Back in June, Foals ended their two-and-a-half year stretch of inactivity in just about the most brutal way possible. The video for the title track 'What Went Down' not only depicted a pair of women feverishly attempting to drown one another in the sea, but also a bulldog colliding at full pelt with the abdomen of a rather ripped and deranged-looking man. These images couldn’t sum up the album better: on this record, the band has truly gone feral. Across its ten songs, it is hard to know where the beast ends and frontman Yannis Philippakis, more grizzly and full-bearded than ever, begins.

All of this makes sense given the location chosen for the album’s recording, La Fabrique studios in Saint Rémy, Provence. There, in 1889, the impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh spent time in a psychiatric ward shortly after cutting off his own ear. In a recent interview with Q magazine, Philippakis confessed that What Went Down was created in a similar vein, admitting that “creativity feeds off conflict” and that he wanted to bring out his “inner madman” for the record. Songs like 'What Went Down' and 'Snake Oil' definitely deliver on this front. The former is armed to the teeth with dread-inducing barrages of guitar, over which Philippakis snarls with an almost self-destructive intensity. The latter slithers with a leather-jacket-laden sass, seamlessly mixing together screeching reverb and powerful grunge. Even 'Mountain at My Gates', by far the most pop-sensitive song on the album, is smattered with hefty dollops of tribal drumbeats and arresting vocals.

However, beneath all the macho cock-jostling are moments of genuine tenderness. On 'Give It All', Yannis quietly casts off the bravado which kicked off the album and bares all to the listener in a display of true emotion. The result is a bone-achingly honest ballad about the pangs of romantic isolation – a refreshing breather after the record’s exhausting start. 'London Thunder' continues the psychological openness few songs later, where breathy synths and sparse piano chords help document the singer’s feeling of airport melancholy after a long period away from home. All the pent-up angst comes to a head with 'A Knife in the Ocean'. The song, undulating between resigned calm and exhausted frustration, smacks of world-weary despair. “What came of the things I once believed?”, wails Yannis during the chorus’ tidal surge.

This isn’t to say that there’s no middle ground between these two extremes. Things take a more light-hearted turn on 'Birch Tree', a futuristic hip-hop track which frolics and dances with sun-kissed contentedness. 'Night Swimmers' then continues the hedonism with spindly flashes of guitar which shimmer and bristle like the surface of a pool. These chirpier songs successfully balance the album’s competing strands of dirty, masculine aggression and heartfelt introspection, and without both of them, the record would probably collapse in on itself.

The variety of moods on offer is a testament to how far the band has expanded musically over the years, where they seem to excel in just about every soundscape they find themselves in. At points, the lyrics struggle to thrive in these new climates: the title track, for example, includes the jarringly cringey line “Don’t step to me, kid / You’ll never be found” (sounding more like a bad Tim Westwood impression than a lyric that would ever sound natural coming out of the frontman’s mouth).

However, as a whole, What Went Down is arguably the band’s most confident record to date, brimming with a conviction that was conspicuously absent from their previous releases. In this sense, Foals have finally emerged from their gawky adolescence to become the full-bred stallions they always had the potential to become.

@BenWaters887