Montreal’s The Fake Friends Announce Debut LP With Sharp Post-Punk Single “A Sucker Born Every Minute”

THE FAKE FRIENDS

“A Sucker Born Every Minute” & Let’s Not Overthink This

1. The Single & First Impressions

1. “A Sucker Born Every Minute” is the first real statement from your debut LP. Why did this song feel like the right door to kick open first?
   – It’s sort of the whole idea of the record. We have a bunch of different things going on; breakdowns, jarring stuff, spoken word, piano ballads, etc. But for the first single, we just didn’t overthink it – let’s put out the catchiest, most straightforward banger that was playing well with live crowds.
2. The track balances tension and melody really well—what was the core feeling you were trying to capture when writing it?
   – Before we recorded the record last year, Matt (vocals) brought up the idea that if the last EP was a night out on the town, this record was dealing with the hangover. Sucker Born feels like, out of all the songs on the album, the one that captures that sort of unearned optimism the best. The music is upbeat and fun, but the lyrics are more on the pessimistic side. That’s Fake Friends at its core.
3. The hook feels self-aware rather than accusatory. Was that an intentional turn inward when shaping the lyrics?
   – At a certain point, you get so good at blowing things up in your own life that you become a real failure connoisseur. If we’re calling anyone else suckers, it’s only because game recognize game.

2. Themes & Lyrics

4. The song circles around burned bridges, impulsive choices, and the urge to run from responsibility. How much of that comes from personal experience?
   – I don’t think people understand how much their circumstances are based on their own bad decisions, and I’m the king of them.
5. There’s a push-and-pull between bravado and self-recognition in the vocal delivery—how conscious were you of that dynamic?
   – We’re all in our 30’s and being in a band is becoming less and less cool with time. We’ve got a combined century of experience of doing lame shit but looking rad as hell doing it.
6. Do you see “A Sucker Born Every Minute” as a character study, a confession, or something in between?
   – When I started this band I was watching a lot of Seinfeld. I just wanted to do music about mundane stuff we do that is somehow hilarious. Listen, you’re probably not going to change the world, so what’s the point of yelling at your neighbour?

3. Sound & Influences

7. People have mentioned Parquet Courts, Yard Act, and Franz Ferdinand when describing the track. How do those reference points sit with you?
   – I wasn’t allowed to listen to music and Gaither Gospel Hour was my first record. Am I doing secular music right?
8. Your sound pulls from hardcore, power-pop, dance-punk, and indie rock—how do you keep that blend cohesive instead of chaotic?
   – I’d say we’re indie curious We love soft and chilled out music, but we all have way too much untreated attention deficit disorders to let go of the high energy high cardio genres we came up on. We’re not reinventing the wheel here, but we all came up listening to tons of crazy shit that we try to shoehorn into music that is listenable to normal people.
9. Rhythm plays a huge role in this song. How important is movement and physical energy in your writing process?
   – The truest thing the band has ever written was the hook on Aigle Noir on our last EP: “I just wanna make you dance.” If we’re jamming a song and we can’t move to it ourselves, we know it needs more time in the oven. Even for our weirder tracks, we always want to make sure that people can sway/salsa/crip walk to the beat.

4. The Band & Montreal Scene

10. The Fake Friends came together through shared apartments, shared bands, and shared scenes. How did that community shape your chemistry?
    – We’ve all just known each other for such a long time. We’ve almost all played together in some way shape or form before this band – Tomizzi drummed for the band like 2 years before he was actually in it. At a certain point, it’s just friendship capital. Who cares if you don’t shred as hard as other people? It’s way better to just hang with people you know and that you know you can work with. W.I.H.C.
11. Montreal has a strong DIY and cross-project culture—how has that environment influenced your approach to collaboration?
    – Ask Tomizzi, the man drums for every artsy band in the Montreal punk scene.
12. With six members, how do you avoid overcrowding songs while still letting everyone’s voice come through?
    – We don’t make it easy for ourselves in a literal sense, since 5 of us get mics on stage (we’re working on our 6th). We all want to prove that we’re good on our instruments and our voices, but we’re able to check our egos and know when a song needs space. Personally, keyboards are a new instrument for me, so there was a mental adjustment to playing an instrument that’s not going to be “always on” in the mix, but we all have enough experience to shut up and jam out when it makes the song better.

