Thoughts on &friends's "folx"

"[...] folk voices summoned from beyond the grave are made to sing new songs [...]"

I don’t know how to string this together into a coherent review, so I’m going to be posting my thoughts in a broken-up out-of-order series of observations that hopefully can at least approximate an explanation for what this thing is and why it's special.

1. There's a bizarre thematic tension pulling folx, full force, in dozen directions at once, but maybe most notable are the fact that a) it's a glitchy dance-pop album at its core (it has hooks for days, it's unironically hugely influenced by AJR, and it's the catchiest thing I've heard this year) and b) it's suffused with mourning. Almost every aspect seems to be adjacent to, pointing to, or otherwise connected with a kind of grief. Mark Fisher's death lurks over every facet of the work; Sophie samples pop up with the frequency of producer tags (I’d be hesitant to read too much into this, but the extensive sampling of her work alongside Can The Circle Be Unbroken does point strongly towards the emptiness left by her absence;) and obviously, JC's father is an implied presence throughout the whole thing. I’m hesitant to talk about this last point because it’s so personal and I don’t want to seem like I’m reviewing someone’s expression of grief, but knowing the context of the album with regards to JC’s father, as well as the constant quoting of Fisher's work, hangs a heavy presence of absence over the release which thrashes oddly against the tone of the albums genres.

2. In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is not an album about Anne Frank; her life and her story got woven into the album's free-associative dream logic along with a dozen other recurring symbols and motifs. But she does serve as a kind of thesis for the release, or at least an identifying, easily decipherable statement of its general ethos. ITAOTS is grapples with the idea that someone with as much inner beauty and spiritual strength as Anne can exist, and that millions like her do then and now, and that blind forces pave over them unthinking of the loss, alongside countless others, and both of these things coexist with utmost intensity, in both history, at the present, and within human nature itself. Folx references ITAOTS at least three times; borrowing Jeff Magnum's voice like a mask (on We Shall Overcome), sampling it (on Do I obey economic laws), and extensively semi-quoting Jeff on The death model, literally spelling out with almost comical bluntness the idea that I was writing this paragraph to point towards - [aeroplane : anne :: folx :: mark]. The album is not about him, but his ghost haunts it consistently. Aeroplane was about the universal concepts of beauty and tragedy that Anne's life and death represented to Jeff. Folx is about the concepts of alienation, loss, cultural lingering, and mourning that Mark Fisher's life and death represents now. I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it approximates the situation here.

3. I think part of the divisive reaction to folx is because it's either a masterpiece or it's a disaster to any given listener. (Oversimplification again, but one I’m making for a reason.) If you see the pieces being laid down here (and click with the vision they pull together,) it's an endlessly rewarding, deeply felt labyrinth, a rhizomic mesh laced with dance-pop hooks to make it easier to swallow. That said, it only works as a masterpiece - it doesn’t really work as just another album. In the context of a masterwork, its extravagance makes sense, otherwise its a perplexing trainwreck if you fall on that side of its reception. Essentially, it is a self-aware masterwork and actively aims for that status; I’m reminded of Octa Sheffner’s Lux in that regard.

4. There's a lot of discussion surrounding it, and one thing I'm surprised to hear no one bringing up is how emotional this is. I've cried to most tracks on here at least once, and some ("Both Sides Now," "Can the Circle Be Unbroken," etc.) get me all foggy-eyed basically every time. It's entirely possible this reflects on me more so than the release, but I don't think it does. This is a go-to crying album for me.

5. The lyrics are unlike anything else I've heard (even ignoring the strange method of generating them, which seemed to involve a kind of mad-lib title coming first, followed by writing a song vaguely adhering to the hyperspecific perspective it creates, while working in elements of the folk song the song takes its title from.) The dissonance in the lyrics is jarring and oddly disarming. It’s about work; almost all of the lyrics here are about various forms of labor. They're about fantastic creatures and monsters engaging in actions for specific ends with a striking disconnect between the entity on hand (and sometimes the unusual action they partake in,) and the utter mundanity with which it is presented. It's like seeing a griffon working retail, with no special attention or value or anything attributed to it. It just works here. (I’ve seen discussion about whether folx is furry-related or not, and that’s not a requirement but it's a pretty succinct summary of the situation here, taken to a cartoonish extreme: an internal world populated by every form imagination can conjure, an external world that's banal and to which the internal world has little to no relation.) The lyrics are also, frankly, distressing. Most of these fantastic creatures that populate its pieces of narrative are either exploiting others, mistreating themselves, or being exploited or mistreated by others, with no sense of malice or even cruelty, just as an affectless product of their job. It's deeply dysfunctional and surreal in its sad banality. This could be read as a thinly-veiled mirror of experience of many, especially in the digital age; people are freed to internally become these alien things and internally sprawl into all the vistas of human emotion and feeling and identity, but are just human all the same, supporting those above them and clambering all over those below because what the fuck else are they supposed to do under the circumstances they are in and are forced to operate within.

