When trapped, we fall back on our instincts for solutions to a way out. That’s how many felt when lockdown and mandatory confinement were imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Foxes, born Louisa Rose Allen, writing music became a solace. “I felt quite lost and needed something to ground myself. Creatively, music was that,” she tells me.
These remote sessions spawned her newest album The Kick. Writing from a place of wanting to escape the confines of her apartment, Foxes imagined the freedom of the outside where people can dance and hold each other again. “I felt a wild and animalistic feeling of needing and wanting to socialise again; come out whilst writing and the feelings just didn’t stop.”
Her first full-length studio album since 2016’s All I Need also wasn’t planned, as she had enough material for an album prior to The Kick. “Most of the music is a celebration but some of the music comes from a painful place, of loss and heartbreak,” Foxes shares. “I felt trapped and almost like my insides were dancing but I couldn’t express it. [Only] in writing did it allow me to feel free again. This record feels like a new start and the ability to come back to life after such a strange time of us all being alone.” Before this, Foxes went on a hiatus where she reassessed her goals on releasing projects that are authentic and from the heart, which led her to make a comeback with 2021’s Friends in the Corner EP.
The 32-year-old Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter further reflected the desolate feeling with The Kick’s album artwork cover, which features nine boxes to correspond to the album’s tracks. Foxes likened these boxes to prison cells which saw her in weird poses as if attempting an escape. This visual concept cements the meaning of the album title too. Also included on the record as the title track, ‘The Kick’ echoes her desire to kick herself out of the funk. “There’s always a song that usually causes the whole album to make sense. And ‘The Kick’ was that. I felt I was confined in my own apartment and looking at my walls; almost wanting to kick down the walls of my house to get out,” she says.
The unexpected arrival of the pandemic upheaved routines and norms. Thus, there’s no choice but to adapt. A first for Foxes is learning to write in isolation. “I had to sit with myself and learn how to create music without another person in the room. This definitely changed the way that I made the album,” she admits. “I’ll be on my iPhone, with my voice notes, singing melodies and lyrics on my own, feeling like I was losing my mind. It felt funny as it resulted in confusion. I was trying to make sense of all of it like everyone was.”
The uncertainty from experiencing isolation and a pandemic at the same time made her push herself creatively. But fortunately, there’s a constant that remained—The Kick’s primary producer James Greenwood (aka Ghost Culture). Foxes worked with the electronic musician-producer, way before the COVID-19 pandemic happened, to positive effect. Hence, the duo continued their writing sessions via Zoom. “We were writing throughout day and night and ideas were flowing. I would record on my microphone and send it over [to him] through email. He would then reply to me with a beat, and then it worked over the Internet somehow. It should feel incohesive, but it actually feels otherwise. I think that’s because he understood what I wanted to convey and we’re both in the same boat too.”
Dance and electronic have always been present in her compositions. Likewise for The Kick. But they are often attached with a hint of melancholia. From her hit song ‘Gravity’ to ‘Let Go For Tonight’ and ‘Body Talk’, Foxes explains on liking to juxtapose honest and dark lyrics with music that would give hope—“You wouldn’t expect to hear [this] in dance. But my theory is if I put something sonically dark over what I was writing, it would be extremely depressing. As much as I love writing dance music, I also really love writing music that’s stripped down and acoustic.” She attributes this sensibility to singing jazz early in her music career. “Sometimes in dance or pop music you can lose a specific emotion. You enjoy the melody and arrangement of how a song is written. But then, one may overlook some of the lyrics [and] its meaning.”
The album’s lead single ‘Sister Ray’ showcases this duality well and serves as a highlight for Foxes. Undeniably upbeat in sound, it’s about the loss of a friend. “It felt lethargic to write such a song,” she says. “But that’s probably one of my favourite moments; realising that I needed to get the words and how I was feeling to come out. That’s why I wanted to release [‘Sister Ray’] first. Because it felt where I was at that time and hence it’s natural to release it.”
For a song that’s born naked and stripped down in its acoustic glory, there’s ‘Sky Love’. The album’s third single, completed acoustically from day one of writing it, depicts the feeling of heady romance upon meeting someone and losing control of this emotion.
“Love can be overwhelming. I remember having this lyric ‘sky love’ and [I] wanted to write a song with that as the title. It was quite easy to write in the end because I was in that feeling. There’s going to be a few versions—the acoustic version that we wrote with an electric guitar, the Roosevelt-produced disco version, and there’ll be a remix as well. So there are different sides to ‘Sky Love’. That’s another [song] which has quite a lot of meaning behind it, but maybe you might not hear it initially because the production is very colourful. It’s about that first feeling of all-encompassing love.”
The Kick by Foxes is now available via digital music platforms including Apple Music.
