See You In The Afterlife Worst Nites Pumped Up Kicks Foster The People

See You In The Afterlife Album: Paradise State of Mind (2024)
Worst Nites Album: Worst Nites (2018)
Pumped Up Kicks Album: Foster the People EP (2011)
by Foster The People

"See You in the Afterlife" is the opening track from Foster the People's album "Paradise State of Mind."

Paradise State of Mind is the fourth studio album released on August 16, 2024, by Atlantic Records, their first under the label. It is the band's first studio album in over seven years since the release of Sacred Hearts Club (2017), although they released an EP and a number of non-album singles between 2018 and 2021.

The album is primarily influenced by the musical landscape of the late 1970s-1980's with elements of disco, funk, gospel, and jazz, with songwriting inspired by such cultural events as the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some themes explored through the album's lyrics include technology, mortality, time, self-reflection and optimism. Foster has stated his fascination with the music of the 1970s decade contrasted with the political, social and cultural changes of that time, drawing a parallel between the 1970s and the 2020s. It is also more of an analog record with less use of digital sounds and instrumentation compared to their previous albums. The album artwork is an oil painting by Matt Hansel.

It is the band's final album to feature guitarist Sean Cimino as he departed from the band months before the album's release.

The album has received primarily positive reviews, with a Metacritic score of 75. Critics and fans praised the experimentation with popular music genres of the past and the quality of the production. It debuted at #8 on the Billboard Top Album sales, selling 7,000 copies during its first week, yet commercially underperforming, as it failed to chart high in other countries, something which has been attributed to the band's unofficial hiatus prior to its long awaited release.

Following the 10th anniversary reissue of their debut album, the band's social media channels remained primarily inactive until May 2024 when the band started teasing new music. Various Instagram animated reels featuring clips of "Lost in Space" were released along with clips from the accompanying music video. When the single and video were released, more reels of the band producing the album began to be posted on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok with the album title officially being announced. Additionally, in the weeks leading up to the full album release, Mark Foster and Isom Innis invited a select group of fans to listen to the album early in its entirety at venues in Los Angeles and New York City.

Foster the People dropped a creative video for their newest single "Worst Nites" on Thursday (Nov. 15 2018). Directed by frontman Mark Foster and The Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson, the video follows the real-life clown Richie the Barber on a nearly five-minute journey from a bad night to a fun performance.

The video opens in a room stocked with clown memorabilia. Richie, donning a giant mustache, jumps out of bed and gets ready for the evening after his alarm awakens him.

He jumps on his unicycle and arrives at his workplace, ducking under his co-workers looming gazes on his way to a cubicle with the words “No clowning around” printed above it. He gets nervous and begins to sweat profusely, the skin-colored makeup on his face wearing off and revealing tattoos.

His co-workers get suspicious, and his boss tears off Richie’s wig, revealing his neon-red clown hair underneath. They begin to aggressively chase him down the street as he pedals away on his unicycle and through a door.

When he stands up — now wearing his cooky clown attire — he finds he’s on a stage. He tries to entertain the bored crowd in front of him with pin juggling, but then the business people catch up to him.

Richie has a revelation when he realizes his co-workers copy his every move and yanks out a radio, getting them to join him in a colorful umbrella-twirling group dance.

The crowd cheers and throws roses. He walks away whistling, now in the light of day.

“We are living in a world where we’re engulfed in pressure to conform,” said Foster in a statement. “This story is a metaphor for not being afraid to embrace who you really are. There’s an immense freedom that comes with taking ownership over what makes you unique.”

“Thank you for watching,” he added. “And sorry if you hate clowns. We love them.”

Foster the People is a Los Angeles indie rock band that started off as a solo project for vocalist, guitarist and keyboardist Mark Foster, who had been working as a jingle composer for commercials. As his songs became more grandiose, Foster enlisted bassist Cubbie Fink and drummer Mark Pontius. This is the band's debut single, which debuted on the Hot 100 chart dated May 7, 2011.

Mark Foster explained the song's meaning to Spinner UK: "'Pumped Up Kicks' is about a kid that basically is losing his mind and is plotting revenge. He's an outcast. I feel like the youth in our culture are becoming more and more isolated. It's kind of an epidemic. Instead of writing about victims and some tragedy, I wanted to get into the killer's mind, like Truman Capote did in In Cold Blood. I love to write about characters. That's my style. I really like to get inside the heads of other people and try to walk in their shoes."

Foster says he considered writing Pumped Up Kicks from the perspective of the victim, but felt that would be a cop out. He also points out that there is no actual violence in the song, as the threats are all the kid's internal monologue.

About those "Pumped Up Kicks" the other kids in this song are wearing: In the late '80s and early '90s, the Reebok Pump basketball shoe enjoyed modest popularity. The sneaker had a pump shaped like a basketball on the tongue, and the idea was that if you needed a little extra lift, you could just give it a few pumps - keep in mind that Nike had Michael Jordan selling its kicks, so Reebok was pretty desperate. The greatest moment in Pumps history came when Dee Brown of the Boston Celtics won the 1991 Slam Dunk contest wearing the shoes. Just before his winning dunk, he reached down and inflated his Pumps, a moment that Reebok used in commercials for the shoes.

