Kevin Bronson on February 24th, 2018

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Over five-plus years of hanging out and harmonizing, L.A. duo Freedom Fry have been nothing less than a singles machine. The husband-and-wife team of Bruce Driscoll and Marie Seyrat have released more than 25 of them, counting covers, along with handful of EPs, songs on compilations and maybe even a few others by telepathy, who knows? At any moment you could be sipping latté and hear their boy/girl cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or the duo’s gender-flipped answer to Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros’ “Man on Fire,” or a Freedom Fry snippet in the background of a TV show.

It’s all pop music to them, but they’ve explored varying nuances, from spare folk (and even Western) to orchestrated pop to cool Euro to bouncy electronica. So while they have a distinct aesthetic — native Midwesterner Driscoll’s boy-next-door vocals paired with native Parisian Syerat’s breathy coo — Freedom Fry’s classic pop somehow isn’t cookie-cutter. Oh, wait, did we say “Classic?” This week the duo announced that “Classic” will be the title of their first full-length album, arriving June 1. The title track holds up its end of the deal, with horns and strings right out of ’60s AM radio. The string arrangements came via Phillip Peterson, who’s worked with Portugal. The Man, and that’s Stewart Cole of Edward Sharpe on the trumpet. The buoyant feeling, though, is all Freedom Fry. “The lyrics paint a semi-serious picture of all the cliché things we can’t help but love about L.A.,” the duo says. “It’s also about feeling like maybe you were born in the wrong time, which we sometimes do.”

||| Stream: “Classic”

||| Previously: “Party Down”