Faux Real

Two brothers, two cities, no instruments

Faux Real are brothers: Elliott and Virgile Arndt, Franco-American, with Virgile the elder of the two. They came to the project from separate working bands and separate countries. Elliott had played in the experimental London group Vanishing Twin; Virgile played bass in the Luxembourg indie-pop outfit Natas Loves You. When they began pooling material in the summer of 2018, Virgile was living in Paris and Elliott in London, which meant the thing was assembled at distance before it was ever a band in a room.

The format that defines them was an accident of scheduling. What started as a studio side project acquired a gig almost immediately, and rather than recruit a rhythm section the brothers decided, in Elliott's account, that they should "probably prepare some moves" — and go on with nothing between them and the audience. That constraint hardened into the whole proposition: two singers, matching white outfits, synchronised choreography, backing tracks, and a deliberate refusal of the usual guitar-bass-drums furniture.

They describe themselves as method musicians, and the reference points they cite are not rock ones. Elliott talks about game shows and Eurovision pageantry, and about industrial music less as a sound than as a vocabulary of mechanical movement — he has used the phrase "industrial pop" for what comes out. The stated aim is a stadium show at miniature scale: his line is that they do "a stadium show, but tiny, with flashlights instead of pyrotechnics." The brothers have also been candid that it does not land with everyone at first. Virgile has described audiences unsure whether they are permitted to laugh, with the tension usually breaking around ten minutes in.

The records: an EP, then City Slang

The first release under the name was the self-titled Faux Real EP in 2020, self-released and co-produced by Jay Watson, best known for his work with Tame Impala and Pond. That was followed by a run of singles — "Rent Free", "Walking Away from My Demons", "Hi Tension", "Love on the Ground" — which did most of the work of building an audience while the live show did the rest.

The debut album, Faux Ever, arrived in October 2024 on City Slang, and the reviews treated it as a test case: whether a band whose reputation had been built on barefoot choreography and high kicks at festivals could survive being pinned to a record. Loud and Quiet's Tristan Gatward gave it 8/10, singling out "Love on the Ground" as an indie-pop earworm and "Full Circle" as a manipulated gem, and reading the opener "Faux Maux" as the clearest statement of what the duo do — silly peaks and sillier troughs delivered with clean production. His main reservation was structural: six pre-release singles had already taken the best of it, so the deep cuts had a lot to live up to. The verdict was still that the album was more than a footnote to the live act. Record Collector was cooler, scoring it 60 on the Album of the Year aggregate.

By then the brothers had also become a reliable support booking for bigger bands. They have toured with Wet Leg and Metronomy, and their circuit ran through the underground scenes of London, Paris and New York rather than any one of them.

Poison Time, and the decision to stop writing for live

The second album, Poison Time, came out on 4 September 2026 through the New York independent label b4 — a change from City Slang. It runs to eleven tracks and was made at the brothers' home in Los Angeles, which is now where the project is based.

The method changed more than the sound did. Faux Ever had been shaped by what worked on stage; for Poison Time the brothers deliberately refused to write for live, and worked studio-first. The result has been described by the label and by the duo as more visceral and more immediate than the debut, with less pastiche and more exposure: identity, self-perception and authenticity, social anxiety, the mechanics of making things, and a fair amount of existential darkness alongside the humour and the world-building. The record moves between straight pop hooks, electronic textures, distortion and looser sound design.

The lead single, "That Far", appeared in May 2026 with a video. The sleeve was photographed by Grant Spanier and nods to a Marina Abramović performance piece. Elliott has framed the whole thing around a refusal to over-control the outcome: the brothers are, in his words, "big believers in chaos", on the grounds that however curated anyone is, a wave eventually arrives and destroys the arrangement.

Where they stand in October 2026

The headline tour behind Poison Time was announced in June 2026, with tickets going on sale on Friday 19 June at 10am local time, and it covers the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. The North American leg opened in Philadelphia on 6 October and runs through Bowery Ballroom in New York on 10 October, L'Esco in Montreal on 11 October, the Dance Cave in Toronto on 13 October, the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 15 October, Cactus Club in Milwaukee on 16 October, Soda Bar in San Diego on 20 October, Zebulon in Los Angeles on 21 October, Kilowatt in San Francisco on 22 October, Portland on 26 October, the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver on 27 October and Barboza in Seattle on 28 October. North American booking is handled by Joe Price at Ground Control Touring.

The European stretch follows in November: The Abbey in Manchester on 12 November, the ICA in London on 14 November, Le Botanique in Brussels on 16 November, Bus Palladium in Paris on 17 November, Cinetol in Amsterdam on 20 November, Vega's Ideal Bar in Copenhagen on 23 November, Urban Spree in Berlin on 25 November and BARdzo Bardzo in Warsaw on 28 November.

The contrast with twelve months earlier is stark and worth stating plainly. In November 2025 the brothers were opening for Wet Leg across the UK and Ireland — Rock City in Nottingham on 17 November, the UEA LCR in Norwich on 19 November, Portsmouth Guildhall on 20 November, Cardiff University's Great Hall on 21 November, two nights at O2 Academy Glasgow on 23 and 24 November, 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 26 November and Belfast's Telegraph Building on 27 November, plus the Royal Albert Hall on 13 November. The 2026 headline rooms are a fraction of that size, which is what headlining actually costs. Festival work in between included Europejski Stadion Kultury in Rzeszów on 26 June 2026 and Festival d'été de Québec at Place Georges-V on 17 July 2026.

What the act has become

Six years in, the thing that started as a workaround — two brothers with no band, so they learned choreography — has become the reason anyone books them. The live reputation arrived first and the records have been playing catch-up ever since, which is exactly the problem Gatward identified on the debut and exactly the problem Poison Time was written to avoid. Making an album that does not depend on the show is the most consequential decision the duo have taken since 2018.

Whether it works is still being settled in public. The Poison Time tour is four dates old at the time of writing, and no reviews of the current headline shows have been published yet.