Fierce Friend shares new single “Tokyo Rose”

As a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brighton-based Alan Grice has spent years moving through the alternative music landscape but Fierce Friend represents perhaps his most exploratory incarnation thus far. Built around collaboration and experimentation, the solo project brings bright melodies together with adventurous arrangements, creating music that initially feels approachable but can reveal increasingly strange and intricate details bubbling beneath the surface.

His history with projects including Electric Soft Parade, Foxes! and Octopuses provides the background for Fierce Friend and while traditional songwriting remains at its centre, Fierce Friend seeks to interfere with its architecture, allowing structures to bend, textures to collide and songs to develop their own internal logic. First showcased with 2018’s debut album Lies That Comfort You, the project earned support from BBC Radio 6 Music, helping introduce Fierce Friend to a wider audience.

Since then, however, the project has continued to develop in new and exciting ways, with the live-band atmosphere of the earlier material increasingly giving way to an electronic aesthetic, with machine-driven rhythms, spiralling synths, distorted guitars and direct vocals reflecting the tension and overstimulation of modern life. Now Fierce Friend brings us the brand new single titled “Tokyo Rose,” the third track released ahead of the forthcoming album Blood Red Hills & The Uncanny Valley. Following the success of “Blood Red Hills” and “Put You Right,” both of which received BBC radio support including BBC Introducing and Stuart Maconie on BBC Radio 6 Music, the new track takes Fierce Friend somewhere altogether more surreal.

“Tokyo Rose” is an experimental piano ballad inspired by the disappearance of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the strange constellation of unanswered signals, rumours and phantom transmissions that followed. It begins with restraint, where sparse, interlocking piano figures and an intimate vocal create a searching atmosphere, as though the song itself is listening for a signal buried in the static but then, the pattern starts to fracture. Repeating piano parts overlap and accumulate, gradually forming shifting polyrhythms that turn repetition into tension as the cycles create a sense of interference, mirroring a story built around uncertainty and the human desire to make sense of fragments that may or may not mean anything.

Building with delicate vocals, the punch of pattering drums injects energy while the glide of subtly biting guitar notes adds subtly intensity. Swooping backing vocalisations underpin Alan’s bright leads while layers of intricate guitar notes, cello and harp progressively bolster the arrangement until the track reaches a driving rhythmic energy, transforming its once-minimal piano setting into a sound resembling a distant nightclub collapsing in on itself. It’s a gripping shift in scale and atmosphere that takes listeners on an engrossing sonic voyage from start to finish, offering another incredible display of Fierce Friend’s knack for wrapping memorable melodic writing in forward-thinking soundscapes.

Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has become surrounded by speculation, mythology, rumours of survival, UFOs and phantom signals, leaving history tangled with imagination. “Tokyo Rose” turns that ambiguity into sound, forging an intriguing musical moment that’s enjoyable and thought-provoking in equal measure. As he builds towards the upcoming full-length record, Alan Grice continues to take Fierce Friend into new musical spheres and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Listen to Tokyo Rose below

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