Neil Krug
Multi-instrumentalist Isom Innis (left): “All of our favorite records move across genres.”
He’s been touring with the band since way back in 2010, so it’s not exactly a surprise that keyboardist Isom Innis laughs when I ask, jokingly, if it feels different to finally be named an official member of Foster the People.
“I have a leather jacket now,” says Innis, who also handles drums, guitars and backing vocals. “I used to wear a jean jacket. And I did see my face on a bus stop that’s on my daily jogging route. So that was weird.”
The touring lineup may not be different, but plenty of other things are for the L.A.-based band, which brings the tour for its third album, Sacred Hearts Club, to the Orpheum Theater on Sept. 9. You could argue that the ‘60s-tinged electropop creation of lead singer-songwriter Mark Foster has outrun its own bullet: The band has the historical distinction of being one of the last acts to hit it big in the pre-streaming era. When “Pumped up Kicks” obtained pop-culture ubiquity back in 2010, it did so on the strength of an avalanche of paid iTunes downloads. Spotify hadn’t even launched in the United States.
Sacred Hearts Club finds the band exploring and mixing some startling new styles. Some of the songs, like “Sit Next to Me” and “Doing It for the Money” would have dovetailed with just about anything on Torches, the band’s first album. On the other hand, there’s “Loyal Like Sid and Nancy” — an atonal hip-hop effort that features Foster rapping politically charged lines like “Ghosting like I’m Daniel Johnston and I’m locked in the basement/where Satan lies in satin tweets and realigns his facelift” over a dance beat — that is as out there as anything the band’s done.
“This album was written out of experimentation and improvisation in the studio,” says Innis, who’s no stranger to the songwriting game — he co-wrote a few of the songs on Supermodel, Foster the People’s 2014 release, and has been writing and producing alongside Foster for years.
“Recording ‘Sid and Nancy’ was a pivotal moment for us,” he says. “It helped us finish the rest of the record. The initial effort had a psychedelic, ’60s sound, with guitar and analog. The latter part was more beat-driven, connecting that ‘60s sound with hip-hop and dance.”
Innis says the touchstones for Sacred Hearts Club include other experimental efforts, albums like Radiohead’s Kid A and the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Let’s just go ahead and call it an evolve or die thing.
“There’s a certain edge that comes from experimentation,” Innis says. ‘All of our favorite records move across genres, do something that hasn’t been done before. We just want to keep evolving. The moment we stop doing that, we should stop and just make products at Target.”