Future Islands Lost Their Desk But Still Delivered With Their Tiny Desk Performance

NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has been going on for a long time now: The first installments were in 2008. Future Islands were among the first wave of artists to perform for the series, as they previously featured in 2011. Now, ten years later, they’ve returned.

Like all artists over the past year or so, though, they didn’t take to the NPR offices for their performance, but to a remote performance space. They didn’t even have a desk in the room, let alone a tiny one, and between songs, Samuel T. Herring noted, “We lost our desk, but we’re still happy to be here.” The first three songs of the set — “Hit The Coast,” “The Painter,” and “Thrill” — come from the band’s newest album, As Long As You Are, while they dug into the archives to close out the performance with “Balance,” which first appeared on the 2011 album On The Water.

The band hasn’t yet been able to tour in support of their latest album due to the pandemic, but they’ve still had some chances to perform. Before this Tiny Desk set, they visited Late Night With Seth Meyers to perform a couple weeks ago and they were on Colbert in October.

Watch Future Islands’ Tiny Desk concert above.