Friday Night Cru On How They’re Blending Sounds From Both Sides Of The Atlantic

Friday Night Cru’s latest single, Sun Up, Sun Down, offers a panoramic view of summer’s most vibrant days and blissful nights. Warm melodies coast over a glossy instrumental as the Kingston duo sketches portraits of romance, friendship, and general good vibes. “This life is scenic,” they rejoice in the chorus.

Like their alté counterparts in Nigeria, Friday Night Cru continue to drift past genre norms, opting instead to brew sounds from both sides of the Atlantic into their own alternative mix. They juggle inspiration from Coldplay and Burna Boy as readily as they do that of J. Cole and Koffee. The pair might lift a cadence from hip-hop one day and then pluck a little bounce from Afrobeats the next. They even look as far as Mozambique when importing some of their beats.

Damani ‘Dash D’ Gardner and Djavan ‘KinDah’ Warner, the artists behind Friday Night Cru, are candid about the stamp of these influences. “The melodies that Rema and Wizkid use are so effortless that they don’t need to say a lot. They just perfectly glide,” KinDah mentions towards the end of our conversation. “Yeah. Even with a song like Come Gimme , we just tried to complement the production,” Dash D adds.

For the rest of our chat, Friday Night Cru explained the vision and the stories behind their music. Check out the conversation below.

How do you feel like your approach to making music has changed since you dropped your first single Monáe in 2018?

Dash D: When we first did Monáe we were coming from a very different background. We’re very into rap music so I feel like we took an American approach to how we executed everything, from the writing to the visuals. And then as we’ve progressed we began doing a lot of things that incorporate more cultures. So now when we write, it’s about the culture, when we do our visuals it’s about the culture. Everything we do, we try to keep to our genuine selves.

KinDah: I definitely think we’ve grown significantly and matured in our music, our topics, and our sound. Even with songs that are a bit off-centre like Enough and Fever, listeners will still get the feeling that the music is authentic.

And with that shift from exclusively releasing singles to dropping your first EP, Welcome To Friday, it felt like a bigger event. What did you take away from the rollout and the response to that project?

KinDah: I wanted to make sure that that release felt as big as possible. And I feel like we accomplished that. I sent a text to our group chat the other day saying that when I look back, some of the content we made was so sick. You really see how far that effort goes.

Also, with a single, you’re promoting this song and this vibe right now, but when we were promoting two songs in two very different worlds, it almost felt like we were pushing the Friday Night Cru brand. You’re getting both sides of us and we’re saying, “here’s the level of content that we’re able to achieve and showcase.”

And do you think you’ll be moving towards the longer format of an album any time soon?

Dash D: Probably not in the near future, but eventually. Right now we feel more inclined to do what we did with Welcome to Friday instead of a full LP because we’re still building our fan base and trying to connect with people. A lot of times when a rising artist puts out music, it’s not as easily digestible as music released by established acts.

Many people have short attention spans so to draw them to a group of two boys who they’ve never heard before, why give them seven songs when you can give them a little taste of what we can offer first?

KinDah: Exactly. I think Welcome to Friday was a good route in terms of showing what we can do in a very small package.

For your latest single, Sun Up, Sun Down, we have Trackmaster on the instrumental, Circa Eleven on the guitar, Runkus doing the mixing and mastering, and you guys writing and performing. How did this all come together?

Dash D: Well, we connected with Trackmaster online – that’s just the beauty of the internet. He also did the instrumental for Come Gimme. We’ve been friends with Circa Eleven for a long time so we just reached out and asked him to play the guitar to give the song a little more spice. And then Runkus is another one of our great friends so we trusted him with the sound and he delivered.

KinDah: Overall, I feel like this song came out pretty easily. The mixing and mastering took some time but in terms of recording and knowing what we were going for, it felt super simple. This was also the first time in a while that we were able to sit down and write a song together from start to finish. I feel like you can feel that chemistry and see that we were both in sync.

You’ve said that with another song, 876 , there was a three-year gap between when you recorded it and when you released it. Is there any hesitation in dropping music that you’ve been holding onto for that long?

Dash D: Well, that’s a particular case. When we recorded 876 in the summer of 2018, we weren’t doing music remotely close to that sound, but we knew it was a good song. So we just said alright, let’s push this back.

KinDah: In 2021 we decided to put it on the two-song project, Welcome to Friday, so we were looking for something else to pair with it. We were thinking what’s something that complements 876 but also shows a different side? And that’s how Come Gimme came about.

I don’t think we were ever hesitant to put it out. It just came down to timing.

So do you have other songs you’ve been sitting on,  just waiting to be released?

KinDah: Adam, our manager, would say we do. We have a song called Whine and Roll that he loves. Maybe it’ll come out one day and you know, if it does, it’ll be because he pushed for it. It’s a great song – it’s just that as we try to build our catalogue, we look at the options to figure out what fits how we feel right now as well as what’s happening around us.

A lot of your songs feature the artists within your local orbit but you’ve also looked beyond it. One of the most interesting examples of that is the feature from the Ghanaian singer Amaarae on your 2020 single Follow My Lead . How did you guys link up?

KinDah: That’s a wild story. I met someone in December of 2018 who showed me all these Afrobeats artists that she was listening to, and I remember she played me a song by Santi called Rapid Fire. I’m already thinking this song is amazing and then this voice comes on and I’m like this is the best thing I’ve heard.

I find out the singer’s name is Amaarae and I just start going through all of her music. I send it to Damani and to Adam and I’m just telling them we need to hit this person up for our next song.

And then we finally had the song. Follow My Lead actually started out with this soca/fully Caribbean sound but slowly transformed into our first Afrobeats type of song. At that point, I’d wanted to work with Amaarae for a while so we just reached out. She responded with her management contact, and after that, she sent back her verse in less than two days. When we heard it we just kept saying this is crazy. She’s so talented.

And you’ve said that blending genres within your music allows it to travel more easily, too.

Dash D: And that’s ultimately what we want to do. We want to hone in on the Jamaican ears and for people not to say they’re just doing rap or they’re just doing rock. And we also want to make it an international sound so that it’s not far off from what people can expect from us. So when we drop a song like 876, which has a Dancehall-sounding chorus and the verses are rap, we’re trying to give listeners the best of both worlds.

KinDah: So someone in New York and someone in Kingston can still appreciate both sides of it.

Dash D: So that’s what we love to do with our music. We like to have all these sounds happening at once without overcomplicating everything. We just want it to blend well so everybody can get a taste and enjoy the music.