Canadian quintet Foxwarren – Andy Shauf, Avery and Darryl Kissick, Dallas Bryson, and Colin Nealis – released “Yvonne”, the second single from their new album, 2, out 30th May via ANTI-.

Following lead single “Listen2me”, “Yvonne” is a compulsory study of love’s strange spell. Shauf sets the scene above a looping Laurel Canyon rhythm, and then when his vocal harmonies hit the string section singing, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Yvonne”, it’s like watching the sun rise in someone else’s eyes. “Yvonne, the woman scanning the beach each morning for buried treasure, deserves a love song too”, the band says. A collage-style animated video by artist Meghan Fenske accompanies “Yvonne”, further nodding to the cut-and-paste elements of 2.

Riding a crest of enthusiasm, Foxwarren headed into the studio in the autumn of 2018, hoping to cut a half-dozen songs for a follow-up rather quickly. Given a little distance, though, the songs felt flat. So Foxwarren opted to try something entirely new: In their own home studios across four provinces, all five members would upload song ideas, melodic phrases, or rhythmic bits to a shared folder. In Toronto, Shauf would then plug these into a sampler and construct songs from the fragments supplied by his bandmates, leaning into classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète alike as unlikely lodestars. Foxwarren would convene at weekly online meetings, offering long-distance suggestions about which way a song might shift. It was a long and difficult process, but 2 became an uncanny revelation for Foxwarren; they warped and pushed the florid folk-rock of their past until it evolved into a mesmerising song cycle about the vagaries of love.

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