Fox Theater

Mark Foster didn’t show up at The Church, his old friend and collaborator Paul Epworth’s studio in North London, expecting to dive full force into a new Foster the People album. He arrived without any expectations at all, just excited to be traveling internationally for the first time in a couple years, and eager to reconnect with Epworth after almost a decade. He didn’t realize at the time that Paradise State of Mind was about to be born, its title track written and recorded hours after he set foot in the door.

It was spring of 2022, and Foster had accompanied his partner on a work trip to the U.K. He knew he’d be there a couple months, and he was happy to have no real plans. It had been five years since Sacred Hearts Club, the band’s previous album, and so many intense things had happened in the world at large, and in Foster’s world in particular, that he hadn’t really felt ready to jump back into the fray of public life. Musical ideas had visited him, but none of them felt inviting. “I thought long and hard about what I wanted to make,” he says. “I almost made a punk record, and just went straight at everything. But I kept pausing because the energy didn’t feel quite right, and it wasn’t making me feel any better. I started thinking, ‘How can I make a record that is healing for me, and maybe for people who listen to it, too?’”

The trip to the U.K. brought a fresh perspective, and a chance to look at that creative puzzle in the company of trusted collaborators. And The Church itself felt like a welcoming nest – this beautiful, historic structure that had been converted from a proper house of worship to a more metaphorical one in 1980 by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and which had previously hosted recordings by Bob Dylan and Radiohead and Adele. Foster entered the studio with nothing and started building from the ground up, that very first day. He grabbed a bass and started to lay down a groove, Epworth jumped on the drums, and singer-songwriter Jack Peñate, who had also stopped by that day, joined them on guitar, adding some of his signature strumming to “Paradise State of Mind.” And suddenly, there it was: a new beginning.

“It was such a cathartic relief when that song came together,” Foster says. “That one day cracked open a lot. I can hear it in the vocal when I listen to it now – the isolation I had been feeling, and how much I needed to break out of my own head.” The lyrics flowed out of him: “Just need to stop trying to work out why something feels good and let it all in.” That’s exactly what he did, over the course of the next eighteen months and a couple trips back and forth between The Church and the legendary East West Studios in Los Angeles, where he recorded and produced Paradise State of Mind.

Foster explains that when he came off the road following Sacred Hearts Club, he realized he needed to take a step back and get healthy, and part of that was getting sober. “I had to really let things get rearranged, and put some old things down, in order for this to be sustainable,” he says. “I got everything I thought I wanted, and then I realized that that wasn’t it, and that the simpler things that I didn’t know I needed were right in front of me, and didn’t cost a thing. I think stripping away all of the things I was chasing made me open enough to be able to receive some of the deeper things that were more spiritual, that are kind of effervescent and intangible, and really gentle, like the wind. You have to be quiet enough to be able to hear it. I need that connection, more than anything, to be able to walk through the rest of the noise. I feel like now, coming back out into the world, I’m open to whatever this experience is, in a new way.”

‘U shud listen 2 this!’:

This is the subject line of the first email sent from the newly created Good Neighbours Gmail account back in August 2023. It was a cold email with a SoundCloud link containing four tracks: Keep It Up, Ripple, Skipping Stones, and Daisies, and it had just landed in the inboxes of various major labels and A&Rs. “It was kind of a joke. We were just sending it to see if it was good enough, to see if people believed in the music as much as we did.” Despite the teasing misspelled email, and the faux false-pride, within a few hours, almost every recipient had replied asking to set up a meeting with Scott Verril and Oli Fox. They couldn’t believe it. Note: This just doesn’t happen in the real world, it’s more like something you’d see at the end of a trashy 2000s movie-musical.

With this new found confidence and hunger, they tested the temperature on TikTok using a chorus they’d whipped up of a little known song called ‘Home’. To their surprise and delight, people went absolutely crazy for it, so much so that Scott and Oli ended up having to build the entire song around that chorus in a moment of madness and virality. The hunger of the audience finally matched their own. For those hearing Good Neighbours for the first time, it was the glimmer of the next big thing, for Scott and Oli however, it was a second chance.

Scott and Oli’s ability to connect with so many people across the world through Good Neighbours goes well beyond the thirty seconds of a song you may have heard, and is actually due to their shared love of imperfection. “With this EP we’re trying to recreate ‘the fizz’, you know, that moment you hear Kids by MGMT for the first time and everything changes- when you hear the people chatting in the background of the track, or the stylophone ringing in your ears…you can only recreate that feeling with mistakes, or spills.” It’s achieved through unorthodox techniques like recording drum parts through iphones and embracing the tinny compression; or the untainted immediacy of a song that can be written, recorded and brought to life within a few hours thanks to Scott and Oli’s wizardry in the studio. The songs, like Good Neighbours themselves, retain their innocence and stay naive, but still achieve something dynamic and sophisticated- their own coming of age. “That’s what the sound is, to us: coming of age, you know, that main character feeling”. Its something that we can all relate to, the feeling of a shared, universal experience paired with the down to the earth, unsynthesised nature of the production means that unlike what you would expect from most viral hits, they’ve managed to sell out Village Underground in London after only two tiny shows.

The sublime power and charm of Good Neighbours lies in their ability as songwriters and artists to stay honest and childlike, “we’re not just trying to give out continuous positive vibes, although it might sound like that, we’re just trying to stay naive.” By writing with themselves at the centre, unsigned to any brief or genre, has allowed Good Neighbours the freedom to work on what they call a “blank canvas”. Rather than taking notes from what’s going on in the charts, or hitting on TikTok, their greatest source of inspiration comes from their Mubi account, and in particular the gorgeous coming-of-age films of A24, like Mid90s and Close. “We’d just stick them up on a projector and let those visuals be the backbone of the song rather than a certain trend or genre.” In a way, the project is about giving themselves their first experiences of success, again- something that was ripped away from them. “What’s so important for us is being present. The first time round you get so caught up in the groundswell, you don’t really take notice of what’s going on. But this time round being able to sit in those feelings and be so grateful that people are listening to your tunes all around the world is really important and a really insane feeling.”