Peaceful Faces aren’t just chasing freedom on their new single ‘Freee’—they’re interrogating it, dismantling it, and ultimately setting it ablaze.
Opening with a jolt of fuzzy, overdriven guitar, the Brooklyn-based outfit dive headfirst into their most sonically untamed release yet. But while the track bursts out of the gate with untethered energy, it’s the moments of contrast that give ‘Freee’ its pulse.
This isn’t freedom as a flag-waving anthem. This is freedom with caveats, with messy contradictions. The repeated line “How could you ever be so free” lands more like a challenge, a reckoning with the individualism that can edge toward self-absorption. That tension is reflected in the arrangement: horns swell and recede, guitars oscillate between jagged and tender, and drums crash like waves before retreating into calm.
Tree Palmedo’s voice is weary but pointed as he doesn’t need to scream to be heard. And when the song crests into its final section, everything combusts: the trumpet lines soar, the percussion grows urgent, and the track achieves a kind of glorious, untamed catharsis that recalls the chamber-punk dynamics of bands like The National or early Beirut, filtered through the noise-hugged lens of Broken Social Scene.
For a group known for their cerebral, intricately layered compositions, ‘Freee’ is striking in its looseness. It plays like a breaking point. A release. And maybe that’s the whole point. It’s disruptive, it’s reckless, it’s vital.
Peaceful Faces have long carved out a niche in the orchestral side of indie-rock, but with ‘Freee’, they let the seams show, and it’s glorious.
