Your Friend delivers its long-awaited debut, Gumption — and, soon, a side project

There are moments on Gumption, the debut full-length album (released January 29 on Domino Records) from Lawrence’s Taryn Miller — who performs as Your Friend — that seem suspended in space and time. Only one of the album’s eight songs clocks in under the four-minute mark (the wordless “To Live With”), and it evaporates thinly into the dark, inky “Desired Things” — the latter a standout track on a record of home runs. Yet the album is also markedly different from the sounds that Miller offered on her 2014 EP, Jekyll/Hyde.

Acoustic instruments and the warm nuances of self-recording are here replaced by a chilling, sparse electronic narrative that sees Miller exploring the metaphysical aspects of relationships — with others and with herself. It’s a heady work, but one that is wholly rewarding.

Ahead of Gumption‘s release on Friday and Miller’s accompanying show at Liberty Hall, I called her at her Lawrence apartment.

The Pitch: The last time we spoke, about seven months ago, you were pretty firm that Lawrence was still home to you, despite your new life on Domino Records. Do you still feel that way?

Miller: I was talking to my mom about that recently, actually. She was like, “What are you going to do if you start touring a lot and have to pay rent? You could leave your stuff here.” And my ultimate argument was like, I love my apartment and I love my job and I like being close to my band. I feel very good here. I’ve kind of created my own little world in my apartment. I have a place for work. I have my gear set up in a certain way. And I set up a projector so I can work on music to films. It’s comfortable. I feel good coming home and being here, and I can walk to work if I want, and it’s nice. There’s a new sort of peacefulness that I have right now — well, with the exception of the record going out. That’s been super, super busy. But it’s all good stuff.

The tone of this album is different from what we’ve heard from you before. There seems to be a lot more space and distortion on this album. It’s less folksy. How did that change in sound come about?

I think the thing with the [Jekyll/Hyde] EP was that it was archived in this more organic way — we had more acoustic instruments and things like that, and the songs made sense that way. Inherently, I always wanted to make a record like this and continue to explore this sound, but I didn’t have the resources like I do now. Also, the cycle of writing through this record was a darker time for me. I was digging really deeply into my own psyche, and that was where I was. I had this teacher from high school who was always really special to me, and he moved to Lawrence and we sat down for coffee and my head was in so many places, I was just rushing around, and he said — I saved it, I wrote it down on a Post-it note and put it above my fridge — he said, “Art is just where you are now.”

I revisited that a lot: Where am I right now? What is my path right now? And I was really honing in on myself and how I fit in with the people that I connect with and how I present myself in the outside world, because I was spending more time alone [writing the record], so I had this contrast. This is who I am here and how can I still connect with people in this way? I was living a different lifestyle altogether. It was a quieter time, and it feels like it was so long ago. It was just darker, and it felt good to make darker music. It was cathartic in that way, and that was where my head was at. Embracing that felt natural to me at that time.

It sounds like there were some specific relationships or events that inspired the songs on this record.

Oh, certainly. [Pause] I think your art comes from the environment that you’re in, and I think that just happens with who you’re spending your time with, who you’re around the most and who you’re talking with on a deeper level. But this is such a bigger picture record for me, beyond just things like “How do I feel?” It was the core of everything. And I feel like I’m going to be exploring that for a long time, and this is just the start of that.

You’ve also got a new side project, called Clothe, debuting in February. What kind of material is Clothe?

There’s elements of what I do on the side — things that wouldn’t necessarily come across as being songwriting, just things I’ve been wanting to explore for a long time — and Clothe is a product of a desire to make what I’m really drawn to. We’re still figuring it out. It’s dark and electronic to some degree, but also taking field-recording sounds and making drum sounds out of that. It’ll be more of a groove-based thing, more of a headspace that you can move to. It’s seamless: There’s not songs and they end — it’s a sonic journey through the whole set. And it might be just a live thing for a while. It’s a world that I’ve wanted to make music in for a long time, but the music that I’ve made — the record [Gumption] doesn’t necessarily fit in that aesthetic. It’s really exciting for me.