FEATURE: Spotlight: Friedberg — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Friedberg

_________

EVEN though…

they have not released new music since November, there are signs to suggest that Friedberg are going to have a big 2025. Their debut album, Hardcore Workout Queen, was released in November. I am familiar with Anna Friedberg, who I have covered in the capacity of a solo artist. As a band member, I was keen to check out Friedberg. They have some live dates coming up this year, including a spot at The Lexington on 5th March. I think that a lot more eyes will be on Friedberg as we head through the year. The band formed in 2019, though Hardcore Workout Queen is their first album, so many are highlighting them as a new band. Even if they have been on the scene for a while, this year is going to be a new stage. One where they will cover a lot of ground and release new music. I want to start out with this interview from House of Solo, where Anna Friedberg talked about the group and their then-upcoming debut album:

“Friedberg was formed in 2019 by Anna Friedberg. Could you share with us the story behind the band’s formation? What brought each of you together, and how did you discover your shared musical vision?

I had written a bunch of songs in Joshua Tree, and when I came back from the U.S., I spent some time in London. I didn’t know anyone there at the time, and I wanted to have a band to play those new tracks live with. A friend recommended Emily, the guitar player, and Emily lived with Laura, the drummer, at the time. I bumped into Cheryl, the bass player, in a bar in Lewisham, and one week later, we rehearsed those new songs for the first time and played a secret gig in a pub in London.

The band’s lineup consists of members from various locations, including London, Berlin, and Austria. How does this diversity influence the band’s creative process and sound?

I think traveling to different places and meeting new people has always been the biggest inspiration for the writing and sound of Friedberg.

Congratulations on the release of your new single, ‘My Best Friend’! Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the song and what it was like working with Dan Carey and the Nüesch Sisters on this project?

Sure. The song is about non-commitment in modern life that I seem to experience more and more. And I’m not a big fan, as you can probably tell from the lyrics. Working with Dan was amazing. I knew it was going to be amazing when I first walked into his studio. We just started to jam with two guitars and a cowbell, and half an hour later, we had written and recorded the first draft of the song. I like that Dan works very quickly and really knows how to capture the energy of that first moment when you write something. Because if you try to recreate that later on, it never really has that same vibe again.

‘My Best Friend’ explores themes of non-commitment in modern society. Could you elaborate on the message you’re conveying through this track?

I feel like in all aspects of life, people tend to commit to anything less and less. Be it a party, relationships, or a simple dinner appointment. I’ve especially experienced this in the U.K., and I’ve also learned that, ‘let’s have dinner at some point’ means ‘let’s never have dinner.’

The music video for ‘My Best Friend’ takes place in the London Underground during rush hour, which sounds like quite an experience! What was the creative process like for developing the concept of the video with the Nüesch Sisters?

When Kim Nüesch first told me about the initial idea of having a rammed Underground and us amidst the chaos trying to perform the song, I thought it was genius. I then suggested bringing in the cowbell theme again (as there’s no Friedberg music video without the cowbell). I especially love the moment when the cowbell falls to the floor and I’m looking for it, crawling between the legs of all the passengers. It was super fun to work with them. The whole video was basically created by all my best mates, so I couldn’t have wished for more.

The chemistry within a band is crucial for creating great music. How would you describe the dynamic between the members of Friedberg, both musically and personally?

I think personally, as well as musically, we are four completely different characters with completely different tastes, styles, and priorities, which is quite funny. Together we cover loads of different things, which makes it so good and fun.

Your debut album is set for release later this year. Can you give us any hints about what listeners can expect in terms of musical style and themes explored in the album?

Noooo, they should have a listen. I’m not going to say any more than that for now.

Your music has been described as having a distinctive sound that’s uniquely Friedberg. How do you approach experimentation and innovation while still staying true to your musical identity?

I’m trying not to think too much about what it should sound like, but just do whatever feels right for each song and have fun with it.

Friedberg has had some remarkable achievements, including having your single ‘Go Wild’ featured in FIFA 2020 and BBC’s Normal People. How do you feel about the reception your music has received from such diverse audiences?

Honestly, it has exceeded my expectations, especially that we got such a good response with only the second single. I couldn’t be happier about that.

Friedberg has garnered a significant following on social media platforms. How do you think platforms like Instagram and TikTok have impacted your music and the way you connect with your fans?

I don’t think it has influenced the music, but it has certainly influenced how you promote your music. Nowadays, as an artist, you not only have to make the art but also promote it yourself (or more or less). Social media has become a powerful tool for musicians to share their work and interact with their audience.

As a band that has already achieved success in Europe and is now making waves in the U.S., how do you see your music resonating with different audiences across various regions?

