THE INDIGO FAULT, a debut EP preluded by sci-fi themed teaser videos and a set of unfathomably great singles, piques intrigue and foreshadows a much larger tale to be told. Joining us, Audrey and Ashley of FOXCULT give insight into the lyrics and the lore of their phenomenal breakthrough release. Though still at the beginning of their story, the magnitude of what this band seems capable of despite being so young in their career feels nothing short of astronomical; the scope of the tale they are weaving coupled with the parallels it bears to the very real and lived experience of trans folk around the world, delivered via a meticulously crafted, post-hardcore chronicle with an epic, space operatic flair.
As we delve into the creation of, and the meanings behind the five tracks of THE INDIGO FAULT and beyond, the band are excitable, smiling and chattering away, giving out every bit of detail in a genuine, warm and wholesome manner. It’s glaringly evident that being a part of FOXCULT is a labour of passion, love and joy.
EMPTY SPACE
Ashley: “Okay, so empty space was one of the last songs that we wrote for the EP. When I was writing it, I was listening to a lot of Thrice (as if that’s not something I do every day already), but I wanted something heavier that wasn’t just chunky breakdowns, but still aggressive at the same time. I’m a really big fan of Thrice‘s The Alchemy Index, and on that their Fire EP is really, really, really, really good. They have a lot of really great tonal use in the first few songs, which I used kind of like a mindset for EMPTY SPACE. Going into the studio, the only thing that we had written for empty space was the chorus, that was it, and I knew what I wanted to do with it, I just wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish it. So first I made sure that the chorus was perfected, and we knew exactly how that was going to sound for how the structure of the song was going to be, and then in the studio we were fucking around with it and I realised I needed a note lower than what I was capable of playing on my guitar. So we actually rented a really cheap seven string and ended up like using it to create the breakdowns in the song. It’s supposed to be that angsty, drive-y, puts you on edge kind of track.”
Audrey: “So the EP as a whole is this concept style thing, as I’m sure you’ve kind of gathered from the consistency of the aesthetics and the teasers that we did leading up to it, a narrative set in a sci fi, space opera-esque kind of theming. And ‘EMPTY SPACE’ is where the story starts. Sort of. The story actually begins with the announcement teaser that we did for the EP, so all of the voiceovers that we did for the teasers and the track reveal, actually take place prior to when the EP starts. And so the protagonist is in the middle of having just started basically travelling across space, because of this like weird, faded, faint echo transmission coming from somewhere in the galaxy. And so this song is basically about making that decision of whether or not to like chase after it. The lyrics serve make that all very apparent; “from all the way across the empty space called the whisper of a distant light”, so it’s very much that first debate of whether or not to take a sort of plunge into something because the whole story is ultimately an allegory for transitioning.”
Ashley: “It’s a good moment to point out that with the artwork for the EP and then the singles themselves, each one has its own artwork and colour that informs the prism that’s on the front of the main artwork for the EP. It’s all it’s all very purposeful.”
Audrey: “So each of the five colours in the gradient correspond to each of the songs. And that kind of came from a sort of synaesthesia perspective, the colours of the feelings that each song conveys. So yeah, EMPTY SPACE is very much just that like; something’s going on here. And deciding whether or not to chase after it, having whatever conflicting feelings come with making that decision. When we were starting to write the lyrics, we had this idea of like, let’s base each song on a particular planet, so in this case when I say it’s only sort of the beginning, the character has already left Earth at this point, and this song is Jupiter as far as the overall aesthetic of it, and I tried to set the tone of that with the first line “I looked up to the burning sky” because Jupiter’s y’know, it’s just all gases and chemicals and very orange so yeah, that’s that’s what EMPTY SPACE is all about in that regard.”
CLIFFJUMPER
Ashley: “This is actually a funny song in a way, ‘CLIFFJUMPER’ is actually the oldest song on the EP, but it also almost didn’t make the EP. It was originally called FOOL’S GOLD, too.”
Audrey: “It was also the second thing we ever actually teased, except it was a completely different chorus, different melodies, so I completely rewrote the lyrics from what I’d done originally like over a year ago at this point.”
