LA-based band Girl Friday have been steadily honing their craft across two EPs in the last few years, and will bringing that to bear on their debut album Androgynous Mary, which is due on August 21. Today they share the lead single and video, the excellently-titled “Amber’s Knees: A Matter of Concern”. They say:
“‘Amber’s Knees’ came together lyrically from bits and pieces that we’d all written over a long period of time. It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It has to do with the borders of culturally sanctioned dissociation and the willful ignorance we often employ to keep things functioning, which manifests differently for everyone. We wanted the video to be an extreme example of this, so naturally we turned to reality TV for inspiration. However, that initial idea festered into a visual fever dream fueled by our increasingly dystopian waking reality. As life seems to spiral ever further out of our control, we keep ourselves grounded dancing above a greenscreen sea.”
A straight-ahead rocker full of infectious gang vocals and hooks, “Amber’s Knees: A Matter of Concern” is an undeniable blast. Girl Friday fill the song with surreal imagery like “A ghost inside a screen, eating like a king / Dripping grapes and suckled pig,” which leaves plenty to the listener’s imagination, but when it comes to the chorus we can all join in with full-throated understanding: “Crushed by the why / Crushed by the if / Frightened by the nothing.” The intertwining guitars are taut, giving “Amber’s Knees” an addictive urgency, only ramped up as they curve upwards to the psychedelic firestorm peak, and leave us with the unsettling chant “Maggots dress up in the meat / I eat, I eat, I eat.”
Girl Friday’s debut album Androgynous Mary comes out through Hardly Art on August 21. You can follow them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Bandcamp.
