Friendly Fires have given their fourth album a date. Dig Deeper arrives on 15 January 2027 through LAB Records, and the band have put out the single Magnetic to introduce it. The record closes a gap of nearly eight years since Inflorescence in 2019, the longest stretch the group have gone without a full-length since they started.
Magnetic is about attraction and the trouble it causes. "Attraction is a force so strong it can be beyond our control," the band told DIY, framing the song around the distance between what a person wants and what they should probably do. It is the second piece of new music the band have released this year, following Lose All Your Friends in August.
The album took the best part of a decade to finish. Ed Macfarlane and Edd Gibson wrote and reworked the material over that stretch, and the two of them are now the core of the band. DIY traces the sound back to Talking Heads and New Order, through Madchester and Balearic beat and on into the nu-rave records of the 2000s that Friendly Fires came up alongside.
Macfarlane put the scale of the wait plainly. "This is some of the best music we've written," he told DIY, describing the release as a leap of faith and saying that putting something honest out and hoping it lands is the hard part. For a band whose last two records arrived in 2011 and 2019, the gap is by now part of the story.
There is one live date attached to the announcement. Friendly Fires play MOTH Club in London on Thursday 24 September, a room that holds a few hundred people, which makes it a deliberately small return for a band who have headlined festival stages. No tour, tracklist or further dates came with the album news.
The 2019 album was itself a comeback of sorts, arriving eight years after Pala. That record was made as a trio and toured widely; Dig Deeper is the first Friendly Fires album built by two people. Readers following what is coming next year can keep an eye on the release calendar, and the band's earlier return is covered in our story on their first new music in seven years.
Our indie coverage has followed several acts of that 2000s British generation back into the studio this year, Bloc Party among them. Friendly Fires now have a date, a label and a single, which is more than the band have offered at any point since 2019.
The facts
- Friendly Fires release their fourth album Dig Deeper on 15 January 2027.
- The album comes out through LAB Records.
- It is their first album since Inflorescence in 2019.
- The single Magnetic is out now as the lead track.
- Ed Macfarlane and Edd Gibson now make up the band as a duo.
- The pair spent close to a decade writing and reworking the material.
- Friendly Fires play MOTH Club in London on 24 September 2026.
- No tracklist or tour dates came with the announcement.
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