Start Listening To: false futures

Songs that swing between the jagged and the tender, False Futures are carving their own path through the noise.

False Futures are a new band with old souls and a keen sense of what makes a great song tick. Emerging from London by way of Hull, Salisbury and Swansea, the quartet deal in a kind of guitar music that’s unafraid to be melodic, messy, and emotionally direct all at once. Their debut single Fire Movement arrives fully-formed, a track that snarls and sways with Pixies-esque guitar bends and a distinctly British sense of character. We caught up with them to talk about writing singalongs with teeth, recording 21 tracks in 16 weekends, and why sometimes the best guitar part is one that sounds "kind of horrible" on its own.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

Hello! We’re false futures. The project was started in London, where we all currently live, but Jamie Dean & I (Mat) are from hull East Yorkshire, Jamie Welfare is from Salisbury & Isaac’s from Swansea. We play guitar music. We call ourselves a rock band. But like to think we cover quite a lot of ground within that, from the janky and jagged kind to the slower more singalong sort. 

‘Fire Movement’ is a bold first impression. How long had that track been in the works, and what made it the right one to debut with?

Thank you mate, that means a lot. I wrote it some in mid 2023 I think, and recorded some time between June-November. The demo came together pretty quickly; I’d done a basic recording of a drum jam track at our rehearsal room a few months before and just decorated that one evening, writing about a recent encounter in a pub. 

We’ve played the track at all of our gigs since the demo, and mostly as an opener to the set, so we wanted it to be the first release.

You described the writing as imagining the Pixies trying to write a Blur track. Can you talk more about how that tension between dissonance and catchiness plays out in your songwriting?

Aye that was the idea for this particular song. Use of dissonance is something joey Santiago of pixies does beautifully. His guitar playing was really inspiring growing up and inspired the lead guitar stuff for the Fire Movement chorus. Drawing out the semi-tonal ascent of the bend over 4 bars is quite a long time really and alone that guitar part is kind of horrible - but in the context, it’s long enough to feel increasingly uncomfortable, then pleasing once it’s resolved. The resolution is sweeter for the discomfort that precedes it - It’s kindof like a bad smell that you go back for more of. 

More generally in the rest of our songs; I can’t be sure really. We have some songs that I would consider pop songs, really, or that have pop sensibilities, but think they’re approached from a place that’s not really pop at all. I love, and we all love a lot of different types of music… and are all suckers for a singalong and for melody. Trying to write with singalong potential in mind was always important, and is to a greater or lesser extent across all our songs. We felt like a lot of bands in London became kindof averse to this, ‘writing songs you can sing to’ - like it became a taboo & so, because we’re into it - we wanted songs that people may like to sing along to (whether or not we achieved this remains to be seen…) but also try not to make it too on the nose. It’s something I think about a lot and is a concern really, a fine line to tread. When writing, it’s  almost like making progress in one direction, then realising it’s too clean or nice - and then bastardising it by more alternative means. Or, the reverse, trying to pull back towards the middle from somewhere way left field. I suppose that way of working in itself creates a tension. 

There’s a raw, live-wire energy to both sides of the single. What was it like self- producing your debut, and how did you land on the right balance between polish and grit?

Thanks a lot! That was a conscious effort when tracking and something we were aiming for. The balance between grit and polish never really ends, and think it’s just a case of working with what’s there until you over cook it and dial it back. Mat Jaggar who’s mixing our music is a huge part of the way the music sounds, and has been really patient with the mixing process. He’s extremely talented and has an ability to take what’s there & really build on it in the mix to define the mood of a song. He really knows how to get the best out of the audio - he makes everything 3D. 

Production wise, I suppose it comes from a few simple things - having to work as fast as possible, not really giving time to second guess things like mic placement and typical engineering stuff like that. Also not really know much at all about how an engineer might typically do stuff like that in a real studio. Then performing the music in live full takes, leaving in inhalations in the vocals, allowing bum notes here and there & deviations in timing. 

The B-side, ‘Alisters Conundrum’, has a completely different tone. How do you see that track complementing or contrasting with ‘Fire Movement’?

With the first single, we wanted to make a point of releasing it with a B-side that contrasted it. These songs belong to a batch of recordings & a period of time, from what I believe to be our first album. Whether that will eventually be the recordings for the album I’m not sure but that was the intention. So there are a lot of songs. We wanted to offset any kind of expectation with regards to where things might go next really. And each single is quite different in that way, showing a new and different side to what we do. 

You’ve already supported bdrmm at Scala, as well as bands like Picture Parlour and Lip Filler. How have those shows shaped your early sense of identity as a band?

I’m not sure really - consciously I don’t think they have really, our identity is just four friends that play music together. But think those experiences have definitely stoked the fire a little bit. Particularly the bdrmm gig… gives you a taste of where you can take things if you persist and work hard. 

