The single of anthemic proportions comes hours before the St. Albans trio’s headline show at O2 Academy Brixton.
Friendly Fires emerged during a time of “landfill indie”, where England’s music scene had become grossly oversaturated with trilby and polo shirt wielding Camden dwellers that walked a well-trodden path. The aforementioned hoped to grasp a fragment of the same overnight success that The Strokes and Alex Turner’s Arctic Monkeys had seemingly achieved, though with little originality or distinction to their music. Similarly to Oxford based quintet Foals and their afrobeat meets Kompakt brand of guitar pop, Friendly Fires were simply an anomaly for the time. A needle in a haystack.
From humble beginnings the trio recorded their Mercury nominated debut in the St. Albans home of frontman Ed McFarlane’s parents. The ten tracks within captured a sound that boasted an overwhelming and undeniable pop sensibility as well as a restlessness (quite literally, see video footage of live performances for McFarlane’s snake hips), love for and cross-pollination of an unlikely amalgam of genres and the ability to evoke imagery of sun-kissed coastlines and hedonistic beach parties despite being executed from the landlocked county of Hertfordshire. In 2008 Friendly Fires wrote the book on how to make people dance and the band’s 2011 sophomore album Pala followed suit.
However several years passed following the release of 2011’s Pala and it began to seem as though Friendly Fires may never return from their calculated obscurity. Nothing was said regarding a third full length release, social media pages went silent and attentions turned to hosting club nights and releasing the dewy, shimmering and sprawling soundscapes of McFarlane and Gibson’s debut as The Pattern Forms.
Then, in the final months of 2017 the band broke their silence. After several months of teasing, festival announcements and three warm-up shows that provided a glimpse to those in attendance of what is to come, Friendly Fires have returned with a new single and it doesn’t miss a step.
For an artist to assume an absence of such considerable length, and then return with a body of work that falls directly back in to the pocket and shows an undeviated continuity whilst only making minor tweaks, is a testament to their timelessness. ‘Love Like Waves’ marks the beginning of a new chapter for the band following news of their signing to Polydor and also serves as a reminder of their glorious past to those that needed reacquainting.
Grab your maracas, listen below and prepare for the rest.
P.S. we’ve missed your Hawaiian shirts, Ed.
Words by Sam Wilkinson.
Fruit and Grooves Collective 