Foxwarren

Canadian quintet Foxwarren – Andy Shauf, Avery and Darryl Kissick, Dallas Bryson, and Colin Nealis –  announce their new album, 2, out May 30th via ANTI-, and release the lead single/video “Listen2me.” 2 is a fun and surprising record, where boundaries between genre and song are constantly blurred. Built on 20 years of friendship, Foxwarren ostensibly plays folk music, where warm tones and cantering rhythms buoy songs of characters wrestling with existential quandaries inside of twilit vocals. But after touring their lauded, Juno Award-nominated, 2018 self-titled debut, Foxwarren decided to do it all differently, eventually dropping the familiar band-in-a-room routine to instead plug those songs, and various other sounds into a sampler. The result is mesmerizing and uncanny, an album that traces two sides of a relationship through 37 minutes of collage art.

During the last decade, Shauf has become known as a uniquely imaginative and precise storyteller – a perpetually restless songwriter and musician, always using some fresh fascination, skill, or concept as the catalyst for albums he would write, play, and produce almost entirely by himself. These ever-evolving interests are evident from 2016’s The Party through to 2023’s Norm. But before Shauf’s solo acclaim, he was a member of Foxwarren, which initially consisted of Shauf, the fraternal rhythm section of Avery and Darryl Kissick, and guitarist Bryson.  Their self-titled debut album arrived in 2018, almost an entire decade after the formation of the band, garnering solid reviews, packed live shows and some of Shauf’s most celebrated music, immediately overcoming any suggestion whatsoever that this was just a side project. Multi-instrumental ace Colin Nealis – a member of Shauf’s touring band – officially joined Foxwarren after their summer touring in 2019.

In creating 2, the band opted to try something entirely new: 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.

It was neither a fast nor an easy process, but 2 became an uncanny revelation for Foxwarren; they warped and pushed the florid folk-rock of their past until it evolved into a song cycle about the vagaries of love, where voices sampled from the past commingled with songs that sparkled with the power of their collective imagination in the present. A trove of found-sound conversations between two lovers were weaved into the songs. Borrowing from a bit of dialogue, lead single “Listen2me” features a guitar riff and bounding rhythm cut in to repeat themselves, spinning around again and again while Shauf relays a loud-mouthed lover’s quarrel. The song’s video was directed and created by filmmaker and artist Winston Hacking.

There is something uncanny about the feeling of these songs— the way bits recorded in different home studios amplify your attention, looping and interlocking. But the true connective tissue is the generous and gentle way Foxwarren’s 2 moves with melody.

By himself, Shauf has already had a stellar career, his reputation built not only by the sweetness of his melodies and sharpness of his words but also his inability to rest with past success. 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.