New Thing just starts. Just a voice, a few chords, and then a feeling that lingers longer than it should.
Avery Friedman’s debut is like reading Ocean Vuong by streetlight—half of it’s about what’s said, the rest is shaped by silence. There’s that same softness threaded through sharpness, a sense of someone figuring themselves out mid-sentence. But it has a soundtrack quality too, like Frances Ha! Perhaps not the dancing or wild declarations but the quieter in-between moments: couch surfing, wandering, rewriting your story in smudgy pencil and letting the lines blur.
Friedman didn’t chase a music career. She only began writing songs last year, in the emotional debris of a Brooklyn mugging that took away the comfort of walking off her worries through the city’s streets. “I needed a different way to get out of my head,” she explains, “and that’s what my guitar became.” The songs that emerged, some recorded in single takes with a loose-knit group of friends including Felix Walworth (Told Slant / Florist), aren’t polished statements. They’re glimpses. Moments of breath, nerves, and tenderness held up to the light.
Take ‘Flowers Fell’, a track born from a walk down Greene Avenue where spring blossoms had quietly vanished overnight. “The flowers fell off when I was asleep / But that’s okay, ’cause now it’s all green,” she sings, not to reassure us, but to convince herself. Her voice wavers like light caught in curtain folds, while a dusty guitar line shuffles alongside. It’s a song about learning to let go without knowing what comes next, delivered like a secret said out loud, then quickly taken back.
That quiet courage also ripples through the album’s namesake, ‘New Thing’, written after a solo subway ride reopened a trauma-shaped crack in the pavement. The track hums with unspoken tension, guitars swelling like sirens in the distance. “It’s a little hard to predict…” she murmurs, and the line hangs there, trembling like rising steam. There is fear, but it no longer obscures the view.
One of New Thing’s most affecting qualities is the way it gives equal space to fragility and euphoria. ‘Biking Standing’ captures the drift of sleepless bike rides and memory static, cast in the glow of an orange streetlamp. “Don’t you worry about me; I can sleep in my dreams,” she offers—half mantra, half deflection. ‘Photo Booth’ bursts in with limbs and laughter—queer joy lit by neon signs and bad decisions you don’t regret. “Truth-or-dare pupils / Thigh-to-thigh in black and white,” she sings, tracing moments that flicker and fizz with the giddiness of being seen. Friedman calls it “a spin-the-bottle-type second adolescence”—a reclaiming of those messy, tender rites of passage that sometimes arrive late. It’s the record’s brightest, most pop-leaning moment: a track that lets mischief and vulnerability dance in the open.
In contrast, ‘Finger Painting’ pulls the walls in close. Captured live, its intimacy borders on voyeuristic. A voice just inches from your ear feels too raw to ignore. It’s slow and tactile, a swirl of desire, nerves, and emotional textures that builds not to a climax, but to a full-body blush. ‘Somewhere to Go’ follows that arc downward, into the looping logic of a mind trying to reason its way out of feeling. Synths buzz beneath scattered thoughts, restlessness pulling against restraints. “What if I can’t say it? My futile proof,” she sings, a question still waiting for an answer. The repeated line, “Somewhere to go,” becomes less a hook than a vicious cycle, like pacing back and forth in your own mind.
Closing track ‘Nervous’ arrives like a deep, relief-bearing sigh after all the thinking. “I got a little nervous,” she admits, and the way she says it—calm, clear-headed, almost amused—feels like the gentlest kind of closure. Not because the fear has gone, but because she’s learned how to carry it differently. Like Squirrel Flower or Babehoven, Friedman reaches into the mess of human emotions and finds something luminous, if still delicately shaded by uncertainty.
If you’re after drama — big moments, everything underlined — New Thing might pass you by. Nothing here tries too hard. This isn’t a record about overcoming. It’s about carrying on. About staying soft, staying honest, even when it would be easier not to. Friedman lets the awkward bits show—those silences, stumbles, and spirals—and doesn’t rush to tidy them up. Like a photo booth strip tucked into a jacket pocket, New Thing stays close without making a scene, surfacing just when you’d forgotten it was ever there. Its sophistication is simple: circling emotion without trying to pin it down, finding meaning in what’s left unsaid. The sort of record that doesn’t insist on being heard, but ends up being remembered.
‘New Thing’ is released on 18th April via Audio Anti Hero
