New Thing, the scarily accomplished debut album from Avery Friedman, is all about change and growth. In a similar way to artists like Adrianne Lenker, she explores queerness, longing and personal upheaval, and like Lenker, Friedman seems to have a natural feel for the way a song’s music and its lyrics can be intricately and viscerally entwined, so that the whole thing taps into a very specific if sometimes hard to describe emotional state. A song like Biking Standing creates a vivid visual world from minimal ingredients, then fills it up with complex reflections on art and relationships. Friedman’s road to recording this album was a rocky one. Aside from the usual difficulties faced by young people, queer people and creative people, she also experienced a mugging, and that violent interpolation of one life into another makes its way into these songs by unexpected routes.
The Lenker comparisons are not superficial; the title track recalls Big Thief with an added shoegazey shimmer. The guitars tap into a certain millennial/Gen X nostalgia for that special sweet spot where slacker rock met alt-country, but there’s enough of a DIY bedroom pop sheen to appeal to fans of Men I Trust. In other words, Friedman presses all the right buttons. Crucially, she presses them in the right order. Nothing feels like it has been shoehorned in; all the influences are subsumed into a bigger overarching sound, one entirely of Friedman’s own invention. The insistent refrain of Flowers Fell, combined with its strung-out guitars that creep towards distortion, makes for a song that sits somewhere between hazy afternoon indie and a wine-dark sea of alt-rock noise. Friedman obviously has an incredible ear for balance, and nothing ever tips over into genre parody.
She creates layers, but she also strips them back. Glimpses of minimal electronics rear up at various points in Photo Booth, vying for supremacy with the grungy guitars. The winning trifecta of pretty melodies, unconventional arrangements and good old-fashioned distortion might make you think for a minute of the Breeders or Kristin Hersh’s Sunny Border Blue, but there is something altogether more dreamy but also more anxious about Friedman’s work. In this respect, it is a product of its time, of the fuzzed and freaked reality of being young on an ageing planet. The slow build of Finger Painting pits Friedman’s languid vocal delivery against a fraught coil and release, somewhere on the fringes of alt-rock and post-rock, and the distorted crunch of Somewhere to Go feels like a release of weird claustrophobic tensions that gripped many of us during Covid.
Trauma – both collective and personal – runs through New Thing, occasionally breaking the surface but often remaining slightly obscured. This gives the whole album a disconcerting feeling: there is a veneer of beauty, but it is constantly – and expertly – undermined by a vague but nagging angst. It is most apparent on Nervous, the fidgety final track, which effectively reimagines the meanings and the uses of anxiety. Friedman inhabits a complex emotional realm where nervousness can coexist with (and inform) ideas of sexiness, sadness, tenderness. Her world is fragile but appears to have arrived fully-formed.
New Thing (April 18th, 2025) Audio Antihero
Bandcamp: https://averyfriedman.bandcamp.com/album/new-thing
More: https://linktr.ee/averyfriedman