Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, Pt. 1

An album of stunning ambition and outright defiance, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 rips apart everything you know about Foals, a bold transformative work, as inspiring as it is urgent.

Longtime fans will know what to expect from the indie-rock band that’s been releasing records since the mid-aughts, but predictability isn’t always a fault. The Brit rockers fully understand what they excel at, and they take advantage of the syncopated brashness that they best exemplify.

Musically tying everything that’s come before together in a comprehensive showcase of the band’s continued prowess, and lyrically providing an ominous but defiant voice for 2019, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is Foals’ definitive statement. And that’s only part one!

This is Foals at their best, and we're only seeing half of the picture.

Its meticulous self-production frames new lyrical pathways from band leader Yannis Philippakis, who seeks to channel the anxieties and fears felt the world over in light of our crumbling political systems and ecological crises. It's a tall order to wade into such essential yet complex themes, ones that Philippakis felt a duty to engage with.

For now, this is an album that establishes Foals as one of the most exciting and driven bands of the generation.

The intricacies and experimentalism of those math-rock early days, the spacey ambience of ‘Total Life Forever’, and the bolshy production brilliance of those last two records: it’s all here.

Foals create a testament to their longevity but also consider where this new era is going to take them. Is this Foals’ first front-to-back essential record? Not quite, but with Pt.2 around the corner, it’s surely just a matter of time.

Everything Not saved is an exercise in artistic liberation. More importantly, perhaps, since it's chock full of tunes, it all comes without them losing the creative ground they've gained, [Apr 2019, p.108]

It all amounts to Foals’ finest yet, and there’s more (Part 2) to follow later this year.

Merging their asymmetrical early math pop with the deep space atmospherics of Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, plus added innovations – ambient rainforest throbs on “Moonlight”, deadpan EDM on “In Degrees”, Afro-glitch Radiohead on “Café D’Athens” – they’ve created an inspired album of scorched earth new music that, in all likelihood, will only really be challenged for album of the year by Part 2.

Foals' new direction is as exciting as it is flawed, and although it isn’t executed to perfection there is serious potential here.

What’s heartening about the first part of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is that this formula has not become tired. Rather, the band are adding to it incrementally and progressing into ever more interesting territory.

On its own merit, Part 1 is yet another banger-laden album, from an indie-rock machine who are now firmly established as one of the most consistent in their scene.