I have to say that the response we are getting in the U.S. is incredible and probably the most enthusiastic response we’ve ever received in live shows. So I would love to come back here for a headline show as soon as possible.

You’ve had the opportunity to perform at various festivals and venues across Europe and the U.S. Which performance stands out to you as particularly memorable, and why?

I think the tour with Hot Chip and the current U.S. tour as a whole were the most memorable shows so far. NYC, Chicago, and Montreal have always been amazing cities for Friedberg, but every show on this tour has been incredible.

What are your aspirations for Friedberg in the coming years, and is there anything you’re especially excited about in terms of future projects or collaborations?

I’m most excited to release our first album this year. And I’m always super excited about live shows. So yes, it should be a good year”.

Anna F. (is how she is referred to in interviews rather than Anna Friedberg) and Emily Linden talked to Guitar.com about the development of the band’s sound. The interview then went on to explore the use of cowbell in their music. Perhaps not the most obvious instrument, it was interesting what they said (“From there, things started to snowball. Emily notes that while she may be the guitar curator, Anna remains the cowbell curator. “We only started off with one cowbell, which is actually still with us,” says Anna, “and now we need a whole flight case just for cowbells! At our last rehearsal, we were extending some songs, and I was thinking, is this too much cowbell? But, then it’s like… can there ever be too much cowbell?”):

“Friedberg’s debut album has been a long time coming. Frontwoman Anna F. led a solo career in a different time, with a different sound – but after a roadtrip across California in 2017, she came back with a set of songs that called for a change in approach. “I had my solo career before that, but I didn’t really want to proceed with that because the new sound of these songs was so different. I thought, I want to have a band. I don’t want to be just ‘Anna F.’”

Upon her return she quickly assembled the lineup for Friedberg (named for Anna’s hometown in Austria) in London, and as she explains, the songs had clearly found their place. “We went to rehearsal, tried the new songs, and it sounded amazing. So the next thing was, just ‘let’s try a gig, just try it out, play a gig in some shitty pub’… well, it turned out it wasn’t actually shitty, it was nice in the end.”

Either way, the project was vindicated by the audience response. “We played Go Wild as the first song, and at the end of it, people were jumping up from the tables and cheering for us – I remember feeling at the time like, ‘oh my god, maybe something’s happening here’”, says Anna.

Following some singles, the band’s debut EP Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah arrived in 2021. But they’re now gearing up to release their first full-length, Hardcore Workout Queen. The album is an awesome collection of angular indie-rock, with propulsive, dancey drumbeats underpinning chaotic, sharp guitar lines. And that guitar-forward approach, for Anna, is something enabled by forming a band rather than keeping Friedberg as a solo project: “The songs just developed in a different direction. I still had a band with me before, two guitarists and so on – but it was a different kind of sound. It wasn’t as guitar-focused – the songs moved into that guitar-heavy direction.”

As for how to pin Friedberg down by genre? Well, Friedberg’s guitarist – and as we’ll discuss later, Anna’s ‘gear curator’ – Emily Linden explains: “It’s hard to say it’s one thing. On some of the new tunes, there’s quite a lot of synth stuff, but then live we have the setup of two guitars, bass, drums and many, many cowbells. And the live performance is different to the recordings, too – we extend things, we put in percussion breaks, and instrumental breaks too.”

“Also live it’s a lot heavier too, at least that’s what many people say after they see us live,” Anna adds. She laughs as she then recalls the last attempt at pinning Friedberg down to a set of standard genre markers: “The latest was ‘alternative rock with slices of dance punk’ – that was our latest attempt!”

PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Vorn

Gear Curation

When it comes to crafting the band’s live sound, the two guitarists take very different approaches. Emily takes the lead on the more expansive, synthy side of things. “When I first started playing live with Friedberg, the approach was that we didn’t want all the synths to come from a track. ‘If we can get it on guitar, then we get it on guitar’ – so I’ve got a good few pedals to make lots of different sounds, sometimes to replicate synths, sometimes to just add noise and so on. So I’ve got a Strymon BigSky that I use for lots of different reverbs. I’ve also got an EHX Mono Synth – we’ve used that on the record before, and then there’s a TC Electronic one with chorus and flanger in one, the SCF. So I play around with those for different synth sounds.

“And then for the guitar sounds, I’ve got a Cali76 compressor, and also a Fulltone OCD. I want to get rid of my OCD, really. Only because with the new songs we’ve dialled down the amount of distorted, crunchy rock tones. So I want to get something to replace that! I’m using the Spark booster set quite clean really to just give it a low-key crunch.”

