Having been collaborating since 1995, it’s been over a decade since the members of Les Savy Fav last released an album together.

With the world descending further into chaos than ever before, there’s been a lot of things to work out, and a lot of living to do. Continuing to play shows together periodically since 2010’s ‘Root for Ruin’ – always on their own terms – after a stint under the sunny skies of Barcelona’s Primavera festival in 2022, the hardcore icons caught the songwriting bug once more. Learning new ways to work and write together as older and perhaps wiser versions of themselves, as they shared demos and jammed in frontman Tim Harrington’s attic, the band’s sixth album was born.

Eclectic, weird, and essentially them, ‘Oui, LSF’ is a toe-tapping, head-banging return that relentlessly swerves from sweet simplicity to sheer craziness. A collection of songs that radiate vulnerability and growth, almost fifteen years may have passed, but on album six the story of Les Savy Fav is still being written.

To find out more about how their latest project came to be and how they are reflecting on three decades in the scene, Rock Sound sat down with vocalist Tim Harrington…

ROCK SOUND: Your last album ‘Root For Ruin’ came out almost fifteen years ago, and it’s safe to say that a hell of a lot has happened in the world since then. This band’s future was always left open-ended, but what sparked the idea to start working on new music?

TIM: “We played shows from time to time, whenever it was fun and it made sense for us. We had a long break, particularly during COVID, but when it was over we played a set at Primavera. Our drummer Harrison [Haynes] couldn’t make it, so we had our friend Tucker [Rule] from Thursday help us out. We spent a couple of months regularly rehearsing in our practice space to get Tucker up to speed, and then we had a complete blast in Barcelona.

Around the same time, we finally got the rights back to our EP ‘ROME (Written Upside Down)’, which is a personal favourite of the band. It finally went up on streaming services, and that spurred us on a little. For a long time, I didn’t know what I was going to write about, but I suddenly started to feel like I was in the right headspace for that.”

RS: When did it become apparent that what you were working on was to become album six?

TIM: “Originally, we thought we’d do a song, or maybe a couple of songs. It’s very hard to find space for songwriting in a life that’s not dedicated 100 per cent to music, but we just kept writing songs. After a while, we realised there were lots, and there were lots that weren’t bad either. It was a really organic process, and at some point during last summer we went into a studio. We were all sitting there thinking, ‘Why aren’t we just recording this in Tim’s attic?’, which is what we ended up doing. Aside from the drums and vocals, everything was recorded in my attic, which really worked because we wanted a thinner sound. It all connects back to the ‘ROME’ EP, which was the first time we were in a studio, but we had a short time period to complete the songs. We weren’t thinking much, but we were also fucking around. With this new record, we wanted to revisit that feeling, but with an added twenty years of knowing how to play. After 14 years though, we forgot a lot, so it was super fresh. It was a playful process, and our motto became – ‘Does that sound interesting?’, as opposed to ‘Is that good?’.”

RS: How was the process of marrying the people you’d become over your time away from the band with the musicians who formed Les Savy Fav so long ago?

TIM: “It’s complicated, because we’ve all gone down different paths. Harrison lives in North Carolina, Syd [Butler, bassist] and Seth [Jabour, guitarist] have been playing on Seth Meyers’ late night talk show for ten years, and Andrew is an unbelievable collaborator and creative force who’s worked on a number of projects in the interim.

For me though, I had a huge personal crisis in my forties. I have a family, and I have kids, and I never envisioned myself as a person that’s on the road constantly. All of my favourite bands are commercial failures, and they all have jobs, so I always thought we’d do the same thing. Having done this band for so long  though, I wanted to take a second to figure out how to make my life work in a way that wasn’t scattered everywhere. I quit my regular job, I wrote and illustrated some kids books, I worked on a fine art practice, I wrote for television, but increasingly I found myself in my attic getting less and less done. I was freaking out in some ways, but coming out of that I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It was a stressful and chaotic time and pulling the threads of my life was really scary. I wanted to anchor myself, and it took a huge amount of time, especially looking for a job with the experience that I have. It’s a tough move to show someone your resume when they’ve seen you in your underpants and you spat beer in their mouth! I ended up landing in the creative agency at VICE though, which makes sense. I’d always tried to keep the two parts of myself separate and attempted to pass as a normal person at my day job, but it never really worked. I needed to figure out how to merge those two sides of my life, and over the past couple years I started to get a sense of what my voice and purpose was as a fifty year old guy. A lot of that came through on the record.”

