On paper, Sydney supergroup FVNERAL’s collaboration with Ben Lee on their latest track friendly fire may come as a surprise to some. 

“I think now in this culture,” Lee first comments after hopping on the call, “features are such a regular thing. It's almost like an expected thing. But gratuitous features that don’t make any sense — it’s like a pop cultural crime. You have to find the connective tissue.”

And the connective tissue for friendly fire? Talking to FVNERAL’s Tay Blunt and Ben Lee, they converge on a shared treasuring of community, with this collaboration being chapter in a story nearly two decades in the making.

“Awake Is The New Sleep is the first CD I ever bought,” Blunt tells The Music in their home studio.

They were in Grade Two and ventured to JB Hi-Fi with their pocket money for the momentous purchase after the Catch My Disease hitmaker was introduced to them watching Rage with their older cousins.

“I remember being so fascinated by that song specifically,” they recall. “I remember taking [the lyric booklet] out and reading along. This thing, that at surface level so joyous and silly and funny, has a real — I didn’t know the words to describe this as a nine-year-old — but like a real yearning and an earnest want for the world to be better.”

“It really fucked me up in a lovely way,” they laugh.

Fast-forward to 2024, after a successful cold call email, FVNERAL scored some support spots on Lee’s regional tour. Their first meeting, Blunt recounts, was post-sound check in the green room as FVNERAL’s unsuspecting drummer nearly trips over a napping Ben Lee on the floor.

"I was like: ‘Oh, we've pissed him off’," Blunt cringes. But regardless of an accidental kick to the face, Lee took a liking to the band and after the tour wrapped, he invited FVNERAL to play an acoustic show at his house.

“We've always liked to have artists play in our house and throw little parties,” Lee explains. “We've had Amyl And The Sniffers. We had Ninajirachi throw a rave. We had Joanna Sternberg do a set. It's just something I've always done.”

“[Ben] really engages in this very deliberate world building,” Blunt says. “Trying to connect different creative friends of theirs, or people who make art that they like, and put them in spaces together because they're like: If I like person A and person B, chances are they'll connect and be able to share some kind of common experience of either consuming some art that's cool or like making something together and collaborating.”

“I think honestly the connection between FVNERAL and community only really became super clear to me when I went to that show at Lazy Thinking,” Lee points out, recalling when he performed friendly fire with the band at a fundraiser concert for Blunt’s other initiative, TRANSGENRE — an annual festival they co-founded with Ellie Robinson dedicated to spotlighting trans and non-binary artists.

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Even though the track was written almost a year prior, Lee remembers that concert as “a bit of an epiphany”, witnessing the palpable impact FVNERAL was having on their community in-person. “I saw what the music meant,” Lee says.

When Blunt sent the original demo of friendly fire over, Lee’s first text back was: "Fun idea: if I did it, I'd like to approach it like Lorde from the Charli [XCX] song."

Using a touchstone of the girl so confusing remix, arguably one of the biggest musical moments of 2024, definitely took Blunt aback. “That's bold! Can I basically turn it into that kind of dynamic?” they wondered. 

But when Lee returned with his verse, Blunt agreed that the pieces immediately fell into place: “It shifts the vibe and changes the structure of the song and brings an entirely new perspective.”

“I look at the song,” Lee walks us back, “in terms of like — here's Tay telling this story of queerness within a conservative environment and me as an older artist saying, ‘There's room here. You can breathe’.”

“When I was 14 and the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth swept me up, it was the same thing. It wasn't around gender or sexuality, but it was around older, eccentric left-of-center artists going, ‘Come and join the circus. You're with your people here’.”

That sentiment was felt in full force by FVNERAL. “[Ben] treats me and FVNERAL as a friend and as part of his chosen family,” Blunt says, gleaming with gratitude.

This bond forged between FVNERAL and Lee, and the broader unconditionally-loving community of creatives that surround them, is a juxtaposing image compared to the setting in which friendly fire starts, with Blunt revisiting their experiences growing up queer within a deeply conservative religious space. 

“That first line is really trying to think about how odd it is that there's this kind of promise of love from God, but there's also this spectre of violence and punishment,” Blunt unpacks.

For them, navigating their identity was wildly jarring and harmful amidst the messages enforced by their church community at the time.

“It's crazy because you are having these profound self-discovery moments in contexts that are so fucking homophobic and transphobic and colonialist and problematic.”

“It’s a useful touch point in thinking that couldn't be further from the life I live now, and how sweet, kind and supportive my family of origin and my chosen family are, and my broader community,” they smile. “I feel so proud of having found that, and so grateful for it.”

