‘Weird sibling energy’: Nothing’s better than the Faux Real thing

Published On December 12, 2024 » By »
Faux-Real---Faux-Ever---EP-Cover-Art_web

Virgile and Elliott Arndt of Faux Real (photo: City Slag/Big Hassle)

It’s almost impossible to describe the post-post-post-ironic electro-glam duo of Faux Real — aka shirtless, shag-haircutted, high-kicking, high-camp, Franco-American himbos Virgile and Elliott Arndt, rock’s quirkiest brothers since the Maels — without instinctively lapsing into a Stefon-from-Saturday Night Live voice.

Yes, this band has everything: Y2K boy-band choreography, heart-shaped Daisy Rock guitars that may or may not be plugged in, mesh crop-tops, tongues forever planted in sculpted male-model cheeks, phallic flutes, amateur stuntwork, homoeroticism… and some of the greatest glossy-but-glitchy synthpop of the post-post-post-modern age. Faux Real fake it so real they are beyond fake. They’re desperate but not serious, yet also as serious as a sheer heart attack. And their debut album Faux Ever, which the Arndts accurately describe as “an 11-piece symphony for headbanging and longing,” backs up their style with surprising substance.

Virgile and Elliott have obviously known each other all their lives, but they didn’t conceive their bonkers brand of Faux Realism until 2018; before that, Elliott served in the experimental London outfit Vanishing Twin, while Virgile, the elder Arndt, played bass for the Luxembourg indie-pop group Natas Loves You. Faux Real’s DIY, lo-fi, can’t-look-away early gigs overseas — works of bona fide performance art that are now the stuff of legend — featured not much more than their coordinated handmade costumes, jazzercise choreo, a trouser-flute, and what Virgile calls their “weird sibling energy.” But that was enough.

“It was a surprise for us when we started this project,” admits Virgile. “Before the first Faux Real show, we had never done something like this. I had never been onstage without an instrument, and Elliott hadn’t either. And we walked onstage literally shaking. We were like, ‘Either this is going to work, or we’ll never play another show and that’ll be that!’ There was a discussion beforehand about how it was all going to go, and we got everything wrong, of course. Everything went wrong and nothing sounded like what we said it should. But when we came offstage, we were like, ‘Wow, that felt amazing and so liberating.’ And the response was great. So, we just decided to keep on going with it.”

In some ways, the brothers had been preparing to unleash the two-headed Faux Real beast all their lives, ever since their Paris childhood as “skate rats” in the ‘90s and naughties. (Virgile still fondly recalls skateboard he received for his 7th birthday, “one of those mall skateboards with the purple shocks on it and everything.”) Skateboarding not only helped the brothers build the stamina, coordination, and fearlessness needed for their physically demanding and stunt-filled live performances, but develop their arts-and-crafty aesthetic as well.

“The DIY thing comes with the territory, because you spend so much time out in the street when you’re skating and you have to build stuff,” Virgile explains. “You have to be imaginative with your surroundings. We very much like to build our show around the venue. We try as much as possible to keep it fresh and incorporate the surroundings and give ourselves a bit of room to improvise — kind of push ourselves and keep ourselves and everyone else guessing, as the show unravels.”

“We take the DIY thing very literally,” Elliott adds with a laugh. “Like, we got all the bits and pieces for our [stage] outfits from the hardware store. They’re like painters’ outfits, and we cropped them and bought keyrings to jangle on them and added some fringe — which are tassels we got from the curtain shop. It cost us 20 pounds sterling, and they’ve been the same ever since. We haven’t changed them.”

Before forming Faux Real, the Arndts also spent their twenties squatting in European warehouses and getting into punk music, and while Virgile was off on his own artistic journey in Paris, Elliott studied film and photography at the London College of Communication and developed his unique vision — which would later serve Faux Real well — directing music videos for Vanishing Twin and other bands. “We were doing our own things and just gathering experience,” recalls Virgile. “And we were training ourselves by dancing in various seedy nightclubs. That’s another bit of our experience.”

Aside from their Euro clubbing misadventures, Faux Real’s dance training was limited to what Elliott calls “strictly an in-front-of-the-mirror-with-a-hairbrush-in-hand kind of thing.” But the brothers always knew they were destined for greatness and had “TV-esque ambitions.” So, five years ago — with no music yet officially released and no tour dates officially booked — they took off to the land of opportunity to pursue the American pop dream. They ended up playing more than 30 impromptu U.S. gigs, wherever they could — at house parties, at art galleries, at underground raves, on street corners, or even by hijacking official club bills.

“We basically set off to hit South by Southwest in 2019,” Elliott recalls. “We booked the flights and kind of thought of it as our ‘first U.S. tour,’ except we hadn’t booked any shows! We just thought we’d show up and see what we could do. And so, in a certain way, we built a show that was aimed for that. We decided to have a little briefcase, which we still carry around with us everywhere, and we decided that we should try to make the whole show fit in the briefcase. And we should have this briefcase with us at all times, so if an opportunity arises, we can be ready to play in under five minutes. So, we had a little briefcase with our stage, the flute — which is the only instrument that we have during our show — and the backing tracks and all that stuff. We just went to Austin and started knocking on doors, literally. We very quickly realized this was an insane idea, but eventually we managed to make a few buddies out there, because we got there a few days before South by Southwest started. We were playing on street corners and just making shit happen.”

Eventually these men-in-the-suitcase made some famous friends — like Danny Miller from Surfbort, who virally livestreamed one of their Austin street performances, and Jay Watson from Tame Impala, who offered to co-produce and play drums on Faux Real’s self-titled EP in 2020. The duo has a bit more of a budget and even more buzz now — they’ve just announced an official headlining tour for 2025, which will begin Feb. 8 in, of all places, Austin — but they haven’t strayed far from their old-skool cyberpunk vision.

“I think people saw something in us that was very genuine to them, because we were just so happy to be there. People were reacting to that,” Virgile says of Faux Real’s early, scrappy shows. “That was an even more rudimentary form of what we’re doing now, but it’s still the same concept behind our show. It’s just us two, in these matching outfits made by our mom.”

The above interview is taken from Faux Real’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Archived audio of that conversation is available via the SiriusXM app.

Share this post

Tags

Comments are closed.