Album Review: Freidrich$ — We're A Long, Long Way From Home
Freidrich$ has been celebrated for his unpolished, minimal, often heart-wrenching R&B. But real R&B shares its DNA with rock music — because both are deeply rooted in blues and, to a lesser extent, in gospel. The two genres are like the ying and yang here — the mundane world with its troubles (blues) and the promise of hope, of God, of better life (gospel). So it was only logical when on We're A Long, Long Way From Home Freidrich$, constantly torn between heaven and hell, went in search of those roots, finding inspiration in cult rock figures. Jeff Buckley, Elton John, Neil Young, The Smiths, and Elliott Smith are all cited as influences and mentioned or quoted on the album. Each of them is a visionary and an outsider — much like Freidrich$ himself.
I'd add another famous outsider to this list. It's Burial, who maybe wasn't a conscious influence but whose sonic instinct is all over the record — hidden and scattered in its whispers, noises, textures and its general sense of flow. At least, this was the first name that came to my head when the album's opener Lil' Pieces started playing. Its hazy muffled pulse and Freidrich$'s muttered delivery instantly take you down a trip to memory lane. What's interesting, these might be memories of things that never happened, like a soul half-remembering its true essence in Platonic world of forms.
Freidrich$ pulls us down a road of ephemerality and proximity — two people in a car heading to the movies, aware that they're small in a big world and that they'll die. He's not nostalgic, he's in the moment — he even starts the song by claiming that he's "done being all up in his head". Yet everything is drowning in the sonic haze he's created, making us feel as if he's tapping into something older, something eternal. The imagery is archetypal: travel, companionship, the acceptance of mortality as the price of intimacy. It's the memory of a feeling rather than a feeling itself, a sense of what it means to be young and alive, terrified and willing all at once.
We'll die, sure — but we have today. On A Pause for a Day Freidrich$ looks around and notices: the colors, the textures, the way everything bleeds into everything else. There's something narcotic about the way this reality is turned into the track's equally hazy and blurry sound, or maybe feverish — like the world is being perceived through a sort of distorted lens during a heavy illness. When you know time is finite, the edges of things soften. Details become unbearably vivid, and they start dissolving. You're not remembering the moment as it happens; you're already half-forgetting it, already losing it, and that loss is what makes it beautiful. But in the moment you're free. It's cool how the artist's tag "Freidrich$!" sounds like "Free drift" in this context.
City Lights is memorable for its tender vocal and its sweet melody that wraps around you like waves. The sound design here mimics the muffled sound of waves and seagulls in the distance.
Freidrich$ sings about the way other people's desires and identities are branded on our skin and our memory often holds only what hurts. He looks down at the city lights and sings about his never-ending pain — but he sings about it like a lullaby. As if our human pain was coded in the lulling pulses of nature, like breathing, like the rhythm of the sea.
But maybe our pain is just our own? The city lights below aren't hostile; they're just light — a flow of particles. Beautiful, distant, and Freidrich$ sees them from far away, in the mountains, in the water, thus becoming an illusion of an illusion.
And when everything is just a flow of particles and we're surrounded by illusions reflecting illusions, everything becomes the same thing — like the Buddhists say — even pain and tenderness. You can be wounded and soft at once. And distance isn't coldness — it's a form of love, or at least acceptance. The song holds you like the sea does: it drowns and it carries you at the same time.
Hey, Girl simultaneously namechecks Nas and Jeff Buckley, which makes total sense in the context of the album wiping the line between leftfield rock and sensual R&B. The track glitches and stutters and finally almost falls to pieces, which calls to comparisons with other legendary 90s acts — electronica pioneers Oval and Autechre.
There's even more of the glitchy electronica influence on Soren. The production mirrors the troubled philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, the man in the title of this song — the way sounds skip and stutter, finding no resolution. The hook "I am Soren Kierkegaard / In the way I can't / Get over myself" also repeats like a loop that won't break, much like the beat's digital failure made into obsession. The second kinda-hook "Poor Regina" stammers four times, each repetition like a small crack in the surface, preventing you from moving forward.
The glitch isn't just a gimmick here; it's the sound of consciousness trapped inside itself, of a mind that keeps circling back, bumping against its own walls. You're listening to someone who can't escape their own echo chamber, and the production doesn't let you escape it either — it traps you there too, in the haze and stutter, until the only way out is up that hill at the end. The resolution cleverly comes after the 2:15 mark. The rest of the song sounds a bit like vaporwave or almost like warm, chill and peaceful New Age music.