6. The juxtaposition of silly and heavy/tragic subject matter (out-of-context MLP voice lines selected and presented out of context to mirror Fisher's ideas [the loss of potential futures, capitalism-induced guilt], Sonic the Hedgehog as parallel to Nick Land, the aforementioned fantastic monsters and their bleak labor environments, etc.) is very carefully and (IMO) tastefully used. "Cute/silly"+"edgy/dark" is a time-tested (and largely exhausted) trope, but the tense superposition of emotional states invoked here, trapped between silly and joyful and often downright shitposty, and sincerely emotional and heart-felt (if not -broken), is more than the sum of its parts and forces you to engage with the album on its own territory and with its own logic. It looks like a fucking mess outside of that logi, whereas within it, the juxtapositions work exceptionally well. Neither negates the other. The year is 202x and you hang out with your friends and do things you find fun and whatever, and all the time you know there’s looming crisis points coming in an uncertain but probably single-digit number of years, and neither negates the other. 

7. This has nothing to do with anything else, but Take Me Home, Country Roads sounds like something from Garden of Delete by Oneohtrix Point Never. Hypergrunge isn’t dead, I guess.

8. The album's approach to cultural revivalism is clearly very carefully thought out and careful. It wears Mark's lamentations for a zombified culture on its sleeve, and yet constantly peruses the past for source material in a way that feels like a manic research project, drawing on each cultural pointer and weaving them into a network that sounds nothing like its source material. Most plunderphonics, sample-based works, or highly aestheticised 2020s cultural revivalist electronic albums, or basically any post-modern art that relies heavily on self-aware jabs at pre-existing culture, are equivalent to quilts in their patchwork approach. This is not derogatory, I love a lot of that stuff. I indulge in cultural pastiche often. That said, to extend the metaphor, this is a web, not a quilt. The ways it connects its gathered cultural pointers seems quantitatively different.

9. It's a violent, bitter, tongue-in-cheek, silly, maximalist celebration of what music can be and can make you feel, without losing sight of the sensation of slow collapse, stated or otherwise, that underscores the cultural strata all art now stems from. It's the first album produced in the 2020s that actually deals with what the decade is, and I feel confident in making a statement that bold. Maybe that's why it hit me so hard: it put into words the feelings saturating 2020s culture but which almost nobody is acknowledging or engaging with in any actual way.

10. There’s some Freudian concepts, I believe, about linking love and death, eros and thanatos, and the former being motivated or connected to the latter in a psychoanalytical sense. If you take the perspective that conventional love is connected with an awareness of individual death, this album seems to propose another kind of love which is connected with awareness of extinction. I have no real way to justify this, but I have a tendency to fixate on existential risk and folx seems to play with its emotional perspective in a way that seems related to that. (Maybe update or remove this part later.)

11. The usage of AI voices is very interesting and a tough thing to analyze. It's very tongue-in-cheek and self aware; JC and the others obviously have the skill to do all the vocals here, there's no need to put on dead (or living!) musician's voices like ghastly masks and they know it. If we're now going to be plunging into a zombified future of 90s revivals and 00s trends (and now the kids are romanticizing the 2010s in an increasingly tight loop of feedback and regurgitation) - if we're gonna be cosplaying our own recent past instead of attempting to project a meaningful future, we should deal with how ghastly that is. The discomfort of the AI voices is just what we're already doing, wearing recently dead culture's flayed skin; this just makes you actually face that fact. The voice cloned conversation with JC's "father" is a good thesis statement for their usage of voice cloning in the album: "I didn’t consent to this. You don’t have permission to use my voice. You’re talking to yourself." Shoving your words into Jeff Magnum's voice is a bizarre and offputting thing to do and friends& is acutely aware of this as they do it. It opens some questions worth considering about sampling and ownership, cultural recycling, our degree of identity with and living through the personalities of others. Vague parallels exist between the mostly public-domain folk songs the album is built around in which everyone owns them, and to what degree that extends to modern culture, and how far you can push that idea until it gets too uncanny-valley-ish. Nobody owns a folk song (at least until the influence of labels and big business, another major point here); in the current era, do you own your voice? Is it right to give up your "self" as artistic material to others, in the spirit of the folk-culture sharing of oral traditions? I don't think the main point the cloned voices are making is about AI itself (but that's definitely there - if this album has anything, it's layers,) and more so about cultural lingering (I want to say hauntology but I’m always worried I’m misusing that word,) and the degree to which past culture and media influences/infests current culture ("the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present,") in both pop culture and indie music. Pitchfork and /mu/ are obviously heavy influences in friends&, JC acknowledges both, and the (slow breakdown of the) interplay between art-makers and the surrounding magazines, websites, imageboards, subcultures, etc. [unfinished part] Whenever we listen to these canonized albums, they play though us; we project our own perspectives onto the singers, and put their words into our literal mouths. This is normal and the way we've been interacting with music since forever. The stolen voices used here are an opaque and provocative way of playing with this concept, one that vaguely gestures at an array of questions and avenues of discussion but without really providing answers. I can forgive engagement-bait when it comes from a place of good intentions.

