Black Foxxes: "We don't need that negative energy in our lives anymore"

Bristol alt-rock trio Black Foxxes have always been open about the ups and downs of the lesser-talked-about areas of band life - the grimy bits behind-the-scenes that cause sleepless nights and terse email exchanges. The toll it cane have on your mental health. After two albums' worth of compromising and playing by the rules, their third self-titled record seems them come back more assured than ever before. With frontman Mark Holley now joined by two new members, drummer Finn Mclean and bassist Jack Henley, it's a fresh start for a band reinvigorated. Hi Mark, talk us through what happened after the release of your last album - when did the band transition to its current line-up? How close were you to calling it a day? I think a lot of growth happened for all of us. We had a lot of really great tours off the back of the second record, some of my fondest memories. But after we finished the Dashboard Confessionals tour in November 2018 things just went quiet in camp. I was personally spending a lot of time writing with different creatives in Bristol and trying to develop as a songwriter, and for whatever reason, the band just lost touch. I don't think it was anyone's fault. Time just passed, and people felt differently about the band - these things happen. I reached out to the guys, and Tris had decided that the time out was a good opportunity to reflect and, for him, it was time to call it a day. Shortly after, Ant decided the same. Absolutely no bad vibes between the three of us, we were a band for seven years, and the moment someone comes to me and says they think the spark's gone and they're not sure they want to commit to it anymore, that's all I need to hear. It's an inevitability that people will be on different pages after pursuing something for that long. The one thing I wasn't ready to do was call it a day. I didn't know at the time whether all the stuff I'd been writing separately would be used for Foxxes or for a different line-up, but after a few different project attempts, it sort of all just snapped into place. I'd been writing with Jack for the most of 2019, he's my oldest friend, and we grew up playing in bands - so it just felt like a really easy transition to get him involved because the family dynamic of an older band felt like it wasn't lost. Finn slotted in shortly after that; I basically head-hunted Finn because I think he's such an exceptional player. It's been an incredibly exciting time writing music with this band over the past year. Did all that upheaval impact the kind of music you wanted to make? Of course. I think one of the reasons we naturally all parted ways with the old line up is because we all wanted different things musically. I really felt like I had taken the songwriting as far as I could with the style and genre of music we were making. I really wanted to take a step into the unknown and make different music than I'd ever made before. It's not even that this third record feels like the truest reflection of myself as a songwriter; it's bigger than that. With the new line-up, there are simply no limitations, and it's the excitement of the fourth, the fifth, the sixth records that's making us smile ear to ear at the moment. We know we've really unlocked something with the three of us as players, and that's so fucking important and missed in modern-day rock music. You've said you made the record for no one but yourselves, what points of contention have you previously come up against in that respect? Hah, where do I fucking start? If we didn't make this record for ourselves, it never would have been made. I have been aired, pushed and pulled, physically drained from the process of this record. It's funny looking back because I look at so many exchanges with people and I'm like, 'Jesus, if I didn't just bite my tongue here, if I didn't just grit my teeth and get through this phase - this record would never have been made or written so many times'. I basically saw the absolute worst parts of the music industry time and time again over 2018/2019. It's not something I want to go in-depth about because it actually fucked me up a lot. But it is something I'm massively proud of myself about given the fact I stuck by myself every step of the way. I never doubted myself once. So for that reason, when the new band formed, we told ourselves that this is all about us now. We don't give a fuck about pleasing anyone else that doesn't understand the band or the music. We love the music, the people closest to us love the music, and that's enough for us. We don't need that negative energy in our lives anymore, ya know?