Andy Shauf’s Foxwarren New Album, 2, Out Now Via ANTI-

Canadian quintet Foxwarren – Andy Shauf, Avery and Darryl Kissick, Dallas Bryson, and Colin Nealis their new album, 2, out now via ANTI-.

Alongside the album they release the new single/video 'Deadhead'. Following 'Yvonne,' praised by AV Club as “an understated kind of gorgeous,” 'Deadhead' sees Foxwarren on a quest for levity. The song seamlessly moves from an MF Doom-like pitch-shifted sample to a line-dance guitar lick to honeyed country-rock harmonies of the titular band all in three minutes. There are darting flutes, mangled electronics, and meticulous snippets of rhythm, all expertly placed to illustrate the song’s emotional tumult. “I won’t stop dancing,” as Shauf sings, is exactly the feeling the song evokes.

'Deadhead' exemplifies the unique approach Foxwarren took in creating 2. After touring their lauded 2018 self-titled debut, the band dropped the familiar band-in-a-room routine. Instead, in their own home studios across four provinces, all five members would upload song ideas, melodic phrases, or rhythmic bits to a shared folder. In Toronto, Shauf would then plug these into a sampler and construct songs from the fragments supplied by his bandmates, leaning into classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète alike as unlikely lodestars. Foxwarren would convene at weekly online meetings, offering long-distance suggestions about which way a song might shift. The result is mesmerizing and uncanny, an album that traces two sides of a relationship through 37 minutes of collage art that aspires to “sound best blasting out your car window,” as put by Shauf.

By himself, Shauf has already had a stellar career, his reputation built by the sweet melodies and uniquely imaginative and precise storytelling found on 2016’s The Party through to 2023’s Norm.

Foxwarren, especially here, is a crucial part of that ongoing process, but 2 represents something even more significant—five friends now nearing the end of their second decade making music together, pushing against what they’ve learned how to do in order to venture somewhere new. It is the sound of friends who trust each other, cutting themselves loose from their past and their preconceptions to have some fun with a sampler and the very idea of songs.

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