“Old Friend” is a love letter to people looking over the edge penned by a person looking over the edge, or who has at least spent a good deal of time looking over it before. The edge of “what,” exactly? There’s the proverbial cliff, or perhaps more applicable to modernity, the roof ledge. But, holistically to the modern world at large, the edge is less a razor-line than an amorphous amalgam of youth, love, doubt, hope, disappointment, fear, exhaustion, beauty, trust, and once again, deep, all-encompassing love. What it means to grow up or at least grow older and see some ideas you thought you had about the world and the people in it fall away, and what that means, and how destabilizing that can be. How to step out of that years-lingering mushroom cloud.

“Old Friend” is the debut album from Hazel City, the brainchild of Clay Frankel, guitarist and vocalist of Chicago-based Twin Peaks. (This album also features some tasty upright bass from fellow Chicagoan Liam Kazar of “Shoes Too Tight” acclaim). Time has only made this capsule sweeter. When the album first dropped in June 2023, I came to it very happily entrenched in this-changes-everything romantic love, and found plenty of tender lines herein to feed my affliction like “Are you looking for a husband or just someone to get drunk with? What you want is never wrong. I could do both or either one. I could see us holding court at night or you holding our son.” Now, I revisit “Old Friend” in the early days of an equally life-changing breakup, and there are plenty more morsels waiting in these lines for me this time around – stuff I missed on the first pass, or more accurately, wasn’t ready or able to hear. Frankel’s record is a lyrical kneecapper, brutal in its simplicity and unflinching in its sincerity.

“Rain” (the opener) is the star track for me, followed closely by “Dirt.” The piano composition on “Rain” is jaunty and impressive, tones that make this gloomy ballad wildly poignant instead of weighing too one-note sad – and this is a sad, sad song. It opens with radio static and rain sounds, immediately evocative of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” and the singer is telling a similarly domestic story. He’s pacing from the living room to the kitchen to his young daughter’s bedroom waiting for his lover, late, to arrive back home. Our speaker is sadly, patiently, even a little worriedly waiting while, outside, it rains.

This album is unexpectedly orchestral in scrumptious pockets the listener doesn’t see coming – like “Snow,” an interlude that contemplatively heralds the next song (“Gorgeous”), not unlike “Behind the Wall of Sleep” into “N.I.B.” on “Black Sabbath” Black Sabbath. When it arrives, “Gorgeous” is cheerful but not naive. It doesn’t forsake a lively beat to lean self-indulgent or heavy-handed, but it’s still enough to break your heart. (“I knew that you were someone that I wanted to get to know, and now I know you, but I don’t know if you’ve done me any good.”)

No rest for the wicked! Next track “Really” rips in with another kneecapper, “What am I so dumb that I don’t know? Haven’t I been good and beautiful?” backed by dreamy effects keys from strawberry chimes to space bells. One song later, our singer lays the heater “No one remеmbers what we did. No one was еven looking. No one knows we almost made it. No one knows how close we were.” Holy shit! Ow! Not the Face!

“Rain 2” is clearly the answer to “Rain,” the cryptic counterpart of the earlier story-song sung by a piquant chorus of vocalists Emily Neale, Lillie West, Quinn Tsan, and Elizabeth Moen. But, in subtler ways, “Root” is the response to “Dirt.”

“Root” is a vote of encouragement to keep fighting the good fight – an intensely sincere, even desperate plea for loved ones to just try, try again. Its non-naive world weariness prevents this track from being gratingly optimistic. (If there’s one thing people on the edge historically respond well to, it’s a “Hang in there!” cat poster.) Instead, Frankel posits, “I know it’s hard they’ve saddled you up with a heavy heart, well ain’t that a weight we can share.” This is a track that recognizes that the world is fucked, and that at the end of the day the Everyman’s antidote to surviving it is just living the best you can from day to day, loving other people, and letting them know how deep and life-affirming that love really is. Frankel is speaking here about the type of love that is only earned after years of walking the rock beside a person – which might be where the album title “Old Friend” comes in. For the rest of us, “Old Friend” offers an answer to the sempiternal background question that takes on an especially tooth-shaking volume in eras such as ours: “What now?”

Written by Autumn Swiers