In 2017, road crews working to remove a road sign in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, toppled the sign into traffic, causing lengthy backups—and inspiring an eyewitness report that has become a minor viral sensation over the years. One Philadelphia man, interviewed by a local CBS affiliate, looked up at the construction team’s flashes of light in the sky that night and, for a brief moment, saw the cosmos: “I thought it was a bunch of shooting stars,” he recalled, eyes wide. “I was making a bunch of wishes.”

That moment could be a lyric from Caveman Wakes Up, the humbly exceptional fifth album from Philadelphia’s very own Friendship. Across the record, the four members of the group sketch a starry-eyed map of the city: “I have chilled on that stoop before,” frontman Dan Wriggins sings on “Tree of Heaven,” as if memorializing a former battleground: “Nothing is forgotten.” On a song called “Love Vape,” he spends half a verse romanticizing a gas station off Locust Street that has the “cheapest cigarettes on Earth.” On “All Over the World,” he looks up at the sun while stoned at his landscaping job and feels “the beating heart of God.” If you stay long enough in one place, Caveman Wakes Up suggests, you start to find warped profundity in the everyday.

Friendship have spent the past decade finding cosmic meaning in the tangled metaphors of contemporary life. Over the course of the band’s discography, Wriggins has painstakingly examined aleatory minutiae, seeing the poetry in a ramekin of leftover jelly, a six-pack of beer on the porch, the resilience of a pestering housefly. Fleeting emotional truths erupt from his baritone delivery like ants scattering from an overturned rock. With each album, the band’s tweaks to the indie-folk canon have steadily grown more complex and self-assured, from the lonely thud of a drum machine on 2017’s Shock Out of Season to the stomp-clap rhythms and slow-burning melodies of their 2022 Merge debut Love the Stranger.

All the while, the band members’ individual pursuits have somewhat retroactively rendered Friendship a dirtbag Americana supergroup. Guitarist Peter Gill fronts the prolific power-pop revival act 2nd Grade; percussionist Michael Cormier-O’Leary co-runs the Philadelphia label Dear Life and composes for the instrumental chamber-folk ensemble Hour; bassist Jon Samuels plays in 2nd Grade, co-runs Dear Life with Cormier-O’Leary, and is the touring guitarist for MJ Lenderman. Wriggins, meanwhile, spent the past few years splitting his time between odd jobs and writing his first book of poetry while pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop (“I woke up loving the sea. Enormous and full of garbage,” begins one typical entry). Caveman Wakes Up is a spit-shined culmination of the band’s collective powers, a ramshackle triumph that transforms gritted-teeth non sequiturs into unlikely anthems for the downwardly mobile.