Real Friends’ First Independent Album is “Too Sad,” and That’s Okay
As they spent the summer on the road with Sad Summer Fest, the band told Pleaser about what fans can expect from their upcoming album
Real Friends stands by calling themselves an emo band. As Pleaser caught up with the band in Philly at Sad Summer Fest — their first touring festival since Warped Tour — we talked about how bands in the alt/punk/pop-punk space define themselves today. While “emo” may have fallen slightly out of use for other bands they share lineups with, Real Friends is happy to keep the label — though the music they’re making today denies genre constraints or expectations.
The band has been through a lot that’s gotten them to the current stage of their career. In 2021, they announced the official addition of lead singer Cody Muraro, whose first full project with the band was their EP There’s Nothing Worse Than Too Late. This past summer, they set out on their first Sad Summer Fest, which was also Muraro’s first touring fest ever. And perhaps most significantly, they announced they’d be going independent from their label last year.
MURARO AT SAD SUMMER FEST IN ASBURY PARK, NJ. PHOTO BY HALEY MILNES
In the time since then, they’ve taken bigger musical risks than ever before. They announced their upcoming album Blue Hour with the release of “Waiting Room,” a song about loss and grief written by bassist Kyle Fasel. But this has set the tone for what’s to come from Real Friends’ next project; it may not sound like what they’ve made before, but that’s exactly the point.
Pleaser talked with Muraro and Fasel about how all these changes are manifesting in the next album, and the connection with their fans amidst it. Even more than a month out from the album which now arrives next week, they could feel the difference.
Pleaser: This is your first full album in six years. Can you talk a little bit about how it felt to make this album?
Cody Muraro: It was a very intense but exciting experience. There's obviously a lot of pressure being the first record with me and the first album in six years. But we really just wanted to make something that felt special to us, something that we were excited to listen to, and we spent two months in total in the studio writing and recording it. There were happy days, there were sad days.
Kyle Fasel: There were tears shed, mad and sad. And happy!
CM: It's a challenging process writing a record. You have everybody's different opinions in there and everything, but we're very, very happy with the final results. Every time that we had a song finished, being able to sit down and listen to it was always very rewarding.
It's such a great feeling when you bust your a*s and work really hard on a song, and all the stress and all that, and then you come out at the end of it and you have this song that you're really proud of.
KF: It was the first time that I felt like we made an actual album. Every other time we've made an album, it's been like, song, okay, next song, okay, song, next song. And you have these 10 to 12, three-minute songs, and then you just stack them on top of each other. Which, there's nothing wrong with that, but this time around I felt like we wrote certain songs and things that we were like, this isn't gonna be a single.
There's a song that has emo-y, pretty guitar with talking over it, because that feels cool. There's a song that’s two parts that's a minute long that just felt like when you listen to it, it feels like you actually kind of go on a journey. And it feels like it all just flows.
So I'm really proud of that, because I feel like that can be kind of a lost art form. But at the same time I think that it also is accessible for someone that's like, “I'm gonna listen to just the four or five singles.” It has that too, because I understand there's many people like that in today's day and age with listening to music and attention spans. But for the people that are like, “I want a Real Friends album,” it's 38 minutes of music and feels the ups and the downs. That's there for them as well. So that's the first time maybe ever that I could say that.
This was the first album you made since you went independent. How did that affect your process?
KF: Well, we had to pay for everything. That was the difference. [laughs] I mean, honestly, it felt the same. Even when we were on Pure Noise Records, we've been on Fearless Records in the past, I feel like the labels have always been kind of more hands off with us with kind of letting us do our thing.
More so it feels different because people are taking notice. So many people have mentioned it to me on this tour. There's just sort of this, I feel like almost more of an urge to support an independent band, which feels really cool because that's always kind of been the spirit of the band. Even when we were signed, we were very much still doing a lot of things on our own.
There was always talks over the last 10 years of “What if we did go do it on our own? How would it be?” What if this? What if that? So to be in the reality of it now feels really refreshing and new and just exciting.
FASEL AT SAD SUMMER FEST IN PHILADELPHIA, PA. PHOTO BY HALEY MILNES
The first few singles off the new album are very vulnerable. It's really hard to share that much yourself, but you said online that you've gotten so much meaningful response. Can you talk a little bit about having that emotional connection with your fans?
KF: The first single “Waiting Room” is about my dad passing away. And that was such a vulnerable thing, like you said. It's honestly something that maybe three or four years ago, I would be like, a Real Friends song about someone's close family member dying? Maybe not. And when we were actually writing the song, even [with] the producer we were with Andrew Wade, I said “Maybe we don't make it seem like it's about someone dying.” Like, maybe we touch around it. He's like, no, let's do it, let's go for it. Make a song about someone [who] died.
Because I thought, is it too sad? And breaking that wall down felt nice. We all were a little scared to release that song, because we're like, are people gonna hear it [and think] “It's a good song, but I'm good.”
