If you’re the type to roll your eyes when a band says their new album is their best yet, Josh Hodges of STRFKR has something for you: he’s pretty sure Future Past Life is the best thing they’ve done, and you might actually believe him. “It’s supposed to go backwards for bands — your first record’s your best — but I think this is the best we’ve made,” he says, half proud, half relieved.
Future Past Life landed with the subtlety of a meteor strike: a few singles dropped, then boom — a whole record. Surprise! Hodges says the semi-surprise was a long time coming. “We’d wanted to do that for a while, where you just kind of drop it.” For once, an album rollout didn’t feel like a corporate hostage situation. They streamed it live with fans, answering questions in real time while Hodges pecked away at a keyboard, probably with more typos than cosmic insight. “It was really fun… it was like sharing the baby that way,” he says.
This time, the baby has an acoustic guitar up front, a lo-fi heart, and the lyrics pushed closer than ever. “Bravery in music is just honesty,” he says. “That’s what I respond to in other people.” For a band that’s made its reputation on dancey neon bops for house parties, these new songs feel like they’d rather sit with you on the floor at 3AM while you confess all the ways you’ve messed up.
Some of the songs were born out of a dusty Amsterdam writing session with Dutch friends who were, at the time, basically strangers. Those half-finished sketches found new life under the “no rules, but a few rules” vibe of Future Past Life — acoustic guitars, tape loops, a recurring melodic motif tucked into each track like a secret handshake. “Every instrument gives you its own little world that shapes the song,” Hodges shrugs.
The most sci-fi twist in all of this is that an actual astronaut took Future Past Life up to the International Space Station and played it while orbiting the Earth. No big deal. “She sent us pictures of her iPod playing our music in space,” Hodges says, still sounding a little shell-shocked. That same astronaut gets a wink in the album art — those permission numbers in the corner, that’s for her.
Don’t get too cozy in the acoustic haze, though: STRFKR’s already planning the next record. “It’ll go back to being a little more dancey,” he teases. For now, there’s something intimate and beautifully small about Future Past Life. A record made in bedrooms that made it to space. Not bad for a party band that used to bury its lyrics under synth glitter. “If one person likes it and gets it, that means more than a lot of people liking me,” Hodges says. Cosmic honesty, no matter the orbit.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
