Girl Friday's debut EP Fashion Conman, released last summer, packed a lot into its four tracks. The L.A. based four-piece works as a collective, with all four members taking turns on lead vocals and sharing songwriting duties equally, so even the EP's poppiest song, lead single "Decoration/Currency," felt restless. They also made no attempt to obscure their influences (Hole, Placebo, Sonic Youth), so when the vocals switched up mid-song it felt like a sudden shift in gears. They were polished enough to sign to Hardly Art but still raw enough that they might have been playing in a UCLA dorm.
Today their announcing their first full-length, Androgynous Mary, a record that retains what made the band thrilling in the first place but leaps forward into more ambitious songwriting. They're also premiering lead single "Amber’s Knees: A Matter of Concern," a smart post-punk song that comes with a straight-up bizarre video of the band in Bret Michaels drag.
"'Amber’s Knees' came together lyrically from bits and pieces that we’d all written over a long period of time," Girl Friday wrote of the song in an email to The FADER. "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 green screen sea."
Watch the video for "Amber's Knees: A Matter of Concern" at the top of the page. Androgynous Mary is out August 21 via Hardly Art. Pre-order the album here.
Thumbnail photo: Al Kalyk c/o Hardly Art.