But the emotional response to it, honestly, was something that I don't think a Real Friends song has ever had. People just talking about their loved ones and people [saying] “I thought about my mom from the song, and I haven't thought about her in a while, she passed 10 years ago.” It brings up this emotion. It proves to me [how] music is so powerful.
And you can forget that, especially us being in a band. Like, what time are we playing? How much merch do we sell? What are we posting on this? There's so many business things that we're involved in all the time. It's easy to forget something like that, where it's like, damn, we wrote a song that someone was like, “This made me think about someone that I dearly miss.” It kind of erases all that way.
CM: I feel like it's kind of a tagline for the record. “It's too sad” is kind of a theme. Too sad, but in a good way.
During Sad Summer Fest, you guys were playing some of the new songs at the merch booth if somebody asks. Have you done that a lot?
KF: We've been doing it quite a bit, and you don't really get that very much. You release a song and everyone loves it on the internet, [but] you don't see that real time reaction. There's been certain songs that literally only four or five people have heard from the album that are fans that I've shown.
If it's one person, and I'm standing there, I'll put on the other pair of headphones. I hear what they're listening to. And then you see the reaction to a certain line or something. You don't get that outside of this.
CM: Imagine if that was the only way you could release music. I'm just imagining a lineup of 100,000 people where you're just showing the new song one person at a time.
What part of the new album release are you looking forward to most?
CM: Just everything, because we've been sitting on it now for a couple of months. And you know, I listened to it religiously. Anytime people ask me “What are you listening to right now?” I always say my new record. It's good being able to be a musician and be able to be proud of the music that you've written and being able to be so proud of it.
Sometimes we ask ourselves, are we all crazy? Maybe we don't know yet because you don't get to share with anybody. So there's been times where we're like, maybe we're just all crazy. Like the five of us really like it, and maybe we'll release it and everyone else hates it.
KF: We were literally saying that in the studio. We got over a hump at one point, and we were like, “Okay, this record's great.” And then we're like, are we nuts?
CM: Yeah, maybe we're just absolutely insane and it's terrible music. But I mean, hey, at least we like it. So that's, I guess, the gratification. Being able to release music and see people connect with it as much as you connect with it is a really nice experience.
A big part of releasing new music is just being able to be like, “Here's this thing that means something to me. Hope it means something to you too.” And then having it have that effect is a really special thing, to be able to have that connection. At the end of the day, that's the main reason why music exists, right? To do that.
KF: There's so many things I can answer that with, but I will say the next single that we're releasing [in September]. It's the heaviest song we've ever released. So I'm really looking forward to that because everyone that I've shown it to has been kind of like, whoa, I wasn't expecting that. But I like it.
We've never really done that, especially with a single. Maybe when we wrote it, we weren't thinking this is going to be a single. And the more we were listening to the record, we're like, this is going to make people [think], “What? So weird.”
That's not the top answer, I could go on for hours. But I'm really looking forward to that—that song is called “Never Has Become Always.”
Were there any other big surprises while making the album? Anything you guys did or wrote that you didn't see coming for yourselves?
CM: We wrote a couple songs that didn't make it on the record that definitely surprised us.
KF: Yeah, I think there were surprises. Like Cody just mentioned, I think there were times that we did what we wanted to do with the song. So that's the thing, we said let's push ourselves, let's push ourselves. And a couple of songs that we ended up not using, I think were us pushing further than we wanted to go, or maybe not far enough.
But to be honest, there was probably about a week’s time that we were like, yeah, I don't know if this is gonna happen. Because we just kind of hit like a low, it was weird. But then, literally days later, boom, it all started to come together. So it very much was a journey for us.
CM: It's an interesting thing when you're trying to make something that you know will eventually be shared. Because you're obviously writing it for yourself, and you want to make yourself happy. But there's also that [feeling] like, is this any good? Are people gonna like this? There's always that doubt and having to sit on things for so long, that festers, especially when you're in the writing process.
KF: After being [at the studio] for a week or so, we kind of stopped posting on social media. I was like, let's get into this record. Trust yourself. Because we've done it where we're tiptoeing, like, I hope people like it. And it [was] like, give it up. Let's write what we want to write. We want to be heavier. Cool. Let's be heavier. We want to be sadder. Cool. Let's be sadder.
Going back to the two singles that were released so far, it's been awesome. So that feels good. And as a creative artist, and band, it makes you trust yourself. It's reassuring to be like, all right, yeah, do that. Next time we're in the studio and someone says, let's do something weird, [it] probably will be cool. Let's do it.
Real Friends’ album “Blue Hour” is set to release, Oct. 11. Their singles“When You Were Here,” “Waiting Room,” “Our Love Was Like a Sad Song,” and the most recent “Never Has Become Always” are out now. Support your local independent emo band!
