The Fiery Furnaces are warming up again and hint there's more to come

For the first time ever, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger won’t have a home in Chicago to go to when The Fiery Furnaces headlines the Old Town School of Music on Feb. 22.

“Our mother just sold it,” Matthew shared about the beloved family property in Oak Park, located just blocks away from Ernest Hemingway’s own childhood home.

For years, the Oak Park Avenue abode was the fertile breeding ground for the siblings’ ambitious musical project that would become a highlight of the 2000s-era indie rock boom. On most days, Matthew and Eleanor would spend hours in the basement noodling with instruments after singing with their grandmother Olga at the nearby Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, all of it eventually marinating in the duo’s experimental rock soup.

It’s a lot for the siblings to wrap their heads around, especially at a time of already big changes for The Fiery Furnaces who have been largely quiet for the past 15 years. After an incredibly prolific period that resulted in eight albums in seven years, including their 2003 garage rock debut “Gallowsbird’s Bark” and 2004’s conceptual opus “Blueberry Boat,” a hiatus came in 2011 to allow Matthew and Eleanor to pursue individual creative paths and solo careers.

There’s been some blips since, like a performance at the 2021 edition of Pitchfork Music Festival and, a year later, working with Jack White’s Third Man Records to release new music in a decade, the characteristically whimsical singles “Down At the So and So on Somewhere" and “The Fortune Teller’s Revenge.”

But there are signs of life that the duo is really warming up again. In addition to the slate of new shows, the pair just re-released “Blueberry Boat” in 2025 for its 20th anniversary and there’s a new limited cassette re-release for 2006’s “Bitter Tea” that will be available exclusively at the upcoming concerts.

“We want to work,” Eleanor explained of the reunion. “We want to keep doing something that we've been really lucky to do in the past. It’s just taken us this long to get our act together, literally.”

For the upcoming date at Old Town School (also a throwback to their mom who took guitar lessons there in the ‘60s), Eleanor and Matthew are going back to the basics: just the two of them playing small venues with a small arsenal of instrumentals. All of it is very intentional.

“We played some shows like this back in 2011 … and those were kind of the last shows that we did as a band. So it feels like a good place to start again and reevaluate,” said Eleanor. “It’s kind of nice to present them in the barest way possible before we start doing something else.” She hinted that new recordings are planned for the near future, which will be featured on the duo’s Bandcamp page.

“We get to fulfill or slightly surprise the expectations coming back into it, even for ourselves,” added Matt of digging out the older material. “Playing ‘Blueberry Boat,’ I liked it much better than I thought. And I was much less embarrassed by the lyrics than I thought I would be,” he joked.

Of course, that’s long been the running theme for The Fiery Furnaces who often elicited scratched heads for their non-linear orchestrations and wacky lyrics on avant-garde songs like “Nevers” or for making a full album with their grandma Olga narrating her life’s stories (2005’s “Rehearsing My Choir”). “People would say we’re so weird and awful, and other people said they make good music, but of course, we were always running up against people's expectations and we weren't always delivering on those,” said Matt, joking, “And they got especially annoyed at having to hear us when they file shared or downloaded our record for free.”

Eleanor hopes that the reception might change given some distance and the fact that music makers now are heralded for what The Fiery Furnaces did all along — being experimental and coloring outside the lines. Even the Talkhouse Podcast just released a new episode titled, “Apologizing to The Fiery Furnaces,” hinting that critics may be coming around to the fact that they were wrong all along.

“It seems like people do have a larger capacity for all different kinds of sounds now, but whether they will be able to grasp on to those things, I don't know,” she wondered. “It would be great to put out new music and then have people rediscover what we did in the past. That’s the goal. Do we stand a chance with 100 times more competition than we had 20 years ago? I don't know, but it’s going to be fun to try.”