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about this album
Thematically, Quiet Friend is full of songs about social anxiety, queer identity, and the fraught, often painful experience of seeking out intimacy in crowded cities. “Breathplay” is a window into fumbling, anonymous sex, with the chorus “Where has your body been?” acting as a mantric internal question to which one would presumably rather not know the answer. Still, there is optimism, and sometimes it prevails. “Name All The Animals,” though peppered with familiar references to the bleariness of dating in your 20s (“we drank all of the sake, we skipped out on the party, we are hungover in our hiding place”), is ultimately a pre-relationship love song, one which, for all its swooning string arrangements, embroidery-like microbeats and lush production, slowly reveals itself to be an appropriate vessel for such personal, physical lyrics. Elsewhere, the instrumental “Thorn From Paw” suggests the dry, unyielding patterns of Italian minimalism before slipping into an apocalyptic glitch-waltz that suddenly pulls the listener into an enormous sun-scraped space. It’s these deeply cinematic moments that allow Quiet Friend to transcend the sum of its parts, able to move nimbly between meticulously polished dance pop (“Breathplay”, “Playgrounds”) and murkier experimentation, often heavily inspired by private press new age (“Bath”, “Seance”). The rolling, syncopated bell-whirrs that make up the backbone of “Avalanche” are unmistakably in homage to the experimental pop geniuses of 80’s J
