Released on the 5th September, as the last warmth of summer slips into colder nights, james K’s most recent album, Friend, feels perfectly timed. It carries the quiet melancholy of the season’s turn—painful in its softness, comforting in its sorrow. The record moves like a structure of pink vapour and velvet, music built from synth pads and reverb-drenched guitar layers that wraps around you like a room you don’t wanna leave. Across its 13 tracks, K reshapes her voice and electronics into something less jagged than the industrial shadows of Random Girl and PET, but no less intense—intimacy as a form of disorientation, softness that conceals an ache.
That tension between comfort and unease has always defined K’s work, and it explains why she’s remained such a vital figure in the underground. For over a decade, K has carved out a place in New York’s experimental scene by refusing to settle on a single approach, constantly pulling her sound in new directions. Since her 2013 debut Rum EP, she’s cultivated a catalogue that bends between worlds. PET leaned into warped, elastic pop structures, while Random Girl pushed further into industrial abrasion and experimental noise. Scorpio, released via AD 93, revealed yet another facet, a lullaby wrapped in trip-hop haze. What ties these shifts together isn’t a fixed style but a commitment to testing how far her voice and production can stretch, moving between intimacy and dissonance. Alongside her solo work, K’s spectral voice has woven through projects with Yves Tumor, LEYA, Moin, Drew McDowall and a constellation of artists tied to the New York’s experimental underground, where she remained a constant presence.
With Friend, K pushes into more vulnerable territory. The tracks are crafted with fragments of the past and present, holding onto nostalgia but refusing to leave it intact—emotions pressed until they harden into shape. K turns private intensity outward, not in a confessional sense but in a way that makes her solitude feel communal, turning raw sensation into something inhabitable. That approach extends to the way the record was made. Recorded between New York and Montreal with the likes of Special Guest DJ, Francis Latrielle, Ben Bondy, Patrick Holland, Hank Jackson and Adam Feingold, the album bears the touch of collaboration without ever losing its centre of gravity.
Opening track, “Days Go By”, immediately situates the album in a liminal zone. Its refrain “Watching the days go by and they go” isn’t delivered with despair but with calm, as though waiting itself could be a form of release. That sense of liminality carries into “Blinkmoth (July Mix)”, where words of loneliness and unrest are cushioned by production so soothing it feels almost nocturnal, such as the soundtrack to the hour when the day has dissolved and thoughts finally surface.
From there, the records drifts into a deeper haze. Midway through, tracks such as “Doom Bikini”, “Rider” and “On God”, take on the glow of shoegaze and dream pop—K’s vocals floating with Elizabeth Fraser-like ethereality above blurred guitar lines. “Rider”, in particular, feels devotional, almost sacred, a song made for lying down with eyes closed until breath and thought dissolve into atmosphere.
The haze is brought to life with “Play”, a bold turn into art pop inflected with atmospheric drum’n’bass. It begins with falsetto floating over gentle chords before snapping into breakbeats and distortion. The track balances sweetness with bite, fragile at the edges but carried with meticulous production, a clear expression of K’s hauntological dream pop—nostalgic and futuristic at once.
The most transcendent gesture comes with “Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream” which folds Bôa’s “Duvet”—the theme from the 1998 cult anime Serial Experiments Lain—into its centre. It’s played like a sèance, summoning a memory many listeners never lived yet somehow still recognise as their own.
Closing track “Collapse” fades the record out quietly, stripped down to hushed vocals and clean guitar—a skeletal arrangement that lets the weight of memory land without ornament. It’s a gentle fade, easing the listener out of her world and back into daylight, the pink haze lingering only as afterglow.
When listened to as a whole, Friend moves like a single current—fragile, heavy, devotional and, at times, uncanny. It’s an album of “melancholic ecstasy”, where catharsis isn’t chased and vulnerability is left to hang in the air. The production folds trip-hop, shoegaze, dream pop, electronic and club frameworks into one language. Layered guitars blur into synths, beats dissolve into ambience, and her voice drifts like another layer in the atmosphere. In its blurred contours you catch echoes of Cocteau Twins, while its more restless electronic turns nod toward Aphex Twin, influences that register clearly but sit in perfect harmony within her own world.
What lingers most is the record’s hauntological pull. These songs stir up a nostalgia for memories that aren’t quite yours, feelings surfacing like echoes from another room or fragments of a dream. Sometimes it’s the shimmer of a high frequency cutting through the haze, sometimes a bassline tugging downward, but always in service of that fragile core. Friend shows how pain and memory intertwine, how melodies can cradle the weight of loss until it feels almost safe to carry. In the end, what this record makes clear is that fragility isn’t something to escape, but the thread that connect us—we are all delicate, and that’s the quiet beauty of being human.