ninehertz

Cardinal Fuzz is more than a grand record label of the UK, it’s a public service, providing opportunities to hear the most adventurous and wonderful of psychedelic music from across the globe. Firefriend are a great case in point – they’ve been releasing music for nearly two decades now, but perhaps due to them being from across the world in Brazil, it wasn’t until their Avalanche album of 2019 appeared on the Cardial’s roster did I discover their excellence. The opening track from that album made me fall in love with them immediately.

They tour the UK at the end of the month, and I’m more than a little excited to see them for the first time live. It’s not long to wait, but there’s new music from them to bridge even that small gap. And to little surprise, Fuzz is a delightful album.

Obviously fuzz is the key word here, titularly and in the label, and of course running as veins through every moment. It is present in the first track, a magical and engulfing warm embrace, and the album grows from there. There’s a naturally lazy, cool momentum to the whole thing, a nice beat to some songs similar to someone like White Hills.

Elsewhere, there are post-party good vibes chill-out times and music to lie back in the long grasses and stare at all the colours of the sky, most noticeably on the awesome Most Natural Painkiller, to which my first draft notes simply stated “this is happy music”. There are elements of shoegaze on the closing track mingling with the psychedelia creating fresh and calming airs.

Firefriend have a frequent and steady release schedule, constantly creating, always offering something new (on the same day Fuzz came out, there was a twin album of instrumental tracks) and whilst everything they release is always intriguing as a minimum, this is the best I’ve heard from them since that first taster. Tune in, trip out and (if you’re in the UK) turn up, at a venue near you at the end of the month.