Firefriend has never been a band that uses psychedelia as escapism. The São Paulo group is more interested in distortion as a worldview, with noise as resistance. On Fuzz, their newest full-length, they take that ethos and burn it to the wick.
The new album is one of their loudest, densest, and most immediate statements yet. It’s a half-hour-plus of scorched guitar haze, narcotic rhythm, and defiant clarity.
The opener, “Spearhead,” arrives like a flashbang. A wall of blown-out guitar slams forward, along with some excellent work on the drums. Beneath the chaos, there’s the band’s steady, confident, almost casual pulse.
Firefriend understands something that many psych-rock bands miss: volume isn’t always the point. Their fuzz is elemental instead of ornamental. Like many shoegazers, the distortion in their songs feels like a heavy mist that trails you and eventually swallows you up.
Throughout the record, the band toggles between combativeness and trance. “Hologram” stretches into hypnotic territory, vocals dissolving into delay while bass and drums carve out a slow, muscular momentum.
“Kill Switch,” the shortest track, is a jolt of adrenaline, a reminder that punk and psych share more blood than history likes to admit.
What makes Fuzz compelling is the emotional spectrum hidden inside all that noise. When the band pulls back on tracks like “Most Natural Painkiller,” the haze becomes something unexpectedly warm, almost devotional.
But the record’s climax is “Apophis,” a slow-burn closer named after the asteroid projected to skim Earth in 2029. It’s like a soundtrack to the end of the world, or maybe a refusal to look away from it.
Fuzz is blistering, heavy, and defiant, yet weirdly hopeful. It suggests that noise can be cleansing and that sometimes the only way to cut through the static of modern life is to be louder than everything trying to drown you out.
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