Shuggie

Foxygen is the classic rock-leaning experimental pop project of Sam France and Jonathan Rado, two multi-instrumentalists whose swagger on stage summons Jagger, Bowie and Reed about as much as their songs do. They grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Westlake Village and started the band in 2005, as 15-year-old high school freshmen. Both had a voracious love of classic albums, from the Ramones to Led Zeppelin, and both came out of a screening of the rockumentary Dig with the same idea: Anton Newcombe, the mastermind behind the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the film's key subject, played as many as 75 instruments on his band's records, so they would learn as many as they could themselves. About ten home-recorded, self-distributed albums came out of their high school years, and then they parted for college, France west to Olympia and Rado to New York, playing in other bands and feeling mostly unsatisfied. France made a brief trek east in 2011, and Foxygen built the schizophrenic, Stones-steeped Take the Kids Off Broadway, released in the summer of 2012 by Jagjaguwar. A more realized full-length, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, produced by Richard Swift, followed in early 2013, after which the band toured internationally without pause and France developed a reputation for antagonistic and sometimes violent stage antics. The densely stuffed double album ...And Star Power arrived late in 2014, and the more refined, theatrical Hang in 2016, with contributions from the Lemon Twigs and the Flaming Lips' Steve Drozd and a symphony orchestra of more than 40 players behind them. A fifth album, Seeing Other People, returned to the classic rock forms of their earlier work and came with the announcement of an indefinite hiatus from touring.