Hailing from Australia, The Faim have been plugging away for a number of years.
Vocalist Josh Raven and bassist Stephen Beerkens grew up together and began writing music after stumbling upon an enthusiasm for doing so following a school assignment. Over the course of time they enlisted a guitarist and drummer and the band was born.
Their approach to garnering attention was a well-trodden path: handing out flyers outside gigs and recording snippets of tracks to release online. The remote location of their hometown, with a relatively nondescript music scene, worked to their advantage and they were able to enlist a producer who pulled some strings for a helping hand.
And what strings there were. Flying to over to L.A. with half-finished ideas, the band were lucky enough to work with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Mark Hoppus of Blink 182 amongst others. The fruits of this labour came in the form of an EP last year, the title-track of which, (Summer Is A Curse), has been streamed an astonishing 15 million times.
They’ve been building momentum over the summer, playing Download and Reading & Leeds with a headline tour in the autumn, and from a commercial perspective being chosen as the soundtrack to Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign for their Zero range means they have been and will be ubiquitous.
The songs chosen for this album have been in gestation over a four-year period, yet the key modus operandi is ‘go epic.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean everything is bombastic, although there’s more than enough gusto here. Lead single Humans sets the standard; an earnest, steady verse with hip-hop tempo precedes a chorus which explodes into life. It’s historically been a successful formula for their external consultants (and make no mistake, the spirit of Fall Out Boy is the bedrock of State Of Mind), but The Faim deviate slightly, using modern pop instrumentation rather than guitars to attempt to bring the sound into 2019.
This better than anything demonstrates the key strength on display: the experience and savviness of the production team bringing these songs to life, sanding off any rough edges to provide a nous that the band’s exuberance may lack.
It’s successful (clearly very successful judging by the amount of streams), but owing so much to Pete Wentz and co does at points sail quite close to the wind. Fortunately there is enough enthusiasm to sustain the record, and promisingly they sound more comfortable on tracks such as Where The River Runs, an out and out piano ballad as opposed to the pop-rock power ones that are the default setting. The band themselves make no bones about being original, and earnestness doesn’t and shouldn’t age.
The album is just the icing on the cake, a necessity in what is and will no doubt continue to be a huge rise for The Faim. After all, 15 million listeners can’t be wrong.