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Between Christmas and New Years Eve, Goodfight quietly released their self-titled debut album. The five-piece band was founded by South Floridian singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Forman and features Annique Monet (a high school friend of Forman’s) on co-lead vocals, Guy Paz on drums, and David Zyto and Daryl Johns on guitars, with several additional instrumentalists filling in the gaps on the new record. On “One of Us,” a standout from the project, Goodfight welcome us into the fold of their curious art-pop cult, whose influences include (per Forman) The Adam Friedland Show, John Coltrane, and Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition.
“131,” Monet repeats at the start of the track, over Forman and Zyto’s jangly guitars, an elastic groove from bassist Ian Kenselaar, and Paz’s sure-handed, precise drumming. The number, it turns out, is an area code (more specifically, the area code of Edinburgh, Scotland) from which Monet got a call from an unnamed woman, sparking a cascading series of reveries about their time together. Harmonizing over herself (and later joined by Forman), she paints an impressionistic picture of a relationship, rendered even more delirious by its dreamy instrumental setting.
The song’s charming, wayward nature was informed by the album’s process. “[Goodfight] is the Frankenstein outcome of years spent recording with friends, toiling with sounds, no plan to make anything of anything,” Forman tells The FADER. “There was so much time to spend literally recording time onto this record. The guerrilla recording sessions required to create Goodfight numbered in the tens. Hundreds of field recordings and audio samples, thousands of recorded tracks later, Goodfight became a reach at the cusp of maximalism.”