Interview: Future Islands
In early 2005, Art Lord and the Self-Portraits drove across the state from the East Carolina University campus in Greenville, N.C. to Asheville for a gig at Broadway’s before two of the band’s members — singer Sam Herring and keyboardist Gerrit Welmers — had turned 21.
“We had to wait outside until it was time to play,” Welmers recalls. “The door guy took one of those Magnum Sharpies — the ones with the widest tip possible — and put giant black Xs on our hands.”
Within a year, Art Lord dissolved and cleared space for a more ambitious, and arguably more accessible, musical project. Herring, Welmers, and bassist William Cashion regrouped as Future Islands and moved to Baltimore, plugging into a thriving DIY scene and embarking on a steady recording and touring schedule that would define the two decades that followed.
In March 2014, a performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on the Late Show with David Letterman went viral thanks largely to Herring’s eccentric dance moves, catapulting the group to synth-pop stardom and a trajectory of seven acclaimed albums and thousands of shows around the world.
“Herring dances in a controlled mania, with the flair of an over-eager drama kid and the intensity of a metalhead,” GQ wrote in a 2017 profile. “He sings to the audience with the sincere guiding hand of a pastor, occasionally possessed by a demonic, Tom Waitsian growl. The whole thing is very weird and exciting and hard to look away from.”
To mark its 20th anniversary, Future Islands is releasing From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth — a 20-track collection of B-sides, rarities, and previously unreleased recordings — and hitting the road for a short run of “hometown” shows across North Carolina (Wilmington, Carrboro, Asheville, and Greenville) and concluding the mini tour in Baltimore.
Asheville Stages spoke with three-fourths of the band — Herring politely declined in order to stay focused on writing the next Future Islands album — via Zoom about the group’s origin story, what it’s like to revisit two decades of work, and why returning to their roots felt like the right way to honor the milestone.
Jay Moye: Why was Greenville and ECU fertile ground for bands like yours in the early 2000s?
Gerrit Welmers: I think it was the perfect place and time for everything to come together. Art Lord was performance art, heavily influenced by art school and parties, really just trying to have fun before taking things more seriously with Future Islands. At that time, we were playing and touring with so many bands, especially from Baltimore, who are huge influences on us. It all came together in this perfect storm. I relate a lot of it to those house parties, which were the biggest thing back then. You got to see so many cool, out-of-town acts from traveling through. It was just a very special, unique time.
JM: Then you guys splintered, but you stayed in Greenville?
GW: I did. I was working at the Hilton and, at the time, didn't plan on leaving. We weren't really playing or writing much. Sam was in Asheville and William was in the Triangle. We never quit but hadn't really decided on the future. I was adamantly saying I was going to stay in Greenville, like, forever. [laughs] Because why would I ever leave when I have an apartment and a solid $7.25-an-hour hotel job? But when we decided to do this for real, we moved to Baltimore and hit the road.
JM: You mentioned connecting with Baltimore bands when you were in Greenville. Was that why you decided to build a home base there?
William Cashion: Our friend booked a show at the Back Door Skate Park in Greenville with [Baltimore-based artists] Dan Deacon and Cairo Wings, and he asked Art Lord to play. We were set up behind the skate bowl, and it was awesome. It was the first time we played with Dan, and we just hit it off. It was a big party with a few hundred people. We reconnected with Dan a few months later at a DIY festival in Hampton, Virginia, and he started coming through Greenville every month or two, bringing a different Baltimore band down with him each time. We got to meet so many people from that scene. The whole time, Dan was like, “You guys have to move to Baltimore. It's awesome. You'll get signed, you'll get huge!”
Our move to Baltimore was kind of staggered. I moved up first, Sam came a month or two later, then Garrett. That was around that time our first album, Wave Like Home, came out. When we got there, it was really exciting. The shows were awesome and there was electricity in the air. Really good energy and lots of bands doing wild stuff.
JM: Why did you decide to dig into the vault and unearth unreleased tracks for this compilation instead of releasing a “best of” like a lot of artists do when they hit a milestone?
WC: We've had the idea to put out this kind of compilation for over a decade, but it never quite felt like the right time to drop it. We were looking at the schedule and figured out 2026 was our 20th and that we’d be taking most of the year off from touring to work on the next record, so we decided there’d be space to do it. We've been writing a ton over the last six months while simultaneously gathering material for this compilation.
When I was growing up, I always loved finding the B-sides only available on a Japanese reissue or limited-edition release. Those hidden tracks were really special to me. When we started putting out 7”s, we made the decision early on to hold some stuff off of streaming. We wanted to keep that special feeling of finding a rare song for our audience. So, it felt like the right time to do it.
JM: How’d you go about choosing what made the cut?
GW: William put together a list of all the recorded songs that felt like the most formed or put together. Everything we picked ended up on the album.
JM: Was the intent to compile a retrospective collection to showcase different chapters of Future Islands’ sonic journey?
WC: We wanted to bring songs that have been in the shadows or in the wings onto the stage with us, so to speak. The compilation is somewhat, but not totally, chronological. It’s really interesting for me to hear the evolution of the band and our production style and the way we write songs — the kind of synth sounds Gerrit was using in certain eras. You can really hear the way it shifts.
JM: Has the exercise of reflecting on the past inspired new music?
GW: Definitely. It’s been fun to revisit the absolutely insane sounds I used to use all the time and think, “Wow, that really happened at, like, an ear-piercing level the entire song.”
JM: Will you be doing some of these live for this run?
WC: We're pulling out a decent amount of the songs. I think we're planning to rehearse around 10, but we'll see. Some of these songs have never been played live and some have not been played live in over 10 years. The last time that we played some was when we still had a drum machine. So, it'll be our first time with live drums.
JM: Mike [Lowry, who joined Future Islands as a touring drummer in 2014 before officially becoming a full-time member in 2020 prior to the release of the As Long as You Are album], could you speak to that? What will it be like for you to play these songs live for the first time?
Mike Lowry: I'm really looking forward to it. I can already hear, on a bunch of them, room to juice up the energy. It'll be fun to see where there is room to help the song keep whatever characteristics made it really strong but find space to build from. A lot of those early songs are so stripped down, drum-wise, so there's a lot of opportunity to really accentuate dynamics, like building into the choruses.
JM: Future Islands has played here regularly over the years, culminating with a sold-out show at Forestry Camp last May. What stands out about Asheville?
WC: Because Sam's brother lived in Asheville, he helped us play some house parties there in the early Future Islands days. I think our third show ever was in Asheville at a house party. In Greenville, we knew people at the house parties we played. But in Asheville we only knew Sam's brother. We were doing a little tour with this band called The Texas Governor. I remember it was very cold in the living room. And another time we played like a block party on someone’s porch. Asheville has been very formative in our career.
IF YOU GO
Who: Future Islands
When: Friday, May 22 (with Jenny Besetzt) and Saturday, May 23 (with EAR PWR), 8 p.m.
Where: The Orange Peel, 101 Biltmore Avenue, theorangepeel.net
Tickets: $45
(Photo by Shawn Brackbill)
