Foster the People

A jingle writer, a drum stool and a song that got away from them

Foster the People started in Los Angeles in 2009, briefly billed as Foster & the People. Mark Foster had been writing advertising jingles to cover rent; he brought in drummer Mark Pontius, and the group played its first show on 7 October 2009 at the Dakota Live Music Lounge. Bassist Jacob "Cubbie" Fink completed the original trio.

Inside two years the whistled hook of "Pumped Up Kicks" had reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 — a song written from the point of view of a boy who has found a gun, and heard by an enormous number of people as a summer radio record. The debut album Torches arrived in May 2011 through Startime International and Columbia, and at the 54th Grammy Awards in 2012 the band took nominations for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and Best Alternative Music Album.

Foster has since been blunt about what was driving him then. Speaking to the Recording Academy in August 2024 he tied the early scramble for attention to self-doubt: "When you start performing you want to be seen, and you want to be heard." The gap between that hunger and what the band actually became has shaped most of the work since.

Two records that widened the frame

Supermodel followed in March 2014 and Sacred Hearts Club in July 2017, both on Columbia. Neither produced anything on the scale of the debut single, but Sacred Hearts Club carried "Sit Next to Me", which peaked at number 42 on the Hot 100 and was eventually certified four-times platinum — a slow-burning streaming hit rather than a radio event, and evidence that the band's biggest songs tend to arrive sideways and late.

Then the records stopped. Seven years passed between Sacred Hearts Club and the next album, a gap long enough that by 2024 a good share of the audience knew Foster the People chiefly through two songs and a playlist.

The band got smaller

The line-up thinned steadily. Fink left in 2015. Pontius, the co-founder, departed in October 2021 during the pandemic shutdown. Guitarist and keyboard player Sean Cimino, who had joined in 2017, left months before the fourth album came out in 2024. What remains is a duo: Foster on vocals and most instruments, Isom Innis on keyboards, synthesisers and drums.

Foster used the forced pause on himself rather than on material. He got sober in 2018 and married in 2019, and told the Recording Academy that with touring off the table he "dove into myself, really unpacking a lot of things emotionally, psychologically". He described the resulting album as "a new chapter of life", which is the sort of line bands say routinely, but in this case the personnel sheet backs it up.

Paradise State of Mind

The fourth album, Paradise State of Mind, came out on 16 August 2024 — the band's first release for Atlantic after three albums on Columbia. Foster produced it with Innis, Chrome Sparks and Paul Epworth, working partly at EastWest Studios in Hollywood, the room where Brian Wilson cut records with the Beach Boys. The reference points are late-1970s and early-1980s: Nile Rodgers-style rhythm guitar, Bernie Worrell's synthesiser work, disco and funk structures with gospel and R&B in the arrangements.

Three singles set it up: "Lost in Space" on 31 May 2024, "Take Me Back" on 28 June and "Chasing Low Vibrations" on 26 July. Reviews were mostly warm — Metacritic settled at 75 from generally favourable notices, with praise for the retro experiment and complaints from some quarters that a few of the hooks felt forced.

Commercially it was modest. The album reached number 170 on the Billboard 200 and number 43 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums, but it went to number eight on the Album Sales chart on roughly 7,000 first-week copies — the band's third top-ten entry on that chart — and number 34 on the UK Album Downloads listing. That split, strong with the people who still buy albums and quiet everywhere else, is a fair description of where Foster the People sit in 2026.

Where they stand now

Touring, not sales, has carried the record. A 23-city North American leg opened on 25 January 2025 in Seattle, with Good Neighbours supporting, and the band went on to play Europe, the UK and Latin America across the year, filming a set in Mexico City in November 2025. On 12 and 19 April 2026 they played the Outdoor Theatre at Coachella, their first appearance at the festival in twelve years, and used it to introduce a new production design.

In late April 2026 the band announced the Good Mourning Sunshine tour: more than twenty North American dates, opening on 9 September at Arizona Financial Theatre in Phoenix and finishing on 23 October at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, with Red Rocks Amphitheatre on 22 September and Forest Hills Stadium in New York among the stops. Tickets went on general sale on 8 May 2026. Goth Babe supports on nearly every date; The Beaches opened the Red Rocks show. As of 20 September 2026 more than twenty shows were still to come, and no new album has been announced — the tour has a name and a look of its own, but Paradise State of Mind remains the record it is built on.

What the show is

The staging is the part that has changed most. The production, first seen at Coachella in April 2026, sets the band inside a 1950s-styled utopia that comes apart over the course of the evening into a psychedelic dreamscape — a deliberate mismatch between bright melodies and darker material underneath, which is roughly how Foster's songwriting has always worked.

The sets are long and paced to keep moving. At WaMu Theater in Seattle on 16 September 2026 the band played from 9.10pm to 10.50pm — one hour forty minutes — opening with "Life on the Nickel" and running through "Helena Beat", "Are You What You Want to Be?", "Houdini", "Call It What You Want" and "Pseudologia Fantastica" before a two-song encore of "Sit Next to Me" and "Pumped Up Kicks". "Coming of Age" got its tour debut that night; "Warrant" was on the printed sheet and dropped. Paradise State of Mind material — "Lost in Space", "Lotus Eater", "A Diamond to Be Born" — sits in the middle rather than being held back.

Reviewers on the 2025 run described much the same approach: a February 2025 account of the sold-out Van Buren show in Phoenix counted a 21-song set with very little rest between numbers, vertical red and orange LED columns and smoke doing most of the visual work, Foster's vocals holding up across the night, and audiences singing the new songs as readily as the old ones. The current tour has swapped club lighting rigs for a full theatrical concept, but the shape of the evening is unchanged.