This shift is crucial: Kierkegaard died at 42, never married Regina and never escaped the spiral of his own mind. But here, Freidrich$ lets the loop finally break. Through exhaustion, acceptance and through whatever peace comes when you've stopped fighting yourself and just... let go. "You don't have to understand it all just yet," the song says gently. One day you'll be standing on that hill. Looking down and finally still.
Tiny interpolates the Elton John classic Tiny Dancer, a sad yet overwhelmingly hopeful tune. The Freidrich$'s jam is deeply bitter, though. Continuing the narrative of the previous songs, the artist says "he only wants closure". And the song's ocean of sadness and bitterness does bring some of that feeling of closure: its lush pads and haunting vocal samples are warm and strangely comforting.
On God is also warm: but its warmth is creepy and haunted and its comfort is discomforting. Freidrich$ proudly proclaims he is in love, but his voice cuts through your brain with sorrow and pain he just can't hide. The way he repeats the hook "On God" sounds a bit like Drake, mirroring the Canadian's mix of bitterness, affection and machismo.
Echoes of this delivery are also present on Promised Land, playing against the backdrop of pulsating synth bleeps, pleasantly cheesy strings and even a brief injection of drum&bass, all borrowing from the 90s aesthetics, like many of the album tracks do in one way or the other.
Rock 'N' Roll sounds like it's being sung by someone so thoroughly wrecked, so completely spent, that they're about to dissolve into atoms. Freidrich$ sings of drowning out the world with accumulated pain — years of collected damage, all those painful sounds scraped together from being broken. Then comes the invocation of The Smiths, who once sung "Hang the DJ" as rage against the machinery of commercial music, against everything that tries to mediate authentic suffering into digestible content, much like Freidrich$ himself.
This isn't just rock 'n' roll or rock; there's a punk spirit running through the song, an aggression born from exhaustion so complete it becomes violent. The song is raw in a way that's impossible to ignore like a sore wound. It's the sound of someone who's stopped trying to be acceptable and just started screaming (not literally), and somehow that scream is more beautiful than a polished tune.
Follow lets the beat continue its dissolution, and the sound occupies the specific space between electronic, R&B and pop — the liminal zone that How to Dress Well, who is mentioned in the song, carved out. Tom Krell's project is all about tenderness inside fragmentation, beauty emerging from the gaps in the production, and you hear that same gentleness in Freidrich$'s delivery here. There's no aggression left; the quiet punk scream has given way to something equally quiet but subtler.
It comes into full bloom with the invocation of Jets to Brazil's "Sweet Avenue" — it is a band that knew how to make sadness feel like celebration and how catharsis doesn't have to sound like destruction. There's an almost festive quality to Follow, something hopeful emerging from all the accumulated wreckage. It's the kind of joy that only makes sense after you've truly fallen apart. You can feel Freidrich$ reaching for it too, testing the edge where sorrow tips over into a zone of relief, like the realization that you've survived the worst and now you're here. Alive.
Pop Song closes the album but, contrary to our expectations, doesn't resolve anything and actively sabotages itself — it's a pop song about wanting to write a pop song, but every impulse toward simplicity, mass appeal and adoration mentioned in the lyrics, gets strangled by intellectual self-awareness. Freidrich$ wants to be screamed for and his name remembered (don't forget the dollar sign). But he can't help himself. He's in the backseat of a sports car reciting Walt Whitman. Every stanza cuts like a papercut. He's read too much for his own good, and now he writes songs about reading books while reading books, which means he's writing about writing about reading, which means he's trapped in an infinite loop of self-reference.
This is postmodern collapse dressed up as ambition. The beat falls apart because Freidrich$ himself is falling apart — not from pain this time, but from the unbridgeable gap between what he wants (simple, pure adoration) and what he is (a mind too full of ghosts, too contaminated by literature and theory and self-awareness to ever be truly simple). "Every stanza is a papercut" might be his whole problem: he's too sharp, too precise, too much a product of his own education.
And the ending offers no mercy. "Don't we all want to be adored?" The album closes not with catharsis or acceptance, not with relief or even resignation. It closes with a question that has no answer, a door left open because the only alternative — closure — would mean there is nothing to more to say, write or sing about — and nothing to reference or self-reference.
