No one in Foxwarren has ever made a record quite like 2. The Canadian quintet, built on 20 years of friendship, ostensibly plays folk music, where warm tones and cantering rhythms buoy songs of characters wrestling with existential quandaries inside of twilit vocals. But after touring their lauded 2018 self-titled debut, Foxwarren decided to do it all differently, eventually dropping the familiar band-in-a-room routine to instead plug those songs, and various other sounds into a sampler. The result is mesmerizing and uncanny, an album that traces two sides of a relationship through 37 minutes of collage art that aspires to “sound best blasting out your car window” as put by singer Andy Shauf.

To understand how Foxwarren got here, it’s best to understand where they started. During the last decade, Andy Shauf has become known as a uniquely imaginative and precise storyteller – a perpetually restless songwriter and musician, always using some fresh fascination, skill, or concept as the catalyst for albums he would write, play, and produce almost entirely by himself. These ever-evolving interests are evident from 2016’s The Party through to 2023’s Norm. But before Shauf’s solo acclaim, he was a member of Foxwarren, which initially consisted of Shauf, fraternal rhythm section Avery and Darryl Kissick, and guitarist Dallas Bryson.

Foxwarren’s debut arrived almost an entire decade after the formation of the band. It was released in late 2018 on ANTI-, and quickly became a fan favorite. They found momentum through solid reviews and beloved live shows, immediately overcoming any suggestion whatsoever that this was just a side project. Multi-instrumental ace Colin Nealis—a member of Shauf’s touring band—officially joined Foxwarren after their summer touring in 2019. Riding a crest of enthusiasm, the band headed into the studio in October of the same year, hoping to cut a half-dozen songs for a follow-up rather quickly. Given a little distance, though, the songs felt flat.

So Foxwarren opted to try something entirely new: In their own home studios across four provinces, all five members would upload song ideas, melodic phrases, or rhythmic bits to a shared folder. In Toronto, Shauf would then plug these into a sampler and construct songs from the fragments supplied by his bandmates, leaning into classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète alike as unlikely lodestars. Foxwarren would convene at weekly online meetings, offering long-distance suggestions about which way a song might shift.

It was neither a fast nor an easy process, but 2 became an uncanny revelation for Foxwarren, a rock band allowing itself to be sampled in order to become something else. They warped and pushed the florid folk-rock of their past until it evolved into a song cycle about the vagaries of love, where voices sampled from the past commingled with songs that sparkled with the power of their collective imagination in the present. It is a fun and surprising record, where boundaries between genre and song are constantly blurred.