• News

• All

Mar 27, 2025 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Mamie Heldman

Brooklyn-based indie singer/songwriter Avery Friedman spent her young adulthood orbiting the music world but didn’t begin writing her own songs until 2023, following a moving live performance and a traumatic robbery. Friedman began turning to her guitar for release and catharsis, making her live debut last year alongside fellow indie acts h. Pruz, Dead Gowns, and Sister. Sister.’s James Chrisman also offered to produce her debut album with Felix Walworth (Florist / Told Slant) on drums and Ryan Cox on bass.

Her full-length debut, New Thing, is a work of raw singer/songwriter confessionalism, evoking the knotted melodies, homespun arrangements, and searing edges of musicians like Squirrel Flower, Babehoven, or Adrienne Lenker. As Freidman explains, “New Thing is a conduit for emotions too frenetic to hold on your own. This record is a collection of the first songs I’ve ever written, after many years of orbiting the music world but denying myself my own musicianship. Many of these tracks were born of anxiety—from my turning to a guitar to externalize (and organize) a sense of chaos that otherwise felt trapped inside me. We recorded the bulk of it with a live band as a means to maintain the raw energy at the center of the record. What results is a time capsule for a year of intense personal expansion in my life—and the layers of warmth, wonder, sensitivity, and sharpness that come with growing.”

The full album is due out on April 18th and Friedman has already shared a pair of new singles from the record, “Flowers Fell” and “Photo Booth.” Today, she shares the record’s title track, “New Thing,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“New Thing” moves forward with a steady percussive stomp, building upon its foundation of churning guitars with chiming harmonies and swirling effects. Friedman makes the track’s later moments feel like a dissociative blur, adding new layers to the winding chord progressions until it turns from a reflective meditation to an elliptical folk rock spiral. Meanwhile, the lyrics mirror these undercurrents of creeping anxiety. The initial traces of dread grow steadily more and more overwhelming as the track goes on: “It’s a little bit of a new thing / It’s a thing of the past / On the edge of my seat now / And there’s crack in my laugh / It’s a little bit of a new thing / I got shit to redirect / Little lace of black licorice / Pulling knots in my chest.”

“I wrote ‘New Thing’ in one sitting after riding the subway home alone at night for the first time since being mugged at knifepoint months prior,” Friedman says. “I was shocked and disoriented by the anxiety I experienced doing something so routine—I felt foreign to myself. It’s one of the first of my songs that I truly loved, which is part of why I chose it as the title of my upcoming record. I’m grateful for how this song continues to bring me back into my body.”

Check out the song below. New Thing is out everywhere on April 18th.