Ra Ra Riot – Friendly Neighbor

Indie-pop stalwarts Ra Ra Riot release a second new track following May’s “The Wish”: the darkly theatric “Friendly Neighbor,” available on streaming platforms today.

“Friendly Neighbor” took a long road to completion, having been worked and re-worked several times over the past decade and spanning writing and recording sessions for several albums — including 2016’s Need Your Light and 2019’s Superbloom. On one hand, its sound is a return to the group’s signature baroque-pop stylings associated with celebrated early records The Rhumb Line and The Orchard, featuring a lush and cinematic string arrangement supporting vocalist Wes Miles’s incomparably clear and emotionally resonant croon. But it also functions as a continuation of the band’s evolution through and beyond Superbloom, with its more adventurous production, subtly psychedelic leanings, and world-weary themes of alienation and atomization.

“I wrote the beginning of the lyrics one night while my neighbors were having a party,” explains Miles. “But it sort of more broadly turned into something about alienation, and how it feels like basic social interactions are breaking down because of the messed-up rewards of the internet. I felt like the walls we shared — it wouldn’t have mattered if they were three inches or three miles thick.”

Whereas the band’s previous single, the Rostam-co-written and produced “The Wish,” channeled the breezier finger-picking styles of Fairport Convention or The Band, “Friendly Neighbor” echoes the endearing creepiness of a late-70s Beach Boys album, featuring lyrics about clogged pipes and giant plastic lawn decorations that could be just as easily read as earnest as tongue-in-cheek. The protagonist grasps awkwardly at trying to reclaim a sense of human connection that may be more imagined or projected than real; whether his fantasies relate strictly to plumbing is left for the listener to decide.

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