Syko Friend - The Code (2022)

Syko Friend’s third LP, ‘The Code,’ wanders endless margins and endless centers, reveling in every sound, every feeling, every word. It balances the vastness of choice with the certainty of an individual path. This path belongs to Sophie Weil, the sole member of Syko Friend, who acknowledges this swing of extremes, this movement from the center to the edge: “I do want people to understand what’s going on,” she affirms, “but I know it’s weird.”

Weil plays guitar like it’s a faucet, the warm roundness of bathwater just a half-turn from a furious scalding, another full turn from the whole-body shiver of winter rain. Her foundation is a roaming kind of fingerpicking, the nimble, leave-only-footprints comfort of a regular hike. But Weil knows the switchbacks and undergrowth too, constricting the guitar into a staticky bludgeon, or clearing out all melody for the raw nerve glower of a single minor chord. It’s an exemplary kind of American Primitive guitar work, the quiet revelation of intensely personal, timely expression found through century-old folk and blues forms. Weil’s vocals–curious, fervent, dynamic and certain–fit perfectly with her playing. It’s the voice of an observer, of a listener. Many lifetimes are woven through this singing, slight modulations and lung-full bursts of sound revealing half-conversations, slight revelations, world-obliterating moments of connection.

‘The Code’ is the result of a year of recorded explorations, an unprecedented process in Syko Friend’s existence. Countless demos chipped each song into its best, most potent form. The songs are shorter and more direct than on past records, speaking to a purposeful, stripped down confidence that buoys each of these 11 songs. Working again with Evan Burrows and Robbie Cody, who recorded Syko Friend’s 2020 LP ‘Fontanelle,’ Weil credits the shared language developed between the three of them with nurturing this record that can run tense and fragile and massive and skeletal but never once runs false.

‘The Code’ is Syko Friend’s third LP, following 2014’s ‘Problem Child’ (Mind Rider) and 2020’s ‘Fontanelle’ (Post Present Medium). In addition to her work as Syko Friend, Sophie Weil is a writer; owner of the record label Dove Cove; and member of the band Pink Trash Can, whose debut LP was released in 2021 by Post Present Medium.