There’s already been one rock band this year that’s taken a radical departure from their established sound, with Muse releasing their Skrillex-inspired single Unsustainable. Now beloved indie act Foster the People are also looking to fuse together electronic sounds with their more traditional instrumentation.
However, in the case of Foster the People it’s not so much an outside influence as it is the musical ideas that have been realised by Mark Foster and Isom Innis in their EDM side project Smims & Belle. With the duo recently making their festival debut at Hard Summer in Los Angeles, Foster caught up with Rolling Stone to explain how Smims & Belle effects Foster the People.
“[Innis] makes stuff a lot more in the electronic realm,” Foster explained to Rolling Stone, “He’ll build foundational stuff for Smims and Belle and we’ll come together while I’m doing foundational stuff for Foster the People.”
“It’s all in there. We make a really heavily electronic hip hop track and explore that world, [and] it’s floating around in my brain the next time I write a Foster track. One thing about Foster the People is that it’s taking pieces of a lot of different genres of music and kind of melding them together.”
In June Foster said the new Foster the People record will also be influenced by The Kinks and The Clash. As Foster more recently explained to Rolling Stone, the amalgamation of various genres has always been his goal with FTP.
“In the first record, I was looking at my vision for the project through a piece of opaque glass. This next record’s going to be more evolved; it’s going to be a clearer picture of what I’ve had in my head when it comes to that vision. Working on this project and getting deeper into electronic music is gonna help bring a deeper color in the next Foster record,” Foster revealed.
Listen: Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans ft. Azealia Banks (Smims & Belle Remix)
