Made by Vancouver label File Under: Music, the video is part of an ongoing video single series entitled ‘One Song at a Time’. This will continue every two weeks until the 21st March, where the label will release a video for various artists from the UK, US and Canada.

The indie rockers are also currently embarking on a UK tour with Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam. You can find details on the remaining dates below.

OCTOBER
20 MILTON KEYES Crauford Arms
21 BRIGHTON Sticky Mike’s
22 LONDON Birthdays
23 CANTERBURY Lady Luck
25 WORCESTER The Marrs Bar*
27 LEEDS The Library*
28 ABERDEEN Tunnels
29 GLASGOW Hug and Pint
30 EDINBURGH Sneaky Pete’s

* w/o Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam

This delightfully charming song was originally found on their two track EP ‘Stop Eating My Sesame Cake!’, which was released back in April. It has now been fully re-worked for their upcoming new EP ‘Lemon’, which will be available to pre-order via Rabbit Ear Records this Friday 7th October. It is due for an official release on the 14th October.

The band will be making an appearance at Manchester’s A Carefully Planned Festival #6 on the 16th October and they will also be supporting Johnny Foreigner and Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton on the 21st.

photo credit: Sam Cordell

Johnny Foreigner have always been a bit of an anomaly, not really fitting in any scene or doing things in the typical ‘indie’ way, “where the first year is the only good album and the tenth is the reunion tour playing that album” as singer and guitarist Alexi Berrow puts it. He needn’t worry. On ‘Mono No Aware’, their fifth album, they knock it out of the park. Despite dealing with the same subjects Johnny Foreigner have usually approached – relationships, parties, ghosts -, they’ve reframed it within the context of appreciating our temporary existence. As Berrow sings on introspective opener ‘Mounts Everest’: “My ghosts got spooked, took one look at what was left and blew”. Melancholic ghosts and worrying about the future? It’s a far cry from the old party’s chaos, but it’s refreshingly honest to hear a decade old band talking about their worldview changing.

That’s not to say the album is a downer. For the most part, Mono No Aware is absolutely manic in how it presents itself, with cuts like ‘Undevastator’ and ‘The X and The O’ offering the fast paced, guitar aerobics to be expected from Johnny Foreigner. And drummer Junior Elvis Washington Laidley is exceptional as usual; his frantic, atomically precise drumming on tracks like ‘Into The Veldt’ propelling the band into their chaotically fast comfort zone.

But the introspective admissions of maturity permeating throughout the entire album creates a tone that Johnny Foreigner haven’t really hit on before. Like on lead single, ‘If You Can’t Be Honest, Be Awesome’ which rattles through the majority of its playtime as a pretty standard, upbeat punky slab of indie-pop, complemented by the introspective, instrumental coda. These moments where Johnny Foreigner pause, slow things down and think things through show a band dealing with the anathema to all punk rock – growing up, accepting responsibility and trying to account for it into your life.

So whilst JoFo are still rioutous on the aforementioned ‘The X and the O,’ gang vocals cluttering the mix and background natter in the monitor, the carnage of the chorus catches up with the band. The infectious sing-along of: “your exes, my exes have probably met/your exes, my exes, are promised a debt”, betrays the litter of lovers the band have left behind in their wake. Now, every hook-up has a consequence, every debt will one day be called in. Turns out living in the present whilst everyone around you has been planning for the future can come back to haunt you, which strangely makes one of the most upbeat songs on the album one of the more poignant.

The interplay between music and lyrics also hits hard when the intensely broody driving riffs of ‘Cliffjumper’ are juxtaposed with Berrow’s mumbled declaration that: “this one goes out to all of us that have given up on life”. A bleak admission on the side effects of growing up, and more pathos on an album patchy in melancholia.

Yet, amidst the introspective lyrics that revel in the unease of growing up, Johnny Foreigner have never lost their optimism, which is what makes this album a real blast to listen to. Sure, it may not be carried so hard in their lyrics as it used to be, but the music is still joyous and rapturous, still bounding with effortless energy. And the quieter moments of the album, highlighted on closer ‘Decants The Atlantic,’ look back at all the accomplishments they’ve achieved together with pride, because what else can you do?

