camille blackman bottles the delirium of a gradual crush with a grin on “just friends.”
Even before she opens her mouth, a zippy, clear-toned guitar conjures wistful, lofi ambience, but the spotlight stays on blackman’s lyrics. “Handshakes turned into locking fingertips, it’s cool,” she coos as a simple backbeat clicks into place. It’s the DC-via-LA singer-songwriter’s second release since signing to Mom+Pop in the fall, following December single “readysetgo.”
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I first got hip to blackman’s music last summer with the wonderfully vivid “cant have your fish and eat it too,” which turned her empathetic eye for detail onto a floundering relationship. There’s an emotional immediacy to the vignettes blackman sketches on her bedroom folksongs, and whether she’s crafting an extended metaphor or an unpretentious confessional, their narratives unfurl gently.
These songs mirror the pace of real life, rather than the synthetic Circadian rhythms of dating apps and TikTok algorithms, and in their refusal to rush, build toward even greater catharsis. That might help explain why Blackman has been teasing snippets of “just friends” since last July — anything this good is always worth the wait.