Currently comprised of longtime friends, including founding trio Eddie Gore (vocals, keys, guitar), Mike Sansevere (synths, guitar, percussion) and Eric Grossman (guitar), with newest members Devon Sheridan (bass), the Brooklyn-based indie act Future Generations can trace their origins to when its founding members met while attending Fordham University. The trio of Gore, Sansevere and Grossman wrote and recorded an EP that included their breakthrough single “Stars,” which caught the attention of Frenchkiss Records before they had finished school. And as a trio, they also quickly wrote and recorded their 2016 full-length, self-titled debut. Interestingly, Sheridan, was invited to join the band after Gore met him while waiting in line at a school dance — while Wells was a lucky Craigslist find.
After graduating, the members of Future Generations moved to Brooklyn, where they quickly split their time between music, their day jobs and hanging out — and live together. “Some people might think, ‘Don’t you guys get sick of each other?’ But even though we live together and work on music together and tour together, I don’t ever feel like I’ve had too much of anybody,” Gore says in press notes. As he notes, the Future Generations home life is always kept colorful by the band members’ varying obsessions. “Eric loves good food, he’s always cooking these very intricate things for us,” says Gore. As for the others, “Devon is always illegally streaming NBA games and Dylan is very talented when it comes to betting on horse races.”
Released earlier this year, the Brooklyn-based indie quintet’s Justin Garish-produced sophomore album Landscape is the first recorded output with the band’s full-lineup finds the band expanding upon their sound with some free-form, mischievous experimentation that included recording guitar riffs and guitar lines from the receiving end of phone calls, using a vintage synthesizer called the Fun Machine, building percussion tracks by sampling a batch of drum circle recordings with a deliberate attention to a greater emotional intensity — while retaining the pop-leaning, hook-driven sensibility that won the band attention across the blogosphere. “The title partly came from ending the first significant relationship of my life, and with the band’s move to Brooklyn, we were all put into this world we’d never experienced—living on our own and navigating the landscape of being in New York City,” the band’s Eddie Gore explains in press notes. Making this album was the most creative time we’d ever experienced together,” Gore adds. “I remember after the ninth day of recording, we were all walking to the subway together to go home, and we just stopped and looked at each other like, ‘This is crazy, what’s happening here.’ It was this euphoric experience; the energy in the studio was completely palpable.”
Landscape’s latest single is album title track “Landscape,” a track centered around a lush, arpeggiated synth line, propulsive yet skittering percussion and a rousingly infectious hook that nods a bit of post-punk, 80s synth rock and contemporary indie rock but with an earnest look at themselves, their lives and their relationships as they get older — and as life becomes much more uncertain and confusing.
Directed by Kenny Polyak and Drew Lewis, the recently released video for “Landscape” mischievously draws from the opening sequences of bad 80s and 90s sitcoms — particularly Full House, Family Matters, and Perfect Strangers. As the band says of the video treatment ““You know that feeling when you’re two hours into a YouTube session and you come across a legendary Sizzler commercial from the 90s and you decide your next music video has to be a tribute to it? Thats how this all got started.”
