Outsideness is a project that pairs the insanely talented Freidrich$, whose album we recently reviewed, with the enigmatic singer and songwriter Azalias. Its debut album …From What? is eleven tracks of outsider R&B that sounds like it was made in a room full of supernatural presences – bearers of memories that won't stay buried, feelings that never got named, and questions that outlived the people who asked them – and somehow convinced every single one of them to sing.

That first song is the one that actually opens the album – "Remedy." A demo before it was anything else, a single question posed between two artists still figuring out whether this collaboration even made sense. The answer wasn't immediate – but something in the track's unresolved, tilted atmosphere convinced Freidrich$ it was worth pursuing (although Azalias was hesitant at first). And he was right.

Listening to it now, you understand both reactions. "Remedy" is smoky in a way that is almost literal – the kind of smoke that fills a room where ghosts from the past, present and future are all speaking at once. Both Freidrich$ and Azalias address figures who feel just as spectral as the atmosphere around them: the people they're singing to exist somewhere in the haze, present but never fully visible. Freidrich$ is the more upfront of the two – his voice carries the song's central confession ("I'm feeling sick / You could be my remedy") with a directness that wins you from the first words. Azalias dissolves further into the texture, her presence here less a statement than a feeling that lingers throughout the song.

What "Remedy" doesn't do is resolve. The story of the song doesn't close – instead, it opens a door into a strange, haunted world of the album and leaves it ajar. From the very first track, the invitation is to step inside and stay disoriented, in the best possible sense.

"Pretend" arrives and the temperature shifts. The arrangement carries you somewhere new: springy drums with the DNA of '80s disco in their bounce, layered against atmospheric synths and a section where the 808s take over and pull the floor out from under you. Everything moves, and nothing quite stays where you left it.

That instability runs through every layer. Azalias sings that life is like a race track, keep on running, never look back – and the arrangement takes her literally, propelling forward with an urgency that never fully explains itself. The world of "Pretend" is one where things are never quite what they seem, and her delivery embodies that perfectly: in any given moment she's all forward momentum and cold detachment, then warmth, then something almost flirtatious – shifting registers so fast it's dizzying in the best way. You can't get a read on her, and that's clearly deliberate.

Freidrich$'s lyrics do the same from the other direction. "Don't pretend you love me when you're just getting close to me to be seen" – the accusation is specific, but the hurt underneath it is shapeless, harder to locate. Someone is performing something here, and neither the song nor its protagonists seem entirely sure who.

"Crazy" opens on an acoustic guitar sample so good it stops you mid-listen. Just that, for a while – raw, unhurried, the kind of thing that makes you want to know where it came from. Then past the two-minute mark everything changes: a guitar melody surfaces, and Azalias begins to climb.

What follows is the album's most visceral moment. The kick goes straight-four, the bass hits like a train disappearing into the night, and Azalias stops navigating the song's emotional register and simply ignites it. Her wordless vocal moment is one of the most powerful things on …From What?. It has the quality of Susanne Sundfør on Röyksopp's "Running to the Sea": that rare kind of voice that doesn't ornament a track so much as become its reason for existing. Melody and feeling fused into something that bypasses language entirely.

"Different", with lyrics navigating the territory between plea and prayer, is the album's ballad, and it's the kind that feels like it shouldn't still exist in 2026 – the kind of song that calls up the great Motown lineage: Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye in the seventies, Lionel Richie in the eighties, Boyz II Men in the nineties. That tradition of writing about human failing with genuine tenderness rather than irony or detachment.

What keeps "Different" from being simply elegant is its structure, which, like the rest of the album, isn't linear. Small moments accumulate – a shift in tone here, a vocal aside there – and the track becomes a kind of maze. But unlike the album's more spectral corners, this maze has an exit. The light at the end is Azalias, who takes the song's final stretch and lifts it somewhere the lyrics alone couldn't reach.

Another song built around an acoustic guitar sample that hooks you immediately – "Poltergeist" might be the purest distillation of what Freidrich$ meant when he described the Outsideness sound as "off-kilter, yearning R&B". If "Remedy" posed the question, this is where the answer finally crystallizes.

Both vocalists sound rawer here than anywhere else on the record. Freidrich$ especially – there's less distance between him and the material, less production smoothing the edges. That exposure suits the song completely. "You're a poltergeist to me / You still scare me / I said you were floating over my bed / You looked one million years old / You felt cold" – these aren't lyrics that benefit from polish. They need exactly this kind of emotional nakedness to land, and they do.

The vulnerability isn't weakness – it's the track's whole emotional architecture. Someone reaching out ("hmu I ain't doing much") to a presence that has never quite left, that resurfaces without warning, that frightens precisely because it was once something real. The ghost here isn't metaphor so much as accurate description of how certain people stay with you long after they should be gone.

"Lovers" arrives with a lightness that's almost deceptive. Playful, easy on its feet – but there's weight underneath it from the start, the kind you feel before you can explain it.

