Frank Hamilton

Future Islands: (from left) William Cashion, Gerrit Welmers, and Sam Herring

Sam Herring is standing near the used CD section of the Sound Garden, about to sing, but he’s not entirely there. He swings around to grab a towel and wipes the sweat from his face as synth player Gerrit Welmers plays the twinkling opening bars of “Where I Found You.”

Herring turns back toward the crowd in the Fells Point record store’s aisles, his gaze directed at the floor near his feet. A programmed bass beat comes in, and he glances up to deliver his husky vocal.

I remember your smile
The smell of your skin
The way that you walked
And laughed.

At the start of the next verse, which begins with the line “I remember our room,” his voice cracks ever so slightly. His eyes are closed for much of the song as his words go through the little memories of what once made him happy in a relationship. And then the second half catalogs when it was beyond saving.

Even given a solemnity that is downright tamped down compared to the confrontational theatrics Herring gives to most every other Future Islands song, it is an emotionally intense performance. “I love that song, but it fucking makes me cry,” he says to the spectators gathered for an in-store show to celebrate the arrival of the Baltimore-based band’s new album On the Water, released on Thrill Jockey Records.

With every song that deals with his own life, Herring tries to channel the very feelings he had in those specific moments, and then he does his best to convey them with his whole being while performing. He enunciates certain phrases and sounds within a vocal range spanning gruff growl to melodramatic wail. He twists and contorts his face to broadcast pain and anguish. And he bounces around the stage making the grand theatrical gestures of an actor, sometimes going so far as to hit himself. It’s all meant to put him in a certain mind-set.

“I want to relive those things for the sake of my audience,” he says in an interview a week after the in-store show. “For me, it hurts, but that’s, like, the point. I want it to be as real as possible. I want them to really feel what I feel, just for the sake of communicating an emotion.”

The short checklist of little memories and small details in the lyrics of “Where I Found You” is something of a recall mechanism, and with each one he brings out, he puts himself through the emotional wringer, fully realizing once again what he has lost.

In the smile, the smell, the walk, he says of the lyrics, “This is what I have of you now. I used to have you here, and this is what I have now, and this is pretty much all I have. And that’s sad. That’s heartbreaking.”

Last year’s In Evening Air, the album that landed the band on the radar of the national indiesphere, combined all of the above attributes in a fiery, emotionally raw breakup album featuring dance-floor-ready synthesizer and drum-machine beats from Welmers punctuated by the uptempo bass playing of William Cashion.

With On the Water, all of these aspects of Future Islands’ sound have been stripped down. Cashion’s bass playing is more melodic and is used more to accentuate feeling rather than rhythmically push songs along. Welmers’ beats are a little looser and airy, allowing for songs that still have that new-wave style but intone greater mood. Everything is given more room to breathe, and the band has used the open spaces to push the emotional depth of its sound. In doing so, the arrangements they have created are probably the best emotional complement to Herring’s personal bloodletting.

It marks a new chapter for musical collaborators whose first band was something of a gimmick and who eventually made their mark with party-ready electro-pop tunes perfectly suited for sweat-soaked dancing.

For Herring, it’s another benchmark in his journey from performing as a joke to performing as catharsis, from lost love to moving beyond.

Welmers and Herring became friends around 1998, when neither survived final cuts from the 8th-grade baseball team at their middle school in Newport, N.C. They began hanging out more in high school, when Welmers’ mom drove the carpool.

In 2002, both enrolled at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., where Herring ended up meeting Cashion after the two had art classes together.

Around the time of final exams, Herring and Cashion discussed putting together a band, resulting in a concept group called Art Lord and the Self-Portraits. The Art Lord character was, in so many words, a pompous asshole artist from Germany, Ohio, who emerged in Greenville with three self-portraits he brought to life because they were the only people good enough to play with him.

Played by Herring, the Art Lord would sing supposedly high-brow art criticism missives backed by a four-piece band (fellow students Adam Beeby and Kymia Nawabi played keys) with painted faces and black turtlenecks playing weirdo synth pop. In between songs, the Art Lord would drop self-congratulatory stage banter such as, “It’s good to see you all tonight. We drove a long way to see ourselves.”

It was supposed to be a social commentary about pretentiousness, Cashion says, but it backfired because people just ended up liking it.

On May 26, 2004, Art Lord met up with Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon at Backdoor Skateshop in Greenville—Deacon was on his first tour—beginning a steady stream of Baltimore artists who played in Greenville and befriended Art Lord and the Self-Portraits, including Videohippos, Nuclear Power Pants, Height, Santa Dads, and Blood Baby, to name a few.

Art Lord and the Self-Portraits continued playing shows for several years before deciding to call it quits in September 2005—only to remember later they had already committed to a 2006 tour with a friend’s outsider alt-country band, the Texas Governor.

> Email Brandon Weigel