FUTURE ISLANDS
People Who Aren’t There Anymore 4AD 7/10 Spacious-sounding seventh from Baltimore’s heart-on-sleeve synth-pop quartet.
IF Future Islands ever felt moved to remember that “all things come to those who wait”, they must also have wondered the heck when. For this Baltimore quartet (initially a trio), it was in May 2014. Over the preceding eight years, they’d racked up many hundreds of shows and three albums before an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman blasted them into wider public awareness overnight, thanks to singer Samuel T Herring’s famously unbounded performance of “Seasons (Waiting On You)”. Ten years and two UK Top 30 albums later that viral meme is history, while Future Islands press forward.
Alongside their serious live draw, the band’s status rests on a hybrid of romantic new wave and upbeat, ’80s-toned synth pop which they’ve dubbed “post wave”. Across six albums to date they’ve made minor tweaks to that sound – ratcheting up the tension on one, letting out some slack in another, introducing the odd guest vocalist – rather than transformed it. If this has le them relying rather too heavily on a formula, then it’s an honest one that clearly connects. On People Who Aren’t There Anymore, then, no curveballs are thrown. However, the band’s debt to OMD and New Order is increasingly less obvious, while the earlier bombastic synths are being edged out by a more spacious, less forceful style of electronic pop that recalls fellow Baltimorean Dan Deacon, with echoes of Peter Gabriel.
At the centre of these 12 songs is Herring’s muscular, resonant baritone, with its tremulous quality and sudden yelps. It carries most of their emotional drama and leads the melodies, the distinctive, surge-dropdown pattern in his cadence likely the different singing style he was forced to adopt due to damage done to his voice by years of hard touring. As always, Herring’s lyrics are fearlessly candid, with a direct narrative style that’s its own kind of poetry. The title signposts his focus, the pain and turbulence of a relationship’s end, as it was for both 2010’s In Evening Air and the following year’s
On The Water, though deep hurt – and its existential fallout – is generally the meat of every Future Islands song. This time, Herring plots the disintegration as if with a sextant: from pandemic-enforced separation (“The Sickness”) and the wretchedness of long-term transatlantic communication (“Deep In The Night”, “Say Goodbye”) to his denial that something’s wrong (“The Tower”) and an acknowledgement that love is lost, twinned with the determination to survive (“The Fight”, “The Garden Wheel”).
The set opens with “King Of Sweden”. Here, against an urgently bobbing synth line that gradually builds into a Technicolor mesh, Herring is travelling, in-ight headset on and “feeling like I’m 15, wandering with the Mists”. The chorus has him declaring, “You are all I need/nothing said could change a thing/where you go, I go”, which assumes extra poignancy with the knowledge that it – like seven of the songs, in fact – was written pre-breakup. In “The Tower” there’s a Krawerkian twinkle in play, while the slow-spinning “Corner Of My Eye”, with its reflections on relationships lost, the difficulty of going home and the need to move on, is saved from a ponderous, power-ballad fate by Herring’s tone, which has the gritty tenderness of mid-period Van Morrison. On “The Thief”, an anguished set standout, he adopts a distinctly Ferry-ish voice, a foil for the alluring interplay between sombre and ebullient synths. “Iris”, which sees the singer musing on how we escape the tangled knots of our own DNA without losing our moorings, is a mid-paced ’80s throwback, while there’s an A-ha-like familiarity to sad banger “Peach”. It pulls zero lyrical punches in its message that whatever happens, we come out the other side: “There’s life in this tunnel/we’re just hanging around/please, if you see my hand/ Just pull me out/there’s death in this tunnel/ Still hanging on me/still begging on me”.
Last is “The Garden Wheel”, another post-split composition and as Herring sees it, “an epilogue to the whole album”. It moves at a smooth-rolling clip, leaning on emotions and memories as held by landscape and the turn of the seasons in a portrait of upheaval. “How am I supposed to feel?” he wonders, adri in loss. The answer, of course, is that no guidebook exists – this is the stu of life – but People Who Aren’t There Anymore is another deep-grained investigation, in hope.