Future Islands are best in yearning banger mode. Although their 2020 album, As Long As You Are, brought instant classic For Sure, it was often dismayingly downbeat – melancholy unrelieved by the consolation of rhythm. Luckily, People Who Aren’t There Anymore is better at dragging its tears to the dancefloor.
Here are grownup, weighty ruminations on devotion, sacrifice, separation and Covid, but The Tower and King of Sweden are also perfectly constructed pop. Iris smartly repurposes a 70s Nigerien funk beat, while Deep in the Night and Give Me the Ghost Back (“Two hundred million feel they’re underneath a knife”) offer beauty suffused with dark drama.
You could say the songs they wrote as a scrappier, come-up band had stickier choruses and more memorable riffs. The trade-off? Samuel T Herring’s voice is so much richer now, a velvet mallet wielded with a preacher’s fervour, by a man who dreams in colours you will never see. A ballad such as Corner of My Eye makes great use of his vibes, his intensity; it doesn’t seem much of anything until Herring gets out on the stump and sells it with his chewy, syllable-relishing diction.