5. Making Let’s Not Overthink This

13. The album title suggests instinct over analysis. Was that a guiding principle during recording?
    – The title came up while Matt and Brad (keys) were demoing vocals. On the 2nd hour of trying to nail down one, we finally said “Let’s not overthink this” and knew right away that we had the title. There’s an irony in a band with a lot of hyper fixators and overanalyzers just trying to make music that gets people dancing, and that title became a nice reminder that we could let go of some things in the name of rock.
14. How does Let’s Not Overthink This expand on what you were doing on earlier EPs?
    – I think it’s us just actually finding our sound. Our first EPs were a chance for trying shit out, but now when we’re experimenting it’s with an understanding that there’s a core sound that it has to relate to.
15. Bigger arrangements and more interplay between guitars and keys stand out—what unlocked that evolution?
    – Familiarity, honestly. This lineup has all recorded together before, in this band or beforehand, and when you spend enough time in Coldplay worship bands, you know how to kill the Fix You bridge.

6. Production & Process

16. Working with Jordan Barillaro, what was the biggest shift in how you thought about recording and arrangement?
    – Jordan’s the man. We’d worked with him before on a couple of the tracks from our last EP, but this was the first time we got to lock in with him for the whole process. He knows when to let our neurotic asses circle up to find gold, and when to cut in to stop us from spiralling. I (Brad) had never worked with him before, but it was really cool seeing someone who was so confident in how much layering was needed to beef things up, how to fit us all into a sonic space, and where simplicity was key.
17. The album feels very rooted in place. How did Montreal’s studio ecosystem shape the sound?
    – Recording at Mixart was awesome. Because we were able to be home while we recorded, we could open the doors up to our friends on a drop in basis. Just having our buds in whenever they could let us spotlight them on the record, sometimes planned, and sometimes real spur of the moment. Sometimes it was just John Donnelly popping in for an hour to hang out on the couch and say “sounds sick ,” but even that helped to bring the right energy.
18. How do you balance rawness with polish without sanding off the edges?
    – Conquering our DIY roots means letting ourselves spend time making something sound more polished, but at the same time, we’re a live band and we want people to feel that on recordings. It was helpful having the other guys tell me when I was being a little too critical of our takes and when mistakes actually sounded swagged out.

7. Live Energy vs. Studio Precision

19. You’ve built a reputation as a strong live band. How important was it to capture that energy on record?
    – This is the first time we had a pretty heavy deadline to get an album done. Honestly, that helped – since we couldn’t lose ourselves in revising songs until they were “ready,” a lot of the decisions we made tracking the record were a little spontaneous. That captured the energy of our live sets, where you don’t know if you’re going to hear the right words to the song or a collection of George W Bush’s most iconic quotes.
20. Did touring the Midwest and East Coast change how you think about pacing and dynamics in your songs?
    – Just live shows outside of Montreal in general. Seeing how different songs hit crowds of people who don’t know us is a huge indicator for what parts need to change, what works, and which songs are good picks as singles.
21. Are there moments on the album you’re most excited to translate to the stage?
    – Outside of the high energy tracks, we tried out some moodier songs on the record, and we really want to see how those translate live.

8. Growth & Identity

22. This is your first full-length with the current lineup. Does it feel like a reset, a culmination, or both?
    – Writing music is kind of like dating. You just have to put yourself out there and see if it works with other people, or with the project, until you find a combination you can be yourself in. Now we’ve reset into a 6 man polycule that works out of a rented Chrysler Pacifica and can scream the beginning of Hooked on a Feeling in perfect unison.
23. At what point did The Fake Friends start to feel like a band with a clear identity rather than a collection of influences?
    April 2023 when Felix (guitar) started playing with us.
24. How has your definition of success changed between your early releases and this album?
    – Now we’re not asking ourselves if we can make good music, it’s more a question of where we’re able to take it.

