“A conduit for emotions too frenetic to hold on your own,” is how Avery Friedman describes her debut album New Thing, a release which sees the Brooklyn-based artist finally commit to her own music after many years around the indie music scene. A decision born as much from necessity as any sense of artistic ideal. “Many of these tracks were born of anxiety—from my turning to a guitar to externalize (and organize) a sense of chaos that otherwise felt trapped inside me,” as Friedman continues. “What results is a time capsule for a year of intense personal expansion in my life—and the layers of warmth, wonder, sensitivity, and sharpness that come with growing.”
After a dreamy intro which seems to be passing through the haze of reflection in real time, the title track sees Avery Friedman immediately begin to excavate the past for anything which might warrant a place within this time capsule. Only such reflection inevitably leads back to trauma, and soon a key event begins to reveal itself. The dark centre around which the album orbits. Friedman wrote the song while riding the subway for the first time since being mugged at knifepoint months before, existing within a newly brittle version of life, where sudden violence can upend the expected physics of any given day. “It’s a little bit of a new thing / It’s a little hard to predict,” as she sings, “And I can’t quite describe it / But it’s like a magnet flipped.” But, as we noted in a prior piece, the song confronts this new mode of life in order to do more than merely describe. “[‘New Thing] represents the beginning of the path forward, allowing Friedman a method by which to return to her body and start the process of becoming whole again.”
Positioned in what we called “the interstitial space between trauma and growth,” ‘Flowers Fell’ represents the first step forwards along this arc of healing. A song too close to ground zero to offer bright epiphanies, sheltering instead within “that lull between the ceasing of decline and visible signs of recovery,” as we continued, “where improvement exists only as a nascent understanding of the possibilities which lay ahead in time.” Tracks like ‘Photo Booth‘ and ‘Finger Painting’ follow and seem to confirm the wisdom of this patience. For while there’s an undeniably morose air hanging over the songs, there are also signs of small shoots pushing through. Be it the latent mischief of the former and the playful potential therein, or sensuality of the latter, with longing registered as intimate as it is intense.
Which isn’t to say such a path from trauma to health is linear. Bathed in a kind of fog of ambience and reverb, ‘Somewhere to Go’ finds a person stuck within a strange contradiction, their external stasis matched by a constantly churning mind. A mind which seems set on retrospection, turning back towards the past in lieu of anything more productive if only to escape the agonising tedium of the present. “So stuck inside / Centrifuge / And eye-for-an-eye,” as Friedman sings. “Appeasing, Stifling, Rummaging, Rifling / Somewhere to go.”
How these frustrations are navigated is what comes to mark the record. A combination of patience and burgeoning trust. Be that in the very ability of a person to come back to life, or else in the humble loves that make such a goal worthwhile. Take the gentle defiance of penultimate track ‘Biking Standing’, a mood triggered not via gritted teeth or the pulling of bootstraps but a “surrender to surprise” on a July evening. “They played country / I stood and danced with you,” one verse goes. “Warmth and darkness / Not quite opposites / Surrender to surprise.” Closer ‘Nervous’ might be more hesitant in tone, but still pushes further into this mood. Its tone full of confession and vulnerability and the closeness inherent in sharing such things with another person. An ending to a record which might not represent the apex of the curve from trauma to health, but in fact something more sustainable. One beginning to realise, slowly, gradually, that the process is forever ongoing, but life can continue nonetheless.
New Thing is out now via Audio Antihero and available from the Avery Friedman Bandcamp page.