Anna adds that she also has an OCD (“and I hate it too!”), but explains that her approach is a lot more straightforward, and basically consists of that OCD as an always-on drive. “I have so much to do on stage – I have to play a million cowbells at the same time, I’m singing, playing guitar and swapping between things. So I basically just have one setting that I use throughout the set.”

When it comes to amps, Emily is also clear on her preference for the analogue approach. “Because we play a lot of gigs in Germany and Austria and we’ve been to America a few times, I was always thinking that it’d be so much easier to fly with a Kemper – everything’s all set. But I just missed the analogue thing. You can become limitless with a digital board. The realms of possibility are massive. But… when you bring it down and you are limited, and trying to get as much as you can from what you’ve got – I love doing that.”

Anna concurs. “Yes, it’s always better, that limiting – there are so many options in these current times. Like everything – 10 oat milks and so on,” she adds, and laughs – “but there’s definitely more excitement, more potential for something unexpected to happen with the analogue stuff.”

Emily’s passion for her gear has clearly let her slide into a natural role within Friedberg, as Anna explains: “Emily is basically my pedal curator , because I’m not a geek about it at all – I’ve got a lot of other things on stage, so I’m always happy to hand that over to her!”

As for actual guitars, Anna has a similarly straightforward approach, in that she’s found her number one guitar and has stuck with it since. “I have a Duesenberg Starplayer – and I like the sound of it. I’ve had it for 10 years now, back in another time when I had another curator! I just asked, what guitar should I get? And he said this one, so I did – and I love the sound of it. Whenever I have to use another guitar live, if I break a string or something, the guitar lines don’t sound as good”.

I am going to move on to an interview from New Noise Magazine from last year. The most recent interviews I can find are from 2024. I think we will start to see some more as Friedberg head out on live dates. Get an update regarding their plans and what comes next for them:

“Hardcore Workout Queen has a pretty funny spin on living up to impossible standards, a concern that a lot of musicians will sing about more gravely. What sort of headspace were you and your bandmates in when you were making the record? Or were you caught in between two headspaces?

Anna: I started it on a road trip from the East to West Coast, following the path of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the other Beat poets. [Hardcore Workout Queen] ended up being a good album to listen to while you walk around the city, or drive around in a car, maybe along a coastline.

The humor helps me stay sane too. I’m actually super anxious most of the time, but I try to always tell myself ‘life is a game, life is a game’ and try to make it more fun for myself. I like to watch fun stuff where people don’t take themselves too seriously; that’s also where the video ideas came from.

Speaking of road trips, how does the touring experience change from Europe to America, as a European artist? There are spots like the petrol stations here that you’ve expressed a fondness for, whereas so many Americans will go to Europe and feel relieved not to see them everywhere.

Anna: Yeah, it’s great, it’s so insane. First of all, how big it is, how many different landscapes, how many different people…and then you’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s only petrol stations and you can’t get anything healthy to eat. It’s literally crazy. But also, I remember, once I fell asleep in the desert, and woke up and it was green everywhere. I find it inspiring to be on the move constantly, and just looking out the window and seeing all this craziness.

All the things you get to see between the big cities where we play the shows…I found crazy little cowboy cafes in the middle of nowhere. And then I’m like, “Okay, I have to go in there. Even if it’s a bit scary, I just have to see what’s inside.

You’ve cited British exports like Wolf Alice and Wet Leg as influences on the album, and that comes through not just on the lyrical front but in the instruments. What of those influences would you say came from your British bandmates in Cheryl, Emily, and Fifi, vs. being in a new place and hearing different artists on the airwaves?

Anna: How it always worked from the beginning…I wrote and even recorded most of the songs before I even met the girls. I brought the songs in and we worked on the live arrangements together.

So far, we haven’t really done lots of studio work together, but we always come up with all the crazy live arrangements, which are quite different to the recordings: much more energetic and heavy. We also do extended versions with long percussion breaks and stuff like that.

Given that you had the songs written before meeting the rest of the band, are there any songs where you look back on when you wrote it, and it’s taken on a new meaning from when you first envisioned it?

Anna: Some of the songs are brand new. But for some of the songs that are older, like “Hello” and “My Best Friend,” it was interesting because you never, ever normally get the opportunity to record something, and then play it live, and then record it again.

Usually you release a record and then you start touring it. And then you think “ah, fuck, it’s so much cooler now that we’ve played it live, it would be a good time to record it now.” But we actually did that with a few songs, because we didn’t release them yet. They were a few years old and we played them several times.

Most bands don’t have the opportunity that we did. We had that chance since we took such a long time with our record.

Yeah, that definitely comes across. In particular, I think the cowbell you guys use is such a great live instrument. It just has a way of getting people moving, a je ne sais quoi to it. A few studio tracks off HWQ sound like the cowbell was decided on after a great live take.

