013\u2019s Glastonbury Festival<\/a>, an underlying howl charges Philippakis\u2019 urgent scrabble for escape, flexing a beguilingly dramatic shroud amid its effects, soaked guitar ripples. Far from bottling some explosive heavy attack in the heat of the moment, it turned out that \u2018Inhaler\u2019s gargantuan strut had been in gestation for several years despite its urgency.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019Inhaler\u2019 we kind of half-wrote that on the last tour, guitarist Jimmy Smith told Consequence of Sound, reflecting on the number\u2019s birth during their Total Life Forever Tour. \u201cWhen we used to play \u2018Miami\u2019 live, we used to do like a two-minute jam afterwards, and that\u2019s kind of where the beginning of \u2018Inhaler\u2019 came from. That\u2019s where we discovered the groove for that song. And then Yannis would have this fat riff lying around and would be like, \u2018Hey, check this out.\u2019 It just came from that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such alchemic fusions resulted in a strange beast of a single, tough but still percolating with Foals\u2019 knack for undulating arrangements and delicate frissons. While the rest of the Holy Fire record didn\u2019t quite match the lead single\u2019s indie fire, \u2018Inhaler\u2019 marked a creative gamble that paid off handsomely, pleasantly surprising old fans while pulling in new ones with confident ease.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Foals \/ Press) Tue 10 February 2026 6:00, UK It wasn\u2019t all that apparent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":755278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,222407,222408,269,16,15,222409],"class_list":["post-755277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-foals","tag-jimmy-smith","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-yannis-philippakis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116047200028649020","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/755278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}