Friendly Fires - Dig Deeper

Friendly Fires end nearly a decade of waiting with Dig Deeper, their fourth album and first since 2019's Inflorescent.

The road back was not smooth. Ed Macfarlane and Edd Gibson have admitted to doubting what the band was even for, and the record was shaped by uncertainty and personal loss, including the deaths of two friends. Instead of retreating, they returned to the music that first lit them up, reconnecting with influences that run from Talking Heads and New Order to sun-bleached Balearic grooves.

Lead single Magnetic is about attraction as a force beyond anyone's control, and it moves with the kind of pulse the band built their name on. Lose All Your Friends, their first new music in years, opens the album, while Cuban Heels and Catherine Wheel sit further down an eleven-track running order that rarely loses sight of the dancefloor.

Macfarlane has called it some of the best music they have ever written, and the honesty underneath gives the euphoria real weight. These are songs made by people who nearly stopped, and decided not to.

Due in 2027, Dig Deeper is a welcome return from a band whose records have always sounded best with the volume up and the windows open.