Sibling duo on capturing chaos, camp, and chemistry in their debut album.

A sunny September afternoon painted the backdrop of Dalston’s curve garden while I searched for Elliot and Virgile Arndt; the Franco-American sibling duo known as Faux Real. Since starting this collaborative project in 2018, the pair have been prolific on the live circuit; their shows feeling like a campy adrenaline shot to the heart, complete with heavy choreography, costumes, and both brothers full of personality. As they play increasingly bigger stages, and gain more and more satisfied listeners, Faux Real emerge with their debut album Faux Ever, hoping to bottle all of that energy into a record. Finding them tucked away near the back, it felt almost like seeing off-duty superheroes. Virgile’s leather vest and Elliott’s Dallas Cowboys jersey keeping that on-stage persona under wraps. 

Sibling music projects are obviously not uncommon, but what’s always been curious is how that specific familial dynamic translates to writing and recording music. “We chose this life” Elliot jokes, “but honestly it took a lot of trial and error, and the first iteration of this came when we were just in our teens, playing in our first garage rock band”. He recounts going through their parents’ record collection together, moving into playing together, and Virgile agrees: “It was a kind of the natural progression to our closeness and our friendship” he says. Of course, circumstances played a part, and after living apart following different pursuits for a while, both came to a realisation. “All of a sudden you're like in a closer orbit than you've been for a while, and you're just like, oh, this feels viable, you know,” Virgile says. Elliot continues: “We were both like ‘Huh, is this the time when we do some music together again?’”. 

This closeness between them is immediately apparent, and it’s obvious their chemistry on stage, while carefully rehearsed, comes from a genuine brotherly bond between the two. It’s the same closeness that makes it so effortless on stage and in the studio. “You start digging and scratching the surface and realise these things, like core values in your art that you can rely on as a common language” says Elliot, “and you can build things quickly and efficiently compared to someone you don’t know at all”. In the long tradition of sibling projects, the brothers know they can feed into this common vernacular. “It’s like a little freak show,” Virgile says with a smile.

Faux Real’s live shows are spoken with reverence by everyone that’s experienced them, and earlier this year I’d seen them at Wide Awake, prancing shirtless on stage donning white carpenters jeans and whirling a flute around. This rawness has taken a bit to fine tune, according to Virgile. “We started out doing it differently, like with a band, with some synths. Then we thought no, no, let’s put ourselves in a situation that feels uncomfortable. Zero things on stage, and just us with our bodies having to make the show exist, and we got such a rush from it” he says. This need to make an impact was also driven by the fact they didn’t have any music out yet at all. “The thing is, we played a lot of shows before putting any music out. So that was like the sole way to show our music to people,” he continues “so it sort of became like ‘You had to be there’.” It’s obvious that for Faux Real, the show and the music are one in the same, and as Elliot states “the live thing is an essential aspect of the project and how people perceive us”. Their enthusiasm for performing live shows when we digress into their cover of ‘Girlfriend is Better’ when playing with the Byrne’s Night collective, a highlight of their experience at Wide Awake. “It was chaos but also kind of felt like summer camp or something,” Elliot says, with Virgile asserting “It’s a crazy project, but I kind of feel something like it should be like every festival. Like an all-star team up”.

Their forthcoming debut album Faux Ever, seeks to capture all the vigour and zest of their live shows, something which seems akin to putting fireworks in a glass bottle. “It's been a great exercise honestly, and our live shows really just inform what we wanted our album to sound like, not the other way around” Elliott says. The pair have a few favourites, both to record and perform. ‘Rent Free’ transitions from “tuned vocals and this pissy guitar, but turns into this dance track” as Virgile describes, and singles like ‘Walking Away from my Demons’ and ‘Love on the Ground’ all have that trademark blend of glam, punk, and camp. For both of them though, ‘Scratch’ is a Faux Real favourite. The album closer, it is heavier and more industrial than the rest of their catalogue, and gets deep into what their project is getting at. “In New York, sold out show, people really know our music well, but no one had heard ‘Scratch’, and they were like ‘Whoa what the fuck is that?’. But I think it hit in a different way, and we really felt that” Elliot says in earnest. “The theme is very much about the bare bonesness of it all, and how deep under the surface you need to go to make something from scratch because isn’t everything recycled anyways?” Virgile elaborates. 

On discussing ‘Scratch’, and how it touches on how so much of reality is made up then recycled, I remembered that I hadn’t even asked the most basic questions about their project, and especially their name. “It took us fucking months to come up with it honestly, because we wanted it to mean something to us. Obviously faux is a French word and real is an English word, and we’re both half French, half American” Virgile says. “But yeah, this thing about making stuff up has definitely become a bit of an obsession of ours” Elliott says. It’s clear that by connecting the dots backward from their name, it gives them flexibility in their songwriting, in drawing from their influences, and in how they approach their live shows. “But it’s also always a piss take” Virgile quips back. This jestful perspective continues when they explain their influences. The brothers have sometimes been dubbed a new Duran Duran, which came as a bit of a surprise. “I honestly don’t know Duran Duran at all. Like I love what I hear and they’ve played us on their radio show, and invited us to play with them at their Hyde Park show, but we don’t actually know their music that well”, says Elliott. And while neither of their parents’ records contained much of the 80s flamboyance that they’re clearly drawn to (mainly DEVO and Talking Heads they say), they’re more than happy to rediscover the historical roots of their style. 

At this point, the sun was setting, and both Elliott and Virgile had finished their pints. The brothers had for some reason willingly discussed such a wide range of topics with me, while still making time for in-jokes about Charli XCX, and about the art pop label that gets stuck on them so often. I wanted to ask them the most hated question (and they would agree) of what they personally think the genre they belong to, and how they got there. “LA’s been a great home base for us. It certainly feels exotic for us,” says Virgile, “but yeah you take different things from different places.” While they both observe that scenes are much less localised with the internet than when they grew up, they don’t think it’s a bad thing. “Now everything is so much more fluid and so much easier” Virgile says, and it explains why their music is so steeped in that online culture. While they might not self-describe as art pop artists, Elliott thinks that it “encapsulates something that's like a little bit beyond the music”, which he enjoys. According to him, their label once said they sound like if “a philosophy student and an art director came together and made a project,” and personally that might be the most accurate illustration of their sound yet. 

I spent an hour chatting with Elliott and Virgile veering towards various different digressions to varying value. However, much like their project, the conversation was wide-ranging, at times nonsensical, and most of all hard to pin down. But it was incredibly entertaining. They had a gig they were headed to, but left me with a suggestion to visit a Krautrock Karaoke event happening that weekend. I did, and unsurprisingly had a great time, because more than anything Elliott and Virgile know where to find a good time.