by Devon Chodzin (@bigugly)
Welcome Convinced Friend, the Providence-based indie rock project fronted by A.S. Wilson (Strange Bedfellows, Bad Hand), whose geographic fluctuations between Louisiana, New England, and Berlin have played a big role in shaping Convinced Friend’s twang-forward sound. The oilfield towns of Louisiana, with their distinctive cultural manifestations and religious preoccupations, remains at the forefront of Convinced Friend’s sound, partly reflecting Wilson’s own fascination with faith and place that makes the music of David Bazan and Jason Molina so timeless. Convinced Friend itself is a Quaker religious term, the colloquial term for convert, and Wilson spends much of his time intellectualizing persuasion.
Those preoccupations are made manifest on Convinced Friend’s self-titled debut album, out November 11th on Relief Map Records. The record’s first single, “White Collar,” is a blown-out folksy rock number narrating the new precarity of remote work. Wilson penned the track pre-pandemic; his predictions about how remote work would tax us and render us oddly prone to capital’s control reveals his prescience. The track is one of Convinced Friend’s loudest and most ardent, making it a fitting introduction to the fall’s newest can’t-miss band.