12. Folx is horrifying, blissful, incredibly fun, silly, the highest-effort shitpost to date, obviously heartfelt, deeply distressing, and incredibly comforting. It's a patchwork with a million pieces I will spend the next year at least tracing over. Folx is a masterpiece and I don't expect literally anyone I know to like it. JC, he would be so proud. Thank you for this.

Final thoughts: this album is a bottomless pit.

Excerpt from something I forgot

"I pass over your letters and I wonder where you are. You left so little for me to remember you by, and I couldn't dream of how I would reach you now, where you might have gone to. I never went anywhere, if you wanted to find me. The idea that the hand that wrote these words still moves and lives somewhere out in the great wide world settles over me on nights like this, where the trees outside my window are still and spike into the darkening sky and I can't help but realize how everything seems to be illuminated only by the gradually fading light of those days gone by. I don't remember the last thing we talked about, or quite why you had to go. It always seemed to matter just as much to you as it did to me - I try to tell myself that what we shared must not have been quite so important to you as it seemed, but I remember how it felt, and how you held me, and I can neither explain nor forget it. I know all things must flicker out like the sunset giving into another winter night, but it feels like those days never ended, in some far-off sense, like those sunrays we felt and moments we shared burn on somehow. On nights like this, I can't do anything but flicker through the pages again and stare at them empty-eyed, whether its the actual papers or little echoes I still hear. I should go to bed."

Musings

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a vaguely defined cluster of largely online art scenes coagulated themselves out of the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem, defined by a post-internet (the term that I will be describing, however inaccurately, to this scene/phenomena as a whole) aesthetic sensibility, awareness of and active usage of both the cutting edge digital mediums then available, a deliberately oblique usage of older cultural artifacts, and a Tumblr- or blogosphere-centric nature. I would describe vaporwave, seapunk, witch house, bloghouse, some aspects of what has been retroactively termed “indie sleaze," early epic collage, and bubblegum bass as various facets of this general nebulous trend.

I’ve spent my entire life basking in the echoes of this subculture, poorly defined as it might be. In spite of its ostensible current nonexistence - its inherently archived nature as opposed to a living phenomena or a scene one can now live through - even its echoes carried more vitality and light than almost anything happening at present in the form of a coherent large-scale “scene.” I’ve spent my entire life talking to digital ghosts - uploads from 2010, the remnants of tumblr blogs and subcultures that no longer exist, every piece of art with an implied “last online X years ago” tagged onto the end.

It’s hard to miss the fact that, in an attempt to seem cutting edge via the usage of then-relevant technological visuals and references, so many of these art pieces accidentally fossilized themselves within 201x permanently like a spider in amber. Glass Popcorn rapping about Google Plus in 2012 was a then-relevant, tongue-in-cheek reference to something that was ubiquitous and hypermodern, something that related to nothing but the immediate present; it’s important to realize that the post-internet scene was, at the time, completely of its era. The symbiotic relationship between the music scene and the blogosphere substrate it grew from in real-time is essential here; for every song, album, and musical trend, you have to imagine a cluster of dozens of blogs posting about it, a real-time conversation being had across now-obsolete or buried social networks.

