Montreal’s The Fake Friends Step Into Sleek New Wave On Advance Single “The Way She Goes”
Montreal’s The Fake Friends follow up their December single with “The Way She Goes,” a sharper, colder cut from their upcoming debut LP Let’s Not Overthink This, arriving January 16 on Stomp Records. Where the first single leaned into big guitars and anthemic punch, this one takes the new wave high road. It is taut, rhythmic, and slightly off-kilter, nodding to Pylon, Ultravox, and Wire while still keeping the band’s melodic instincts front and center. If “A Sucker Born Every Minute” was the wide swing, “The Way She Goes” is the needle, precise, twitchy, and built for late-night motion.
The track sits in the middle of the album’s emotional arc, where confidence starts to fray at the edges. Savage’s vocals land with a kind of weary certainty, circling lines about missteps, mixed signals, and the familiar pull of bad habits. “I’ve been living on the warpath, it’s just me, myself and I against me again” opens the door into the song’s world, a place where momentum covers up doubt and desire loops back on itself. By the time the refrain arrives, “I guess that’s the way she goes,” it feels less like resignation and more like a quiet understanding of the patterns you fall into, even when you see them coming.
Musically, “The Way She Goes” threads tension into every corner. Felix Crawford-Legault and Luca Santilli lock in on tight, interlocking guitars, leaving space for Brad Cooper-Graham’s keys to pulse underneath. Michael Kamps and drummer Michael Tomizzi keep everything snapping forward, giving the song a nervous confidence that hints at the city that shaped it. There is something distinctly Montreal here: the cold glow of neon, the restlessness of late nights, the sense that everything is happening just below the surface.
This second single broadens the picture of Let’s Not Overthink This, the first full-length with the band’s current six-piece lineup. The album was shaped across Montreal’s interconnected studio ecosystem, practice rooms, shared spaces, and sessions at Mixart with producer and engineer Jordan Barillaro, and that community-built feeling is baked into the new material. Where earlier releases showed the band’s punk roots, this record leans wider, pulling in dance-punk, post-wave, and sharper indie tones without losing their instinct for melody or momentum.