Press release –
Young Allies, the New York-based band led by singer, songwriter, and actor Fritz Michel, continue the rollout of their forthcoming debut EP Fingers Entwined with the release of “Watchman,” a new single reaches nearly a thousand years into the past while remaining firmly rooted in the present.
“Watchman is a modernized take on a medieval song dating back to 1059,” explains Michel. “It was once a famous troubadour song from the Provence region of France. There’s something really catchy about the watchman, metaphorically and literally: the sentinel of the end of night, longing for the moment passed in reverie and reflection. Fritz was working on the chord progression before finding the text, and adapted the old story of dawn breaking as lovers meet in an orchard under a hawthorne tree.”
The song embodies one of the central ideas behind Young Allies: finding ways to carry older stories, images, and traditions into contemporary life. Rather than treating history as something fixed, the band approaches it as living material – something that can be reimagined, reshaped, and made immediate through collaboration.
That impulse runs throughout Fingers Entwined, which marks the first official statement from a band that emerged organically from years of creative partnerships, live performance, and shared experimentation. After releasing music under his own name for several years, Michel found himself increasingly drawn toward a more collective process. What began as a solo songwriting project gradually opened into something more fluid and responsive, eventually becoming Young Allies.
Anchored by a simple but increasingly rare idea – music created through real-time collaboration – the band has built its identity around presence, listening, and interaction. Songs gather rather than arrive fully formed. Arrangements shift depending on who is in the room. The result is a sound that feels understated but deeply intentional, where a songwriter’s interior voice expands outward into something immersive and shared.
“What you hear on the recordings is a map of habits and arguments, late-night jokes, an impossible perfect take after an hour of trying, and the quiet between songs when everyone listens to what the other person is doing,” says bassist Gavin Price.
The band features Michel on vocals and guitar, alongside guitarist and co-producer Tosh Sheridan, bassist Gavin Price, drummer Isaac Gardner (Blue Man Group), keyboardist Phil Kadet, and vocalist Shelly Bhushan. Nearly everyone sings, and the dynamic remains deliberately collective, shaped by a shared commitment to collaboration.
That collaborative instinct extends beyond music. Several members of Young Allies share roots in New York’s experimental theater community, particularly through their connection to Elevator Repair Service. Through workshops and master classes taught across the country and internationally, that community has developed a collaborative approach that sometimes begins without a script, using people, architecture, sound, and source material as starting points. That openness carries directly into the band’s creative process.
The release arrives on the heels of Young Allies’ recent residency at LIC Bar in Long Island City, where the group spent several weeks developing material in front of live audiences. Rather than treating performances as fixed presentations, the residency became an extension of the creative process itself – a place where arrangements evolved, songs stretched into new shapes, and the band developed a shared language in real time.
For Michel, the experience reinforced the value of making music in a room with other people at a moment when so much culture feels increasingly mediated and abstract.
In many ways, “Watchman” captures that philosophy perfectly. Inspired by a text that survived for nearly a millennium, the song is ultimately less concerned with the past than with the universal emotions that connect people across generations: longing, reflection, anticipation, and the desire to hold onto fleeting moments before they disappear.
The forthcoming Fingers Entwined EP continues that trajectory. The title track, “Fingers Entwined,” began with a visual reference – double-exposed Polaroids by artist Natalie White – and grew into a meditation on entanglement and chance, using the language of backgammon as a metaphor for the shifting stakes of human relationships. Elsewhere, “Are You In” draws inspiration from Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” continuing the band’s instinct to reinterpret older source material through a modern lens.
Across the EP, there is a consistent desire to translate inherited ideas into something lived and present. There are echoes of classic songwriting traditions, a certain intimacy that recalls Lou Reed, and a warmth that aligns with The Band, but these influences sit lightly within the music. The goal is not to recreate another era, but to carry forward what still resonates.
Young Allies is the result of that process – and the beginning of something still unfolding.
Fingers Entwined EP
Out July 24, 2026
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/youngallies/fingers-entwined/