Ashley: “So for me this is really my wheelhouse, the ‘CLIFFJUMPERS’, ‘GLACIERS’, ‘HAUNTED’, stuff like that. When I was writing this, I was actually still on the same kind of mindset as ‘HAUNTED’ and ‘THE GARDEN’, and I wanted this to be a more like, I don’t want to say the word vibey because I hate that word, but there’s not a lot of resolution in the song at all until you get to the very end. And it was very purposely done: I’m a huge fan of Circa Survive and their songwriting, and I emulated that (as best as I can, because I’m not Circa Survive), so the song is very cookie cutter, it’s intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, almost identical, we do have a pre chorus, which starts lifting up the song, and a lot of the songs that I write, you probably noticed that there’s a sense of tension behind all of them in one way or another.
I like getting people to a particular point of what they’re feeling from the songs and then keeping them there and just sitting at one constant. And so I tried to do that with ‘CLIFFJUMPER’ by instead of making it super high strung, I kind of brought it up to like a midpoint where you’re like, “okay, let’s get this going!”. Like it’s almost dragging, it’s almost taking too long. And then at the end, well, the bridge of ‘CLIFFJUMPER’, which is probably my most favourite piece of guitar that I’ve ever written, that was kind of designated to finally give some kind of resolve to the song. And so we change vibes quite drastically from the chorus into the the ending. We mentioned that the song was originally called FOOL’S GOLD, I wanted it to be like that sense of longing of you wanting something, and you’re so close to getting it, but you don’t get it until it’s almost too late.”
Audrey: “Okay, so the first fun fact about this song is that the title is a Transformers reference. But it works for a lot of reasons. Narratively it is a direct follow up to ‘EMPTY SPACE’, this one is very much about like, now having made this decision actually starting to follow through with it. The lyrics are probably the darkest of any song on the EP, the whole thing is basically suicide metaphors. Except, in the sense of viewing it as an almost positive thing, representing moving on from a past sense of self that wasn’t healthy in order to become something better for yourself. And so the reason why I chose the name ‘CLIFFJUMPER’, actually it’s funny because we were just like, we want to have at least one title on here, that’s like just a classic noun-verber, because those are just cool sounding titles, and then I thought of ‘CLIFFJUMPER’ and I was like, this is perfect, because metaphorically it just works, with the actual action and the overall direction of the song narratively. But with how I wrote the lyrics, it also happened to work out because Cliffjumper is the guy that dies, in like every canon, so I’m like, y’know what, this, this just works. And so it took a little bit of convincing, Ash was just like, “I’m not naming one of our songs after a fucking Transformer.” So I’m like, okay sure let’s think of something better, and there wasn’t, so I won.
The resolution to the song in a way also comes from the lyrics in the bridge, which get a lot darker all of a sudden, with the; “put the barrel up between my eyes, they said courage is the worst pain of all”, which is the whole idea of: if you make this decision, you know it could either be the best thing, or the worst thing you’ve ever done. There’s a lot of imagery about dreaming, and visions and stuff, so that’s the other part of it, finding out whether or not this decision that you’ve made, or the situation that you’re in, pulling the trigger to find out whether you’re actually awake or not. That gets that is made apparent in the line: “I want to believe it’s real this time” at the end of the second part of the bridge, because it’s like, a lot of our songs have separate bridges and breakdowns as different structural elements, even though they’re technically the same thing from a terminology standpoint, but it’ll be like there’s a heavier, more percussive part and then there’ll be the melodic flowy part, but yeah that’s the story behind that one, it’s very bleak but in an overall meant to be positive way. Oh, and the planet for that song was Venus.”
Related: FOXCULT – THE INDIGO FAULT | EP Review
SILICONE DREAM
Ashley: “So SILICONE DREAM’ is interesting, because I didn’t want it to be on EP. But it ended up being one of our best songs, which is crazy, people love the chorus of this song. ‘SILICONE DREAM’ is nothing but anger, it’s that: you’ve made the decision to do something, and now you’re living with the reality of doing that something. And then I love the chorus a lot, because in those like melodic hardcore songs, you really don’t get those shoegazey choruses, you kind of get like one tempo the entire time, so I wanted to make sure that, whatever we did with this chorus, it opened to the song backup, so we go from having like, essentially a left and right guitar part during the verses in the breakdowns to having 2, 3, 4 guitar parts very reminiscent of every other chorus that we do, pulling you back down into that melancholy feeling of like, not remorse, but just kind of pulls you back down to earth real quick.”
