Do Nothing Friend World: Nottingham Band Finds the Joke in the Bleak

By Cole Ashby, November 7, 2026

The album

Do Nothing release Friend World, their second album, on November 6, 2026. It is the Nottingham band's first full length since Snake Sideways in 2023, and it runs 11 tracks, opening with "Misery" and closing with "Incommunicado."

The lineup is Chris Bailey on vocals, Kasper Sandstrom on guitar, Charlie Howarth on bass and Andrew Harrison on drums. They recorded at JT Soar, a former fruit and veg warehouse in their hometown, per NME. Louis Milburn of Folly Group produced and mixed it.

Do Nothing: Friend World

Freer the second time

Bailey has been plain about what changed. "With the first record there was a feeling of trying to move away from what people expected of us," he told NME when the album was announced. "This time we felt much freer. We didn't feel any pressure to make a departure. We could follow whatever ideas felt exciting and not worry about what it meant."

Part of that freedom meant putting the guitar down for stretches. "Getting away from the guitar was useful," Bailey said in the same piece. "We didn't want it to sound particularly rocky or aggressive. We're always interested in finding energy and momentum without relying on the obvious ways of creating them."

You can hear the argument in how the singles were described. NME called lead single "Stars" a song "built around drum machine patterns and squelchy synths." Bailey's own gloss on it is the most useful thing anyone has said about the record so far: "I guess the simplest interpretation of this one would be that it's about ambition, and people who are famous, and all the ways in which it doesn't make them happy people. More than that though, I'd say it's about finding someone you connect with enough that you quit caring about the other things that used to drive you."

Where the title comes from

The name traces back to Andy Kaufman, who used to close shows singing "This Friendly World." Bailey told NME he could not take it straight. "It's this big, face-value expression of positivity that rang so weirdly to me," he said. "I found it difficult to interpret the lyrics as anything other than sarcasm." The novelist Elizabeth Smart is the other stated influence.

Then he turns it around. "For me it's an album about a lot of bleak things, but it doesn't feel bleak," Bailey said. "I enjoyed making it more than anything we've ever done, and I'm more proud of it than anything we've ever made. That's the whole point of the title really. There's two sides to everything. Without the bad, there isn't the good."

The songs people are talking about

The early reviews point to the same handful of tracks. musicOMH gave it four stars and called "Dog 2" the album standout, a song about two dogs stuck at a party. Its line, as quoted there: "Dog 1 says let's leave this party early, Dog 2 says why, Dog 1 says because we're dogs and we don't get what a party is." That is a very funny way to write about loneliness, and it is the clearest sign of what Bailey means by bleak that does not feel bleak.

"Smile" goes darker. NME reports it was inspired by a cartoonist who took his own life, and its chorus borrows his last words: "How good it is to be alone at last." musicOMH says it "struts like prime Talking Heads one minute before collapsing into a cacophony of noise the next." On "The Nail," per the same review, the narrator has "this perfect life that I don't really like."

The opener gets the big billing. musicOMH says "Misery" opens on Bailey's words "Hi honey, I'm back" and runs almost six minutes. NME quotes its plea for "one good night / To put me out of misery."

Friend World tracklist

1. Misery
2. The Nail
3. Act Natural
4. These People Want Blood
5. Stars
6. Smile
7. Dog 2
8. Loner
9. Yes
10. Paris, Jesus
11. Incommunicado

My read

What sells me on this one before anything else is the writing. A band from the post-punk lane that can be this funny about this much sadness is rarer than it should be, and the "Dog 2" lyric alone shows Bailey knows how to get a laugh to land on a sore spot. The other thing worth noting is restraint. A second album recorded at home, with a producer from a peer band and a stated plan to stop leaning on guitar, reads like a group that trusts itself more than it did in 2023.

Bailey told NME he is "pretty solo, in a lot of ways," and that the songs start with him alone in a room. Friend World is a title about looking for company. Fitting that it comes from a writer who works best alone and a band that, on their own telling, finally relaxed into each other.

Verdict: A second album that treats loneliness as both a wound and a punchline, and the quotes so far say it lands both ways.