There’s something undeniably exhilarating about piling into a travel-worn van with your closest comrades, guitars rattling in the back, and an iPhone mounted on the dashboard spitting out directions via Google Maps. It’s that heady mixture of uncertain adventure and sonic communion—loading into a tiny club, the clink of a few pints, the low hum of stage lights before the first chord rings out. Or, leaping onto an open-air festival stage, the audience, a chaotic blur of faces moving in time to songs that have mutated from private sketches to public rituals. In these moments, the open road and the stage become both escape and home, the bonds of a band forged and strengthened in the headlights’ glare as you push ever forward.
Since coalescing in Copenhagen back in 2009, The Foreign Resort have spent over a decade perfecting a brand of soaring post-punk gloom and melodic glare, their propulsive rhythms tempered by a melancholic undercurrent. Their latest single, “Southern Skies,” slides into more soaring shoegaze-inflected territory than usual, blending glossy dream textures without severing themselves from their sharp-edged post-punk roots. The bassline, thick and insistent, bristles like a long-lost cousin to The Cure’s midnight brood or Sisters of Mercy’s gothic throb, proving this is still a band stitched with dark, urgent energy. Bright and stratospheric, the track’s shimmering brightness is offset by an emotional immediacy that lingers long after the music fades.
“Southern Skies” captures the tension between longing and release. Mikkel Borbjerg Jakobsen’s vocals hover between the barbed angularity of 80s post-punk and the lean intensity of its 2000s revival. The new accompanying video, equally lush and transient, finds The Foreign Resort weaving along coastlines, festival fields, and open roads, each scene refracting the band’s sonic wanderlust through fragments of windscreen footage and summer haze.
On the song’s inherent escapism, Jakobsen explains:
“The song is about escaping your everyday problems. Or rather escaping my problems. The southern skies don’t even have to be southern; they could be—and have been—anywhere for me on tour when times have been tough at home. Kinda what our band name is also about: Being out there on the go, never staying too long anywhere because the restlessness feels good, while removing everyday obligations from your life for a while. The inevitable is ‘post tour depression’, but that only comes after the song had ended. As long as the music is playing, the adventure and the fun continues.”
Shot by Henrik Busacker during the final warm weekend in Denmark and on the road through Germany—plus a dash of US tour footage—the video conjures that elusive sensation of fleeting freedom and secret euphoria. There’s a palpable sense of horizon-chasing, of loading gear into vans and out of them, always moving forward in a blur of borrowed stages, ephemeral friendships, and the kiss of the titular southern sunlight.
Watch the video for “Southern Skies” below:
Though the video is freshly unveiled, “Southern Skies” began circulating in mid-September, marking another milestone in The Foreign Resort’s ongoing evolution. Released via Artoffact Records, the single follows their previous offering, “Resound,” charting a sonic trajectory that drifts further into expansive shoegaze territory without sacrificing the band’s underlying post-punk urgency. In that sense, “Southern Skies” is both a reflection of what’s come before and a hint at what future setlists may hold—songs that carry the weight of memories and the promise of open-ended journeys.
Order “Southern Skies” here
Below is a glimpse of The Foreign Resort’s upcoming tour itinerary—a roadmap of late-night load-outs, distant soundchecks, and ecstatic gigs in clubs and festivals across Europe. It’s the restless momentum of a band who never really stand still, each new show a waypoint in their ongoing travels, each venue a canvas on which to paint their distinctive sound and vision.
Closing out 2024, they’ll appear in Chemnitz and Berlin, before heading into a packed schedule of 2025 shows stretching from Spain to Sweden, dipping through France, the UK, and beyond.
UPCOMING TOUR DATES:
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