Audrey: “This one was fun, because, well, I don’t write the instrumentals of the music, but this one was kind of one that I pushed Ash to write, I was like, we’ve got to do a melodic hardcore song, mostly because A: I want to do it because that’s just my bag, and B: We need something that’s just a straight up stompy, heavy, ass kicking crowd song, one to just light the room up y’know, a proper mosher. So, yeah, I just kind of kept pushing Ash in this one direction, wrote a few demos of stuff that I was like “hey this is cool, listen to a few of these records.” And then she absorbed all that and then did her thing with it. And the other thing, the tension building and making things go all frenetic and stuff like that, a lot of that comes from the drum parts that Mia wrote, along with Ashley doing the guitar stuff, like ‘CLIFFJUMPER’ used to have very, very different drums, until Mia did all this crazy stuff, it was her that did like the 16th hats and the kick drum blasts in chorus and stuff like it was way more open beforehand, so the drumming is creating a lot of that tension and release in a way that didn’t really exist in a lot of the demos.
Ash kind of mentioned it already but ‘SILICONE DREAM’ lyrically is very much the middle point in that it’s like, okay, you’ve made this decision, you’re following through with it, and then it’s like, “was this was this dumb? Did I just fuck up big time?” And also the idea of it potentially being too late to have made the decision in the first place. So then the chorus deals with the idea of finding a moment to just retreat back into yourself, and think about decisions that you’ve made, but then it resolves with the last line of the chorus: “Suffer now, so we’re ready, when it’s time to break the patterns that they’ve made”, that’s referring to going through something and dealing with certain struggles so that when when a time comes to fight for yourself, and go against what you’re structurally or societally always meant to do. And also I just wanted a song where I got to just scream the verses, but I had to balance that out with a really pretty chorus. This song was more of like a recollection of Earth, more of like a transitory space, thinking back on previous experiences of societal structure and whatnot, what things were like in the place that you left behind.”
GLACIER
Ashley: “So glacier used to be called PAISLEY-”
Audrey: “And before that it was called CHIPOTLE, that was the original demo title.”
Ashley: “It was, the original demo for this is like so vastly different than how it is now. It was it was interesting writing this song because this is the oldest song that we have, in the sense that I wrote the original version of the song before we were even FOXCULT, I have had this song, for the most part, sitting in my back pocket since we were called something completely different, and it was something that we tried using early on, I wrote it around the same time that I wrote ‘HAUNTED’, but we didn’t feel like it was something that we could use just yet, and I kept coming back to it like “I’VE REFINED THE SONG!””
Audrey: “It was funny because one of the chorus lead guitar parts did actually end up getting cannibalised and used in the lead part of the bridge in ‘HAUNTED’, specifically the [Audrey sings the guitar part it’s referring to] lick that was actually originally in the demo from what ‘GLACIER’ would become, so those two songs sort of formed from the same origin point, and we’ve described ever since we finished it that ‘GLACIER’ is basically ‘HAUNTED’, but better in every way.”
Ashley: “I actually did write the first verse of ‘GLACIER’, and we actually weighed this up a lot, whether or not we were going to have the verse in the song, or if we were going to just write something completely different.”
Audrey: “It took a lot of tries for me to perform it the way you’d been envisioning it, so there was a lot of refining in that regard.”
Ashley: “So lyrically; “this feels like a disease, slipping through the cracks in my skin” is about how from an outside perspective, being trans and queer is seen as this bad thing, or this unclean thing, and dealing with learning to remove that from yourself, so that first verse is about being consumed by those sentiments of “this is bad, this is unclean, what’s wrong with me, I’m being destroyed from the inside.””
