Every Foxing album, ranked

Foxing’s classic lineup downsized from five members to four with the 2017 departure of bassist Josh Coll, and then three with the 2020 departure of guitarist Ricky Sampson, and their last three albums have been accompanied by interviews and/or lyrics that suggested Foxing were about to implode. But they never did implode, and eventually, they started to seem like a band who were actually motivated by all the frustration and exhaustion, rather than deterred by it. And even as they became old enough in band years to do a 10th anniversary tour for a classic album and influence a new generation, Foxing never stopped moving forward–they released one of the best albums of their career in 2024, 12 years after their first EP and about six/seven years after so many of their fourth wave emo peer bands had broken up or faded away. That’s why it came as such a shock today when Foxing revealed that they are going on indefinite hiatus.

“After 14 years as a band and 12 years of consistent touring, we’ve decided to take a hiatus from playing shows, writing or doing anything as Foxing,” they wrote. “It feels really scary to say that. This band has been completely inseparable from us as people for our entire adult lives up to this point. It is so much of our identity and our sense of self worth in the world. But it has become clear to us that in our pursuit of our dreams and making the most honest and genuine art we can, our relationship with music, each other, and our sense of self without the band has eroded. We have decided to prioritize these things and need to step away from the band to do so.”

It’s a huge bummer, and it’s got me feeling genuinely sad to think about a world without Foxing. I ended my 2024 year-end list blurb on their self-titled by saying “I’ll place my bets right now that LP6 is gonna be yet another left turn that none of us see coming” and I kind of can’t believe that we may never find out. (But we also may; Foxing said, “We will come back if/when we feel that we have more to give.”) I’ve also made some of my most treasured music-related memories at Foxing shows over the past 12 years, and it’s hitting me hard to realize I won’t be seeing them again for the foreseeable future (if you’re able to catch their final shows in Chicago on December 4 and/or St. Louis on December 6, don’t miss that opportunity). Sorry for being so EMO but needless to say I am a huge Foxing fan and I wanted to use their hiatus announcement as an opportunity to commemorate their incredible 14-year run.

To do so, I’ve decided to rank their five albums (and their early EP/splits) from least best to most best. And I’ve worded it that way because I think very highly of everything this band has released. I know a ranking is gonna make some people think I’m implying they have bad records, and I know you probably skipped the intro, but I’m just gonna say I LIKE EVERY FOXING RECORD A LOT. Ranking is just a fun way to write about all of their great records, and it’s also fun to think about how my personal ranking of their albums is very close to chronological order. This is a band who made a distinctly different album every time, and a band who never stopped getting better and better.

Read on for my list. Peace out Foxing, and please come back one day.

6. Old Songs EP + Splits (2012-2013)

This isn’t technically an album but the story of Foxing is incomplete without their 2012 debut EP Old Songs and the two split EPs that they released in early 2013. These releases set the stage for their breakthrough debut album The Albatross, and they remain just as fascinating and essential as all the proper albums in Foxing’s discography. I’m ranking it least best because the band clearly improved after these releases, but the reason I’m including them at all is because they deserve more than a passing mention. Foxing still hadn’t solidified their classic lineup when they were recording Old Songs, and Conor Murphy hadn’t even fully solidified his role as the sole frontperson–multiple members trade vocal duties on these songs. The EP only has three songs, but each one is five or six minutes, and they’re overloaded with different ideas and different directions Foxing could eventually go in. It touches on post-rock, indie rock, math rock, screamo, Midwest emo, and more, and each song constantly changes shape. It also found the band using the studio as an instrument, which separated them from most of the emo bands they were playing basement shows with at the time, and which became a constant for Foxing throughout the rest of their career.

A few months after Old Songs, Foxing released two split singles on the same day: February 4, 2013. One was with Send Away Stranger, a short-lived band that emerged out of the ashes of Florida emo band Wavelets (whose other members formed the much longer-running Dikembe), and the other was the first-ever release by Japanese Breakfast, aka Michelle Zauner, who Foxing struck up a friendship with after sharing a bill with her former band Little Big League. Foxing had one song on each split, “Ocelot” and “Tom Bley,” respectively, and these songs were literally and figuratively the bridge between Old Songs and The Albatross. These songs blended Foxing’s many influences more seamlessly than Old Songs, and they sounded more confident and self-assured. Those splits marked a pretty remarkable leap for a band whose first songs came out just about six months earlier.

