Atlanta
Beyond the Individual
“For me, it’s totally a cathartic thing. It’s my way of dealing with the world,” says Franklin James Fisher, primary vocalist and lyricist for Algiers, the socially conscious, Atlanta-hailing group whose new sophomore album, The Underside of Power, continues to carry the gospel-punk torch that the band ignited with their self-titled debut in 2015. “It’s a natural continuation of what we did on that first album,” Fisher says, noting that, this time around, the deadline was tighter and the process was more disjointed, which made for a personally difficult experience for the singer. “It was just such an exhausting process; it was almost traumatizing. I didn’t quite understand my place—what I was meant to do.” The original trio of Atlanta natives—Fisher, Ryan Mahan and Lee Tesche—hunkered down in the studio with touring band member and former Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong, and, for the first time, they also enlisted the help of outside producers. They ended up, despite the strife, crafting an impressive collection of songs that captures the unsteady state of the world. Fisher speaks to the creation of one of the album’s cuts, “Death March,” a track produced with Portishead’s Adrian Utley and written in response to the Brexit vote from last summer. “I remember it was the day after the vote had passed, and everybody was just kind of dazed and in a state of disbelief—very similar to what happened after Trump won the election,” Fisher says. “I just started writing in response to what I was reading in the papers. It was almost like a premonition, a feeling that this was the beginning of a domino effect.” Despite the dark—though undeniably relevant—themes of some of Fisher’s lyrics, which touch on everything from institutional oppression to artists selling out their own culture for profit, there is also hope for the future in there. And for his own part, Fisher isn’t about to let up on his musical catharsis. “I’ve always done this, and I always will,” he says. “It’s important to go beyond the individual. I tend not to write too many things about me, about my subjective experiences. I guess those things don’t bother me as much as things I seem to have no control over, things that make me feel two inches tall.”