First two EPs, then a cassette, now a piece of vinyl. That’s some journey but a worthy one, as Friendship are an immense and unholy proposition. Reductive, simplistic reasoning would suggest the crippling slow-mo of Corrupted meets the lumpen power violence of SU19b, but that would deny the weird chances the band take with form and structure: there’s something almost avant in the way things work themselves out, suggesting a spiritual kinship with acts like Endon, Zeni Geva and Legion Of Andromeda. Despite its pulverising nature, things actually wind up being ominously wonderful: the sense of gruelling, head-wrecked, psychic degradation as curiously purifying as a moment of sheer danger in which you momentarily glimpse the prospect of your own death.