Old Songs by Foxing

Foxing/Japanese Breakfast Split by Foxing

Foxing/Send Away Stranger Split by Foxing

5. The Albatross (2013)

Foxing’s career trajectory has been compared to Radiohead’s on multiple occasions, and if we’re running with that analogy, then their 2013 debut album The Albatross is their Pablo Honey. It one-ups Pablo Honey‘s “Creep” by being home to the band’s two most-streamed songs (“The Medic” and “Rory”), but it’s similar in that it’s a very good debut album by a band who took a massive leap with their sophomore album and never looked back. For years, the aforementioned fan faves from The Albatross and the album’s other standout track “Inuit” were the songs that Foxing crowds went craziest for, and it’s not hard to see why–these are truly songs that are built to be screamed along to. Conor’s melodies are among his most memorable, and sentiments like “She says ‘you don’t love me, you just love sex’” and “Why don’t you love me back?” are the kind of widely-relatable one-liners that emo crowds have eaten up for decades. Foxing are also not really an emo band, but the emo scene was the first community to embrace them, and The Albatross is the closest they’ve ever come to a straight-up emo album. At the same time, this album is full of moments that hint at the artsier records Foxing would release later on. It’s built on post-rock crescendos, fleshed out by orchestral arrangements, and it finds Conor showing off a wide vocal range that can go from an angelic falsetto a throat-shredding scream. Trying to put Foxing into boxes that they don’t fit into has warped some fans’ expectations of them, but the truth is Foxing always existed in their own lane. Even in 2013, The Albatross was unlike just about every band it was grouped with. It came at the right time and was in the right place to benefit from the rapidly-rising “emo revival,” but even back then, Foxing were just being Foxing.

The Albatross by Foxing

4. Dealer (2015)

Being attached to the emo scene helped Foxing stir up some buzz at a time when emo was all the rage, but it was also something that Foxing very quickly knew they didn’t want to be pigeonholed into. Even before they released their second album, they knew it was going to go in a different direction than The Albatross, and Conor has said that’s one of the reasons they chose to sign with Triple Crown, a label that didn’t have as much of a specific identity as some of the other labels they were talking to at the time. It represented a clean slate.

For their Triple Crown debut Dealer, they shed their roots almost entirely and came out with a lush, clean, slow-moving, post-rock-infused album that traded in the push-pit singalongs of Foxing’s debut LP The Albatross for meditative beauty. Produced by Matt Bayles (Minus The Bear, Isis, Mastodon, etc), I’d go so far as to say it’s the most beautiful-sounding album that Foxing has ever made. Being such a genre-transcending leap from the band’s breakthrough debut, it put Foxing on the journey that they remained on for the rest of their initial run as a band, and the album’s gorgeous backdrop went perfectly with Conor’s voice, which he revealed on Dealer to be something much more soaring and delicate than it was on The Albatross. With themes ranging from Catholic guilt to death to an especially haunting song inspired by bassist Josh Coll’s time serving in Afghanistan (“Indica”), Conor’s heartfelt performances gave Dealer an emotional weight and maturity that The Albatross only hinted at.

