‘Sacred Hearts Club’3 min read

‘Sacred Hearts Club’ is the restart of Foster the People, it’s an album from 2017 and the intention was starting from the psychedelic sixties, before moving to other musical destinations, mixing and experiencing different styles and genres.

Sometimes this creative jam session works, others it doesn’t. Luckily, this album is a pure inspiration that mixes of funk, trap music, post-punk and occasionally some psychedelic.

It’s possible to discern that the album is a record that can be examined even before being heard, it can be read from various angles and analysed from multiple perspectives.

For example, it’s possible to tell that Foster the People have decided to start to improve their music, trying to amplify their indie-rock roots to achieve the conditions to launch it towards new challenges while being increasingly challenging.

In many interviews they released, they reveal the record was born from improvisation and experimentation, and what is happening in the world influences the album, as artists, they felt like responding in their way.

However, at the same time, they wanted to embrace it and inform the world that music is the only thing that brings people together.

This record is based on the idea of people as ‘outsiders’, people that don’t live within societal norms. With the ‘Supermodel’ album which was more volatile and acidic, talking directly to the crowds.

So with ‘SHC’, they wanted to try to hug all the people from the world with different genres and styles of music combined, this is to tell that even if now we opened our eyes and we are aware of what’s going on, music will never let us down.

This album contains 12 songs that show all the shades and potential of the band; many pieces narrate a story, a remarkable one is ‘Loyal like Sid & Nancy’, a punk homage to the doomed love between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, in which paradoxically, the beats of the sound increases.

The band mentioned how they struggled to find the right way to mention America’s refusal of Syrian refugees. In the song, they state Sylvia, where I can only think of Sylvia Plath, a poet who committed suicide by gas inhalation.

The whole song can be interpreted in how the US government are disinterested in listening to what the American people have to say.

‘Sacred Hearts Club’ is what the album is called but is also a song featured in the record, personally my favourite.

The subject of the song is a person, where the headman Mark has a relationship, and the other one is God. There are many ways to interpret this song, and the funny things are that there isn’t one that is correct or one that is incorrect, it’s just the way we see and we interpret ‘life’.

‘Lotus Eater’ is an enjoyable song; it can be interpreted as difficulties to find a connection with others. How day-by-day we struggle to find the excitement, and when we find it we lose on our path the passion for it?

That’s the moment we realise that there will always be more afterwards and if we don’t find the strength to change the reality around us, this will be a never-ending cycle.

I want to finish with this powerful phrase Mark Foster says in an interview: ‘A song is a living thing if you let it be’.