Failure is the secret of Foxing’s success. The St. Louis band’s most popular songs to date are either about romantic rejection or religious trauma, or the indignity of having to relive those indignities onstage, or the financial precarity that comes with reliving those indignities onstage instead of, I dunno, getting a desk job with health benefits. Before the release of 2021’s Draw Down the Moon, drummer Jon Hellwig joked that Foxing might have been better off if the album flopped, giving them an excuse to opt out of emo-indie cult stardom and start playing nu-metal. That didn’t exactly happen, but they made their “Break Stuff” anyway. “Carson MTV! Bizkit NYE! Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuck!” guitarist Eric Hudson shrieks on the priceless chorus of “Hell 99,” a stadium-sized skramz spasm that is arguably the most aggro and the most catchy Foxing song yet, and undeniably the first that sounds like they’re having fun. After a decade shooting for the stars, Foxing is the sound of a band liberated by wallowing in the mud.
By swapping the sounds of Coachella 2012 for Woodstock ’99, “Hell 99” might appear as a course correction for Draw Down the Moon, an album that couldn’t totally beat the Grouplove allegations but had fathoms of dread beneath its Day-Glo exterior. Singer Conor Murphy means to be taken at face value when he blares, “Throw out all the joy and show me metrics for my failures.” But the only major difference between the subject matter of Foxing and its predecessor is that the latter lacked any songs about his dog dying. This album counts at least two.
Think of Foxing as Nearer My God’s evil genius twin: the type that spends more time in detention than study hall and still ends up with an A. Where in the past the band’s experimentalism was anchored by clean, rafter-reaching choruses, Foxing genre-leaps without a net, trusting its weirdest impulses to embellish and deliver the hooks. No spoilers for opener “Secret History”: Just know that by comparison, “Hell 99” is kind of a breather, at least before a refrain of “Constant shame! Constant fatigue!” hyperventilates into an ambient collapse. “Gratitude” is the one Obama-core throwback, performed with a white-knuckled intensity equal to the parts of Foxing that might credibly be compared to Deafheaven, Knocked Loose, and, in the case of “Dead Internet,” a Soundgarden mp3 playing through a dial-up modem.
For 56 minutes Foxing alternately thrills and confounds but provides little in the way of catharsis. No longer daydreaming of planetary apocalypse, Foxing fears not death but dying, the Doomsday Clock that starts up with every morning alarm. The mantras provide grounding and no relief—“You’re on your own”; “Repeat and then repeat, you can never really leave”; “What if it doesn’t matter anymore?” On “Kentucky McDonald’s” the vocal, lead, and rhythm guitar melodies appear to be going in opposite directions, as if drawn and quartered by Nearer My God’s four horsemen. The arrangement turns molten as Murphy sounds like he’s choking on his own blood, but there’s no release, only more tension. Questioning your entire life on a Ronald McDonald bench is not something that should be resolved in four minutes. Murphy likens the Foxing experience to a slow drowning on “Greyhound,” which thrashes to the surface only for him to yell, “It means nothing to me!”
If only. In an interview, Foxing revealed how much they despised each other during the album’s recording, how Hudson spent five days “hate-mixing” a song that he couldn’t wrap his head around and experienced “the darkest fucking thoughts of my life” revisiting The Albatross for adoring crowds in 2023. They don’t give a firm answer as to whether it was all worth it. Foxing concludes with a recording of Hudson at 13, saying to Murphy, “I don’t think the song is as good as it could be, but it’s coming along.” If they could have seen 20 years ahead, would they keep at it? As Murphy sighs during the preceding piano ballad “Cry Baby,” “If I could I’d start over again/It’s been fun but I’d change everything.”
Foxing isn’t a sob story from a band that is, objectively, more successful than most of its peers. Save for a few snapshots from the road, Murphy’s words could be those of a middle school teacher buying their own supplies for the next term, a harried public defender $250,000 in debt, or basically anyone exploited by their idealism long enough to realize salvation isn’t coming. If there were a viral hit or festival booking that could make Foxing feel secure, it probably won’t come from this album. Instead, the meaning comes from the dozens of little moments when they’ve pushed themselves further than they imagined, without promise of any future reward. The days of yelling “I want it all” to an imagined arena audience are gone. Foxing are learning to want what they have.
