JAMES K - Friend

Labeling the music of Jamie Krasner, aka james K, is as tricky as it is pointless, since everything shifts depending on the moment: one minute you're catapulted onto a ski slope, maybe picturing a Super 8 reel suited to a Boards of Canada score ("Days Go By"), the next you're surfacing from a Cocteau Twins dream, reworked with a glazed, looping gaze not unlike that of the Japanese schoolgirls drawn like a young Miyazaki heroine who populate countless lo-fi and instrumental hip-hop tracks scattered across YouTube. Yet the New York electronic composer essentially belongs only to herself, and smiles whenever people ask her to play guitar, aping Avril Lavigne, as she recounts in an interview for Cult Classic.

"Friend" arrives after a long gestation. It took nearly two years to bring the thirteen songs of james K's fourth album into the world. An unusual wait by today's supersonic standards, but a necessary one. This time around, the American musician fully explores her enchanted world, defined by her unmistakable ethereal voice and an exquisitely graceful downtempo pace.

In short, there's never a beat out of place, a senseless rhythmic variation, or one shade too many. Tracks like "Doom Bikini" also explore the future of that thing called dream-pop, or rather the possible configurations of a genre and its potential crossbreeding with less raucous electronics, for a kind of IDM calibrated without ever forcing things, not even when it's time to revisit the Sandison brothers once again, as happens for instance on the more elusive "Idea.2".

The never-hidden love for the freak-folk scene emerges above all in Krasner's elf-like, spellbound way of singing. And then there are the ghosts of Seefeel's "Filter Dub" in the fluctuations of "N'Balmed", or once again a more disheveled Fraser on "Rider". The lyrics then tie together broken feelings and stories of true friendship, which james K conceives as "light to give to the fog". A clear message underlying the soul of a musically accomplished album. Even when the guitars and the fascination with a certain vintage indie-pop come to the fore more, as on ballads like "On God". And there's no shortage of glitch flourishes either, to remind us of Jamie's earlier past ("Peel").

"Friend" is an ubiquitous dream, in which the nostalgia for the 90s is obvious yet well-mannered. And the siren song, which couldn't care less about seducing you, nonetheless always delivers its damned allure. Movements like "Play" then give us the song that Grimes never wrote, perhaps because she was distracted by a universe that wasn't hers, or simply because she's "unable" to count to ten and let go.

One could go on for hours daydreaming between a memory and a hyperbole, getting swept up as the waves of undertow staged by Krasner roll on, heedless of time passing by. No small miracle.

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06/09/2025