Over the next year and a half, Real Friends honed in on a more sophisticated Emo/Pop Punk direction, self-releasing three more EPs — 2012’s Acoustic Songs and Three Songs About the Past Year of My Life and 2013’s Put Yourself Back Together — before signing with Fearless Records for the More Acoustic Songs EP and a debut full-length,Maybe This Place is the Same and We’re Just Changing, both in 2014. With each successive release and the subsequent touring opportunities, the band’s popularity and profile rose exponentially, and with Fearless’ increased distribution and resources, the suburban Chicago quintet found themselves playing to increasingly larger and more diverse audiences.
After months of touring behind Maybe This Place, which hit No. 24 on the Billboard 200 album chart and the Top 10 of four other Billboard charts, Real Friends began writing new material, which resulted in a batch of new songs that was embraced by the band as the best work they had done to date. Early last year, just after Fearless had announced a new Real Friends album sometime in 2016, the band sequestered themselves with producers Steve Evetts and Mike Green without alerting anyone to the fact that they were actually recording the new album. Five months later, Real Friends unveiled The Home Inside My Head and the album’s first single, “Colder Quicker,” which the band had been inserting into its live sets since 2015. Although reviews were generally mixed — some praised the band for consistency and others faulted the group for not offering an advance on its previous work — fans new and old still nearly pushed the album into the Top 50 of the Billboard 200. But Real Friends will tell you, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about the passion, and they’ve got that by the metric ton.
