Flight Facilities On Their Long, Long-Awaited Second Album ‘Forever’
Fans have waited eight years for the follow-up to 'Down To Earth'. Now, Flight Facilities have finally landed.
At 11am on the last Friday in October, Flight Facilities are deciding who sits where on the bed in a Sydney hotel room.
Hugo Gruzman, the lanky, clean-cut half of the duo, has just walked up the road from his home in Bondi. (“The same answer I could’ve given 10 years ago,” he says.) Jimmy Lyell, the beardier half, has parachuted in from life as a new dad in Byron Bay.
The longtime friends and collaborators reunited in Sydney to rehearse for their first live shows in two years, as support act for RÜFÜS DU SOL’s November tour across the US. The occasion for our glitchy Zoom call, however, is FOREVER, the Flight Facilities album fans have waited eight years to hear.
The duo’s follow-up to their 2014 debut, Down To Earth, was originally scheduled for a late 2019 release, but that deadline came and went. Then COVID-19 happened, giving Gruzman and Lyell a welcome pause to keep tinkering.
Now, after a run of new Flight Facilities singles, FOREVER is actually, definitely coming out this Friday, November 12. “We’ve been through so many seasons, mentally, with the release date, and now it looks like it’s on a great trajectory,” Gruzman says, his relief palpable over Zoom.
Under The Hood
The pandemic is one thing, but FOREVER took, well, forever because Flight Facilities obsess over the details. Some songs on the album started life back in 2013, while others only happened because the duo were prepared to wait. So, how did they know when the album was actually finished?
“You know when you’re sick of hearing it,” Lyell says. “When our perfectionism takes a holiday.” That meticulousness manifests in different ways. “Perfectionism for Jimmy is way more sonically, and for me it’s structural,” Gruzman adds. “Things that seem insignificant to the other might be huge for us.”
Like Down to Earth, FOREVER is bursting at the seams with guests. Red-hot Los Angeles producer-rapper-vocalist Channel Tres struts on lead single and album opener ‘Lights Up’, while elsewhere the duo calls on buzzy acts Broods, Your Smith, DRAMA, Love Mansuy, and BRUX. FOREVER also features Flight Facilities favourite Emma Louise on album closer ‘If Only I Could’ and Sydney newcomer Jordy Felix on the emotive ‘Pain’. The goal was to find the best fit, not the flashiest star power.
“We love our project being a vehicle for new talent,” says Lyell. “It’s cool, because a bunch of [the guests] have already, or will in the future, usurp the size of our brand. It’s going to be one of those things of, ‘Yay, we had them at the start!’”
“We’ve always been a champion of the underdog because we still consider ourselves underdogs, even after a 10-plus year career,” Lyell continues. “Especially here in Australia, mainstream media still hasn’t really…”
Gruzman completes the thought: “There seems to be an awareness of us, but it’s not a mainstream celebration. We’re in the demographic we want, where people don’t have to be ashamed of liking us.”
Taking Flight
Flight Facilities first turned heads in 2010 with ‘Crave You’, a warm and breezy bit of cocktail bar house featuring doe-eyed vocals from Giselle Rosselli. From there, they deepened their pop-meets-house sound with earworms like ‘Foreign Language’, featuring Jess Higgs, and ‘Clair de Lune’, featuring Christine Hoberg.
By the time Down to Earth dropped on taste-making Sydney label Future Classic, Flight Facilities had found their people. Before long, the duo was headlining the likes of Splendour In The Grass, touring the world and staging ambitious shows with both the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras.
“We’re in the demographic we want, where people don’t have to be ashamed of liking us.”
In the whirlwind years that followed Down to Earth, Gruzman and Lyell chipped away at new demos, never quite getting to a full album. In 2019, they released ‘Better Than Ever’, a collaboration recorded in LA with Aloe Blacc. Originally intended to feature soul great Charles Bradley, who died in 2017, ‘Better Than Ever’ suggested a new, not-so-housey Flight Facilities sound.
“We’d never given our fans a straight-up pop song [before then],” Lyell says now. “A lot of them were like, ‘Ah, we don’t know about this one, it doesn’t really scream Flight Facilities.’ That was maybe the Aloe Blacc effect — he walks into the studio like, ‘We want to make a record here.’”