Your lyrics cut quite sharply where do you tend to draw inspiration from, and is it usually a personal starting point or more observational?

I would say more observational, across the board, but sometimes personal stuff in there, experiences or things from the past. Rather than either, or, I tend to think of them more to belonging to a period of time of writing / recording songs, and loosely during that time was trying to write about coming of age in the capital and all that comes with that. Trying to find a way to communicate something more universal from my own experiences and observations. A handful of them are about experiences & people on the street I live on now.. some about people I have met in London, in pubs, or by others conversations in pubs. It can come from anywhere really. 

You came together from different corners of the UK. What drew you all to London, and how has the city influenced the way False Futures sounds and functions?

I couldn’t say exactly for the other boys, but I think they all moved here to pursue music really, with new people. We’re all from quiet, small rainy towns, so London is an attractive as a place of endless possibilities. Sound wise, as mentioned earlier I think it influenced the decision to do something that we felt no-one was doing here at the time. With regards to the way we function, I guess because everything in London is so expensive and free time outside of work so scarce it means you have to approach things like recording and rehearsal with that in mind. Not waste time. The fact the cost of typical studio recording is so high here definitely influenced the decision to learn how to do that. Because there were so many songs, and we were unsigned the only way to record them all was to do it ourselves really. The cost of recording 21 songs in a proper studio would be huge… and take too long. By doing it on our own, I was able to record for 15 hours of the day or late into the night if I wanted to, spending Saturday morning to Sunday evening at the studio every weekend for a few months. Tracking for the 21 songs was done in 16 weekends. 16 weekends at a proper studio would be really expensive, and wouldn’t have given me the freedom to work as quickly, and knowing I had to leave on Sunday night and only had enough money for maybe 18 weekends at the ‘studio’ forced the quick pace. Maybe some of the feeling of immediacy or the ‘rawness’ you referred to earlier comes from working in that way. I suppose London has influenced the way we work quite significantly really, more than I’d ever considered. 

A lot of early indie bands lean into lo-fi or post-punk aesthetics, but you’ve clearly got an ear for big choruses too. What role does that sense of pop ambition play in the way you write?

Aye I think I may have touched on this a bit in your earlier question too. I like that stuff, for sure, but it felt like a lot of people were doing it, so we tried to do something else I suppose. It’s hard to say cause it’s not really a conscious decision when writing, more just writing off of instinct and in a way that feels natural. We had a drummer before Jamie, he said at practise that he liked how we have a ‘ballad’ in the set and it hadn’t even occurred to me that we had anything of the sort. I have no objectivity with it so it’s quite difficult to think about it from the inside. I think rather than a conscious pop ambition it’s more the decision to try and make music we felt no-one was making at the time. Or the kind of songs that I wanted to hear, but couldn’t find contemporary stuff in that vein. That was more the ambition I think! 

There’s a kind of push and pull in your sound, between softness and bite, melody and noise. Is that something you aim for deliberately, or does it just reflect the mix of voices in the band?

Yah I think within the songs we currently play, there are a lot of left turns. There was a decision to have a first album that didn’t close any doors for the possibilities of futures releases, and didn’t suggest a clear direction. There was an intention to cover a lot of ground under the umbrella of contemporary guitar music. There’s harder stuff, like Fire Movement, softer stuff like the B-side, ballads, a love song, we have really simple tracks & some that are more complicated. I’m hoping that having these deliberate contradictions, or juxtapositions rather, from the get go will allow us to explore more avenues through the band, so that by the time we’re a few albums in, stylistically, things will be very different to where we are now. Even on the next album. This is all in the pursuit of longevity for the band, and the need to keep it interesting, and to push my songwriting. My favourite bands develop in chapters like this, and I think it keeps things interesting for everyone. 

You’ve mentioned Blur and Pixies, but what other influences might people be surprised to find behind the False Futures sound?What do you love right now? What do you hate right now?

Ah so many. It can be anything, I love a crooner, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, more contemporary singers like Kali Uchis I love, recently I’ve discovered Sarah Meth who is amazing. 

The blue bendy album I’ve been listening to a lot, which is for me one of the best albums I’ve heard in years, songwriting wise & production wise - I love it. I wouldn’t like to say what stuff I don’t like at the minute, everyone’s doing what they think is right for the time & making the best they can with what they have, so don’t wanna bash anyone. And really it’s about serving yourself first, which I’m sure everyone does, so if other people don’t like it that’s fine - there’s plenty of other stuff to try! 

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you? 

Nevermind is the first album I ever got. My cousin gave it to me as a kid and I still revisit that occasionally when I get the urge. It’s just such a strong album, start to finish. There aren’t many elements, but each element is perfectly executed. It still sounds contemporary. There’s something inspiring about pop songs decorated and dressed as rock music. Clever fellas they were.