The Foreign Resort
Endurance
Artoffact Records
Danish post-punk act The Foreign Resort have never lacked for power nor emotion in their songs. In a live setting, the band have carefully walked the line between stormy, thrashing grooves and the more angular edges of their material, and yet their preceding albums have been inconsistent in capturing the force of their performances. New record Endurance arrives a full seven years since the release of preceding LP Outnumbered, and finds the trio at both their tightest and most reflective, addressing personal and political strife with a focus that pushes through the uncertainty and angst with bracing determination.
Part of the record’s appeal is certainly in how it charges headlong into extremely personal and relatable emotional territory, heart on its sleeve and with complete and total sincerity. Early album cut “Resound”, amongst the best songs they’ve ever recorded, epitomizes this approach; it bursts out of the gate, vocalist Mikkel Borbjerg Jakobsen working his quavering Robert Smith-esque lilt atop a galloping bass groove and wiry guitars, the implied heartache of the verse washed away by the conviction and feeling of its chorus. While not always that fraught, the record returns to that emotional well repeatedly, and squeezes the most out of it each time. As its titles suggests, “Closure” contrasts the melancholy of finality with the release of being able to move on with your life, while the speedy, yelping “Southern Skies” taps into classic out-of-the-blue-into-the-black rock sentiment with rare commitment.
It’s invigorating no doubt, and works because the band is so good at building up the sentimental core of each song before providing a cathartic release. Opener “Despair” takes its time building a depressive and anxious portrait of isolation in the modern world, slowly building from the sparse and atmospheric verses to an underplayed and sincere message of connection, its cloudy pads blown away by cleansing swells of shoegaze distortion. Similarly, the title track uses space and thin, muscly bass and synth programming to create a tension commensurate with its theme of societal and political instability, the stridency of its refrain and that implores us to stand together and hold on seeming all the more resolute for the time spent getting there.
Endurance is certainly the best The Foreign Resort have ever sounded on a record, both in terms of the strength of the songs, and in the resolve and the earnestness they embody. It’s a record of sturm and drang, the tumult matched by its insistence that the answer is not to retreat from the darkness, but to reaffirm our connections, to each other and the world at large. Recommended.