On the album’s centrepiece, the incredibly beautiful, anxious and heartfelt ‘Our Lifestyles Incandescent’, Berrow yells: “just cos we don’t party like we used to, doesn’t mean we’re not alive”. The party is still there for Johnny Foreigner; and, if ‘Mono No Aware’ is any indication, it’ll be going on strong for another 10 years.

MATTHEW WILSON

The tour will include an appearance at A Carefully Planned Festival #6 in Manchester on the 15th October. The band recently released their fifth album, ‘Mono No Aware’, on Alcopop! Records.

OCTOBER
07 BIRMINGHAM The Flapper
08 BATH The Nest
09 NOTTINGHAM HHF
13 SOUTHAMPTON The Joiners
14 COVENTRY The Kasbah
15 MANCHESTER A Carefully Planned Festival #6
16 LIVERPOOL Maguire’s Pizza Bar
20 MILTON KEYES Crauford Arms
21 BRIGHTON Sticky Mike’s
22 LONDON Birthdays
23 CANTERBURY Lady Luck
25 WORCESTER The Marrs Bar*
27 LEEDS The Library*
28 ABERDEEN Tunnels
29 GLASGOW Hug and Pint
30 EDINBURGH Sneaky Pete’s

* w/o Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam

Deliberately or not, new track ‘The Worst Of Us’ channels this message perfectly in its repeated refrain. “That’s just the worst of us,” the fuzzed out vocals chant in among dream like guitar mastery that tells the tale of both mutual destruction and reliance. No matter how bad these things get, we’re all better together. “Drop out when you want to, I’m convinced I need you,” Kelly Southern semi-pleads.

It’s a message that spreads into their self-classification. Lex ponders their place in punk, the classifications and restrictions placed on art. “People laugh at us when we tell them we’re punk,” he states. “We don’t got the aesthetic stylings or the harsh distortions… What we do got, is an ethos, a belief in those ideals and the community and culture that’s rooted round them.”

And that’s what matters. ‘The Worst Of Us’, as well as all of ‘Mono No Aware’, is a celebration of togetherness and freedom, and how one links directly to the other. It just helps that it’s all encompassed in an exceptional musical package in equal parts whimsical and hard-hitting, and always distinctively progressive.

‘Mono No Aware’ will be available from the 8th July via Alcopop! Records. Read the full statement from Lex and see the excellent track artwork by Lewes Herriot and Irene Zafra following the exclusive stream of ‘The Worst Of Us’.

Hello there friends. Wow, what an honour. Firstly I wanna thank the gods, our label, and the team at Punktastic. I mean, what even is punk, right? Cos people laugh at us when we tell them we’re punk. We don’t got the aesthetic stylings or the harsh distortions. We don’t have the doctrine of the NEVER SELL OUT-old guard, or the £meetandgreet punch of the POST “SELLING OUT” wave. What we do got, is an ethos, a belief in those ideals and the community and culture that’s rooted round them. Real punks don’t get to chose. (shuffles notes) Um, they tell me this has never been done before. That yr supposed to pick the one site, give them the whole record. That what we’re doing here is whimsical, goddamn impractical, and The Fans need convenient herding to the one big billboard.

They say alla this like we don’t have a glorious history of doing -impractical. We can’t even say “The Fans” without either cringing or pretending we’re writing a terrible Oscar acceptance speech. What we’ve somehow ended up is a cross between a post-border displaced family and a really inclusive, posi clique. This spreading interjection of exclusives seems like a natural (and more fun) way to deliver our new works and it’s beyond thunderdome that everyone participating gets that, and has offered us this chance.

The 8 sites we’ve conspired with to do this, they don’t just support our band. They rep for our friends’ bands, your friends’ bands, maybe your band. Our new album is almost here and we’re so fucking proud of it. But also, proud to still be part of this mad interwoven tapestry/collage of brave and inspiring humans creating, chronicling, and soundtracking our lives in a time when the rest of the country wishes it could be this united and positive.