Then past the one-minute mark the drums find a new gear. What was breezy becomes abrasive, and a distorted bass steps forward and takes over – deep, modern, the kind of low-end that sounds like it was made for exactly this moment in 2026. The vocals pull back slightly, sitting behind the bass rather than above it, and somehow that shift changes the whole emotional register of the song. The instrumentation stops accompanying and starts asserting.

The lyrics are where the false bottom reveals itself. On the surface this is a song about wanting love – but the desire here is mediated entirely through screens and stories. "I read about it in the stories / I watch it on TV" – the narrator isn't reaching toward a specific person so much as toward an idea of companionship assembled from borrowed images. "Would you be my lover / Would you be my friend / Would you die with me and at for me end?" The ask is enormous, almost absurdly so, and it lands with the particular sadness of someone who has confused the shape of a life with the life itself. "Maybe these happy people know something I don't know about yet" – that line alone carries more loneliness than most albums manage in their entirety.

This is a song that can shake any car. But the bass and the loneliness hit at exactly the same frequency.

"Thank U" makes a bold move. Dido's original exists in deep cultural memory – and then there's Eminem, who embedded it into something even larger, inescapable. To touch that song is to invite comparison at every level. Outsideness touches it anyway, and finds something neither version quite named: the undertow beneath the melody, the dark current that actually powers the whole ocean.

Because that's what "Thank U" is really about – an ocean of sadness, longing, depression. And somewhere inside it, barely visible, a faint thread of hope. It doesn't look like hope. It won't announce itself as hope. But it's there, and if you've ever been in that particular darkness you'll recognize it immediately. If you haven't, you might miss it entirely.

What makes this version devastating is precisely what it refuses to perform. Neither Freidrich$ nor Azalias is trying to sound skilled or composed here. There's no polish holding them at a safe distance from the material. They sound like someone who couldn't find the energy to get dressed this morning – which is exactly what the song is about, someone who barely made it out of bed. That specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. They inhabit it rather than interpret it, and the difference between those two things is everything.

That's what makes it extraordinary. Not the boldness of covering Dido. The courage of meaning it this completely.

"Country" sounds like something that happened in a dream – the kind that catches you off guard in the middle of the afternoon, hours later, when you're doing something else entirely. Acoustic guitar gestures toward roots music, toward something grounded and earthen, while the synths do what they've done throughout the album – hold the atmosphere, keep the air charged. But what defines this track above everything else is Azalias, whose harmonies run through the entire song without pause. She's a siren here: part-myth, part-presence, part-human. Like the country the song asks about – something you can feel but not quite locate.

"Touch Me" moves toward the most interesting place contemporary music has been exploring lately – that frozen, slowed semi-ambient zone that exists in the liminal space between emotional interiority and the total indifference of the world. The kind of sound Kelela has been pursuing in her most recent work, or what Pain Gain are doing to the Australian indie scene right now: music that insists feeling and atmosphere can occupy the same breath.

At some point the music disappears entirely. What's left is silence – not absence, but presence. Something breathing. Then a charged rhythm emerges from it, but the air inside that rhythm is the same air as the silence before it. And then it too begins to dissolve, reassembling itself slowly, on its own terms.

Two dreams in a row now. You're deep inside the album and losing track of where the music ends and sleep begins. Which means "Ends" has a lot to answer for.

What she did was simple yet unrepeatable. Her backing vocals wrap around Freidrich$'s phrases like rainbow halos around objects when you've taken psilocybin. It gives the track a warmth that no algorithm will ever replicate, no matter how far the technology goes. This is precisely where they break. Because Azalias' instinct and vocal presence are simply not reproducible – something Freidrich$ himself has noted, with a candor that says more about his artistic honesty than any press release could.

Before the track ignites, a guitar solo cuts through, adding grit and melody in equal measure – a last moment of controlled beauty before the straight-four kick arrives and everything opens up. That final stretch is a full Azalias showcase, and she delivers without effort, which is the most impressive kind of delivering there is.

Album closer "Ends" feels like the furthest point the Outsideness sound has been pushed – that outsider, deeply atmospheric R&B they've been crystallizing track by track, brought to its logical and emotional limit. The song could play on radio. But it might instead become something rarer: a cult artifact, the kind that finds its people slowly and then permanently. The early Weeknd mixtapes did exactly that – back when he too existed in shadow, faceless and enigmatic, before the world caught up. Azalias carries that same quality of deliberate obscurity. Some artists reveal themselves gradually because that's the only honest way to do it.

What we're witnessing, it seems, is the birth of a supernova. Two musical minds who bring out not just the best in each other but something neither could access alone – each one illuminating the other's brightest edges. They move through the album like the ghosts that populate their songs: present without announcing themselves, felt before they're understood. Like smoke filling your lungs and leaving with the depression it finds there. Like naming the demon out loud and watching it dissolve. And in the space it leaves – something that functions like hope, even if it doesn't look like it from the outside.

That's what …From What? ultimately is. Music wrested from real feeling, arriving when it's needed most. The names Freidrich$ and Azalias are ones worth remembering. The world will catch up eventually. It always does.