Dealer by Foxing

3. Draw Down The Moon (2021)

A lot of bands have that one black sheep album that remains misunderstood by fans and critics alike. It’s usually a darker, stranger album that’s harder to grasp on first listen, but in Foxing’s case, their black sheep album is actually their poppiest, 2021’s Draw Down The Moon. It came after 2018’s Nearer My God, an art rock-infused album that had all the makings of a magnum opus, and Foxing made us think they were about to go even further in that direction with Draw Down The Moon‘s seven-minute lead single “Speak With The Dead,” which closes the album, but it turned out to be a red herring. Most of Draw Down The Moon picked up where Nearer My God‘s title track left off, pushing them towards the festival-sized synthpop of bands like Passion Pit and M83. It didn’t end up popping off with the Lollapalooza crowd and it seemed to confuse a lot of Foxing’s longtime fans, but it’s an album that I think continues to reveal itself as some of Foxing’s strongest work and I have a feeling that time will treat it well. “Beacons” in particular became a setlist staple, and it’s just as much of a speaker-busting sensory overload in a live setting as Foxing’s harder-edged songs. DDTM also has one of Foxing’s most beautifully quiet/folky songs, “At Least We Found The Floor.” One particularly popular review accused Foxing of “[scraping] away their unwieldy experimentalism in favor of the approachable, frustratingly anonymous sounds of 2010s festival rock” on this album, but look beneath the synthy surface and you’ll find songs that are anything but “anonymous.” This album is as distinct to Foxing as all of their others.

Draw Down The Moon by Foxing

2. Foxing (2024)

It’s hard to say goodbye to any band that you love, but it’s even harder when they just released one of the best albums of their entire career. I guess I’m ranking this at #2 as of September 23, 2025 but it’s probably more like a tie with Nearer My God for #1, and I could see it eventually overtaking NMG for me one day. It was the followup to Draw Down The Moon, and it’s basically the inverse of that album. Foxing is the kind of raw, discordant, alienating album that would be most bands’ black sheep album, but for Foxing was the most widely-loved album they’d released in years. When I saw them on tour behind it, they played almost entirely songs from this album, and it was the first Foxing show I ever went to where it didn’t feel like the crowd was waiting around for “Rory” and “The Medic.”

Foxing grabs your attention right away with the full-on screamo of its opening one-two punch (“Secret History,” “Hell 99”), but this is not just “Foxing’s screamo album.” Among its best songs, there are also lengthy slow-burners (“Greyhound”), groovy art pop anthems (“Barking,” “Gratitude”), and a sentimental, album-closing piano ballad (“Cry Baby”), all coated in a noisy exterior that makes for the most blatantly unpretty Foxing album. And even when Foxing do screamo on this album, they do it in the ambitiously melodic way that they do everything else.

The disorienting-sounding record is matched by subject matter that gives off a sense of longing, nostalgia, regret, cynicism, paranoia, and mystery, and especially now with Foxing going on hiatus, it’s easy to read into some of the lyrics as being about the band’s end: “I’ve been feeling like my peak is in my past” (“Greyhound”), “Obsessed with ‘what if it shatters?’ or what if it doesn’t matter anymore?” (“Hall of Frozen Heads”), and “If I could I’d start over again/It’s been fun but I’d change everything” (“Cry Baby”). It became pretty obvious when this album was released that Foxing’s peak was not in their past, and maybe the band is gonna shatter (for now?), but it definitely is gonna continue to matter.

Foxing by Foxing

1. Nearer My God (2018)

To go back to the Radiohead analogy, Nearer My God is not just Foxing’s OK Computer but it’s the OK Computer of the emo revival–it is as much the creative peak of that era/genre as OK Computer was for Britpop and grunge. It’s a masterpiece that would more accurately be described as “post-emo” than “emo revival,” and it is by far the most ambitious album that Foxing or any of their longtime peers ever made. It embraces Foxing’s roots in emo and post-hardcore with moments like the screamed climax of album opener “Grand Paradise” and the pure chaos of “Gameshark,” and it also blends together art rock, electronic music, and R&B in a way that sounds like TV On The Radio, Age of Adz-era Sufjan Stevens, and the aforementioned Radiohead in a blender. Its title track is the best M83-style synthpop anthem not by M83 themselves. Nearer My God brings tons of seemingly incongruous styles of music together in a way that somehow feels natural, and for all the various artists that you can compare certain ingredients too, the overall album doesn’t sound like any other artist in the world. It came at a time when lovelorn emo stereotypes seemed tacky and trite, and it instead captured the sense of paranoia that permeated society at the end of the 2010s. It is strikingly original, deeply experimental, and somehow so easy to listen to. I’ve spent a lot of time with this album over the past seven-plus years, and it tops this list because I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

Nearer My God by Foxing

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For more, I assume I’ll probably be talking more about how sad I am this week on BV Weekly (our newish podcast! Have you subscribed yet??).

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