Old Friends

"Old Friends" is Pinegrove's thesis statement, and it works because Evan Stephens Hall writes about social failure with a precision most songwriters reserve for romance. The arrangement is deceptively plain — strummed acoustic guitar, a country-inflected electric line, drums that build from restraint to a full-band surge — but the structure keeps shifting under you, phrases arriving a beat early or late, refusing the comfortable four-bar grid. Hall sings in a conversational Jersey drawl that slides into a yelp when the feeling outruns the melody, the phrasing so speech-like it sounds improvised. The lyric turns on an ordinary catastrophe: running into someone at a party, realizing you've let people drift, learning a friend died and understanding you missed the chance to know them. The famous line about wanting to be everybody's best friend is delivered as both a wish and an indictment. Released in 2016, it became a generational text for people in their twenties watching their friendships thin out through pure neglect, and it seeded the emo-country hybrid that dominated the next several years of American indie. Best heard walking home from a gathering where you talked to everyone and connected with no one.