For Friday Pilots Club, reinvention has never been about wiping the slate clean. It has been about finally having the freedom to decide what stays, what changes and what no longer belongs.
After years spent navigating the pressures of the music industry, label expectations and the growing pains of becoming a fully realised five-piece, the band entered a new phase with their 2024 debut album, Nowhere. But if that record represented escape, their latest project, EP1, feels more like intent.
Stripped back, instinctive and deliberately less polished, EP1 finds Friday Pilots Club trusting the chemistry between its members and embracing the imperfections that once might have been edited out. Across the project, the band turns its attention towards the uncertainty of getting older, self-destructive habits, grief and the strange moments that make up everyday life, all while leaning into a harder, more immediate alt-rock sound.
For a group that once had other people trying to define what it should be, this latest chapter feels significant. There is less concern with fitting an expectation and more interest in following wherever the songs lead.
House of Solo caught up with Friday Pilots Club to discuss starting again, learning to trust their instincts, embracing imperfection and why EP1 feels like the beginning of something much bigger.
There’s something quite bold about calling this project EP1, especially when you’ve already released EPs and a full-length album. Does that title represent a reset for Friday Pilots Club — almost as if you’re saying, “This is where the band really begins”?
A little bit! We like to feel like each project is a little reset of its own, and I think calling this next project EP1 is our way of leaving the door open in this current era of the band’s sound.
Nowhere felt like the sound of a band finally escaping something, whereas EP1 feels more like a band actively choosing what it wants to become. Do those two kinds of freedom feel different to you?
Absolutely! They definitely provide different styles of inspiration. With Nowhere, it just felt good for us to go into album mode in our heads. Thinking about the project as a whole, from start to finish, then whittling down a list of 40 or 50-plus song ideas to the 12 we ended up with was incredibly fun — and a little bit taxing.
With this new EP, I think we’ve all embraced a little bit of a defiant nature. We are following our guts, trusting our taste and allowing the youthful love we’ve always had for making music to take the reins.
You’ve spoken about stripping the production back and wanting these songs to sound more like five people playing together in a room. After spending years around an industry that often wants everything polished and perfected, what did you have to unlearn to get back to that instinctive sound?
We have certainly been exercising a bit of restraint in that aspect. It’s a fun challenge. It’s so easy to want to make everything sound huge and clean, and a lot of the time that sounds great and has worked for us in the past!
But we really struck inspiration when we started working with our producer, Chris Lyon. He really fostered an environment that made us comfortable with picking up that janky, out-of-tune guitar and recording it because it sounded cool. We started to really feel like we could embrace those unique sounds and imperfections and lean into them.
“You Can’t Tell Me Nothing” pushes against this culture of constantly optimising yourself and having your life figured out. As you approach your late twenties, have you become more comfortable with not necessarily knowing what comes next?
Yes and no. You certainly have moments where you still question so many things about the future. I think this song is about that moment in time when you get fed up with the pressures of the world around you and end up just saying, “Well, I’ve been through it all already, so nothing else can faze me.”
You describe the new writing process as “record now, ask questions later.” Was there a point during the making of EP1 where you realised that overthinking had actually been holding Friday Pilots Club back?
I think right from the jump, we had an intention to embrace imperfections with these new songs and with the writing process. The moment we entered the studio with Chris Lyon, we had a few very freeing creative sessions, and that felt very reassuring for us that we were doing the right thing.
With five members, there are five different instincts entering every song. Can you remember a moment on this EP when somebody completely changed a song in a way the rest of you initially resisted, but ultimately made it much better?
We knew we really liked the vibe of “YUP!”, but there was something off about the initial chorus idea we had. It was spooky, strange and disconnected from the verse idea, which we loved.
James came in, heard it and thought, “Why don’t we just jam on the bass riff for the chorus and call it a day?” It took the song in a very fun direction.
“YUP!” comes from Caleb finding himself in a pretty questionable East Nashville bar and wondering, essentially, “How did I get here?” There’s something very late-twenties about that moment. Are you finding that ordinary, slightly strange moments in your lives are becoming more interesting songwriting material than the big dramatic ones?
Definitely! We’ve all written hundreds of love songs in our day, but after a while, those topics feel slightly less inspiring. They’re still cathartic to write about on occasion, but we’ve been trying to dive more into the minutiae of different topics and be more specific in our lyricism.
