Foxglove - 'Lights Off'
Foxglove are back with a brand new single, ‘Lights Off’ – a gloriously disorientating pop rock song that builds it’s world around you.
‘Lights Off’ is an electrifying fever dream, powered by raucous guitars and a soaring vocal line. Manchester’s Foxglove have produced a densely layered track, creating a wall of sound that hits you in the chest and knocks your off your feet. It’s disorientating, but it’s fun.
The track feels like it belongs to a long tradition of pop punk, but one that’s grown up with its performers. Booming drums lead the melody along, while an infectious bassline does the rest of the work. Dirty, gained-up guitars give you the snarling solos you want.
Abi White, the band’s lead singer, tried a new approach to her lyricism for this track, using lines she’d jotted down from TV shows, books, and disparate bits of lyrics she had on her phone to construct a full song. It does the trick – creating a disorienting but all-enveloping world. The lyrics are stand-alone lines with a big impact (“how are you going to hold the gun, when there’s a war inside?” is a personal favourite). It’s emotionally charged, always cryptic, but it hits on a pervasive feeling of disconnection. Interestingly, ‘Lights Off’ is a part two to the band’s previous single, ‘Bright Lights.’ The former had a more coherent narrative, but it hit on the same feelings of disconnection.
The music video blurs the line between fantasy and reality, compounding the sense of disconnect. We see shots of White sitting in her room and singing along, shots of the band miming their instruments, all interspersed between shots of a totally normal performance. It’s an affective metaphor. ‘Lights Off’ is a beautiful mystery, and one I’m more than happy to try and solve.
Word by Izzy Rowley