The Worst Of Us
Music by Johnny Foreigner
Artwork by Lewes Herriot and Irene Zafra

‘Mono No Aware’ will be available from the 8th July through Alcopop! Records. The band will be celebrating its release at Birmingham’s Sunflower Lounge on the 8th, followed by an appearance at London’s The Crowndale on the 9th.

Vocalist Alexei Berrow said the following about the record:

Johnny Foreigner is our band and Mono No Aware is our fifth studio album. We’re 10 years old this autumn. Not like, indie band 10 years where the first year is the only good album and the tenth is the reunion tour playing that album. 10 years of writing and playing and long-haul flighting and being a mostly happy mostly functional not completely unsuccessful brokeass working cottage industry/mobile entertainment unit. And it counts for absolutely nothing. That’s the magic of music innit; yr ears and heart give not one f**k for experience or actual skill. Sure, we can use those resources in a whole bunch of ways to try convince you that this next record is The One, but if it doesn’t connect on a more primal level, well, we’ve failed.

I am waaay too emotionally invested to tell you objectively if this next record is awesome or a failure. Or worse, somewhere in the middle. I hope you’ll take some integrity from that statement, and that we’re not paying someone to write hyperbolic bs that would include the terms “legacy” or “maturing” or “still capable of…” I hope by now all of that was obvious. This isn’t a construct. It’s not even a lifestyle choice these days. It’s part of us. Johnny Foreigner is Us, the musical. We’re not the type of band to spin our personal delights and disasters into PR angles, but it’s all there in what we create. There’s births and marriages and drama and death. The casual horror you somehow just get used to in your 30s, and the moments of bliss and clarity you don’t (and hope you never do). As portrayed by 4 friends determined not to let all manner of acquired loved ones down. It’s definitely the most acute pressure we’ve felt, to go make art good enough to justify continually juggling our burgeoning families and tenuously stable lives with the now involuntary compulsion to go sing songs about it all in darkened rooms for days on end.

I can say, we’re happy with it. So happy. Beyond thunderdome. It has the colours we wanted, it sounds rough and produced in all the respective proper places, the symmetry works and the mountains of actual artwork fit perfectly. It feels…right. Some projects we do are Hollywood montage smooth; we plan the thing, we do the thing, we celebrate. And some are like going into a cave for three months and emerging victorious clutching a severed demons head as proof. This was mostly the latter. It wasn’t clean or easy. It couldn’t have been, really. But it was a righteous kill. We are f**king proud to finally show it off, and proud of being Johnny Foreigner in 2016, and I guess that’s what this record is about.

The band’s fifth album, and follow-up to 2014’s ‘You Can Do Better’, marks the band’s 10th year as a band.

As we prepare for new material, the band’s vocalist Alexei Berrow has this to say:

Johnny Foreigner is our band and Mono No Aware is our fifth studio album. We’re 10 years old this autumn. Not like, indie band 10 years where the first year is the only good album and the tenth is the reunion tour playing that album. 10 years of writing and playing and long-haul flighting and being a mostly happy mostly functional not completely unsuccessful brokeass working cottage industry/mobile entertainment unit. And it counts for absolutely nothing. That’s the magic of music innit; yr ears and heart give not one f**k for experience or actual skill. Sure, we can use those resources in a whole bunch of ways to try convince you that this next record is The One, but if it doesn’t connect on a more primal level, well, we’ve failed.

I am waaay too emotionally invested to tell you objectively if this next record is awesome or a failure. Or worse, somewhere in the middle. I hope you’ll take some integrity from that statement, and that we’re not paying someone to write hyperbolic bs that would include the terms “legacy” or “maturing” or “still capable of…” I hope by now all of that was obvious. This isn’t a construct. It’s not even a lifestyle choice these days. It’s part of us. Johnny Foreigner is Us, the musical. We’re not the type of band to spin our personal delights and disasters into PR angles, but it’s all there in what we create. There’s births and marriages and drama and death. The casual horror you somehow just get used to in your 30s, and the moments of bliss and clarity you don’t (and hope you never do). As portrayed by 4 friends determined not to let all manner of acquired loved ones down. It’s definitely the most acute pressure we’ve felt, to go make art good enough to justify continually juggling our burgeoning families and tenuously stable lives with the now involuntary compulsion to go sing songs about it all in darkened rooms for days on end.