In the screen-recordings that make their way into these videos and cover arts, they are permanently burned into their respective year, almost identifiable down to the month based on the webpage layout or MacOS edition being used. What was supposed to look like "now," like the then-present, like the real-time experience of watching teenagers and modern artists on tumblr run circles around establish magazines and build their own, cooler pop culture continuum, now just looks like November 2010. It now looks like a memory, and the infectious, enthusiastic vibrance of it, the incredibly aliveness of it, is poignant even despite the fact that its obviously just echoes, and that much of the metatextual part of the whole subculture (the surrounding substrate of Tumblr and music board posts) are now either buried or gone. Obviously, all past-decade subcultures and scenes were lived through in the moment, but they were lived IRL, sufficiently separated in time as to not fall into the uncanny valley of semi-relevance that the post-internet scene (2009-2016?) does, which was lived URL, and thus we can wander through it's ruins (and arguably do, every day, given that its influence is so omnipresent now as to be almost banal.) It feels like it was built to linger.

"deleted, hope you got what you needed"

Pointless ramble

I'm by no means an expert on the topic (despite my efforts thus far,) but it seems like the recognizably furry artstyle evolved out of a mixture of mainstream western cartoon animals (Disney, mascots, etc.), 80s anime (imported and tape-traded in the CFO days, which led to heavy overlap in the early funny animal fandom and early American otaku community,) and underground comics (Fritz the Cat comes to mind as an obvious reference point, but I think there was bigger influence from lesser-known and less documented comics, the kind that ran in zines, were distributed hand-to-hand, etc.) (About that last point, when I went through the 1980s AD&D Dragon magazine scans, the fan-submitted artwork resembles early furry art styles a lot, and I think they were both stemming largely from the same source, that being amateur comics from young adult nerds.)

I’m even less well versed in kemono subcultures, but I think it’s safe to say that the continuous bleedover from modern anime aesthetics is why it looks the way it does (and has the same kind of unique manifestations, such as kemono utaus and v-tubers in more recent years.) (That latter example's a thing, right? I don’t keep up with this much.) It’s kinda like two branches on an evolutionary tree - the Western furry community was heavily influenced by 80s anime but hasn’t taken much anime/manga influence since (no doubt there’s some, but it’s fairly minimal. It’s essentially a closed-circuit culture that’s influenced mostly by itself until it stabilized in its current, very distinctive aesthetic that’s proven surprisingly resistant to change in the last 30 years.) The kemono culture is what would have happened if they never diverged and the influx of otaku influence just kept on going unabated in the decades since, with all the recent anime artstyles and surrounding culture having their influence. (I would quite like to know more about early kemono communities though, especially their influence or connection with western furry communities. Was there any, or was it just convergent evolution? I'd imagine there was some degree of both but I have no evidence here. ("source: dude trust me"))

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I think I just wanted to bring up Nagabe because while obviously rooted in kemono aesthetics, his style is very different and doesn’t look much like anything else really. I’m curious where he’s visually influenced by because it doesn’t look much like most kemono or furry art at all and resembles nothing quite as much as some 1910s western anthro art. I was going through old scans and got thrown for a loop because the lanky human proportions/realistic animal features and clean linework on some pieces really did look like his work to a surprising degree.

(Pointless ramble, might update into something with some degree of value if I come up with any non-inane observations on the topic.)

Musings

It’s such a minor thing that it’s probably not worth noting, but it’s interesting that the actual presence of AI/machine-generated media has carved a weird hole in language where phrases like “AI generated" used to be and where no terminology has really come in to take its place. In the descriptions of like, 2015-era PC Music (QT, Hannah Diamond, all that) "this sounds like if a computer made a song"/"robot attempting to process emotions and failing"-ish comments are quite common to try to communicate what those works felt like. What this meant and what they were trying to communicate (that it was a wonky, clinically precise distillation of human emotion that proceeds from some mathematically pure but alien understanding of it) was easily able to be communicated with these metaphors and terms. Now that computer/robotic terminology actually has a real-world presence, one that has nothing to do with the way in which those 2010s comments imagined it (instead of being precise, clean, mathematically sterile, it's defined by this faux-human mushiness that feels nothing like that at all,) looking back on them feels strange to say the least. There's no easy shorthand now for trying to say what those comments easily said; the cultural reference point has dropped out and disappeared (or been murdered by the new reality, basically.)

Inspired by alephnullification's post on Reflections.

Screenshots (2026/06/20)

Musings

I know I overestimate the value of some art and music, but I would much rather overvalue or read/misread too much beauty or meaning into things than undervalue or under-read, even if it is not exactly objectively justified. In a world in which I have access to such incredible art/music, I feel I have the right, if not the actual obligation, to overvalue rather than undervalue them, given that the perception/creation of beauty and meaning is to some degree a self-justifying end.