Special Friend releases new single & album

French-American duo Special Friend is back with a new single and an upcoming third album. Clipping is the album's title track. Built around a bright, repetitive guitar loop, the song unfolds with melodic guitar lines on top, carried by Guillaume’s assertive lead vocal and Erica’s airy harmonies. Midway through, a shift in tempo and atmosphere opens the track into a new space.

A song about the passing of time and what remains, its one-shot camcorder video continues the visual thread of “Breakfast,” paying tribute to The Pastels’ Crawl Babies.

Formed in Paris in 2018, the Franco-American duo Special Friend brings together Erica Ashleson (drums, vocals) and Guillaume Siracusa (guitar, vocals). The duo quickly laid the foundations for a minimalist, lo-fi project driven by a very direct approach to songwriting and recording, where spontaneity, naivety, and imperfection are fully embraced.

Following a self-titled EP, two albums (Ennemi Commun, 2021 / Wait Until The Flames Come Rushing In, 2023), and several tours across France and Europe, the duo now returns with a third studio album, Clipping—a record that is brighter, more ambitious, and more confident than their previous work.

This new LP is marked by the duo’s desire to move beyond the lo-fi framework of their early recordings toward something more produced, more arranged, and more carefully crafted in the studio, while still preserving the stripped-down roots of their music. Erica and Guillaume patiently prepared this new album through July 2025, spending long hours rehearsing in their Paris studio. The record was then recorded in the summer of 2025 at Studio Claudio by Alexis Fugain (Biche) and Margaux Bouchaudon (En Attendant Ana), in an isolated countryside setting conducive to full immersion. The twelve tracks that make up Clipping were later mixed in London by Syd Kemp (Thurston Moore, Ulrika Spacek, Caroline, Crack Cloud, Vanishing Twin, etc.).

This unprecedented attention to recording and mixing has infused Clipping with a new sense of scale and ambition. The sound is broader, clearer, and more fully realized than on the duo’s previous records. The compositions have gained considerable richness and variety, with forays into folk (Isolation), krautrock (OOO), and slowcore (Sanctuary, Mold), as well as more upbeat and driving tracks than in the past (Theoretical, Mustard, Breakfast). While the album clearly fits within the continuity of the duo’s earlier releases, it nevertheless stands as a new step forward and the culmination of several years of work, both in the studio and on stage.

Clipping will come out on March 20 2026 via Howlin' Banana, Skep Wax Records and Hidden Bay.