Anna: We tried also to do full takes of drums and bass together, not edited too much, just like jam sessions. I learned that from Dan Carey, who [produced and co-wrote] “My Best Friend.” He only works like that. He has the band do a full live take; even if there are mistakes, leave them in. Just get that energy on the record and do some additional stuff on top.

A couple closing questions. I know you don’t want to impose anything too preachy on the listener, but what do you hope people can take away from the record?

Anna: Hmmm…maybe that the record could be a safe space, for however long it is, to escape on a nice little trip where the world is a better, saner place. I dunno. Maybe that.

What’s next for the band? Having toured, and then released the album, is there another round of touring planned?

Anna: Yes, we’re already planning lots of shows for next year! I hope we will come back to the U.S. very soon, because we have some very hardcore fans who have our cowbells tattooed. Touring the U.S. might be my favorite thing so far. We’ve got an agent in the U.S. now, so I hope we can work it out.

My dream is to tour with LCD Soundsystem, but whose dream isn’t that?”.

I am going to end with a review for Hardcore Workout Queen. Crucial Rhythm spent some time with one of the best debut albums of last year. I think that they will go from strength to strength. A group that you will want to keep an eye out for. I am keen to see them perform this year. I might try and catch them in London. This is a band with a bright future:

“Alt-rock outfit Friedberg is back with their debut album, Hardcore Workout Queen, set for release on November 8, 2024, via Clouds Hill. With Hardcore Workout Queen, Friedberg steps boldly into the alt-rock scene with a spirited, genre-spanning debut album that celebrates imperfection, humour, and introspective road-trip anthems. Frontwoman Anna Friedberg and her bandmates—Emily Linden, Cheryl Pinero, and Fifi Dewey—have crafted a debut that feels both deeply personal and universally relatable, blending indie-rock, psychedelia, dance-punk, and pop hooks into a seamless journey that’s as much about self-discovery as it is about having a good time.

The album opens with the lengthy track, “100 Times,” a pulse-quickening track that sets the tone with driving rhythms and candid lyrics, inviting listeners into Friedberg’s world—a place where self-reflection is met with a wry sense of humour. The title track, “Hardcore Workout Queen,” epitomizes this balance. It’s simultaneously an homage to the driven “workout queens” and a cheeky anthem for those who'd rather cheer from the sidelines. With a solid bass line and dreamy production, Anna’s lyrics portray a playful rivalry between different lifestyles, embodying the album’s ethos of self-acceptance. This track in particular captures Friedberg’s skill in combining infectious, festival-ready energy with introspective themes.

“So Dope” offers a contrasting perspective by critiquing the shallow nature of social media, the perpetual “highlight reel” that many present online. The song’s upbeat melody plays against its critical lyrics, crafting a piece that’s as catchy as it is thought-provoking. Anna’s commentary on the pressure to display a flawless self feels refreshingly honest and introspective, balancing the album's high-energy tracks with a raw look at the pressures of modern life.

A couple of the album's earlier singles “Hello” and “My Best Friend” make their appearances as pillars of the band's debut album, showcasing Friedberg’s knack for creating catchy, memorable tunes. "My Best Friend," in particular, leans on humour with its music video—a playful take on magazine fitness covers where the band strikes ironic poses as “lazy” workout warriors. This satirical take reinforces the album's message of self-acceptance and staying true to oneself in a society obsessed with appearances.

The introspective journey continues with “Pull Me Off The Passing Line” and “Venice 142,” tracks that invite the listener to slow down and reflect. Anna describes Hardcore Workout Queen as a “road trip with no destination,” and these tracks amplify that feeling, creating the perfect soundtrack for a late-night drive or a conversation-filled road trip.

With production spanning studios from Berlin to Los Angeles, and sessions with renowned music producers like Dan Carey and Oli Bayston, Hardcore Workout Queen encapsulates a unique global sound that retains Friedberg’s signature European indie-rock sensibility. The result is a polished yet raw album that sounds equally at home in the studio and live on stage.

Friedberg’s Hardcore Workout Queen is a thoroughly enjoyable debut album that plays with the line between sincerity and irony, making it a perfect soundtrack for those who take life seriously without always taking themselves seriously. It's an album for the road, for endless conversations, and for embracing both the active and lazy sides of life”.

I shall wrap things up. If you art not aware of Friedberg, then make sure you check them out. A brilliant and incredible close-knit group (Anna Friedberg (writer, vocals, cowbell, guitar, and more cowbell), Emily Linden (guitar, vocals), Cheryl Pinero (bass, vocals) and Laura Williams (drums) that are producing music that stands out and marks them as an incredible proposition, I think they will stick together and put out phenomenal music…