james K – Friend
Friend
james K
Album
Dream Pop
Dom Lepore
October 28, 2025
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One glance at the enchanting cover artwork gracing james K’s Friend is enough to convey what it sounds like: A spacelike voyage – fuelled by chromium and candied aural embellishments from the past and present – one to float in like the depicted intent traveller adrift in a spiralling continuum.
This delectable sound is the result of james K’s deft synthesis of her disparate aesthetics. The delicate, hypnagogic ambience of her 2016 debut album, PET, and its more industrial 2022 follow-up, Random Girl, coalesce into Friend’s shiny sound. Vibrant pink falling into an astute, dour greyness. The traces of trip-hop are more Sneaker Pimps than Massive Attack, rendering them unlike other contemporary ‘90s alt-dance revivalists, a notion made truer by james K’s crystalline voice echoing that of Dido, Julianna Barwick, and Elizabeth Fraser across her genre-bending music. Friend carries two sides – the remarkable, nuanced art-pop crafted from an otherworldly palette, and the romantic arc of a falling out, followed by an existential longing.
The swirling opener Days Go By is set in motion by ticking, bubbly clicks, the tonal trepidation ever-evolving as strings and james K enter the fore. Woozy synths subtly creep up, rounding out the coiling, spiring rhythm. Idea.2 is Autechre-esque scratchy glitch-pop, the staticky synth jolts an electrifying backdrop for james K’s ethereal voice. “Drift” is a crucial word here – these two cuts begin in one place and end in another, their mutating soundscapes in flux like the perpetually-moving artwork.
As is to be expected with moving to no fixed destination, the next cuts N’Balmed and Rider unsuspectingly follow a constant melody. The former’s gliding, long-drawn trip-hop groove of looping drum breaks sets up the latter’s quantum leap plunge into beatless, monolithic droning shoegaze. On Rider, the divine quality of ethereal pop, like Madonna’s Ray of Light, is taken to its extreme; james K’s refracting, vortexing vocals are trancelike as they rapidly flicker.
This tunnelling whirlwind is escaped on the new wave-y On God, its Cure-like guitar riffage placing it as Friend’s most straightforward yet an immaculate emulation of indie rock at the dawn of chillwave. Here, the ethereality is anchored by rudimentary drumming and mellow guitar, alluding to off-kilter dreaminess.
The further one dives into these airy stylings, the more they pierce the subconscious, unveiling a whole-album reminiscence tied to a once-significant other. james K’s cadence is most like Dido in this regard, her levitating vocals sweetening such ponderings over her futuristic, metallic sound. Blinkmoth (July Mix) on its own is a monumental auditory homage to cyber aesthetics, and her words, marking a throughline of yearning, turn the tune into a phenomenal pop song: “Deep in heart to know when I say it enough that you’re all to me”.
Doom Bikini, even with its perky G-funk synth, is an earlier rendition of On God’s chillwave indiedom, where james K feels her love lingering despite the dissolved relationship: “There is some love that’s in me / I’ll remember all the times you lost me”. The mechanical, warping Peel is a laidback breather contrasted with james K solemnly penning that significant other’s disappearance, once a constant in a routine who’s now disappeared: “But I don’t see your car / Or I don’t see the light you were before”. Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream awakens with chirping cicadas, giving way to muted jungle beats, shimmering guitars, and glistening pads, until james K interpolates Bôa’s Duvet to fit her musings: “And you don’t seem to understand / A shame, you seemed an honest man”.
The stunning guitar-driven closer Collapse (falling forward blissfully all the time) responds to her dejection: “And if you asked me now / Would I be arms in the weight of your love?” Amid a shroud of incredible eclectic sounds in the final minute, a hope for new love is crystallised.
james K’s creates a wormhole to get lost in, while soothing the desire not to be alone. Through the foggy quiet storm she’s built, to find, in her own words: A kiss, a friend, a hand in hand, continuing until things disappear.
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