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The profile · researched 7 October 2026
Two EPs made in a bedroom: Friends of Friends and the long apprenticeship of the support slot
The Gold Coast three-piece have spent 2025 and 2026 opening for larger alternative acts on the strength of two EPs that Barnaby Baker recorded, mixed and mastered himself at home. The four dates currently listed under their name in Sydney, though, belong to a club night rather than the band.
A lineup settled in 2022
Friends of Friends come from the Gold Coast, the stretch of Queensland coast whose reputation for surface and spectacle Barnaby Baker has said works in a young band's favour: the region is widely assumed to be artificial, so the musicians who emerge from it tend to push hard in the other direction. The group came together through mutual acquaintances, which is where the name comes from — Baker has described it as a mission statement about keeping the thing open and communal rather than a joke about who knows whom.
The lineup was finalised in 2022 and has stayed a three-piece: Baker on lead vocals and production, Frank Christian covering multiple instruments, Morgan Blake on drums. Baker produces everything, and the tool he credits is GarageBand, which he has called "this weird mix of therapy and obsession" — a way of turning a bad week into a song structure rather than a journal entry. The visual side runs on the same logic, with the band using Blender to build their own artwork and videos instead of commissioning them.
Their own shorthand, filed on triple j Unearthed, is "Porter Robinson and Radiohead stuck in the trainspotting cubicle", which gets at the collision in the records between electronic texture and guitar noise. Triple j's own verdict was shorter: "great, lethal modern rock". The station's Unearthed profile lists them under indie, rock and pop, and the band's Bandcamp tags run alternative, alternative rock, indie and indie rock — a spread that reflects how little the three records agree with one another.
Real Life, Right Now
The debut EP, Real Life, Right Now, arrived in 2024 and was launched on 26 July that year at The Valley Loft in Brisbane, an underground room holding around a hundred people, with Brisbane's Space&Ages and Sydney's EGOISM on the bill. Reviewers at the time picked out End of the World, Graves, Scared to be Alone and Wolfgang, and noted that the set also made room for covers of U2 and Taylor Swift — a pairing that says more about the band's actual influences than any press description has managed.
What the EP established was the writing method rather than a genre. Its lyrics were drawn from the band's own diaries, and the appeal for early listeners was that nothing had been sanded down: the vocals stay raw where a studio would have asked for another take. Graves went up on triple j Unearthed on 8 July 2024 and is still one of the three tracks the station holds for them.
That first record also set the economics. There was no studio, no producer and no label in the chain, so the band's costs were time and a laptop, and the ceiling on how often they could release was their own patience.
Synthetic Flower Chainsaw
The second EP was built in public across 2025. Attention came first, released on 24 May 2025 after going up on Unearthed on the 19th, with a lyric video assembled entirely from screenshots — Reddit threads, YouTube pages, news articles, the band's own photographs. Baker described the song as a response to scrolling past one atrocity after another and then wanting a bit of attention for himself anyway: "furious, disillusioned, ironic, a bit fun-poking and hyper-aware", and explicitly not a sad song. I Like Ya followed in August 2025, picked up by Kerrang!, which ran the band alongside names like Turnstile and Neck Deep.
Skin was the lead single for the EP proper, and the one Baker has talked about most plainly: "It started as a love song, but what it really became was about feeling trapped in your own body, your own head." Synthetic Flower Chainsaw was released on 24 October 2025, five tracks running a little over twelve minutes — Skin, I Like Ya, Happier, the title track, Attention — with every stage of it, tracking through to mastering, done by Baker in bedroom spaces.
By the time the EP landed the band had passed 1.1 million Spotify streams on earlier releases and had play from triple j, BBC Radio 1 and Kerrang!. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park had been at one of their Brisbane showcases and spoke well of them afterwards, which is the sort of endorsement that moves a band up a support list faster than radio does.
