Johnny Foreigner : How to Be Hopeful
There’s something to be said for bands walking away. Johnny Foreigner surveyed their career with brutal honesty when announcing their fully-fledged return earlier this year: “consistent critical acclaim [but…] completely failed to make a career out of it.” The wheels inconspicuously ground to a halt in late 2016 after the English band wrapped touring for their fifth album, Mono no Aware, and for a while there was no resolution, with the closest thing to a follow-up being Yr Poetry Ruin Music: lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist Alexei Berrow & tireless drummer Junior Laidley combining their powers to Frankenstein together two solo projects as Yr Poetry.
That was two years ago, by which time the Birmingham quartet (completed by bassist/co-lead vocalist Kelly Parker and second guitarist/artwork maven Lewes Herriot) had announced their reunion. Deadlines be damned—for a band who have constantly kicked back against the nostalgia circuit, the message was clear: do it right, or don’t do it at all. Which is to say How to Be Hopeful has a lot riding on it. It’s an album formed out of, and written about, weird coincidences and circumstances that, in Johnny Foreigner’s words, “compelled us to be made.” Given its title, the version of the band who made 2014’s grief-stricken You Can Do Better are probably as surprised as anyone else that they’ve marked their return with something as joyous as this. A lot can change in a decade, particularly if you spend half of it off radar.
They may bill it as their fell-in-love-and-stopped-worrying record, but the first three words on the album are “it gets worse!“, as “Roisin Does Advice Now” sets out the collection’s thematic makeup by blowing the damn doors off, the Berrow/Parker/Laidley vocal trifecta pinging off each other as the song whips up a storm; even as the lyrical content questions the worthiness of achieving your dreams, the song barrels through three minutes with unfettered optimism: “It’s the hurt that makes it worth it.”
Playing to the four-piece’s strengths, it’s a showcase for fans old and new; the latter making up the “art school kids shooting selfies by the speakers” on “What the Alexei,” the band’s first unvarnished love song. “They call it emo / I blush, I guess I’m too old to argue”—the wide-ranging genre descriptor has gone through a couple additional waves since this band was last on the scene, but they can still hang, with the deft musical detours and technical prowess of their best-loved work still very much intact; they know just when to switch things up. “OK 1 More” caps off the album’s first half with an extended instrumental coda that flips the script on the song’s verses as the band lock in, shifting gears seemingly from nowhere, tipping their hat to the more experimental streak explored on Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything.
It’s important to note that the album makes no effort to recapture past glories; if anything, it acts as the story of their musical progression in microcosm. Sure, there’s a throughline in the wider context of their discography from Waited Up Til It Was Light to here, but as frenetic as the likes of “The Blazing World” and “Orc Damage” seem, there’s an intricacy to these heavy hitters that reveals itself fully once you sit down with the lyric sheet; the former a spiritual sequel to ‘To the Death’ that cloaks its subject matter (depressive drinking to cope with loss) in heavy breakdowns and winking blink-182 references; and the latter an absolute barnburner that takes aim at corporate greed and workplace culture, later mirrored in “A Sea to Scream At” targeting those power-tripping, egotistical, married-to-the-job types, whose more contemplative tone builds to Parker unleashing her own scream of catharsis; a late-on home run of a song that deserves to go down as one of their best.
As personal as the album gets, there’s also witty social commentary to be heard on “This is A Joke,” which has the ridiculous culture wars of post-Brexit Britain in its sights, and how the real issues lie beyond small boats and drag shows: “Adults sold off our assets / They slapped the cuffs on, called it freedom.” The second verse also lampoons anti-trans fanatics (“No trans folx on TV / Just a plague of divorced ex-celebrities telling me that they’re scared to pee”); it’s good to see a band as established as this one nailing their colors to the mast, not that they’ve ever just “stuck to the music” as detractors might say. That song rubs shoulders with post-pandemic hedonism on “Dark Tetris,” documenting a “shockwave summer of sixteen months suppressed” while acting as a major focal point for the album’s central theme of chaos magic; ripples and consequences, gaming the butterfly effect and wondering—as they do on the exquisitely moving penultimate track “Emily and Alex”—about the actions that set events in motion.
They knew when to walk away; they said they wouldn’t reform without the songs to justify it—and boy, did they ever justify it. This is a greatest-hits smorgasbord of everything that makes Johnny Foreigner who they are; tipping the hat to each of their past records while sounding entirely like its own thing. With lyrical callbacks and cross-references aplenty, the whole thing culminates in the explosive “We Build This City,” whose introductory guitar line mirrors the album opener, its lyrics encapsulating the ethos of the entire record. Its first three words? “It gets better!” The band fell off the map and still found their way back, and the track contains the kind of musical payoff you just know they spent years building towards, a signature guitar line cutting through the mix around two-and-a-half minutes as the song scales a new peak; a staggering musical endorphin rush. No cash-in comeback, How to Be Hopeful finds the band sounding as varied and vital as they ever have. It deserves to enter the conversation as certainly their most important record, perhaps even their best.
Label: Alcopop!
Year: 2024
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