On the chorus of ‘Gratitude’, a blistering highlight from Foxing‘s new self-titled LP, Conor Murphy lists a series of desires, each more striking than the last: “I wanna hear God yelling at me/ I wanna live my life like a memory/ I wanna sow rage into my brain/ I want wrath written into my DNA.” Like so much of Foxing, the moment is visceral, unguarded, and relentless, neatly capturing the band’s catalog of yearning: a violently spiritual search for meaning, a fury so pervasive it needs biology, a reckoning with the past that can’t be chalked up to nostalgia. Produced by the band and mixed by guitarist Eric Hudson, the album shares the ambition, rawness, and a lot of the same frustrations as its predecessor, 2021’s Manchester Orchestra-produced Draw Down the Moon, but what makes Foxing astounding is less of a streamlined approach than a sharp attunement to its emotional and aesthetic extremes: the bleakness, the catharsis, the exultation; heavy guitars, atmospheric synths, screams over gorgeous melodies. It’s a lot, but it manages to hold itself together. For Foxing, DIY is less of a perfect anti-capitalist philosophy than it is about the doing, the same way living life like a memory is still about living – even if it means scrambling for a sense of worth, sweeping up the mess, and gasping for air, day after day.
We caught up with Foxing’s Conor Murphy to talk about self-titling their new album, the collaborative process behind it, where the hope is, and more.
I know you’re not doing a ton of press for this record. How do you feel about the rollout so far?
The rollout process has been great. With our last record, Draw Down the Moon, it was a 6-month rollout, so it took forever to put it out, and we put out nearly half the album before the release. It was just constant work. I’m really proud of that rollout because we did a ton of stuff – we made a website for it that had a lot of puzzles and really weird things going on, like it had an RPG in it. But it took so long, and it got to a point where it was just a relief to have it out because it meant we didn’t have to do anything anymore. And I think it was a relief for fans, or just people who wanted to listen to the album, because it took forever. With this one, we wanted to do the opposite. The initial idea was to just surprise-release it, but that’s so hard to do when you’re a smaller band like us. Nobody cares – if you surprise-release an album, most people are like, “Oh, cool.” And it’s too big of an investment – of time, effort, money, and passion – to do something that just goes unnoticed. So we went in the middle, which was 3, 4 weeks, and it’s been great.
We also did nonstop press for the last album. There was a point where every day I was doing a minimum of two interviews, but sometimes it was 4-5 a day, for like three weeks. The pandemic was in full swing, so I was mostly just at home, but at a certain point, it’s just exhausting. There’s people like a radio host in Jakarta who I was in an interview with – which is awesome, that was really cool – but they were also like, “Tell me about your band. What does the name Foxing mean?” And it’s like going back to square one with a lot of people. I didn’t want to do that this time around. Our rule on this one is to only do interviews if we haven’t done them with before, or if we have and we enjoyed them, or if they sound fun. Those were only rules. It’s nice to be more selective.
I wanted to ask you about the decision to self-title the album, which I’m assuming has a lot to do with self-producing and self-releasing it, but I wonder if there’s more to the thinking behind it.
It’s mostly those things. I think it’s the most introspective album in terms of our band itself. It’s kind of the band looking in the mirror more so than me individually. With past albums, just lyrically speaking, there’s a lot of personal deep-dive stuff – whether it’s about growing up, sexuality, depression, religion, or whatever the themes are. With this album, I feel like the vast majority of the songs are still written personally, but they’re more about the experience of this band’s career. Not like telling the story of the band, but more like reflecting on what it feels like to have spent so much of your life working towards something, then looking at it as, “What has it all meant? Was it worth it? Should I keep doing it?” I don’t think I’m speaking to anything uniquely personal to me. It feels like I’m speaking for the rest of the band. I mean, for all the songs, I went over the lyrics meticulously with the rest of the band in a way I hadn’t done before. So I think this is the most “from the band’s perspective” set of lyrics that we’ve released.
That, paired with the self-produced aspect of it – Eric produced it, we mixed it, Brett made the art for the album cover, I made the music videos. We all contributed to all these things, it was all done in-house. Brett’s making all the merch for the tour. Really early on, Eric and I were talking about self-releasing, it was like, “If we self-release it, we should self-produce and mix it.” We were just throwing ideas back and forth, and we were like, “It’d be really cool if it was self-released, self-produced, self-titled.” Since then, there’s never been an album name that came close to making more sense.
