Oen Sujet returns with new album "The Friendliest Fight We Know"

Montreal duo Oen Sujet have released their second album, The Friendliest Fight We Know, arriving 17 years after their 2009 debut Life Given to Quiet Places and a full decade in development. Where that debut featured no fewer than 15 members, the band has been distilled down to just two: producer and prime mover John Winston Phillips and vocalist Hammerbell.

The Quietus's review calls 2026 "the year of the unexpected electronic comeback," grouping Oen Sujet's return alongside recent albums from Boards of Canada and Seefeel after 13 and 15 years off, respectively. Opener "Tap The Working Space" sets the record's template: melodies that suggest one path before the track resolutely fails to follow it, distracted by new ideas every few minutes, with Hammerbell's vocals as the one constant thread.

The review describes the sound as "a uniquely slippery" one, reminiscent at times of Max Tundra's maximalist hyperpop but paradoxically minimalist in its instrumentation, built mostly around a single glittering synth sound. Some tracks lean more accessible, including "Second Service," which the review says finds Hammerbell's vocals at their most expressive, and "Goods To This Body (Of People)," which brings in members of feminist choir Choeur Maha.

The album's centerpiece is the 11-minute "Potentiators and Breakthroughs," which opens with an uneasy melody the review compares to Actress's Ghettoville before collapsing into baroque electronics and an unexpected swing the reviewer likened to the quasi-reggae mid-section of the Pixies' "Freedom Rock." The review called the result "baffling and joyful at the same time," and summed up the album as "dense, unabashedly proggy" and demanding of a listener's full attention, but ultimately "that rarest of things: original."

The Friendliest Fight We Know joins the week's new electronic and indie releases on the release calendar.