Faux Real's Poison Time
Can you tell me about Poison Time as a concept, and define it as a term?
The name Poison Time came to us during the making of the record, and we were writing a particular song where that was a lyric. We just thought that "poison time" was maybe an era in our minds, and it felt like we were all in poison time right now.
We quickly decided that we weren't gonna try and explain it too much because it was also a name that spoke for itself. You know, it's evocative enough, and it raises questions more than it answers them.
There's definitely a desire for artistic statements to be completely whole when in fact the opaqueness makes it more immersive and enjoyable.
We're definitely on that boat, as huge David Lynch fans, who famously refused to ever explain anything he did.
Similarly to David Lynch, Part of Faux Real’s impetus as a performance project feels tied to the faux-reality of Los Angeles, the city that you now call home. How did the uncaniness of the city lend itself to this project?
This album came together pretty quickly and it was all written in LA in our bedroom studio. I think definitely the city has an imprint on the sound, but what you're saying about the uncanniness of this place is definitely a major and constant theme for us.
We elected to come here, you know, we chose to live in the city five years ago for these same reasons, because that drew us in. Geographically speaking, this is our first LA record, so it's in there a lot. The song [from] which the lyric Poison Time is lifted is a song called “Hides of March” that we started writing right around when the fires were happening last winter 2025. We were just waking up, and there were half-burnt books in the garden, just traveling in the wind. It was just a really strange, surreal time.
Tell me about “I Got Mine.” The lyrics seem to portray someone relenting to heartbreak and disappointment. Where did this song come from? How does this single sit alongside “Seesaw” and “That Far?” Do they all follow the same emotional arc?
“I Got Mine” is one of the more intimate songs on the record, which is funny because it's also one of the singles. It's about heartbreak and and getting over it and spiraling back into peace after a moment of turmoil.
There are a few overarching themes. One of them is "The Myth of the Ship of Theseus." [For] our first album, we were kind of obsessed with Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill every day and having to do it for all of eternity as punishment. There's less guilt on this record. The ship of Theseus was a really interesting myth or story for us, because the paradox is, if you replace every board on the ship to preserve it, after a while every board is new.
When we finally sat down to start making album two, we'd just been touring for three years straight. It was this relentless go-go-go up until we finally dropped the album. When we finally sat down after all that, we were like, wow, what a crazy crescendo that was. Well, the next logical step is just to do it all again.
Another thing that we were interested in writing about on this album was mythology, and these things have as much depth to them as something that can be so small and mundane in your everyday life. How the micro and the macro affect everyone so significantly. When you read a sentence in The Odyssey, you feel like whoever wrote it is making fun of you, like directly pointing the finger at you through the centuries.
There's so much of the sublime in the mundane, and that's where good lyricism and good poetry are meant to take you.
In the same way, you'll read the label on the back of a cereal box, and it just breaks you down into tears. That's why there's this mythology name-dropping throughout the record, but it's also countered with hyper-mundane ritual acts of everyday life.
The song where we literally say, ‘The Ship of Theseus’ is a song called “One by One.” The song is bookended by found sound. The sounds are just us at the beach on a vacation, so it's the most intimate and the most grand, meshed into one. I never even thought about that.
Are you the ones who choreograph your performances?
It's all self-taught because we don't have a dancing background at all. We just started dancing for the sake of this project, and it was an inside joke that went a little too far, and now we're working with choreographers. It was largely to just give us something to do on stage at first, and we were like, okay, what looks good? We do have a sort of visual arts component to this. Elliot's a filmmaker and a painter, and so that was the lens through which we looked at it.
We've done over 200 performances now, and also with the brother thing, we definitely have just a shared language and understanding of spatial awareness of each other by now.
What was the process of making this music? Is it similarly insular?
Our history with music-making is a little bit different because we've both been in bands and projects and making music for almost 20 years now. By the time we started the project, we were both coming from more traditional rock band backgrounds. When we started writing the songs that would become Faux Real together, we were like, let's forget everything we think we know about making music and just go purely off instinct. Because we're brothers, there was immediately some ease into what we were trying to say.
The insular nature of the start of Faux Real allowed us to experiment and find the sound that would become our first and then second records. So it was a necessary tunnel to go through in a way.
It’s kind of like that band, The Shaggs. They didn't really know how to play music or write songs, and [their dad] just had them rehearsing until they made a record, and it's so bizarre. The music sounds like nothing else you've ever heard because it's so disjointed. That's a big North Star for us.
What are your thoughts on nostalgia culture? Where does iteration versus inspiration come from?
I definitely have participated in musical projects that were revivalist in a way. As fun as it is and as niche as it is, I think that's something we tried to steer away from. Of course, our music's gonna be informed by our wealth of knowledge, and we know our classics. It's not that we're consciously trying to steer it into a modern direction; we're just interested in doing something that feels original to us, that feels fresh and new
I think generally speaking— and this has been a good and a bad thing for the project— is that every time we feel like we're doing something that sounds like that or looks like that one thing, we're like, nope.
When there's a reference, it's usually accompanied by another that offsets it or subverts it. I think that's kind of how we feel about nostalgia. It's a super powerful thing to draw from emotionally, but if you pursue it for its own sake, it kind of bites its own tail and stops being productive.
How do you balance emotional surety and closeness with satire in writing? Do you think it’s possible to satirize without a monoculture to speak to?
I think it's about dosage. A little bit is good; too much of it kind of spoils the fun. And I think an emotionally close song is heightened by self-awareness and sometimes self-deprecation in small doses.
I think even lacking a monoculture, because now everything is fragmented through the internet, it's like what I was saying about the philosopher talking to you through the centuries and making fun of you for not getting out of bed because you're sad. You still gotta get on with it. Everybody understands that. That's like, fundamentally human.
There's a degree of self-awareness and us poking fun at certain things that we do knowingly, and it's just part of the language. In the stories we tell, there's always that element of, what if we threw a pun in this song that’s about something really dark? It's not something you necessarily pick up on the first time you listen, and then the second time you listen, you're like, wait. I think there's a lot of flavor there.
