Originally released in 2018 by Portland's Little Cloud Records, It slipped through the cracks, disappeared into the underground and slowly became one of those records whispered about by people who know exactly where to look. Copies became scarce. Prices went stupid. Discogs did what Discogs does. But Sulfur isn't simply a lost psych-rock record being dragged out of the vault because somebody noticed that old copies are expensive. There is something considerably more uncomfortable lurking beneath its surface and eight years after its original release ‘Sulfur’ is every bit as relevant as it was in 2018.
Firefriend have always understood psychedelia as more than a decorative filter to throw over a guitar. Their music comes from a particular worldview, one that looks pretty damn hard at the world we've built, the economic machinery grinding away underneath it, and the ecological and human wreckage being left in its wake. Capitalism burns through everything. Land. Labour. Resources. Attention. Time. And eventually, perhaps, us.
Firefriend's response isn't to write a pamphlet and stick it inside the sleeve. They turn up the amplifiers and let the noise do some of the talking. This is psychedelic music with its eyes open.
Coming out of São Paulo, Firefriend make music that feels like it has been dragged through the city after midnight with psych rock, shoegaze, noise, darkwave and electronics all feeding into one another until the distinctions start to become meaningless. There are riffs, grooves and melodies, but also a constant sense of pressure, something is happening outside the room, something is burning, and pretending otherwise isn't really an option.
The titles don't exactly offer much reassurance. 'Afterhours. Pacific Trash Vortex. Sulfur. Hello From The Children Of Planet Earth. Cosmic Background Radiation. Solipsism. Vintage Puzzle'. The Pacific Trash Vortex isn't some psychedelic invention. It's the real-world consequence of a system that produces endlessly and disposes endlessly. Sulfur is full of these little collisions between the cosmic and the catastrophic, outer space and environmental collapse, psychedelic escape and political reality.
And that is perhaps where Firefriend's music really hits. There is a temptation with psychedelic music to imagine that you're escaping the world. Firefriend seem more interested in staring at the world until it starts to dissolve. The guitars smear into the horizon. The electronics buzz like malfunctioning infrastructure. The rhythm section keeps the machinery moving. Voices emerge from the fog like transmissions from a planet that may already have received its final warning. And yet there is beauty in it. Because resistance doesn't necessarily have to sound like marching drums and shouted slogans. Sometimes it sounds like a band plugging in, turning everything up, and refusing to make the apocalypse sound comfortable.
A special tip of the hat, then, to Mike Nesbitt and Little Cloud Records, who had the good taste to put Sulfur on wax back in 2018. Independent labels are strange little organisms: somebody hears something they believe in, takes a punt, presses a few records and throws them into the world. Mike heard it first. Now Cardinal Fuzz (UK) and Feeding Tube Records (USA) are giving Sulfur another trip around the sun, finally bringing on vinyl and coinciding with Firefriend's UK tour in October.
Eight years on, the record doesn't sound like an artefact. If anything, it sounds more relevant, more uneasy and considerably more on fire. Perhaps that's the problem with good psychedelic records. You put them away for a few years and when you come back, you discover they've been quietly telling you what was coming.
The world is burning. Firefriend have the soundtrack.