And probably there is nothing. All the references, self-references, puns intended and slipped in by mistake, ghosts of rock-n-roll and half-forgotten 90s prophets, Elton John and Jeff Buckley, hazy synths and dirty digital guitars are not what I will remember when I reach for the play button again. What I will remember, though, are the masterfully written melodies, sudden shifts of mood, Freidrich$'s wounded voice and his wounded sincerity. Just music that I fucking love. That makes me feel something. I guess it was all worth the pain.
I'd add another famous outsider to this list. It's Burial, who maybe wasn't a conscious influence but whose sonic instinct is all over the record — hidden and scattered in its whispers, noises, textures and its general sense of flow. At least, this was the first name that came to my head when the album's opener Lil' Pieces started playing. Its hazy muffled pulse and Freidrich$'s muttered delivery instantly take you down a trip to memory lane. What's interesting, these might be memories of things that never happened, like a soul half-remembering its true essence in Platonic world of forms.
Freidrich$ pulls us down a road of ephemerality and proximity — two people in a car heading to the movies, aware that they're small in a big world and that they'll die. He's not nostalgic, he's in the moment — he even starts the song by claiming that he's "done being all up in his head". Yet everything is drowning in the sonic haze he's created, making us feel as if he's tapping into something older, something eternal. The imagery is archetypal: travel, companionship, the acceptance of mortality as the price of intimacy. It's the memory of a feeling rather than a feeling itself, a sense of what it means to be young and alive, terrified and willing all at once.
We'll die, sure — but we have today. On A Pause for a Day Freidrich$ looks around and notices: the colors, the textures, the way everything bleeds into everything else. There's something narcotic about the way this reality is turned into the track's equally hazy and blurry sound, or maybe feverish — like the world is being perceived through a sort of distorted lens during a heavy illness. When you know time is finite, the edges of things soften. Details become unbearably vivid, and they start dissolving. You're not remembering the moment as it happens; you're already half-forgetting it, already losing it, and that loss is what makes it beautiful. But in the moment you're free. It's cool how the artist's tag "Freidrich$!" sounds like "Free drift" in this context.
City Lights is memorable for its tender vocal and its sweet melody that wraps around you like waves. The sound design here mimics the muffled sound of waves and seagulls in the distance.
Freidrich$ sings about the way other people's desires and identities are branded on our skin and our memory often holds only what hurts. He looks down at the city lights and sings about his never-ending pain — but he sings about it like a lullaby. As if our human pain was coded in the lulling pulses of nature, like breathing, like the rhythm of the sea.
But maybe our pain is just our own? The city lights below aren't hostile; they're just light — a flow of particles. Beautiful, distant, and Freidrich$ sees them from far away, in the mountains, in the water, thus becoming an illusion of an illusion.
And when everything is just a flow of particles and we're surrounded by illusions reflecting illusions, everything becomes the same thing — like the Buddhists say — even pain and tenderness. You can be wounded and soft at once. And distance isn't coldness — it's a form of love, or at least acceptance. The song holds you like the sea does: it drowns and it carries you at the same time.
Hey, Girl simultaneously namechecks Nas and Jeff Buckley, which makes total sense in the context of the album wiping the line between leftfield rock and sensual R&B. The track glitches and stutters and finally almost falls to pieces, which calls to comparisons with other legendary 90s acts — electronica pioneers Oval and Autechre.
There's even more of the glitchy electronica influence on Soren. The production mirrors the troubled philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, the man in the title of this song — the way sounds skip and stutter, finding no resolution. The hook "I am Soren Kierkegaard / In the way I can't / Get over myself" also repeats like a loop that won't break, much like the beat's digital failure made into obsession. The second kinda-hook "Poor Regina" stammers four times, each repetition like a small crack in the surface, preventing you from moving forward.
The glitch isn't just a gimmick here; it's the sound of consciousness trapped inside itself, of a mind that keeps circling back, bumping against its own walls. You're listening to someone who can't escape their own echo chamber, and the production doesn't let you escape it either — it traps you there too, in the haze and stutter, until the only way out is up that hill at the end. The resolution cleverly comes after the 2:15 mark. The rest of the song sounds a bit like vaporwave or almost like warm, chill and peaceful New Age music.
This shift is crucial: Kierkegaard died at 42, never married Regina and never escaped the spiral of his own mind. But here, Freidrich$ lets the loop finally break. Through exhaustion, acceptance and through whatever peace comes when you've stopped fighting yourself and just... let go. "You don't have to understand it all just yet," the song says gently. One day you'll be standing on that hill. Looking down and finally still.