RS: How so?

TIM: “The general thesis of the record to me is a sense of polarity. As we get older, the thing that you love is also the most terrifying thing in the world. Those go together, and you don’t pick one or the other. I have my relationship with my band, and my relationship with my wife and kids. You have to embrace the dirty complexity of that, and when I was younger, I would have thought that was corrupted in some way. I was never a super political punk, but there’s a difference between hypocrisy and paradox. There are some paradoxes that you just need to be able to live with if you want the life that I want.”

RS: Compared to the tension and uncertainty of ‘Root For Ruin’, this album feels like a release. It’s weird, it’s silly at times, it’s heartbreaking at times, but it feels very authentic. ‘Somebody Needs A Hug’ feels like a particularly important track, exploring  the sheer joy of performing and being onstage. How integral has the idea of being a vocalist, a performer, and an artist been to the person you’ve become?

TIM: “I’ve always been a performer and a writer, but between this record and the last I learned how to play a lot more music. I learned how to produce too, and as a result I think this record is more of a reflection of me than past records. We wanted to more be eclectic and expansive, but we also played with simplicity and dryness. It was fun again, and being a lyricist is central to my life now more than ever. I’m somewhat of a storyteller, but I just like words. I like what words mean, and I like how they work together. That’s just a huge part of my life, but having taken fourteen years between records I had to acknowledge that the person you hear on this record and see on stage is the same person taking his kids to school each morning. Understanding the nuance of how those things happen at the same time was important. Creative people spend a lot of time protecting their little candle that they don’t realise there’s no fucking way to put it out. For better or worse, that’s who you are, and that’s not going to burn out.”

RS: There’s also some surprisingly intimate and vulnerable moments on this record. ‘Don’t Mind Me’ is this beautiful ballad that I think will come as an unexpected one for a lot of people. Was that a song that came naturally for you to write and record, or was it a little more uncomfortable knowing that you were sharing it with your bandmates, and eventually – the world?

TIM: “Honestly it was embarrassing, but I played it for Andrew [Reuland, guitarist] when he was over one day and he was like, ‘Dude, that’s real’. I’m not embarrassed to be barely clothed and throwing myself into a pile of people, but that song is scary and embarrassing to me. Part of working on this record though was I wanted to do stuff that’s scarier. I wanted something to reflect more what it feels like when we play, which is a bit scatterbrained and all over the place. As that happened though, I ended up bringing in things that people don’t see. It turns out I’ve got a good falsetto too, who knew?”

RS: ‘World Got Great’ is the ultimate tribute to where this band – and ultimately the world – is at in 2024 though. It’s a closing note of positivity and faith, which feels incredibly important in the current climate…

TIM: “The first song on the record, ‘Guzzle Blood’, is pretty doomed, and so ‘World Got great’ closing things out was super deliberate. The chorus of that song is “I know someday we’ll say we were there when the world got great // And we helped make it that way”, which is a crazy sentence. Come November, I might be eating shit in the US when the election news comes in. That’s a line that I had freestyled in the title song from the ‘ROME’ EP, and we have always played it at our shows. A lot of times, we play it for a very long time, and in the middle I will make up some little lines. We were performing that song around twenty years ago when those lines first came out, and I always wanted to write a song about that idea. It took a long time to figure out in a way that felt authentic.”

RS: Having met at school so long ago now, how does it feel to know that the bonds and relationships between yourself and the rest of the band are not only going strong, but still growing?

TIM: “They’re family members. I’ve known them for most of my life, and it’s amazing to have that through line. To think of how many times we’ve been on stage together is crazy, and we’ve had all these milestones in our lives together. It’s amazing to have a creative project be so consistent and so collaborative, so it’s almost like an autobiographical experience for the five of us. That’s what makes the band so fun and special to us. Everyone that started a band started for themselves, and other people joined in along the way. It’s all amazing, but I just love music. Listening to music and making music is the biggest joy in life, but if we don’t feel like playing a show, we just don’t do it. We would rather headline a show to four people than open up a show for 100 people if we don’t like the headlining band.”