Future Islands frontman Samuel Herring was in a Stockholm cab one morning earlier this summer, being driven to the airport. He had been visiting his partner, Julia Ragnarsson, after spending most of the pandemic apart due to travel restrictions, but the country’s visa regulations prevented him from staying longer. His heart was heavy, and he didn’t want to leave her. And then Herring checked his phone and found an email announcing that influential house music DJ and producer Carl Cox had accepted Future Islands’ offer to remix one of their As Long as You Are songs for an ongoing project and had submitted his mix.

“I was crying in the backseat of this guy’s cab, who’s just like, ‘Dude, what is wrong with this guy?’” Herring recalled in a video call from his home in Baltimore, alongside the band’s drummer, Michael Lowry. “Carl Cox is … everyone’s royalty. It’s crazy. He chose [‘City’s Face’], probably the song you would least expect him to pick. It’s awesome.”

The song will appear on the final of three remix EPs that Future Islands have been releasing this year to give their fans something new to cling to until the band is hopefully able to hit the road next month—the Delta variant causing a not insignificant amount of stress on the band at the moment. So far, the ALAYA Remixes series has included reworkings by the likes of Washed Out (“For Sure”), Smallboy (“Hit The Coast”) and Egyptian Lover and COMPUTER DATA (both of whom took a stab at “Thrill”).

Getting Egyptian Lover involved was another major coup for the band. Herring said the influential artist, along with Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa, were what brought him and bassist William Cashion together.

The idea for the remixes came out of a conversation with the band’s label, 4AD, about finding a way to prolong the life of the new album, which the band released in October 2020, Lowry said. Around the same time, good friend Dan Deacon (Herring said they’ve known each other since 2004, and it was he who convinced Future Islands to move to Baltimore) reached out and asked to remix “For Sure” for fun.

“Dan has been doing a ton of film scores recently. I think he just kind of needed an outlet,” Herring said. “It’s cool for me to hear just what someone can do in adjusting a palette of music. When you see what someone else does with your music, it kind of makes you think about what you can do with your music.”

Unlike with 2017’s The Far Field, which Future Island recorded over several weeks between tours (and rushed through it), the band took its sweet time with As Long as You Are, recording a couple of weeks at a time and then taking breaks to refresh.

Still, because the band never got a chance to perform the song in front of fans—there was one livestream earlier this year—and went back into the studio afterward, it’s just now delving into it.

“I do a lot of walking these days, so like I’ve been walking around and like listening to it,” Lowry said. “As artists, with your own art, I feel like people want to be like, ‘Oh, I don’t like this, I don’t like that. I wish I could have changed blah, blah, blah, blah. But I really enjoy this record, I really enjoy these songs. It sounds better than I remember the last time I listened to it. I was really proud of us and the job that we did; how thorough we were.”

That’s typically what happens, Herring added. The challenge is accepting the record for what it is from the moment it goes to press. But with this one, all four members, including keyboardist Gerrit Welmers, walked away without having to sacrifice any artistic integrity.

“We kind of did the thing that we’ve always been trying to do,” he said.

Compromise and trust in your bandmates are big parts of being in a band and usually necessary to finish any song or album, but the extra time allowed the four to work through all their issues. Lowry said he’s even still happy with the song order, which is not typical.

But—and there is a “but”—whether Future Islands are happy or unhappy with an album, the next step remains the same: heading right back into the studio.

“When you write a record that you’re not happy with, you feel like you need to immediately get back in the studio and right your wrongs,” Herring said. “When you write a record that you’re really happy with, you feel like you need to immediately get back in the studio and keep doing whatever you did before. The artistic process is always moving. You don’t always find it, you know? Sometimes it takes time to find you.”

While The Far Field is just Future Islands’ fifth album, Herring said he feels like its follow-up is more of a chapter of his and his bandmates’ lives, and that’s how he views making albums going forward. He compared it to the way listeners can relate to certain albums because they share a connection to an album coming out at a particular point in their lives.

“You listen back to that album you got your first year of college, and it takes you back to that place,” he said. “It can be very similar for the artist; listening back to songs and reconnecting to places. There is a pride. I think that would be the word.”

The job then becomes balancing that sense of ownership with the business of making music because musicians have to sell their albums in order to keep making music. Lowry said he understands the pressure to write about his and the band’s truth and recording enough to stay afloat. He calls it “practicing your art by living.”

“When I think of what my ideal life is, it’s that,” he said.

Lowry has been with Future Islands for several years and performed with them on The Far Field, but the 2019 album was his first as a full member of the band. He contributed equally to writing and recording it. The status gives him an equal share of the publishing and royalties, but he said he’s felt fully included and respected since he first joined.

Herring said Lowry is the hardest-working member of the band, always proactive. For him, the realization to extend the invitation dawned on him one day because the drummer had far outlasted any of his predecessors.

“‘We have this guy, this amazing drummer, and we’re not using him to his potential. He should be writing with us now. What the hell are we doing?’” Herring recalled thinking.

And it wasn’t an insignificant gesture for the others, who had birthed the band and cared for it like their baby.

“It was a big deal to have Mike in because we’ve had drummers before that lasted two weeks, a drummer that lasted a month, but this guy is still around! Mike is still around!”

Since March, Future Islands have put in about four months of work on their next album. They’re still writing and recording, but have more than half of a record’s worth of material completed. Lowry suggested 2022 for the band’s next relief, before Herring jokingly pushed back on the assertion. Taking time worked last time, so they’re doing it again.

Between 2008 and 2012, the band released three records with no break. The members couldn’t afford to be off the road, where they made most of their money and massively grew their fanbase. Two of those three records were written between tours, so there were no breaks to take a break or live their lives. Singles, released in 2014, changed the circumstances considerably with the success of “Seasons (Waiting On You).”

The writing sessions for The Far Field started and then petered out after months of writing, he said.

“We started off really strong, and then after you’re writing for five or six months, by the end of it you’re just kind of pulling at things,” he said. “We kind of burned out on this pushing through.”

The band needed to experience something to write about it; and sitting in a room and writing, while very meta, did not make for compelling content.

At the time of this interview, Herring was a week into writing a song about being apart from Ragnarsson and how that is straining their relationship. But he was driven crazy because staring at a notepad wasn’t very inspirational.

“The song is powerful. It’s putting me in a really emotional place, and I know that’s a good thing, even though it’s kind of about exercising that feeling and trying to understand it, so then I can look at it, to see what it means,” he said. “In taking more time, but writing more often, the hope was that we would be capturing more of these moments in time as they happened and just capturing feelings, instead of trying to cram it all in because we were in this process.

In an ideal world, Future Islands will also get a chance to rest out some of their songs live before committing them to an album, as well as letting finding creativity during soundchecks. Herring said he finds joy in performing something new and seeing what an audience sees as special. They haven’t had a chance to do that in two years, since the last time they ended a tour.

“I never thought that we would be stopping for any reason,” Herring said.

The band is chomping at the bit to get back on stage but is more wary of what pandemic-era touring will look like. Lowry is worried about not being able to visit his favorite places in different cities, and the members drive themselves crazy if they’re stuck with each other for too long.

“This whole pandemic thing is just fucked,” Lowry said, before Herring jumped in with a more dire scenario:

“I’m waiting for them to cancel the whole tour,” Herring said, laughing, to which Lowry retorted, “Don’t even bring it up.”

After denial comes bargaining.

“If it’s just people have to wear masks, that’s not that big of a deal,” Lowry said. “After being locked down, if I really was dying to see shows, I’d be like, ‘I’m vaccinated. All I have to do is wear a mask? Easy.’”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.