Splitting their time between NYC and Olympia (apparently they live 6 months here, 6 months there), Foxygen is a band that's only devoted to its crazy musical intuition. Besides the insane mash up of influences that can almost all be traced back to the sound of the 70s (we hear early Roxy Music, early Bowie, Captain Beefheart, John Lennon, Motown...) the most astounding thing about their music is how it flows (in this regard, check out the streaming track). It flows like... a record from the 70s! This, after we spent 30+ years listening to new records produced with a click track (or directly with a drum machine), feels incredibly refreshing.

The band also possesses great songwriting chops, which definitely helped them snatch a 7.9 grade from Pitchfork - that's great, but if this is not "Best New Music" material, we have no idea what else can be. That is why their debut album "Take The Kids Off Broadway" was The Deli NYC's Record of the Month in May. - We featured Foxygen in print in our latest NYC issue, you can read Mike Levine's full interview here.

Summer 2012 Issue

This is The Deli's Summer issue 2012! 
Read it here.

A bit of advice: If you've just listened to the first track off Foxygen's debut LP 'Take The Kids Off Broadway' and are a bit puzzled, don't worry! That's just the band shifting your brain cells around to prepare you for what comes next. 'Make it Known' makes Ariel Pink's 'Hold On' sound halfhearted... hell, this song could be our new anthem if we're not careful.

But that's probably not what they had in mind. A lot of this duo's music feels entirely off the cuff, even while sounding like a lot of time was spent on these tracks. Occupying that historical space somewhere between hippie psychedelia like 13th Floor Elevators, and glam rock like Roxy Music/early Bowie, it's hard to tell what era this music was conceived in - which is the very prerequisite of timeless records. Frankly, this is a band that can't seem to make up their mind about much of anything, and it's probably for the best. The twin vocals of songwriting team Sam France and Jonathan Rado seem to switch genre entirely mid-verse or mid-hook, going from a tumult of horns and organs to jangly guitar and back again. Leader-of-the-pack motorcycle rock n' roll gives way to Shirelles fanfare and viceversa, all fronted by something close to Mick Jagger... it's retrolicious, through and through.

If all this sounds looney tunes, well... it kinda is. But maybe I'm just being old-fashioned. As Foxygen says themselves: "How could I love someone if I'm not willing to change?" Bedroom production aside, this is the clearest representation of something new I've heard in quite some time. - Mike Levine (@Goldnuggets)

Sometimes we get these press releases in the mail saying that a band we've never heard of just signed with a super cool label, and we look at each other (as if we were more than one) with a puzzled expression: "who the heck are these guys?". Today "these guys" are two zany guys involved in lo-fi psych-folk duo Foxygen, based 50% in Astoria, NYC and 50% in Olympia, WA, who recently signed to Jagjaguwar. Following a very non-chalant musical recipe which seems to phagocytize any musical influence every imagined since 1957, these guys' songs certainly don't lack in character. Think of it as a hipster, but also somewhat retro, version of They Might Be Giant. Fun!