Avery Friedman - “Photo Booth”
Photo provided by artist.
Brooklyn-based artist Avery Friedman has just released the dreamlike and fabulously disorientating shoegaze track, “Photo Booth.”
“Photo Booth” takes an exciting spin on the swirling shoegaze genre blending it smoothly with pop energy and throwing in a good measure of experimentalism. The heavy walls of reverb and distortion are still present but in a beautifully restrained fashion over the woozy tom heavy drum groove.
Avery Friedman segues into neon arpeggios, warping guitar texture, and electronic drum kits on this voyage of swaggering, mascara smudged mayhem. The result is something that leans into the 1990s American underground alt music scene, much in the same way as Blur’s self-titled album from 1997.
At the heart of this storm is the cool, nonchalant vocal of Avery Friedman. The performance is the most ‘pop’ aspect of the track, but it also feels completely weightless as the breathy tones unfold like a half-forgotten dream.
On the track Avery Friedman adds: “I wrote this song after a vibrant night out with my friends last winter – a night memorialized by many chaotic photo booth strips. Something about the novelty, containment and ephemerality of a photo booth just invites a sort of flirtatious mischief. This night out in particular felt like an encapsulation of spin-the-bottle-type ‘second adolescence’ that many queer people experience when coming into themselves after their adolescent years pass. This song really came into itself when we decentred my guitar, and surrendered to the more chaotic, pop-adjacent production it was asking for.”
Fabulously messy and slickly fractured, “Photo Booth” is taken from Avery Friedman’s debut album, New Thing, slated for release via Audio Antihero on April 18th. Preorder LP here.