The shoes were very expensive, and kids with that kind of money to spend on basketball sneakers who didn't opt for Air Jordans tended to be the privileged poseurs who annoyed the hell out of anyone wearing Converse or Keds. In this song, the kids with the pumped up kicks, or at least these type of kids, are threatened with grave violence.
Foster discussed the broad appeal of the song in an interview with Billboard magazine: "'Pumped Up Kicks' is one of those songs that blends something really familiar with something that's very modern," he said. "It's a song where you could lay on the couch and listen to it or you can get up and dance around the room to it."
Talking about writing this song in Rolling Stone, Foster said: "I was trying to get inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid. It's a f--k you song to hipsters, in a way - but it's a song the hipsters are going to want to dance to."

The "gun" in this song is quite literal, but it didn't start out that way. Mark Foster wrote the chorus of the song first, and considered it a song about confidence, with "gun" being a metaphor. That changed when he came up with the first verse, which he freestyled during a recording session. This verse was clearly about a kid who finds his dad's gun, and it changed the complexion of the song, giving the "gun" a literal meaning.

Pumped Up Kicks manages to hide a dark message beneath its cheery tune. "I tend to do that with a lot of songs," Mark Foster told MTV News. "I like to tell a different type of story, lyrically, than what the music is expressing, because it brings another layer to the story itself. I wrote it a block away from the beach, and I was working at a music house — Mophonics, a place where I composed for ads and stuff — and I think that had some influence on the sound."

MTVU censored Pumped Up Kicks when they played the video, dropping the audio any time Foster sang "gun" or "bullets." The frontman told Rolling Stone: "I think MTV is scared of an alternative band that has a sound like this. I think the sound is deceiving. You've got reality shows which are all about teenagers getting pregnant and you've got Jersey Shore, where a girl gets punched in the face and they show the clip over and over and over as a teaser to watch the show. It's like, oh, OK, domestic violence is fine but, like, talking about something like family values and teen isolation and bullying is not."

Pumped Up Kicks's success is partly due to its multi-format appeal, and it was the first song to top both Billboard's Alternative Songs and Dance Airplay charts. (The latter has only been running since October 17, 2003).

The chorus shows up eight times in Pumped Up Kicks, including four times at the end of the song. Chorus repetition is a hallmark of hit songwriting, but this is a little much, and Mark Foster knows it. "If I had known that the song was going to be played everywhere, I would have taken those damn choruses out of the song and made it move faster," he told NME. "By the end of it, it's just chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus... it's driving me crazy to hear this stupid chorus again."

Pumped Up Kicks was never officially released. Foster the People bassist Cubbie Fink explained to Stuff.co.nz: "We were a brand-new band and that was the only song we had completed, and so we put it up on our website to download, and from that it had a life on its own. It was tossed around on the internet, and people would blog about and it ended up on [music blog aggregator] Hype Machine, and radio just naturally picked it up. First independent radio stations started playing it, and then mainstream radio stations started playing it, and it was just gradually growing."

Foster the People's debut album Torches was released on May 23, 2011 through Columbia Records and Startime. Mark Foster told CMU: "This album was really cathartic for me. A lot of the songs are about isolation and being the underdog. It was nice to get them out and take ownership over the things that I wanted to run away from."

Pumped Up Kicks was the most streamed song on the US Spotify music service between when it launched on July 14, 2011 and the end of the year. Another Foster The People track, "Helena Beat," was the fifth most streamed song over the same period.

Pumped Up Kicks was yanked from the airwaves after the shooting of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Mark Foster agreed with the decision to pull the track out of respect for the victims, adding that he wrote the song about the growing trend of mental illness among teenagers in a bid to create a conversation about the need for change. He said in a statement to CNN.com, "I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' when I began to read about the growing trend in teenage mental illness. I wanted to understand the psychology behind it because it was foreign to me. It was terrifying how mental illness among youth had skyrocketed in the last decade. I was scared to see where the pattern was headed if we didn't start changing the way we were bringing up the next generation... This song was written as a way to create ongoing dialogue for an issue that was being talked about, but when it came to government intervention, was largely being ignored...

"Now, this topic is finally at the forefront of major discussion and will hopefully lead to some big changes in policy that will prevent these acts of violence from happening in the future. That being said, I respect people's decision to press pause. And if that becomes a catalyst for a bigger conversation that could lead to positive change moving forward, then I absolutely support it."

Looking back on Pumped Up Kicks in 2014, Mark Foster told NME that he was proud of its cultural significance. "It forced the public to have a conversation," he said. "Not just about guns and gun regulations, but also about art itself - where the line is, and what should be edited. I feel that in terms of pushing the envelope in terms of culture and forcing people to have those conversations, it was a really healthy thing for the country."