Liars - TFCF (LP) - Red Vinyl

Liars have always loved tearing up their own blueprint, but TFCF might be the most striking pivot of all. Released on Mute on 25 August 2017, it is the first Liars album made solely by Angus Andrew after Aaron Hemphill’s departure, and you can feel that solitude bleeding into the music. Andrew decamped to a remote patch of the New South Wales coast, back in Australia after years in New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles, and worked alone with samplers, acoustic instruments, and whatever the bush would lend him. The result is a record that sounds both hand-hewn and haunted, full of brittle textures, warm hiss, and melodies that arrive like thoughts you were trying not to think about.

The title is a little joke and a little key. TFCF stands for Theme From Crying Fountain, and that image fits. These songs pool around the edges, swirl, break, re-form. It opens up the Liars sound without chasing slickness. After the neon grind of Mess, here comes a cracked pastoral world where acoustic guitars are chopped into tiny loops and percussion rustles like someone moving through tall grass. Andrew has said he wanted to treat organic instruments the way he once treated drum machines, and you hear that guiding hand in the way these tracks slide between folkish strum and heady sample collage.

The singles told the story early. The Grand Delusional arrives with a wary, almost devotional air, Andrew’s voice right up front, like he is letting you read the diary but scratching out a few lines with heavy ink. Cred Woes is the lurching counterpoint, an anti-anthem that tilts between chant and complaint, a little funny, a little bitter. They are both earworms, but they do the Liars thing of dodging easy hooks in favor of atmosphere. That push and pull runs through the record. Songs bloom then fray. Space matters. You learn to lean into the gaps, the cicada buzzes, the quick edits that feel almost like jump cuts in a film.

Part of the thrill here is production detail. The low end is more suggestion than blunt force. Beats skitter, never quite settle. Strings or reeds will drift in, then vanish. You can picture Andrew hunched over a laptop at night, cutting up fragments and pushing them around until they feel human again. It is a small universe after the scale of earlier Liars records, but that closeness is the point. TFCF feels like companionship. A strange, often uneasy one, but companionship all the same.

The record’s imagery underscored the reinvention. Andrew appears in a wedding dress on the cover, photographed in the Australian bush, equal parts deadpan and disarming. It is hard not to read it as a ceremonial break with the past, a way of writing a new contract with the project. The following year he issued Titles With The Word Fountain, a companion release that shares TFCF’s sonic DNA, but this is the core document, the moment where Liars reintroduce themselves as a band of one without losing the experimental spark.

Critical response clocked the shift. Outlets like Pitchfork, The Guardian, and NPR highlighted the intimacy and the hybrid palette here, and fans who fell in love with the band’s early chaos have largely embraced this new shade. It helps that the songs hold up to repeat listens. Put on headphones and you hear more in the corners each time. Play it on a decent system and the air in the room changes. That makes TFCF vinyl a smart buy, especially if you like records that reward quiet volume and late nights. If you have been looking to buy Liars records online, snagging the TFCF vinyl alongside Drum’s Not Dead or WIXIW gives a neat arc of how Andrew keeps bending the project’s DNA.

I have pulled this one from crates in more than one Melbourne record store and recommended it to people who thought Mess was a little too garish. It is still very much Liars, just tuned to a more vulnerable frequency. If you are building a shelf of Liars albums on vinyl, this belongs next to the heavy hitters because it explains how the band got from there to here. And if you hunt vinyl records Australia wide, keep an eye out. The artwork looks great full size, and the grooves suit a real needle. TFCF is not a grand statement so much as a patient one. It turns small sounds into big feelings, which is another way of saying it does what great records do.