When you’re collectively looking in the mirror, even if it’s you speaking for the band or going through lyrics with everyone, are there conflicting perspectives at play? Did it get challenging to try and look back at it all with a sort of overarching perspective?
I think in some ways. In past albums, for example, there’d be a song that’s written about, say, a friend dying or something like that. Then I’d bring it to everybody, and they’d be like, “That’s well written” or “Maybe in this spot, what if you change this line to this?” But was more like, “Do your thing,” because it was very personal. With this one, I’d write a song like ‘Greyhound’, which is about cataloging the emotions of a decade of doing this job, and there were a lot more notes and ideas like, “I don’t really like how this line comes across.” It’s not that difficult because it’s still my personal feelings on something.
The most difficult song to do that with was ‘Hell 99’, because it was both Eric and my lyrics going back and forth with each other. It’s funny, because now I look at it and think that’s such a cool thing that happened, but while we were working on it, it was actually argumentative. Eric wrote the lines that he screams, and I wrote the lines that I sing, but we were editing each other’s stuff. It’s too confusing to go into the process how we got to where it ended up, but a huge part of it was that Eric was looking at it from a place of being exhausted and furious about the state of music and art consumption, and I approached it from a perspective of feeling apathy, shame, and just depression when I look at the state of consumption of media and art. I was looking at it more like, “I’m so embarrassed for both the people who listen to music and for people who make music.”
So we were kind of at odds with each other on how to write that. But I think it ended up being really cool because those two things – the two conflicting but similar ideas – are actually happening at the same time, sung by two different people and layered on top of each other. And they go back and forth, where the angry one is screaming and the depressed one is singing, and at the end, they actually are on top of each other: my part is singing “constant shame,” and his part is screaming “constant fatigue.” And then they coalesce with both of us screaming, “Is this all there is?” And it’s funny because none of that was intentional at all. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ll be the one that’s sad, and you’ll be the one that’s angry.” It was more that we were like, “This is how you write it,” “No, this is how you write it.” [laughs]
I thought that was the coolest example of being at odds with each other about that stuff, but with almost every other song, if there was an issue with the lyrics or how they were written, it was mostly based in Eric saying, like, “I think you can do better than that,” or that I should rewrite something because the vocal melody isn’t to his liking or the lyrics aren’t cutting it. So I would just try again until everyone in the band was happy.
It’s interesting hearing about these sentiments being kind of at odds with each other while being clearly connected. In the bio for Foxing, Ryan Wasoba talks about the balance of hope and nihilism, which to me feels like a pendulum swing, but also, like you said, two things happening at the same time. This is an existential record, but I’m interested in the idea of there being hopeful ways to be existential. How do you see that manifesting on the record or in your life beyond it? I’m thinking of this line from ‘Hell 99’: “a better quality of suffering.”
That line, “a better quality of suffering,” comes from a movie called A Field in England. It’s a weird, funny, experimental film from 2013. It’s like a 17th-century war movie. I won’t go into the whole backstory of where the line comes from, but I was obsessed with it. For a long time, I was trying to figure out how to put it into a song because I loved it so much. And it speaks to the rest of the record, like you said, so I’m glad you picked up on it. I think the whole “better quality of suffering” idea, and also the hopefulness, comes from the act of actually doing the thing itself in general. It’s a bleak record – it’s written in earnest, but it’s very bleak. That being said, it’s created – we put so much effort into it. The artwork is bleak and ominous, but we also put hours and hours into. The videos, every aspect of it – there’s an insane amount of work put into it. And I think that’s the hopefulness. As embarrassing and infuriating as it can be to release music and play the content game and try to succeed in any capacity within the music industry – as depressing and stupid as it all feels – it’s also like: we’re doing it. That’s an amount of hope that we put into the world.
There are very few spots on the record that are actually positive or like, “You know, maybe it’s okay.” [laughs] Those positive spots are based in relationships, though. Anytime I write about love or happiness, it’s usually written about my wife or about my friends, and it’s like, “Well, that’s the happy thing.” You do this stuff, and you keep doing it because you love it – the band and the music stuff. The song ‘Cry Baby’ at the end of the record, it’s mostly just: I do all this stuff, and I don’t know if it was worth it, but I do know that I get to come home at the end of it to the person I love, and that means all that stuff brought me to this place. I’m so happy to be in this place with the person I love, I’m married to her, and I’m surrounded by friends that I love. I’m a very happy person. So maybe all of that stuff sucks and sucked [laughs], and I hate that I continue to do it or something, but I am actually really, really happy in life.
