(Credits: Far Out / Foals / Press)
Mon 16 March 2026 6:00, UK
There aren’t many albums about the end of the world that you can actually dance to, and in fact, when you look at the landscape of modern music, there are surprisingly few albums about climate change at all.
It is a strange cultural quirk that leaves one wondering why panic about the planet burning is usually relegated to dry non-fiction, academic journals, or documentaries, as surely the thought of glaciers vanishing and Venice sinking into the tide is as gut-wrenching and panic-inducing as any breakup, if perhaps a little less sexy? It certainly isn’t the case that the musicians have suddenly decided to shy away from talking politics or policy (see Geese at the Brit awards), yet climate change still seems to be a topic that many continue to avoid.
There are a few tracks made by straight-talking punk outfits such as Joe and the Shitboys, who penned a song called ‘Save the Planet, You Dumb Shit’ back in 2021, but the wider musical landscape has remained oddly quiet about environmental issues since Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.
Foals’ 2019 album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1, then, was a breath of fresh air in this sense, with the artwork taken from a series of images created by Ecuadorian artist Vicente Muñoz called Sublimis, which explored the inevitable struggle of man against nature in the urban environment through the lens of infrared photography. Thematically, the album explored themes of environmental decay, political anxiety, and digital-age paranoia, serving as an urgent, post-apocalyptic commentary on climate change born directly from anxiety caused by Brexit, Trump, and rising sea levels.
The impending sense of doom the band were feeling certainly didn’t stop Foals from squeezing some genuine bangers onto the album, though. The enormous ‘Exits’ is both sonically dextrous and driven by a stadium-sized chant of a chorus, a powerful lament for a post-global warming environment where “there are no birds left to fly” and “the weather’s against us, houses underground / The flowers upside down in our dreams”. ‘White Onions’ couples airy percussion with claustrophobic cries for air, while on ‘Syrups’ we hear how “sand dunes filled up all our towns” over a seriously funky bassline.
The album’s closer, ‘I’m Done With the World (& It’s Done With Me)’, however, is by far the slowest, most thoughtful track on the record. Having navigated the burning issues of our times, like climate change, political uncertainty, and mental health problems, Yannis Philippakis doesn’t have much left to give by the close of the album. He juxtaposes a serene, melancholy piano with startling imagery of the world finally caving in, singing: “The fox is dead in the garden / The hedges are on fire in the country lanes / And all I wanna do is get out of the rain”.
As he tries to make sense of the planet burning around him, Yannis also grapples with the idea of still finding beauty and love in such a difficult time: “My daughter’s asleep in the garden / The leaves are on fire in the country lanes,” he sings, trying to protect a moment of peace while the horizon glows orange. This dichotomy is revisited again in the music video for the earlier single ‘In Degrees’, which cuts between the band performing amongst some empty ruins in Brazil and scenes from a raucous party.
As the track closes, Yannis sings, “I’m done with the world / And it’s done with me / All I wanna do is get up and leave / Sun falls into the garden / I’m on my knees”, and you can almost imagine burning debris falling from the sky around him as he longs for the relief of a simple “Autumn day”.
Foals have never been a band to tackle politics or social issues head-on in their lyricism, but that doesn’t make this track, or this album, any less potent, and its final line leaves us genuinely moved by Yannis’ reminder of what we have, and what we might just stand to lose.