I personally abhor the words "highly anticipated" – which are almost always used pointlessly by press people in particular – but in this circumstance those words are perfectly justified. Friends was the most buzzed about emerging NYC band of 2011, mostly because of the beautiful take on psych-soul of their single/video "I’m His Girl" (The band placed 3rd in our Best of NYC Poll for Emerging Artists, and was featured on the cover of our latest NYC print issue. "Manifest!" is the title of Friends’… highly anticipated debut full length, out today on Fat Possum Records and available for streaming on Spin.com. The question everybody is wondering about is, of course, if there is another single as good as "I’m His Girl" in the album… From a quick listen, our feeling is that that single is still the peak of this young band’s repertoire, but we have been wrong before… the new tracks in the album however sound solid and we are happy to report that the recording team decided to keet the "mid-fi" approach of the early singles, avoiding to fall into the often corrupting temptations of "over-production".
P.S. We were hoping for some new press pictures for this release… BIG disappointment (we’ve been using the same 2-3 pics of this band a dozen times already!