I can say, we’re happy with it. So happy. Beyond thunderdome. It has the colours we wanted, it sounds rough and produced in all the respective proper places, the symmetry works and the mountains of actual artwork fit perfectly. It feels…right. Some projects we do are Hollywood montage smooth; we plan the thing, we do the thing, we celebrate. And some are like going into a cave for three months and emerging victorious clutching a severed demons head as proof. This was mostly the latter. It wasn’t clean or easy. It couldn’t have been, really. But it was a righteous kill. We are f**king proud to finally show it off, and proud of being Johnny Foreigner in 2016, and I guess that’s what this record is about.

Phew! In the meantime, here’s some older Johnny Foreigner.

For the first weekend in May, we decided to brave the mean streets of Camden for an entire weekend to experience first hand the madness that is the Camden Crawl. Spread over about 15 venues in Camden, the Crawl is a great showcase for just how many locations are able to host live music in such a compact bit of London, and despite the usual weekend visitors combined with extra festival attendees making the North London area even more difficult to navigate than usual, we put a few extra layers on for the unusually cold May weekend to experience some musical treats.

After collecting our passes at Holiday Inn / Media centre, we stuck around for a while to watch Clement Marfo [3/5] in action. Though it’s really not the usual thing we’d cover on Punktastic, the rock infused hip hop had enough of an alternative bite to make it worth a mention, and if you enjoy a bit of genre mashing, then you could do much worse than investing a few minutes checking the tunes out. Stylistically a world away but with a similar sentiment, SWN festival’s showcase at the Black Cap drew us to check out Trwbadors [2.5/5], whose synth infused lo fi acoustic indie will have a very precise audience (and not one we’d expect Punktastic readers to be part of by default), and though only the more “assisted” electronic parts of their sounds prevented the band fading into the chatter, they’re probably worth a listen if you’re in the right mood.

Next, a quick stop into the St Michaels for Race Horses [2.5/5] taught us a few things: 1. bars in churches are weird 2. Trash Talk screen prints being sold in churches is a bit weird 3. harps aren’t particularly punk 4. trumpets are still awesome 5. Race Horses aren’t sure what decade they’re in. Still, all good nostalgic alt-pop has its place, and though the ultra hipster approach wasn’t quite to our taste or attention spans, the band are certainly not devoid of talent.

We then ventured over to the Red Bull Bedroom Jam stage for a trio of bands, and as the only outside stage of the weekend, it had the highest susceptibility to problems from the weather and sound. The first band we caught there was BIGkids [2.5/5], who carried some London punk sounds with their Ting Tings / classic pop sounds. It’s hard to see just how far the appeal of the band can go, but there’s no doubt that they’re entertaining to watch and given a decent push in the right direction, they’ll do alright for themselves.

Next up at Camden Gardens were Fearless Vampire Killers [2.5/5], and though there’s plenty of scope for bands of their irk to make a strong impression, they’ve got a long way to go before they really start to gain proper traction. The sound didn’t help them out much at all today though. At the end of Fearless Vampires Killers, the Red Bull DJ van had attracted a fairly large group of “standard Camden nutters”, most of which were completely unprepared for the sonic assault Marmozets [3/5] were about to deliver. Today, the sound on the stage let them down a fair bit, but the same energy that makes the band so great to watch still shone through, and it made us even more determined to catch their second set the day after.

We then ventured over to Camden’s Underworld to watch instrumental trio Brontide [4/5] do their thing. They had a fairly impressive crowd in the infamous venue, and produced as magnetic a performance to watch as ever. A few people seemed a bit taken by surprise, but everyone was enjoying themselves thoroughly.

After a brief recharge, we returned to the Underworld to close our evening off with Johnny Foreigner [3/5], who unfortunately did not enjoy a particularly full crowd. It was the first real established act of the weekend that suffered from the somewhat erratic clashes, and it was a real shame to see them have to battle for a crowd reaction. That said, the performance was still great, and they still remain a relatively underappreciated gem of the UK scene.

TOM AYLOTT

Brontide @ The Underworld