FRIENDSHIP : CAVEMAN WAKES UP

1. Salvage Title
2. Tree of Heaven
3. Betty Ford
4. Free Association
5. Hollow Skulls
6. Artex
7. Love Vape
8. Wildwood In January
9. Resident Evil
10. All Over The World
11. Fantasia

Label : Merge Records

Release Date : May 16, 2025

Length : 46:00

Review (Pitchfork) : In 2017, road crews working to remove a road sign in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, toppled the sign into traffic, causing lengthy backups—and inspiring an eyewitness report that has become a minor viral sensation over the years. One Philadelphia man, interviewed by a local CBS affiliate, looked up at the construction team’s flashes of light in the sky that night and, for a brief moment, saw the cosmos: “I thought it was a bunch of shooting stars,” he recalled, eyes wide. “I was making a bunch of wishes.” That moment could be a lyric from Caveman Wakes Up, the humbly exceptional fifth album from Philadelphia’s very own Friendship. Across the record, the four members of the group sketch a starry-eyed map of the city: “I have chilled on that stoop before,” frontman Dan Wriggins sings on “Tree of Heaven,” as if memorializing a former battleground: “Nothing is forgotten.” On a song called “Love Vape,” he spends half a verse romanticizing a gas station off Locust Street that has the “cheapest cigarettes on Earth.” On “All Over the World,” he looks up at the sun while stoned at his landscaping job and feels “the beating heart of God.” If you stay long enough in one place, Caveman Wakes Up suggests, you start to find warped profundity in the everyday. Friendship have spent the past decade finding cosmic meaning in the tangled metaphors of contemporary life. Over the course of the band’s discography, Wriggins has painstakingly examined aleatory minutiae, seeing the poetry in a ramekin of leftover jelly, a six-pack of beer on the porch, the resilience of a pestering housefly. Fleeting emotional truths erupt from his baritone delivery like ants scattering from an overturned rock. With each album, the band’s tweaks to the indie-folk canon have steadily grown more complex and self-assured, from the lonely thud of a drum machine on 2017’s Shock Out of Season to the stomp-clap rhythms and slow-burning melodies of their 2022 Merge debut Love the Stranger. All the while, the band members’ individual pursuits have somewhat retroactively rendered Friendship a dirtbag Americana supergroup. Guitarist Peter Gill fronts the prolific power-pop revival act 2nd Grade; percussionist Michael Cormier-O’Leary co-runs the Philadelphia label Dear Life and composes for the instrumental chamber-folk ensemble Hour; bassist Jon Samuels plays in 2nd Grade, co-runs Dear Life with Cormier-O’Leary, and is the touring guitarist for MJ Lenderman. Wriggins, meanwhile, spent the past few years splitting his time between odd jobs and writing his first book of poetry while pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop (“I woke up loving the sea. Enormous and full of garbage,” begins one typical entry). Caveman Wakes Up is a spit-shined culmination of the band’s collective powers, a ramshackle triumph that transforms gritted-teeth non sequiturs into unlikely anthems for the downwardly mobile. There’s a sense here, even more than on previous records, that Friendship are not in a rush: Despite having fewer tracks than its predecessor, Caveman Wakes Up stretches and takes its time time, basking in the glow of a deafeningly bluesy riff on “Tree of Heaven” and weaving a sighing violin and a synthesized chorus of angels into “Free Association.” Rather than siloing experimental passages into instrumentals, as on Love the Stranger, Caveman Wakes Up folds those flourishes into its fabric. B-side standout “Love Vape” opens with a psychedelic flute solo from folk musician Adelyn Strei before breaking into the grooviest bassline of the album (and perhaps the year). Set to a tambourine’s effervescent heartbeat, it’s perhaps the only song to rhyme “freaky” with “BP” that also makes you want to cut a rug. There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up. Wriggins isn’t afraid to sound straight-up ugly, bleating into the void on “Hollow Skulls” and letting his voice crack on “Wildwood in January.” The gravelly despair of Vic Chesnutt, who Wriggins has referenced as an inspiration in the past, is one obvious comparison: The opening vowel sounds on “Salvage Title,” stretched until they slowly take shape— “Ohh… ’02 Corolla”—recall the way Chesnutt toyed with expectations, letting the manifold meanings in his lyrics unfold with time. On “Free Association,” Wriggins’ voice evokes Bill Callahan’s poetic and patient monotone, somehow convincingly rhyming “work” with “work” as a saxophone slips into the background. Like frequent tourmate MJ Lenderman, Friendship often lace their songs with humor. But while Lenderman uses exaggerated escapism—a houseboat at the Himbodome, Lightning McQueen blacked out at full speed—to diffuse the pressures of adulthood and masculinity, Friendship strain that tension until you can’t help but laugh nervously. On “Hollow Skulls,” the song’s protagonist sips Raspberry Stoli from a tiki cup and tries not to lose his mind after the white noise of the radiator suddenly goes quiet. “Resident Evil” describes the indignity of living with roommates from the perspective of a paranoid observer, “shirts piled on a chair…smell of a stranger lurking in my house.” It all makes the payoff—the roar of Wriggins screaming, “Who’s that shithead in my living room, playing Resident Evil?!”—both funny and tragic. It’s the sound of a man losing his grip, the irony of the video game’s title underscoring the rage towards this new evil-in-residence. In the face of pacifying numbness, Caveman Wakes Up is, above all, a celebration of feeling too much: crying while watching a documentary about Betty Ford, burning with white-hot contempt for a new housemate, glimpsing the divine at work before the boss calls. Can we find love in the time of the Elf Bar? Does drinking beers after work, chilling on stoops, waiting for the bus, and filling out paperwork at the DMV add up to a meaningful existence? What if the rattle of the radiator is the only thing shielding us from the torment of our inner thoughts? On Caveman Wakes Up, Friendship zoom in on these small moments, making wishes on the ricocheting sparks on the side of the highway.