“Thought I was wise, thought I knew about love,” sings Dan Wriggins on ‘Free Association’, the lead single from Friendship‘s forthcoming full-length Caveman Wakes Up on Merge Records. It’s a line delivered with his trademark cadence—plainspoken and wry and somehow also entirely earnest—which encapsulates the tone of a song in which accumulated experience is rendered hollow, its apparent insight revealed to count for nothing. Yet from within this fundamental uncertainty rises something different, a contradiction implied within in the line itself. I thought I was wise (I wasn’t), thought I knew about love (I didn’t). Doubt becomes its own conviction.
The Friendship sound has always existed within an ambiguous space. Each release plays as a stagnant dispatch from a world in motion, Wriggins left to pick the bones out of any given moment in futile hope of making sense of his existence. The grand narratives of life—be that love, work, success or self-improvement—are often revealed to be emptier than he had hoped, yet the inverse is also shown to be true. The ordinary, the everyday, that is where the sublime lurks for those with the time or motivation to look.
Caveman Wakes Up promises to delve deeper into this idea, a record which finds the familiar vocals and lyricism supported by Friendship’s most ambitious and exploratory sound to date. The core group of Peter Gill (guitar, synth, vibraphone, vox), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums, percussion, piano, organ, synth, vibraphone, drum machine, string and woodwind arrangement), Jon Samuels (bass, synth) and Wriggins (vox, guitar) are supported with occasional appearances from Adelyn Strei (flute, clarinet) and Jason Calhoun (violin), and the result further tests the boundaries between country and its adjacent genres—leaning out across the various schools of folk rock and even further still.
‘Free Association’ is the ideal entry point to this freshly curious sound. “Another one about love and other people and how the only hope we’ve got in the search for meaning is to make it up,” as Wriggins told Stereogum. “The Mellotron sax and voice patch were both jokes that we ended up loving. Also the only song with synth bass. We’re proud as hell of the production.”
Watch the video directed by Zach Puls below:
Caveman Wakes Up will be released on the 16th May via Merge Records and you can pre-order it now from the Friendship Bandcamp page.
Cover art: Matthew Reed, Tenant’s Rights, acrylic on canvas. Design: Daniel Murphy