Tiny interpolates the Elton John classic Tiny Dancer, a sad yet overwhelmingly hopeful tune. The Freidrich$'s jam is deeply bitter, though. Continuing the narrative of the previous songs, the artist says "he only wants closure". And the song's ocean of sadness and bitterness does bring some of that feeling of closure: its lush pads and haunting vocal samples are warm and strangely comforting.
On God is also warm: but its warmth is creepy and haunted and its comfort is discomforting. Freidrich$ proudly proclaims he is in love, but his voice cuts through your brain with sorrow and pain he just can't hide. The way he repeats the hook "On God" sounds a bit like Drake, mirroring the Canadian's mix of bitterness, affection and machismo.
Echoes of this delivery are also present on Promised Land, playing against the backdrop of pulsating synth bleeps, pleasantly cheesy strings and even a brief injection of drum&bass, all borrowing from the 90s aesthetics, like many of the album tracks do in one way or the other.
Rock 'N' Roll sounds like it's being sung by someone so thoroughly wrecked, so completely spent, that they're about to dissolve into atoms. Freidrich$ sings of drowning out the world with accumulated pain — years of collected damage, all those painful sounds scraped together from being broken. Then comes the invocation of The Smiths, who once sung "Hang the DJ" as rage against the machinery of commercial music, against everything that tries to mediate authentic suffering into digestible content, much like Freidrich$ himself.
This isn't just rock 'n' roll or rock; there's a punk spirit running through the song, an aggression born from exhaustion so complete it becomes violent. The song is raw in a way that's impossible to ignore like a sore wound. It's the sound of someone who's stopped trying to be acceptable and just started screaming (not literally), and somehow that scream is more beautiful than a polished tune.
Follow lets the beat continue its dissolution, and the sound occupies the specific space between electronic, R&B and pop — the liminal zone that How to Dress Well, who is mentioned in the song, carved out. Tom Krell's project is all about tenderness inside fragmentation, beauty emerging from the gaps in the production, and you hear that same gentleness in Freidrich$'s delivery here. There's no aggression left; the quiet punk scream has given way to something equally quiet but subtler.
It comes into full bloom with the invocation of Jets to Brazil's "Sweet Avenue" — it is a band that knew how to make sadness feel like celebration and how catharsis doesn't have to sound like destruction. There's an almost festive quality to Follow, something hopeful emerging from all the accumulated wreckage. It's the kind of joy that only makes sense after you've truly fallen apart. You can feel Freidrich$ reaching for it too, testing the edge where sorrow tips over into a zone of relief, like the realization that you've survived the worst and now you're here. Alive.
Pop Song closes the album but, contrary to our expectations, doesn't resolve anything and actively sabotages itself — it's a pop song about wanting to write a pop song, but every impulse toward simplicity, mass appeal and adoration mentioned in the lyrics, gets strangled by intellectual self-awareness. Freidrich$ wants to be screamed for and his name remembered (don't forget the dollar sign). But he can't help himself. He's in the backseat of a sports car reciting Walt Whitman. Every stanza cuts like a papercut. He's read too much for his own good, and now he writes songs about reading books while reading books, which means he's writing about writing about reading, which means he's trapped in an infinite loop of self-reference.
This is postmodern collapse dressed up as ambition. The beat falls apart because Freidrich$ himself is falling apart — not from pain this time, but from the unbridgeable gap between what he wants (simple, pure adoration) and what he is (a mind too full of ghosts, too contaminated by literature and theory and self-awareness to ever be truly simple). "Every stanza is a papercut" might be his whole problem: he's too sharp, too precise, too much a product of his own education.
And the ending offers no mercy. "Don't we all want to be adored?" The album closes not with catharsis or acceptance, not with relief or even resignation. It closes with a question that has no answer, a door left open because the only alternative — closure — would mean there is nothing to more to say, write or sing about — and nothing to reference or self-reference.
And probably there is nothing. All the references, self-references, puns intended and slipped in by mistake, ghosts of rock-n-roll and half-forgotten 90s prophets, Elton John and Jeff Buckley, hazy synths and dirty digital guitars are not what I will remember when I reach for the play button again. What I will remember, though, are the masterfully written melodies, sudden shifts of mood, Freidrich$'s wounded voice and his wounded sincerity. Just music that I fucking love. That makes me feel something. I guess it was all worth the pain.