Audrey: “It was the first song that the lyrics were finished for, because we knew even before we’d finished recording the EP that this was going to be the lead single, and then it’s placed where it is within the tracklisting because I wrote it as the climax of the story from the first thing, and then went and kind of wrote the rest of the narrative in a reverse order. The planet for this song is Neptune, which is why it’s full of ice references and stuff like that, and the song is basically the resolution of finding what that signal was. So the imagery here is that deep in the waters below the glaciers of Neptune, there’s this sanctum, and in there is a mirror, made of the clearest ice you’ve ever seen in your life, and in this mirror you see the reflection of who you actually are for the first time. Most of the other lyrics recount the events of the previous songs, getting up to that point and further contextualising the basis of the story whilst also resolving it. ‘EMPTY SPACE’ actually got its name from the bridge of this song; “I chased that sound across all the empty space”. So I used the stuff that I built as the climax for the story to lay out how we actually get to it for the previous songs, and vice versa, like how the word glacier shows up in the bridge of ‘CLIFFJUMPER’, to nod forward to what’s to come.”
SYMMETRY
Ashley: “‘SYMMETRY is like that recollection of all the previous songs on the EP. So, I’m a really big fan of this band called Voices From The Fuselage, and they do a lot of ‘epics’, a lot of their songs are between like six to nine minutes long, so I wanted to make this longer song that was an envelopment of all of the parts that came before it, so a lot of the sections are variations of parts from the other songs on the EP, pulling you back to those, and I think Haven (this is another name used to refer to Audrey) did a phenomenal job of expressing that via the lyrics and melodies.”
Audrey: “So, even the synths in the beginning of the song [Audrey sings the synth part she’s referring to], the very opening passage is the lick from the turnaround of the chorus of ‘GLACIER’, and then that is built on top of the chord progression from the chorus of ‘SILICONE DREAM’, and underneath that, one of the other synth parts that comes through on the second rotation, has the vocal melody from the chorus of ‘CLIFFJUMPER’. And then for the first verse the lyrics themselves are a slight re-interpretation of the melody and lyrics of ‘EMPTY SPACE’. The whole idea of this one is that we wanted to leave it as a cyclical story, to build onto the allegory of how when it comes to transitioning you’re never really done, and you’re constantly finding yourself in new situations that you have to learn how to manage and work through, so you’ve just gone through this big ass super stressful journey and then you’re like: “oh shit, now I’ve gotta start over”, but with this new perspective. So it’s about going back and recounting the journey but flipping it on its head in certain ways, so that it’s ending on a note of resetting and having to come to the understanding that despite all of this, and the exhaustion of everything you’ve just been through, you have to start over.”
Ashley: “With the song being intended to be cyclical, if you hit play on ‘EMPTY SPACE’, and you listen through whole EP and you have it set to loop on Spotify, or Apple Music, or whatever platform you prefer, the ending of ‘SYMMETRY’ will go right back into the beginning of ‘EMPTY SPACE’.
Audrey: “It’s not like a completely direct musical loop, but if you notice there’s like no actual silence when symmetry finishes fading out, it’s because it’s set up so that both ‘SYMMETRY’ and ‘EMPTY SPACE’ are both in 4/4, they’re, like ten BPM apart, but basically, it ends right on the end of the bar line, so that if you play through, empty space starts off, literally on the very next downbeat, so you wouldn’t actually have to stop you’re like, stop counting or anything as far as keeping time goes, it just kind of comes in as a new section of music. We were very particular about that when we were getting it mastered. Instead of being a particular planet, it’s more of a like, weird, strange geometric anomaly in the middle of space that-”
Ashley: “-lets you see into all the different like, perspectives and time, yeah.”
Audrey: “That’s where it gets real, real sci fi.”
Ashley: “As you might have caught on, we are writing new music already, the first song we’re writing is about travelling back towards Earth, and then the second one is about that freefall gravitational pull, the atmospheric force of crash landing back on Earth.”
Audrey: “Yeah, the subsequent music we’re writing, both for these next two singles and then what after that will eventually be our next release are very much continuing the narrative of THE INDIGO FAULT.”