foxtails – fawn LP

Foxtails is a self-proclaimed “bunch of fucked-up kids” from Connecticut. Over the last several years, the band’s sound has evolved to encompass everything from gentle and jazzy guitar interludes to instrumental pummeling and nihilistic shrieking in the best screamo tradition, but the core of their sound has always been in confessional, cathartic, confrontational post-hardcore. Making the personal political and vice versa has been a rallying cry for emo since the first whispers of Washington, D.C.’s Revolution Summer, but Foxtails has found a way to merge the two in its own pained, forthright, and shockingly vulnerable way since 2014.
Foxtails originally formed in the hallways of a Connecticut magnet school for the arts. Drummer Michael Larocca and vocalist Megan Cadena-Fernandez were little more than 15 years old, while guitarist Jon Benham was a relatively stately 17. Their early work, captured on records like This Is Not for You and songs like “I’m a Sociopath,” is filled with lengthy, intricate, deeply melodic build-ups and dynamic compositions, splitting the difference between charming, ethereal beauty and abrasive discordance with a nimble versatility far beyond their years. Larocca’s drumming is almost athletic in its speed, yet mathematical in its precision and graceful in its light, tasteful touches. The core of Foxtails’ musical identity lies in the symbiotic relationship between Benham’s guitar work and Cadena-Fernandez’s vocals. Cadena-Fernandez’s gentle crooning and diaristic lyrical impulses meld perfectly with the lilting fluidity of Benham’s jazz-influenced noodling, but both are capable of turning on a dime and evincing a deeply distorted holy racket; Cadena-Fernandez’s screams are as monumental and solid as a brick wall, while Benham’s guitar work rarely sacrifices its melodic ingenuity even at its most feedback-drenched and spastic. With their latest addition in violinist Jared Schmidt, who joined in January 2021, the band will look to keep pushing musical boundaries for many years to come.
“We had an on-off bassist named Josh who made it onto our first two records,” notes Cadena-Fernandez wryly, “and two other bassists who didn’t stick around.” Fairweather rhythm section musicians aside, Cadena-Fernandez took over on bass in time for Foxtails’ breakthrough 2017 LP, III. The album saw the band gelling into a cohesive and powerful three-piece, producing some of their most concise and direct statements of purpose yet alongside lengthy, sprawling pieces that betray the band’s sonic ambitions and eyes-to-the-sky dreaminess. III was followed up the next year by a characteristically off-kilter, eerily aggressive, and aggressively eerie split with the delightfully catchy and chaotic UK screamo outfit Algae Bloom, and in 2019 by yet another artistic watershed for the band, Querida Hija.
On Querida Hija, Foxtails delivered yet another stunning and idiosyncratic step forward. Though the band had always worn its leftist political affiliations on its sleeve, the lyrics on Querida Hija are both some of Cadena-Fernandez’s most brash and most achingly vulnerable yet, a particular accomplishment in a field of music most known for brash vulnerability. Querida Hija feels like a clarion call from the marginalized underbelly of America, an atmospheric yet defiantly furious demand for liberation and the right to self-determination for people of color, the LGBT community, and the working class; it’s all delivered through an album colored by violence sonically as much as it is lyrically, though the band’s core DNA of gorgeous melodies shines through unabated.
Foxtails are a band that makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand at attention, a Mobius strip of clean and dirty that cycles through musical modes as naturalistically and adroitly as the songs flow through different emotional states. Foxtails are like water: placid or running softly, beautiful beneath the glow of the moonlight, until it hits a sheer cliff. The drop off the waterfall might kill you, but it’s exhilarating and joyful nonetheless.