A theme echoed throughout the track circles back to “breaking the cycle”, with the track’s chorus drumming this home:

“You blame them for the bleeding / As you dance barefoot on broken glass / Find the happiness in healing / If we’re ever gonna break the cycle.”

Taking accountability for their own healing, it became clear to Blunt that in denying themself to actualise their identity fully, they were robbing themself of the life they deserve.

“It's like looking everywhere else to be like ‘Why am I hurting? Why am I bleeding?’,” they explain. “But not recognising that the whole time, I'm jumping up and down on a bunch of broken glass. Maybe I didn't put the glass there, so I'm not fully responsible for the hurt that's happening.

"But if I'm aware that there's glass there and I'm not moving, I'm still going to continue to hurt myself.”

And it’s a continuing journey. In the months before friendly fire’s release, Blunt changed their name. “Before the song was fully done, I had told [Ben] about my new name and he was immediately so sweet.”

After Lee offered to re-record the verse that contained Blunt’s old name, they put the decision on hold.

“I went back and forth in my own head,” Blunt relays. “Even talking to the rest of the band about it,” Madeleine Powers and Ben Siva, also of respective solo projects RAGEFLOWER and jnr., “they were all very much like you should just feel empowered to do what you want.”

In the end, Blunt decided to keep the original recording. “Being able to show that I still have affection for parts of myself that are attached to that old name, it provides a kind of closure to that chapter in a way that feels so ridiculously serendipitous.”

“I don't actually care if Ben says my old name because I think Ben is maybe one of the few people who is a cis person, and an ally in the realest sense, where his use of my old name didn't place me in a particular spot gender-wise in the way that he saw me.”

From Lee’s perspective, he explains, “It's been a real natural exchange of wisdom in the sense for me working with people like Georgia Maq and Byron Spencer,” who are even mentioned in Lee’s verse on the track, “and FVNERAL and people that just have out-of-the-box ways of looking at the world and gender and sexuality and reality.”

“I think maybe there's a path of allyship that's a little more the power of one-to-one conversations than about the labelling of movements.”

"I want to add too,” Lee stresses, “there's this side we're talking about me. How I feel towards the queer community and how that's a nice thing. But I feel welcomed.”

“Alex Lahey came up to me several years ago and she was like, ‘I just want to let you know, our community really loves you.’ And I just felt like that is like the nicest thing anyone's ever said.”

And now together, FVNERAL and Ben Lee are paving the love forward, taking the allyship encapsulated in friendly fire even further afield and partnering with Sock Drawer Heroes, an online and Sydney-based gender expression store, for a special charity merch run.

In light of Trans Awareness Week, the limited edition t-shirt release (which is available for pre-order now) has dedicated all proceeds to Sock Drawer Heroes’ Pay It Forward Program, allowing free gender expression products to be accessible to those who can't afford them.

Far more than just a store, Sock Drawer Heroes, founded by Erin Spencer and Bec Cerio (pictured above with Blunt), has been running since 2018 as a trans and queer-owned small business to provide a safe space for the trans community to feel connected, accepted and to flourish.

“Whether they're visiting the store or they're receiving a parcel in rural Queensland or the Northern Territory or wherever it is, that might be someone’s first connection to their community, which is a really important first step,” Erin explains.

“We get people trying on their first chest binder, for example, and standing taller,” Bec beams. “Or sometimes, people are crying and giving us hugs — we have a box of tissues nearby — because they are seeing themselves for the first time and it's really special getting to witness and be a part of that.”

The merch collaboration is yet another tangible representation of allyship that friendly fire represents. And what Blunt, Lee, and the Sock Drawer Heroes team all agree, is that allyship first and foremost is born from action.

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“Allyship is more of a verb than a noun,” Spencer describes. “It's not a badge someone wears. It's something that you're actually engaging and doing.” 

“It's a title that someone gives to you rather than a thing that you self-identify with,” Blunt affirms.

“It's that community that deems you to be an ally,” Cerio agrees, “through your action and your values and behaviors.”

And the connective tissue all along, through every collaborative point of this track’s journey, is a genuine, whole-hearted offering of allyship and friendship. 

As Blunt mentions on our previous call with Lee, “It's like having you being part of the community of this song, Ben.

“It lifts it from something that's dark and trying to be worked through, to something that can be fun with a real joyousness in working to overcome something, even if you haven't gotten to the other side yet,” they emphasise.

“There's like a camaraderie that just makes things feel lighter.”

FVNERAL’s Ben Lee-featuring friendly fire is out now.