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Ezra Furman: ‘I was like, this record has to be a weapon of war’

‘The future is a text message sending,” Ezra Furman declares on Forever in Sunset, the synth-scorched first single from her new album, All of Us Flames. On the face of it, the lyrics tell a classic American tale: two people in a car – one of them “trouble” – pulling on to a highway with a full tank and the sun in their eyes. The backing is a groundswell of power chords and crashing percussion, recalling Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, with its depiction of underclass dreams bursting out of the confines of material reality. But Furman completely turns her back on society. As the collapse of civilisation feels increasingly inevitable, she heads for a new frontier where rugged inpidualism and systemic failure are vanquished by interdependence and resilience. The passengers ditch the unavoidable for the unknown, with nothing but friendship on their side, Thelma and Louise, suspended in midair.

“I was trying to [say], there is no end of the world,” Furman explains, sipping a small beer in a quiet garden in east London. It is a few days after the UK’s first bout of extreme heat, when record-breaking temperatures left parts of Essex on fire and bin bags melted on the pavement, and a sense of doom hangs in the air. “Your rights being taken away by the government is not the apocalypse. Not being able to buy food at the supermarket any more is not the apocalypse. Or maybe it is – but then we’ve got to figure out how to grow food ourselves and bring it to our neighbours. We’ve got to keep taking care of each other.”

Furman, 35, fiddles with the zips on a beaten-up leather jacket. With her cropped brown hair and electric-blue eyeshadow, she cuts a cool figure, resembling the subject of one of the new album’s most vulnerable songs, Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club – a playful, lo-fi love letter to “the teenage girl I never got to be”. “Queer people are just not given a model for how to be that works, so we find it in the trash of pop culture,” Furman says. She pauses, smiles, then adds, “And I believe in finding treasure in the trash.”

I was writing a document of a particularly threatened moment in my life

Just as the cult John Hughes character’s outsider ego and uncompromising self-belief were a beacon for the young Furman, now her songs play that role for others. Her stories of fragility and confusion have provided the soundtrack to Netflix’s beloved Sex Education, which unglues stories of queer sex and romance from the usual territory of suffering. Meanwhile, Furman’s solo albums have grown sharper teeth. On 2018’s Transangelic Exodus, she and an angel lover run away from an oppressive government in a cinematic road trip, while 2019’s Twelve Nudes lashes out at the sad state of the world in brash bursts of punk. While Furman is soft-spoken and thoughtful in person, taking long pauses after each question to gather her thoughts before offering a winding response, as a songwriter she breathes fire.

Produced by John Congleton (St Vincent, Angel Olsen) in Los Angeles, All of Us Flames is an album of dreamy, unshackled indie rock, while the lyrics wield ideas of community and solidarity like loaded guns. Most of the songs speak to the fight for survival, specifically with reference to the Jewish community and “the 20 people I know in the world who would walk across burning coals for me, as I would for them”, she says.

The album conveys a feeling of endurance typical of canonical rock’n’roll that speaks to Furman’s desire to get closer to crafting the kinds of songs that outlive their maker. During the writing process she listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, the Shangri-Las (whose Dressed in Black inspired a song of the same name about two lovers fleeing a hostile world). “I kept thinking about this world-weary protest music, but also this feminine vitality of teenage girls,” she says. “I wanted these things to coexist.” On the woozy Lilac and Black, Furman and her “queer girl gang” drive out their oppressors and claim a hostile city for themselves. The anthemic ​​Book of Our Names was inspired by the second book of the Hebrew Bible and etches into history those who are cast to the margins of life. “I want there to be / A book of our names / None of them missing / None quite the same / None of us ashes / All of us flames.”

Since the release of Twelve Nudes, Furman’s public-facing life has changed somewhat. Last April, Furman came out as transgender and said she had been a mother for two years. It is something she resisted talking about for a while, wanting to shield her child from “the shitty world of strangers reacting to us”. However, there were also feelings of obligation at play. “I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide culture among trans people, and increasingly understanding that it’s because we haven’t seen versions of futures or kinds of lives we can have,” Furman says. “I became a parent without ever having even seen a picture of a transfeminine parent, you know? That clipped my wings and held me back from imagining what my life could be.”

Her original Instagram post was intended for friends, family and fans, but ended up becoming clickbait. It was reported by CNN, People magazine, Fox News – mass media outlets whose reach directed a waterfall of transphobia towards Furman. She was working on the album in California at the time. “I have a problem with addictively reading that stuff, but I was like, if you fucking losers understood how cool my life was right now, you’d be so embarrassed of yourselves,” she seethes.

Much of the album was written during the early months of the pandemic, a time that Furman describes as “ridiculously happy” for her family. Yet home was also “not a nice place to be”. They had just moved from Berkeley in California to Somerville in Massachusetts, and started renting a property from a landlord they hadn’t met. When they were finally introduced, the landlord made it clear that he had a problem with their family setup. “Because he lived upstairs, his presence was inescapable,” Furman says. She would drive to a lake or a forest – “somewhere I couldn’t really see civilisation” – to write away from her claustrophobic living situation. “I could feel that I was writing a document of a particularly threatened moment in my life,” she says. “It all felt very charged with threat.”

But All of Us Flames is fuelled just as much by love as by anger. Each song considers a vision of the future connected to concepts of care and community as they relate to parenthood and transness specifically. “The thing I really love about becoming a parent is that – to use the phrase from the album – it makes you organise your life around love and care in a concrete way,” Furman says softly. “Daily life is like: ‘I’m not doing that because I have to do this.’ Just to hold a baby and feed him – I think it really just changed my brain. It changed what human life looks like to me.”

That care comes through in All of Us Flames, which is assembled like a circle of people linking arms: it’s sonically robust, with a distinct lack of space, creating the sensation that the songs are built to catch you if you fall. Furman says it’s her most collaborative album in a long time. She co-wrote some songs with drummer Sam Durkes, and learned to turn the instrumentation over to Congleton and the band more often. “In the past, I’ve really been like, it has to be like this,” she says, popping her eyes and straining her voice as if strangling someone. “And I actually think that didn’t serve me well. It mirrors a theme of the record, too: that we all do better if we depend on each other.”

She has also noted a natural tendency to write in the first person plural; her perspective shifting from “I” to “us”. Behind the album, there is a message of hope – something that has been absent from much of Furman’s previous work. It speaks to a creeping exhaustion with our crumbling empire and a refusal to wait for it to change. Rather than doomscrolling, it is better to look for ways to rearrange life around networks of support. In some small ways, that’s already happening, says Furman.

“When we had this transphobic landlord, word spread throughout the queers that we were in this hard spot, and they were like: ‘We will go to the fucking mat for you, let me at this motherfucker!’ That really got into my worldview. I was like, oh, I need queer community.”

In return, Furman raised her own fists. “I was like, this record has to be a weapon of war,” she says definitively, as the first spots of rain in weeks start to fall. “This is armour for my people.”

All of Us Flames is out today on Bella Union.