The support-slot apprenticeship
Almost all of the band's touring to date has been as an opener, and the list is long for a group with two EPs: Kasabian, Sea Girls, The Reytons, Slowly Slowly and Short Stack, the last of those a sold-out Tivoli show marking an album anniversary. They have played Spilt Milk, BIGSOUND, SXSW Sydney and Easy Lover, and shared festival bills with Post Malone and The Wombats. In October 2025 they ran a headline tour of their own, which Baker had trailed as the point where the visual side would get its own budget of effort.
The highest-profile slot came on 9 December 2025, when they were the sole support for All Time Low at The Tivoli on the Gold Coast, the one non-festival Australian date on that band's Everyone's Talking! world tour — the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane shows either side of it were Good Things festival appearances.
Baker has been direct about what the support circuit actually taught them, and it is not songwriting. Touring with larger acts taught professionalism and efficiency: arrive prepared, keep the setup streamlined, get on and off without costing the headliner a minute. For a three-piece with a laptop-heavy show, that discipline is the difference between being asked back and not.
Where things stand in October 2026
The most recent documented show is the Brisbane stop of Enter Shikari's Australian tour with grandson in May 2026, where Friends of Friends opened at The Tivoli. The review that came out of it is useful because it is unsentimental: a cheer went up as the three-piece took the stage, they had "a devout bunch of fans in the crowd", the sound was "tight, crisp indi-pop-punk" and the set was "polished" — but the stage presence read "a little bit green" against the two more experienced acts that followed. That is a fair summary of where the band sits: the material and the playing are ready, the command of a room that size is still being built.
One caveat matters for anyone tracking their dates. The four dates listed under the name Friends of Friends at present are Wednesdays in October 2026 at Metro Social, the smaller room at Sydney's Metro Theatre, and they are not band shows. They run as part of Metro A.i.R, the venue's free programme, billed as Metro A.i.R x Friends of Friends: Chick on 7 October, Father's Favourite on 14 October, Lara Buchanan on 21 October and a San Cisco DJ set on 28 October, with support acts earlier in the evening and Friends of Friends DJs playing until late. The name is shared; the act being profiled here is the Gold Coast band, which has no headline dates of its own currently listed and routes its touring information through a promoter's tour page.
There has been no new release since Synthetic Flower Chainsaw in October 2025, and no announced third EP or album. On the pattern of the last two years — singles seeded across several months, then a short EP in October — the next record would be due about now, but nothing has been confirmed.
The show, now
A Friends of Friends show in 2026 has mostly meant an opening slot: three players, no additional touring musicians, a short support set rather than a headline length, and a run of material drawn from the two EPs, most of which is between two and three and a half minutes long. The Brisbane Tivoli show with Enter Shikari and grandson in May 2026 was reviewed as bass-heavy and "tight, crisp indi-pop-punk", catchy and simple in a way that worked, with a cheer going up as the band walked on and a core of committed fans already in the room; the same review judged the set "polished" while calling their stage presence "a little bit green" alongside the headliners. Visuals are part of the show and are made in-house in Blender, in keeping with a band that records itself, and at their own headline dates the set has been looser — the 2024 EP launch at the hundred-capacity Valley Loft in Brisbane mixed originals including End of the World, Graves, Scared to be Alone and Wolfgang with covers of U2 and Taylor Swift, supported by Space&Ages and EGOISM. Baker has said that touring with larger acts taught them to keep the setup streamlined and the changeover fast, which is audible in how little dead air there is between songs. One warning on listings: the four dates currently showing under the name in October 2026 are free Wednesday nights at Metro Social in Sydney, part of the Metro A.i.R programme and billed as Metro A.i.R x Friends of Friends, headlined by other artists with Friends of Friends DJs playing late — a club night, not a band booking.
Researched from distortedsoundmag.com · musicistoblame.co.uk · livesphere-magazine.com · rocknloadmag.com · friendsoffriendsband.bandcamp.com · abc.net.au · thelivewire.com.au · everblack.com.au
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
CC BY-SA 3.0
