Freidrich$ was one of the few artists I discovered for myself over the past two years. I like his unconventional approach to creativity – a stubborn unwillingness to stay in one genre longer than needed to squeeze everything interesting out of it and move on. That’s why his new album “I Came Across” wasn’t a surprise for me, but a logical continuation of a conversation he’s been having with himself (and with us) for quite a while now.

After “We’re A Long”, “Long Way From Home” – albums where he played at being a rock musician without really being one – it seemed like he could move in any direction next. And he moved to the place you’d least expect to find him: folk. But not the textbook, campfire folk from the picture, but his strange, bare-bones version of it. If Freidrich’s music used to hide behind layers of noise and hip-hop instincts, here there’s simply nowhere to hide. The album is largely acoustic. The obvious influences are recognizable right away: NickDrake, ElliottSmith, ConorOberst. However,Freidrich, with his characteristic creativity, takes the shape of the genre and populates it with his own aesthetic: slightly shifted, slightly uncomfortable, as if the songs were written against all the rules. We’re offered nine new songs, on which Freidrich$ comes across as a decent storyteller. Previously, his stories always carried a sense of irony, a light distance from his own material. Here that distance is smoothed over, and that’s why the album makes a stronger impression than one might expect. There’s a lot of space in the songs: sometimes there’s no clear beat, let alone a predictable structure. So the album feels more like an audiobook, just with light percussion and Freidrich$ as the reader.

The album opens with “Haute Tension” – a smooth, weightless melody intertwined with a touching vocal. The tension the title speaks of is hidden in the pauses. Freidrich$ holds a single note for a long time before letting it go. In my view, this is a kind of statement: what follows will be quiet, but not calm. Out of that state of mild unease, “Ocean Roar” carries you off into open water – and here you can already see how the whole construction of the album works. The recurring guitar figure mimics the roll of a wave: the same line keeps returning, each time colored slightly differently by the voice. The melody is memorable, and the vocal on this piece is, perhaps, the best on the album: Freidrich$ sings as if he himself is surprised by where the current is taking him.

The theme of escaping external noise is explored in “Escape” – a track whose vulnerability rests on the pause between words. The song’s structure seems recognizable enough: verse, pre-chorus, something resembling a chorus – but it keeps threatening to slip sideways, as if the author himself isn’t entirely sure where the melody should lead. Right after it comes “Alissa with an ‘I,’ Pt. 3” – a slow acoustic track with the rough edges that unmistakably mark it as Freidrich$. The title, with its part number, I think hints at a story we’re catching in the middle – and that works for the album as a whole: the listener feels like an accidental witness to someone else’s conversation. Pt. 3 comes across as an epilogue – measured in tempo and deep in meaning.

The center of the album lights up with “Radiant.” It rests more on atmosphere than on melodic line. The minimalist arrangement works like a lens: stripping away everything unnecessary, it makes Freidrich$’s tremulous voice shine in its tonalities. It’s the moment on the album where the light isn’t clouded by irony or unease. That light quickly gives way to the elegiac mood of “Last Days” – a farewell song in which the directness of delivery borders on poetic austerity. The instrumental sections leave a lot of space for the voice and add melancholy to the album’s mood. It’s another piece in which you can hear the Freidrich$ I first got to know through his music.

“Fine” carries a small irony in its title, because “fine” here sounds less like an actual state and more like a way of holding oneself together. The imperfection of the sound isn’t hidden, the structures behave strangely, and traditional songwriting is constantly interrupted by choices that feel slightly out of place. “Hider” continues that strangeness: the track seems to hide from itself, changing direction right at the moment you start to guess where it’s going. And that swerve turns out to be the most interesting part of the song. The album closes with “Fireflies” – fireflies as an image chosen precisely: brief, flickering, elusive. The ending closes the album out by letting the silence speak for itself – and in that gesture lies, perhaps, Freidrich$’s whole method: not to explain, but to let you finish listening for yourself.

It’s easy to write about Freidrich$’s music, and hard – to pin down in words what it actually does. After a first listen, nothing specific tends to stand out from his albums: no single line, no hook. But he creates atmosphere masterfully, and on “I Came Across” that’s joined by an enviable attentiveness to detail. It’s an elegant attempt to find out how little music actually needs in order to become a world of its own. And having listened to the album all the way through, you understand: that world was exactly as big as it needed to be.

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