How do the English do it?

When they hype a band, they REALLY hype a band. The tabloids and music presses seem to unite as one to declare the second coming, that the latest greatest thing will be the BEST THING you’ve EVER heard in the HISTORY of FOREVERDOM…well, at least until the next, next best thing.

Foals are the latest group to be subjected to salivating levels of expectations for a debut album, with Antidotes hailed as the best debut album of 2008 midway through 2007. So, y’know, totally no pressure.

Frontman Yannis Phillappakis admits to reservations about the band’s treatment by the music presses in the past, but it’s something that – with the album now out and about – that he’s learned to ignore.

“I didn’t expect it,” he admits of 2007’s wave of hype. “I’m definitely feeling a bit more relaxed [now that the album is out], because no matter how much you block it out it definitely effects you. We’ve always felt like the underdogs, and then all of a sudden you’re in this place where you’ve got something to fall off and that’s something that’s psychologically quite strange for a band.”

Naturally enough, the NME tried to put a label on the band – first it was math-wave, before they settled on puzzle-pop alongside American group Battles. “I’m totally glad that didn’t stick!” Yannis says with a laugh.

“It’s just sloganeering, and restrictive. It was a concern,” he says of the labelling, “but we became solipsistic and everything is outside [the band] – and I think that it is nice to have good reviews and have people excited by your record, and we feel a lot better about ourselves than we have done for a while.

“We’re totally not a vacuous ‘hype’ band,” he spits, “and there is a deep concern for what we do. We will stay true to our word and try to make weird records.”

The sound of their debut album is a complex and intensive listen, with new discoveries able to be made with each subsequent listen. “It’s just how we write – intuitively. We’ve been playing together for quite some time,” he explains, having shared the stage with drummer Jack Bevan in previous group The Edmund Fitzgerald, “and it’s just how we play. It’s natural and it comes from the music that we listen to and the way that we were brought up to think about music. It’s how our fingers play.”

Recorded with TV on the Radio sound whiz Dave Sitek in his studio in New York City, Foals took the unusual step of abandoning Sitek’s original mix of the album and putting their own spin on things. “He’s a very particular producer, and the studio is lovely,” he says of the five-piece’s experience at the Stay Gold studio.

“But we used his mix as the bare bones. We just didn’t like the final mix – it felt like the record had gone too far away from what we envisaged. He mixed it on his own, y’see,” Yannis explains, “so we left New York with a rough mix then he spent 2 weeks mixing it and what returned was quite a different record. We think he’s amazing – and that’s why we wanted to work with him, and we still think he’s an incredible producer – but we’re neurotic, y’know, so whatever. We talked about remixing it together [with Dave] but he didn’t want to, so we remixed it ourselves.”

Recorded in a relatively piecemeal fashion with elements put together to see what effect they’d have, then stripped back, then tried and tested once more, the recording of Antidotes is, Yannis believes, nothing like how the band represent themselves in the live format.

“We wanted to have our cake and eat it,” he says of the band’s wilfully and dizzyingly different approach, “and a lot of it is just geeky. We’re perfectionists so there’s tiny things on each track. We just wanted to make it sound more like what it sounded like in our heads.

“We’re not interested in doing straightforward live-sounding rock records,” he continues, “and with the technology available now it would be a total waste to go in and record it true to form. I think all the excitement in making records now comes from the possibilities in the studio, and I think there’s possibilities that have never been available before. We’re done very little of that on this record but it’s the way that we generally want to make records.”

The band also took the approach of not revisiting their past, meaning that songs like “Hummer” and “Mathletics” – the songs that really launched Foals into the consciousness of the British public in particular in 2007 – are not represented on the album. (They are, however, included in original form on the American release.)

“We wanted to make an album that was its own body of work,” he says of their approach to making Antidotes, “and it would have automatically disturbed the balance of the album. We wanted to do something that was distinct from before.”

It certainly indicates that the band had a great deal of confidence in what they were putting together for their own album. Yannis, however, doesn’t see it like that, attesting that that’s not the way that Foals think of their music – he believes it’s the label’s job to think commercially like that, not the band’s.

“We just want to record and write new songs. The only reason those songs,” he says of the aforementioned 2007 singles, “would have been put on there would be for tactical, commercial reasons, and that’s not our job. It’s got nothing to do with that – we write new and songs and want to release them, and that’s how it works.”

Hoping to tour Australa in July / August, coincidentally around the time of Splendour in the Grass, Foals’ debut album Antidotes is out now.