Song of the Day: Freedom Fry - Friends + Enemies

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJs think you should hear. Today’s featured song, featured on the Morning Show with John Richards, is “Friends + Enemies” by Freedom Fry from the 2013 self-released EP Friends + Enemies.

Freedom Fry - Friends + Enemies (MP3)

Although they're based in Los Angeles, Freedom Fry is comprised of New York City's Bruce Driscoll and Paris' Marie Seyrat, a pair that combine both of their home cities' sleekest musical traits. Trading off boy-girl vocals (and in Seyrat's case, language), the duo's music emits a vibrant, romantic vibe. Their latest EP, Friends + Enemies, finds the band trying on a variety of sonics that recall elements of some of New York and Paris' most influential bands, including smooth, electronic tinged atmospheres, circular, clinking dance rhythms, and chiming, upbeat guitars. Rolling with a DFA-style drum and bass pattern, "Friends + Enemies" squares Driscoll and Seyrat against one another to create a track filled with positive tension. "All of my friends are ghosts," declare the duo at the beginning of the song, before they proceed to twist the lyrical knife in, describing a series of masochistic relationships. Despite the song's darker themes, the accompanying music is danceable and even uplifting, but when Seyrat whispers, "Even if it was a lie/it was good", the duo shows that their strength lies in their potent and fascinating chemistry.

Freedom Fry's only announced show is at the Make Music Festival in Pasadena, California next month, but if they make the trip up the coast to the Pacific Northwest, those dates will be posted to their website and Facebook. For now, here's a video for their 2012 single, "Earthquake":