Into The Music
Future Islands announced this week that they are going on tour. The catch: they are touring North Carolina. Eight shows, mostly in the state where frontman Samuel Herring grew up, before a final date in Baltimore, the city the band has called home for years. They are calling it the Fountain of Youth Tour. It is paired with a new compilation called From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth, out May 22 on 4AD.
The North Carolina detour makes more sense when you know the band’s origin. Herring, bassist William Cashion, and keyboardist Gerrit Welmers started playing together in Greenville, North Carolina, grinding through the kind of local scene that tends to either forge bands or dissolve them. Future Islands got forged. They played house parties and small clubs for years before anything resembling wider attention found them.
That attention arrived, loudly, with a Letterman performance in 2014 that became one of the more discussed television moments in recent music history. Herring stepped up to the mic and delivered a performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” that was physically committed in a way nobody expected and many people could not stop watching. He danced with his whole body. He delivered a growl somewhere between a howl and a roar. Letterman called it one of the greatest things he had ever seen on the show.
The band had been around for almost a decade at that point. Singles (2014) was their fourth album, and the Letterman appearance was not a calculated career move so much as what Future Islands are when nobody asks them to be anything else. That is the defining quality of this band. Herring performs with an emotional transparency that does not seem performed, which is a genuinely unusual thing to say about a stage presence.
Their discography rewards patience. On the Water (2011) is the place most serious fans start, a record so carefully constructed around longing that it almost functions as a genre unto itself. The follow-up records, Singles and The Far Field (2017), expanded the sound without diluting it. Wave Like Home (2019) found them as confident and strange as ever.
The new compilation, bassist Cashion says in press materials, is “for everyone who has carried these songs with them, from the first house parties to the rooms we’re playing today.” That framing tells you something about how the band thinks about their audience: not as consumers of a catalog, but as people who have been in the room for something that mattered.
The North Carolina run will pair the band with local support acts, including Dan Deacon and Ed Schrader’s Music Beat at the Baltimore finale. Shows run through late May. If you are in range, there are few live acts working today that will leave you feeling more like you saw something real.