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Future Islands: People Who Aren’t There Anymore review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The synthpop quartet’s heart-on-sleeve frontman, Samuel T Herring, is by turns lovelorn and lovestruck on their affecting seventh LP

In 2014, 11 years into their career, they had been catapulted from a well-reviewed but small scale cult concern – “a journeyman band”, as frontman Samuel T Herring put it – to viral superstardom virtually overnight thanks to their first television appearance, performing Seasons (Waiting on You) live on The Late Show With David Letterman. One reason the Letterman appearance went viral was that Herring’s performance seemed so impassioned and unaffected – in a world of carefully posed cool, here was someone on stage who gave the impression they had no filter, Instagram or otherwise, who seemed to be dancing like no one was watching, beating his chest so hard you could hear it over the music and reaching imploringly towards the audience as he sang. But whatever the reason, People Who Aren’t There Anymore is pretty unsparing in its detail, picking over everything from the first vague stirrings of discontent – “I tell myself ‘it’s OK’, when it’s not quite” – through some lacerating self-examination on Give Me the Ghost Back and Peach’s depiction of a desperate, doomed attempt to make things work again, to a kind of disconsolate acceptance on Corner of My Eye.

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