Friday Still Rains is Sonny's debut single — a defiant, jangly Madchester anthem written as a direct answer-back to The Carpenters, for anyone who's ever queued in the rain outside a venue and had the best night of their life anyway.

Music Track Story

The whole song starts from one specific, wry complaint: The Carpenters got halfway to something true with “Rainy Days and Mondays” and then stopped. Sonny gives Karen the Monday — “rainy days and Mondays, fair enough — I'll give her that one song” — but Friday is where the maths breaks down completely. A rainy Friday in Manchester isn't a reason to stay in. It's the whole city deciding, on principle, to go out anyway.

The verses sit in real Manchester — the Deaf Institute, Oldham Street, a queue with umbrellas held up like flags, lads in shirts with no jackets because that's just what you do — before the chorus opens into the kind of line built specifically for a crowd to sing back at once: “You can't cancel a city just because of the grey / Friday still rains — and we're going out anyway.” No pyrotechnics in the delivery. Just Rickenbacker jangle, a baggy shuffling groove, and a Manc frontman who sounds like he's talking to the whole pub at once.

The bridge is where the joke lands its real point: “Karen sang it sweet and sad, but she got the maths wrong… rainy nights plus Friday? Love, that's a different sum — that's the whole of Manchester singing here we bloody come.” It's funny, and it's also completely sincere — under the swagger, this is a song about civic pride and working-class joy, about a city and its people that a bit of bad weather has never once managed to dim.

It ends the way any proper Madchester record should — cascading Rickenbacker and Hammond organ carrying the chorus out, the whole thing built less to be listened to alone than to be shouted, arms round shoulders, by a queue of people with no jackets on, in the rain, at eleven.