Friendship's Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place they've only visited in their dreams.

Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-O'Leary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the group's particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its glory.

Between instrumental pit stops at "Kum & Go" and "Quickchek," local references in Love the Stranger create a catalog of human perception, presented as roadside attractions.

From grape jelly residue ("Ramekin") to the site of a demolished cathedral ("St. Bonaventure") to King of the Hill quotations ("Smooth Pursuit"), the record's images craft a symbolic language of high and low Americana, both evocative and consistently accessible.

Spending time with Love the Stranger creates a community _ one in which the window between the listener and the musicmaker shatters in full, until all that remains are the fragments you decide to pick up together.

Like its sprawling lyrical references, Love the Stranger's production is both familiar and capacious enough for pedal steel, synth strings, airy folk guitar field recordings, and MIDI pad exploration to work in vital harmony.

Influenced by Friendship's punk and indie peers as much as road-star forebears like Lucinda Williams and Lambchop, Wriggins says of the recording sessions: "I wanted the album to sound like Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band in the '70s.

Pete wanted it to sound like a semi full of spent fuel rods, barreling towards a runaway truck ramp.

Jon kept reminding us that the studio is an instrument, and Michael wanted it to sound like the breakdown two-and-a-half minutes into Shuggie Otis' `Strawberry Letter 23.'" Friendship is probably already your favorite band's favorite band, a long-revered IYKYK of DIY with a devoted cult following from Wawa to In-N-Out.

With Love the Stranger, the Friendship universe only continues to expand and grow more open-hearted, more inviting, with every passing note.

It's a record that locates the listener exactly where the listener is, and wherever that may be, makes a friend out of them, too.