![]() “I kept thinking about this world-weary protest music, but also this feminine vitality of teenage girls,” she says. During the writing process she listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, the Shangri-Las (whose Dressed in Black inspired a song of the same name about two lovers fleeing a hostile world). The album conveys a feeling of endurance typical of canonical rock’n’roll that speaks to Furman’s desire to get closer to crafting the kinds of songs that outlive their maker. Most of the songs speak to the fight for survival, specifically with reference to the Jewish community and “the 20 people I know in the world who would walk across burning coals for me, as I would for them”, she says. Produced by John Congleton (St Vincent, Angel Olsen) in Los Angeles, All of Us Flames is an album of dreamy, unshackled indie rock, while the lyrics wield ideas of community and solidarity like loaded guns. While Furman is soft-spoken and thoughtful in person, taking long pauses after each question to gather her thoughts before offering a winding response, as a songwriter she breathes fire. On 2018’s Transangelic Exodus, she and an angel lover run away from an oppressive government in a cinematic road trip, while 2019’s Twelve Nudes lashes out at the sad state of the world in brash bursts of punk. Meanwhile, Furman’s solo albums have grown sharper teeth. Her stories of fragility and confusion have provided the soundtrack to Netflix’s beloved Sex Education, which unglues stories of queer sex and romance from the usual territory of suffering. Just as the cult John Hughes character’s outsider ego and uncompromising self-belief were a beacon for the young Furman, now her songs play that role for others. She pauses, smiles, then adds, “And I believe in finding treasure in the trash.” I was writing a document of a particularly threatened moment in my life “Queer people are just not given a model for how to be that works, so we find it in the trash of pop culture,” Furman says. With her cropped brown hair and electric-blue eyeshadow, she cuts a cool figure, resembling the subject of one of the new album’s most vulnerable songs, Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club – a playful, lo-fi love letter to “the teenage girl I never got to be”. We’ve got to keep taking care of each other.”Įzra Furman singing Forever in Sunset, from her new album All of Us Flames.įurman, 35, fiddles with the zips on a beaten-up leather jacket. Or maybe it is – but then we’ve got to figure out how to grow food ourselves and bring it to our neighbours. ![]() Not being able to buy food at the supermarket any more is not the apocalypse. ![]() “Your rights being taken away by the government is not the apocalypse. It is a few days after the UK’s first bout of extreme heat, when record-breaking temperatures left parts of Essex on fire and bin bags melted on the pavement, and a sense of doom hangs in the air. “I was trying to, there is no end of the world,” Furman explains, sipping a small beer in a quiet garden in east London. The passengers ditch the unavoidable for the unknown, with nothing but friendship on their side, Thelma and Louise, suspended in midair. As the collapse of civilisation feels increasingly inevitable, she heads for a new frontier where rugged individualism and systemic failure are vanquished by interdependence and resilience. But Furman completely turns her back on society. The backing is a groundswell of power chords and crashing percussion, recalling Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, with its depiction of underclass dreams bursting out of the confines of material reality. On the face of it, the lyrics tell a classic American tale: two people in a car – one of them “trouble” – pulling on to a highway with a full tank and the sun in their eyes. ‘T he future is a text message sending,” Ezra Furman declares on Forever in Sunset, the synth-scorched first single from her new album, All of Us Flames.
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