9. Looking Ahead

25. With “A Sucker Born Every Minute” setting the tone, what should listeners expect emotionally from the rest of the record?
    – The record has a ton of bravado and posturing, but there’s also room for us to get emo with it. You’ve got songs about the best of times, a bunch of songs about the worst of times, and an overall feeling of smiling while you hike through shit mountain.
26. Is Let’s Not Overthink This meant to be consumed front-to-back, or can songs stand alone?
    – Whatever ¸¸♬·¯·♪·¯·♫¸¸   ¸¸♫·¯·♪¸♩·¯·♬¸¸ . That said – and this is definitely not just because we’re printing vinyls for the first time – the Fake Friends experience is 80-93% more enjoyable when you’re spinning a wax frisbee. 4-out-of-5 proctologists agree!
27. Where do you see The Fake Friends heading after this album cycle?
    – “G-d willing we don’t implode under the pressure of this most likely quadruple platinum selling album, I think we’d like to see making it 365 days without changing drummers. That, or going to the UK and telling them “give up, it’s over,” explaining nothing.”

10. Final Thoughts

28. If someone discovers The Fake Friends through this single alone, what do you hope they take away?
    – Now that’s what I call pod racing!!
29. What does “honesty” in post-punk mean to you in 2025?
    – We just want to say that it’s actually 2026 now, that’s how honest we are.
30. Finally—what’s the one thing you didn’t overthink on this record that ended up working perfectly?
    – We overthought every single aspect of this record. We were fighting about everything. I’m still not okay.

Video for “A Sucker Born Every Minute” (Dec 11)

Advance Single: A Sucker Born Every Minute 3:19 (No Explicit Language / MAPL)

Genre Tags: Post-Punk, Dance-Punk, Indie Rock, Power-Pop Punk

RIYL: Parquet Courts, Culture Abuse, Yard Act, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, Cloud Nothings

Montreal’s The Fake Friends launch the lead-up to their debut LP Let’s Not Overthink This with “A Sucker Born Every Minute,” out December 11 on Stomp Records. It is a sharp, melodic jolt that threads dance-punk tension through a thick post-punk backbone, landing somewhere between Parquet Courts, Culture Abuse, and the rawer edges of early 2000s alt-rock. The track feels built for both the floor and the headphones, rhythmic and hook-forward, grounded in the kind of emotional candor that has become a quiet signature for the band.

Formed in Montreal’s tight-knit punk and indie ecosystem, The Fake Friends grew out of shared apartments, shared stages, and the cross-pollination that happens when half your friends are already in multiple other projects. Frontman Matthew Savage leads the six-piece lineup: guitarists Felix Crawford-Legault and Luca Santilli, bassist Michael Kamps, keyboardist Bradley Cooper-Graham, and drummer Michael Tomizzi. Their roots stretch from hardcore to power-pop and back again, a range that shows up in the sound. High-energy, melodic, a little jagged, always moving forward.

“A Sucker Born Every Minute” captures that blend with surprising focus. The song drives on tightly wound guitars and a rhythm section that feels both precise and restless, while Savage leans into the tension between bravado and self-recognition. The lyrics circle around familiar patterns: burned bridges, late-night decisions, the impulse to run from responsibility. The hook lands like a self-directed challenge. It is a song that moves quickly but leaves something heavier in its wake.

The single also offers the first look at Let’s Not Overthink This, the band’s first full-length with the current lineup. Montreal’s studio network shaped the record, from practice spaces to Mixart to the hands of producer and engineer Jordan Barillaro, giving the album a sense of place that echoes through its sound. The material broadens the scope of what The Fake Friends were doing on earlier EPs. Bigger arrangements. More interplay between guitars and keys. A stronger thread of danceable rhythm running through the noise. It is still loud and messy in the right ways, just with more intention behind the mess.

Order The Fake Friends’ Music and Merchandise

Onstage, The Fake Friends have carved out a name far beyond their hometown, playing consistently throughout the midwest and east coast and hitting rooms that sharpened their sound show by show. Combined with placements like Hockey Night in Canada and support slots for Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Buzzcocks, and Wine Lips, the band has steadily built a reputation as one of Montreal’s most restless and reliable live acts. With Let’s Not Overthink This arriving in 2026, “A Sucker Born Every Minute” sets the tone for what is coming: post-punk sharpness, melodic hooks, and a distinctly Montreal kind of honesty. It is the first chapter in a rollout that finds The Fake Friends stepping fully into their identity, bold and rhythmic and unmistakably their own.“A Sucker Born Every Minute” lands December 11 via Stomp Records, the first crack in the door before the chaos of Let’s Not Overthink This kicks all the way open.

For press inquiries, interviews, and review copies, please reach out. -Chad

The Fake Friends Online

INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | BANDCAMP | WEBSITE | YOUTUBE