Grammy-award winning rock band Switchfoot will release their new album on January 13th on Atlantic Records/Word.
Preceding the album, Switchfoot release the song Who We Are.
Switchfoot have sold 5.5 million albums, performed sold-out world tours , raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid homeless kids in their community through their own Bro-Am Foundation, and earned themselves a global fan base devoted to Switchfoot’s emotionally intelligent and uplifting brand of alternative rock.
On the lead single Who We Are from their ninth studio album Fading West, Grammy Award-winning alt-rock band Switchfoot look back to a time when they’d just begun to push toward their dreams of bringing their music to the world. Featuring choir-like backing vocals from the band members’ children—as well as the blend of edgy atmospherics and bright, breezy melodies that’s become a hallmark of Switchfoot’s emotionally intelligent and uplifting brand of rock—“Who We Are” embodies both a sweetly youthful spirit and the hard-won, highly impassioned joy that comes from triumphing through 17 years as a band.
Fading West produced by the Foreman Brothers in collaboration with Neal Avron (Aerosmith and Weezer), was ultimately born on the road and in the waves. While touring in support of their 2011 album Vice Verses, the longtime surfers set out in search of songwriting inspiration by visiting several of their favorite surf breaks around the world. “The idea was to surf, write songs, play music, and see what ideas came,” explains Tim. Traveling to Jeffreys Bay and Crayfish Factory in South Africa, Bronte Beach in Australia, Raglan in New Zealand, and Uluwatu in Bali, the band threw themselves into a voyage both physical and emotional—an endeavor they chronicled in a documentary film also entitled Fading West—and soon found themselves infusing new energy, soul, and sound into their music. Here is the trailer for Fading West, film…
The Album opens with the sunny and shimmering “Worth the Fight,” and sees Switchfoot building off the melodic pop sensibility of their early years with bigger, bolder arrangements and heady electro effects. Soaked with soaring harmonies, the album offers up its share of heart-on-sleeve love songs, such as the guitar-powered “When We Come Alive” and the throbbing, groove-heavy “All or Nothing.” Changing gears on “Say It Like You Mean It,” Switchfoot delivers a dizzying assault that merges frenzied vocals, furious guitar, skittering beats, and world-weary lyrics (“Feels a lot like we’ve lost the goal/Lost our minds and lost the soul”)–then strips that all away to dreamy harmonies and hypnotic sitar. Then, on the stirring and slow-building “World You Want,” Fading West turns quietly intense and imparts a global message that’s cautionary but empowering (“Is this the world you want?/You're making it/Every day you're alive”).
At the heart of Fading West is a trilogy of songs that perfectly capture the soul-searching that initially inspired the album. On the sweeping, midtempo “Slipping Away,” the band turns melancholy in its tenderly poetic remembering of their younger years (“Remember coming home at four in the morning/Before the sun was up/Back when the east was a fire of gold/Just waiting for the rest of the sky to fall in love”). Next, on “BA55,” Switchfoot slides into a much darker soundscape marked by swirling distortion, majestically heavy bass, and—in the end—a sense of transcendence that’s entirely true to the song’s promise to “let my soul fly.” Finally, with the anthemic “Let It Out,” Fading West bursts open into a unabashedly joyful mood intensified by power-pop hooks, sparkling piano, handclap-driven beats, and the lyrical plea to “Breathe it in and let it out.”
For Switchfoot, the blissed-out peace that shines through songs like “Let It Out” stems largely from the band members’ redefining their relationship with home. “For a long time, home was a place of failure because it meant that we didn’t have any shows,” notes Jon. “When you drop out of college in your early ’20s and all your friends are getting jobs and you’re the guy who lives with his parents, it’s way better to be on the road. Only recently did I feel like home was a place where I could feel comfortable and content.”
In the midst of all that music-making and subsequent touring, in 2005 the band created the Bro-Am Foundation to benefit local children's charities that aid at-risk, homeless, and street kids in San Diego.
To form the closing segment of Fading West, Switchfoot chose two tracks that serve as love songs to the ocean: the playful yet sprawling “Salt Water,” and the huge-hearted epic “Back to the Beginning.” It’s a fitting finish to an album that was largely inspired by the sea, which Jon describes as a perfect metaphor for simultaneously experiencing reassurance and danger. “You’re comfortable out there, but it’s the unknown,” he says. “You can paddle out in South Africa and it’s exactly like home and nothing like home all at once. That’s what I’m hoping our record feels like—trying to find peace in dangerous places.”
To pre order the album Fading West click HERE
ALBUM TRACKLIST
1. Love Alone is Worth The Fight
2. Who We Are
3. When We Come Alive
4. Say It Like You Mean It
5. World You Want
6. Slipping Away
7. BA55
8. Let It Out
9. All Or Nothing
10. Saltwater
11. Back to the Beginning
Switchfoot is Jon Foreman (vocals/guitar) / Tim Foreman (bass) / Chad Butler (drums) / Jerome Fontamillas (keyboard/guitar) / Drew Shirley (guitar)