PARIS — The Foals keyboardist Edwin Congreave met Yannis Philippakis, his future frontman, at an ice cream shop in the English town of Oxford. Congreave had just been hired, while Philippakis was cheekily returning to a scene of a crime: He’d been fired a few weeks earlier for incinerating the shop’s mascot, a polystyrene toy cow, in a toaster oven, to impress a girl. Both also briefly matriculated at Oxford University. “I dropped out because I was an idiot,” Congreave said. “But with Yannis, it was clear he was supposed to be a superstar of some sort.”

Foals — a brawny, dancey, heartfelt rock band — came up in the late 2000s playing hometown house parties and South London squats built out of abandoned hostels. “Chaos,” said Philippakis, 33, gleaming-eyed when asked what he remembered from those days. “And a kind of beautiful naïveté. And, like, I never felt tired.” He smiled. “There was one gig where a whole wall got demolished by fire extinguishers and everyone was on ketamine.”

Philippakis recalled this, over many cigarettes and one sparkling water, on the roof of a Paris venue overlooking the Notre-Dame cathedral, a few hours before a recent Foals show. Last week, the band released the second half of a two-part album, “Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost,” that explores the apocalypse by way, abstractedly, of the climate crisis. “The hedges are on fire in the country lanes,” Philippakis broods over spare piano and synths on “I’m Done With the World (& It’s Done With Me),” “and all I want to do is get out of the rain.”