‘Better Than Ever’, which doesn’t appear on FOREVER, now feels like a standalone swerve. Instead, Channel Tres was the guest who made the new album click. The duo got together with the mercurial star on his home turf of LA, where no time could be wasted. “We wrote three demos aimed at his sound, so he had a selection of things,” Lyell recalls. “He walked in and said, ‘That one.’”
‘That one’ hinged on a low-slung bass line that fit the producer’s vocals like a glove. The final product combines vocals pulled from various sources, including raw audio recorded on a phone. “We knew we had four hours in one session only,” says Lyell. “He’s one of those guys where you capture as much magic as you can and then he’s out.”
Everyone Needs A Co-Pilot
Appearing one after the other on FOREVER, ‘The Ghost’ and ‘Altitude’ best represent the dual sides of Flight Facilities.
Released back in June with a remix by German house don Gerd Janson, ‘The Ghost’ is punchier and more propulsive than what we’ve come to expect from the duo, with Gruzman’s own vocoded vocals riding the synths. It is, as many YouTube comments have noted, unmistakably Daft Punk-y. The demo first appeared in the duo’s 2017 Boiler Room set and has kicked around their live shows ever since. “The vocoder was never meant to be in there — it was a melodic placeholder because I can’t sing,” Gruzman deadpans.
Meanwhile, ‘Altitude’ is light as air, foregrounding the vocals of Canadian-born singer Love Mansuy over strings and gently plucked guitars. If ‘The Ghost’ is Flight Facilities at their most jet-powered, ‘Altitude’ is the album’s softest landing.
Gruzman and Lyell confirm that the songs appearing back-to-back on the album was very intentional. This kicks off a circuitous conversation about who’s responsible for what in their creative marriage.
“I think people would assume Jimmy is more on one side, and I’m more on the other, but it’s completely the opposite way around,” Gruzman says mysteriously.
Just as we’re about to move on, Lyell jumps in with a clarification: “Hugo is more ‘The Ghost’, and I’m more ‘Altitude’.”
FOREVER also found a secret weapon in Jono Ma, the multi-hyphenate studio wizard who made his name in Jagwar Ma. With international travel cut off by COVID, Flight Facilities instead headed for their friend’s hillside studio in Byron Bay. “It felt pretty good with Jono,” Lyell recalls, “so we ended up saying, ‘Let’s make the whole record together’”.
Throughout the process, Gruzman and Lyell pushed Ma into poppier territory than he’s used to. Case in point: ‘Move’, the album’s ode to ‘90s piano house featuring DRAMA, the Chicago duo of producer Na’el Shehade and vocalist Via Rosa. With Ma’s help on the final polish, the song has all the makings of an Australian summer banger.
Playing Favourites
In 2022, Flight Facilities will play their biggest shows yet on the FOREVER homecoming tour. The seven-date run in March and April includes a curated event, Airfields, in Sydney’s Victoria Park.
The support line-up for Airfields features Australian live favourites Cosmo’s Midnight and Sycco, plus two of the best DJs in the game right now: Melbourne’s CC:Disco and Canada’s Jayda G, whose ‘Are U Down/Both Of Us’ release was a highlight of 2020 lockdown.
This curation streak runs deep in Flight Facilities. The pair’s ‘All Flights Grounded’ playlist “of songs we love” runs a mammoth 66 hours on Spotify, while their new Flight Deck app features a trove of themed DJ mixes from the past 10 years.
The duo’s Decade Mix series for triple j peaked with ‘2002-2012’ (fast approaching a million SoundCloud plays), an era very close to their heart. As such, its tracklist is crammed with noughties house and electro from the likes of Mylo, Tiga, Hot Chip, Soulwax, Justice, and, of course, Daft Punk.
“We met dead in the middle of that decade,” Gruzman says, “and all that music was the scene we grew up in. For the people who do understand it, it’s right on-point. For anyone who wasn’t in that scene, it’s like, What the fuck is this?”.
The guys admit they’re a little worried about making the ‘2012-2022’ instalment. “Does the Biebs get a look-in?” Lyell quips. “You’ve got to do your interpretation of the decade,” Gruzman says. “Otherwise you’d have to put Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ in there.”
Whatever else makes the cut, at least this chapter can finally feature new Flight Facilities.
Flight Facilities’ new album FOREVER is out November 12 via Future Classic.
Jack Tregoning is a Sydney-based music and culture writer for Billboard, the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs and Red Bull Music. Foll0w him on Twitter.