When the time came to return to the studio, pairing with acclaimed producer John Congleton helped recapture the spirit of their earlier albums. “Going into recording, I was like: I want to bring some of that feeling back,” says Sam. “And luckily John Congleton was all about it. He was referencing our history.” Congleton also introduced the band to new musical avenues, including setting up a duet with Debbie Harry on album highlight Shadows. As William says, “She definitely made the song her own.”

When touring for Singles eventually ended, the band took a breather to work on various solo projects. Among them is Peals – Williams’ experimental project with Bruce Willen of the now-defunct Baltimore post-punk outfit Double Dagger – and Gerrit’s project Moss of Aura. William and Sam released a record as The Snails, a live ska band for which they indeed play while dressed as snails, and Sam also raps as Hemlock Ernst – an endeavour which led to him teaming up with respected hip-hop producer Madlib for 2015’s Trouble Knows Me EP. “Hemlock gives me this whole other outlet where it’s completely about flow and wordplay rather than melody,” Sam explains. “There are certain songs on the [Future Islands] record, especially that first verse on [opening track] Aladdin, where I’d never written anything like that before – it’s that weird flow that just flew out of me. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been writing hip-hop verse as well.”

It’s not just the sonics of The Far Field that echo their earlier work. Like 2010’s In Evening Air, the artwork for this new album is by visual artist (and former Art Lord and the Self Portraits member) Kymia Nawabi. Likewise, the titles of both In Evening Air and The Far Field are lifted from the poetry of Theodore Roethke, a 20th Century American writer who has been a lifelong influence on Sam. The imagery from Roethke’s poems resonates with the album’s themes, particularly the sense of getting older and the idea of the road. The title The Far Field is taken from the following passage by Roethke, which could almost have been written by Herring:

I learned not to fear infinity,

The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,

The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,

The wheel turning away from itself,

The sprawl of the wave,

The on-coming water.

Sam read these poems religiously when touring earlier albums, and the spirit of the words sunk in. “He was really the first poet that, like, pulled something from me,” he says. “That book of his collected poems, The Far Field, became a book that I carried around. The first four or five years of touring that we did, I had that book. The Far Field and Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires became my meditation and also the things that, like, calmed me on the road. They were both books that helped me get over – if I’m still over – an ex-girlfriend, the person In Evening Air references many times. I haven’t actually read that book for four or five years but it doesn’t matter because he is like a part of me. The way that he uses words, the way he goes against rhyme at times, putting the beautiful beside the grotesque, it still mesmerises me.”