Foyer Red make winsome and wide-eyed art rock for people who own a fisherman’s sweater and doodle on restaurant menus as an adult. At an earlier point in indie-rock history, they might’ve opened for Dirty Projectors, or joined I’m From Barcelona. You wouldn’t be wrong to say the Brooklyn trio’s debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, is twee, because it is. But unlike their predecessors, Foyer Red are a little bit irony-poisoned. They make fuck-you crayon rock. At its best, their debut is a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny.
Jagged, disjointed, and pure of heart, the songs on Zigzag Wombat exist somewhere between the Suburban Lawns’ Su Tissue singing, “Oh my genitals! I’m a janitor!” and Rose Melberg talking about getting her heart broken on a Softies record. Opener “Fribbe” is 30 seconds of clarinet solo followed by choppy vocal harmonies, courtesy of vocalists Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers. They sing as if collaborating on a crossword puzzle, bouncing off each other as they complete each other’s fragments. “Swimming Pool” starts out almost reminiscent of yacht rock, with a distorted lo-fi loop that shimmers like the Aegean Sea. Then it breaks down, gets mathy, erupts into a collective scream, sounding brainy yet effortless.
As lyricists, Foyer Red favor free association. They like animals (rabbits, frogs), the world wide web (captcha codes, forgetting your password), and minor injuries (mosquito bites, blisters). The album’s titular wombat puts in an appearance on “Plutterbee,” though here the band’s try-anything approach feels too disjointed to succeed as a song. It works best when they sing about art, like on “Blue Pearl,” where they rhyme “peace of mind” with “zen like Yves Klein,” then namedrop the writer Maggie Nelson. The references are almost subtle enough to miss: The first few times I listened, I simply did not think they were speaking about the author of Bluets or the creator of International Klein Blue, but I was wrong, and I felt both trolled and charmed.
Foyer Red aren’t trolling all the time: Zigzag Wombat standout “Slander” is unmistakably lovely. A strident omnichord solo speeds through the song like a plane cuts through the sky, met by a choir of whistlers and warm-toned bass that does backflips. Like all the best twee-of-center art rock jams, it evokes a sense of yearning. It makes you want to bat your eyelashes, go for broke and kiss your crush, or just look out the window and have comically outsized thoughts about your big bright future. It’s a great frame of mind for this young band. “Shoot for the stars” is the cliché. Foyer Red ask: Idk, what if we tried to be famous?
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