Alex Henry Foster, who attracted attention in Europe especially last year, is a Canadian singer and co-founder of the band Your Favorite Enemies, with whom he released four albums. The death of his father in 2016 marked a break in Foster’s life and he left the band.
Windows In The Sky, his first solo album, was released in 2018 and went straight into the Canadian Top 5. The album was made with the help of his old bandmates. Two years later, it was released worldwide, followed by the live album Standing Under Bright Lights in 2021, which was recorded for a CD/DVD release at a Montreal music festival.
For Foster, music has always been a refuge, a gateway to other worlds. His father’s Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums and his mother’s old rock’n’roll singles provided escape from the realities of growing up poor in Montreal. “That town does not treat poor people well,” he says. “I come from a difficult background, very blue collar. Music kept us together as a family. It was the most beautiful gift I could have received. My parents had nothing, and, in music, they gave me everything.”
His music unfolds a hypnotic effect, especially live – the tracks are sometimes improvised and extended to more than 20 minutes by the very well-rehearsed band. It seems as if there is a blind understanding among the band members, as if they are all very good friends with each other and as if they have already experienced a lot together. The audience is also integrated again and again and taken along by the charismatic frontman Foster. The tracks themselves often start quietly and increase into large, sometimes wall-of-sound thunderstorms of sound. Foster lets the listener share in his pain and despair and seems to process his past over and over again, almost like self-therapy. He grabs the audience with it because probably everyone has had to go through loss and grief in their own way. With this, Foster finds the connection and connects his audience to each other….
The intonation of Foster’s chanting sometimes reminds one of Anne Clark‘s great deeds of the 80s …
In Europe, Foster most recently performed as the opening act for the band The Pineapple Thief and impressed the audience there.
Alex Henry Foster and his band will perform on the Loreley on Friday, 14 July 2023.
Tickets for the Night Of The Prog Festival 2023 are available in our WiV Ticket Shop!
Alex Henry Foster Links:
Official website
YouTube Channel
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