The whole thing, we always equate it to this: every album you put out, every song you put out, is like buying a lottery ticket. It’s as depressing as buying a lottery ticket and looking at the odds. But there’s also this little part of you that’s like, “Yeah, but I’m buying a lottery ticket. That means that I believe in some way that this thing could work out.” And it’s not just a lottery ticket because you could be a millionaire or something; it’s more like what you get out of the thing could change your life. I could get to keep doing this forever – that’s the biggest thing we hope for every time.
Musically, one thing that clearly stands out about the record is its abrasiveness. To what extent do you feel like that was driven by emotional versus stylistic impulses? Is that a distinction you can qualify?
For me, it was a stylistic choice that turned into an emotional one, I guess. Very early on, we talked about wanting it to be really loud, abrasive, and angry before we even got into writing lyrics or songs. I think that was the first thing we said about the record, that we wanted it to be experimental, loud, angry, and abrasive. I think Eric said something like, “When it’s soft, it’s beautiful and soaring, and when it’s loud, it’s angry, ominous, and scary.” So that’s what we tried to accomplish. But, of course, along the way, any plans like that fall apart when you start writing something, and you realize the song could benefit from a dynamic change that’s neither soft nor abrasive and crazy. A song like ‘Greyhound’, for instance, has a smashing, loud part in it, but it’s also a very long song that goes through lots of permutations.
You mentioned how taking stock of the band’s career was an important part of making Foxing. Having finished it, can you articulate how it made you reconsider or reappreciate what the band means to you, at the end of the day?
I don’t think it really changed how I thought of the band or what the band means to me. The band has meant different things to me over the years. When we started, it was just another band. I’ve been in several bands in my life, and I was 18 when we started. It was like, “Oh, here’s another one!” And then it became a band that tours, that puts out an album, then two albums. In my early twenties, it was like, “This is the only thing that matters to me. Anything else – relationships or anything like that – are second to this, and if I’m in a relationship with someone, they have to understand that this matters the most.” It was a ruiner of relationships, and I didn’t finish college because I had to drop out to do this. So that’s what the band meant for probably six years.
I think the biggest thing that happened – meeting my wife, and then eventually, the pandemic happened. And I was like, “Whoa, the biggest thing in my life right now, this band – it’s being forced to take a break.” Even within that break, we still wrote an album. [laughs] We were working on it every day, but we were forced to slow down in a lot of ways. When that happened, it put a lot of things in perspective for me where I had to take a lot of inventory of what this means to me in my life and how it informs the way I identify myself. The way I look at myself and say, “This is part of my identity: I play in this band, I write in this band, and I go on tour all the time.” But at a certain point, that goes away, whether because the band breaks up or because we age out of it. It will eventually need to stop. And we’ve known that, obviously, since the beginning; that’s always been a theme of our band. Someday it will stop. But I think I got to a point, especially in the pandemic, where it was like, “I’m not prepared for that in any way. I’m not prepared to look in the mirror and say, ‘Okay, I’m not in a band anymore,’ or ‘I’m not in Foxing.’”
I feel like, since then, I’ve been trying to grow as a person outside of just being a band member. And I think everybody has been doing that to some degree; I hope everybody’s able to do that. This album was the first time I was able to sort of write about that and to write about that sort of struggle. And I hope that it’s universal enough to translate to other careers or passions where you look at a big chunk of your life that you’ve dedicated towards something or someone and you’re like: How do I exist without this thing, even though I’m still existing with it? How can I prepare to not do this anymore? And was it all worth it? So it was a great opportunity for me to do that via writing and getting my thoughts out on the page. The way I look at it now is: this band is still my career, but I’m trying to look at it less as my entire being and more as my creative outlet and my job that I do with other people. We do it together, and that’s amazing, but then I go home and I actually do have a life outside of it. That’s what I’m trying to get to, at least.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Foxing’s Foxing is out September 13 via Grand Paradise.