Foreigner

It's curious to note how Foreigner, one of the flagship bands of American arena rock, were for a long stretch made up largely of British musicians. Formed in 1976 as a sextet, in 1980 they decided to trim down the lineup, without replacing two departing members (keyboardist Al Greenwood and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, already a founding member of King Crimson). In this new phase, only singer Lou Gramm was an American citizen, while the other three all had long track records in the British rock scene: founder, principal songwriter and guitarist Mick Jones had been a member of Spooky Tooth, drummer Dennis Elliott of If, and bassist Rick Willis of Cochise.

For the new project the band decided to enlist South African producer Mutt Lange, who had just helmed “Back In Black” by Ac/Dc, the biggest commercial success in the history of hard rock, and had made a name for himself launching bands with wildly different sounds, such as Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats, standard-bearers of early new wave, and City Boy, with their prog-spiced arena rock.
The lineup was now without a keyboardist, and although Jones could handle the role himself, they lacked an expert who could squeeze the maximum potential out of a branch of rock instrumentation that was at that very moment undergoing its most significant technological revolution. Lange then remembered Thomas Dolby, a young man who had sent a demo to his London agency, Zomba, and who had impressed him with the sounds he was able to coax out of the cheapest synthesizers (Dolby himself famously recounted learning to play on a Powertran Transcendent 2000 found in the dumpster of an electronics shop).
Lange had him flown out to New York, where the new record was being made: upon hearing the name Mick Jones, Dolby was convinced it was the Clash, of whom he was a fan. He knew nothing, however, of Foreigner, who had already scored three multi-platinum albums in the United States, yet had never taken off in a United Kingdom still partly allergic to the sounds of arena rock. Either way, there was no time to be disappointed, since overnight the young musician found himself with access to the widest catalogue of synthesizers he could have wished for. For the album in question he turned to a Minimoog, a Roland Jupiter-4, a Prophet-5 and an Oberheim (whose exact model he unfortunately can't recall today).

The record had already been recorded almost in its entirety, keyboards included, but Jones and Lange were not satisfied with the result and asked him to add as much as he liked to every track, in particular to reinvigorate the rhythmic pulse of “Urgent” and to craft an introduction for the ballad “Waiting For A Girl Like You”.
Dolby recorded nearly all his parts at night, without the band present, though they constantly championed the results, Jones in particular. Once the recordings were finished he went back to England, and his work was paid so handsomely that it became the main source of funding for his debut album, “The Golden Age Of Wireless”, released the following year.
Back to Foreigner: “4” came out on July 2, 1981 and was an immediate success, becoming their first record to reach number 1 on the Billboard chart, where it stayed for ten weeks, spending eight months in the top 10. Among the singles, standouts include “Urgent” (number 4), “Waiting For A Girl Like You” (number 2) and “Juke Box Hero” (which initially stalled at number 26, but would go on to become one of their best-known songs over time). It also became the album that finally broke them in the European market, reaching number 5 in the UK and number 4 in Germany.

The opening hard rock of “Night Life” immediately shows Lange's hand, just consider how similar it sounds to “Let It Go” by Def Leppard, from the album “High 'N' Dry”, which he would begin producing right as the Foreigner sessions wrapped up.
“Juke Box Hero” was born from the merging of two song sketches Jones had been working on, joined together at Lange's suggestion, which is perhaps why it has a far more complex structure than its catchiness lets on: just consider the verse, which starts out mysterious and dark, driven by bass and an electronic pulse, before kicking into a hard rock gallop, returning to the initial mood, accelerating again with shifting melody and vocal harmonies until it builds into a sort of pre-chorus, and then coming back as a brief vocal fragment intertwined with the chorus itself.
“Break It Up” is a midtempo hard rock track whose rhythm section intro seems to nod back to the classic “Cold As Ice”, from their debut album, but it carves out its own identity thanks to a chorus propelled by a synthesizer ostinato and a melancholy bridge marked by digital piano and a small sequenced flourish tucked into the background.

“Waiting For A Girl Like You” is another track whose originality risks being overshadowed by media overexposure. The ambient keyboard intro that opens into an FM radio ballad was already quite an ambitious move in itself, but even more remarkable is the fact that the song never reaches a climax, staying subdued from start to finish, carried along by the electric piano chords, the shimmer of the synthesizers, the ethereal vocal harmonies and the straightforward drumming, which seems to avoid any surge for fear of breaking the spell. In doing so it masterfully sidesteps the bloat of so many power ballads that would go on to infest arena rock in the years that followed, sealing its artistic decline.
“Luanne” likewise proves unexpectedly delicate, its teenage power pop drawing close to the Cars of “My Best Friend's Girl”, revealing a band capable of covering a far broader emotional and stylistic range than is usually told.

“Urgent” is the perfect marriage of arena rock and new wave, its arrangement propelled by a delay-effected guitar twang, a slapped bass, and a synthesizer part built around a kind of syncopated echo (which, incidentally, goes through notable variations over the course of the track). From 2'38" to 3'28" there's even room for a sax solo played by Junior Walker, the legendary Motown musician, which pairs perfectly with Gramm's gritty voice, one of the singers most influenced by rhythm and blues in his field.
While “I'm Gonna Win” is a hefty midtempo number that seems to hint at a soul answer to Ac/Dc's contemporaneous output, “Woman In Black” is yet another shape-shifting hard rock track, with an atmospheric intro for guitar and sequencer, while “Girl On The Moon” flaunts electronic textures and guitar refractions that get lost in the depths of the mix, making it the album's most shadowy track, a sort of noir inversion of “Waiting For A Girl Like You”.
Closing things out is “Don't Let Go”, whose vocal harmonies instead recall the far breezier sunshine pop of the Sixties (Beach Boys, Association and the like).

“4” closes out Foreigner's golden era with a hallmark attention to detail and a forward-looking sound, cementing Jones's place among the finest songwriters of chart-topping rock. The band would not return until 1984, with “Agent Provocateur”, which, although buoyed by the enormous success of the syrupy single “I Want To Know What Love Is”, sold considerably less and, above all, saw internal dynamics start to fray (unsurprisingly, releases would grow sparser from then on).

Trivia: the cover art was originally meant to be handled by the Hipgnosis studio, who proposed an image of a sleeping boy being spied on by a floating pair of binoculars. It would have been one of their best, had Atlantic and Bud Prager, the band's manager, not stepped in and blocked it, deeming it “too gay”. In the end the album was released with a cover designed by Bob Defrin, reproducing the freeze-frame of a countdown on film stock: decidedly less ambitious, though elegant in its simplicity.

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22/06/2026