Flipper started in San Francisco in 1979, built around two singers who also played bass, Will Shatter and Bruce Loose, guitarist Ted Falconi, and drummer Steve DePace. The city’s hardcore scene was racing toward faster and louder. Flipper went the other way. They slowed everything down to a crawl and let the noise pile up, a choice that confused as many people as it converted. “In Life My Friends” is the third track on Gone Fishin’, the band’s second studio album, released August 29, 1984, on Subterranean Records.

Ted Falconi built the song around a guitar part that drones more than it riffs, while Bruce Loose handles the vocals and Will Shatter holds down the bass. Steve DePace’s drums anchor the track at just over four minutes, brief by Flipper’s usual standards. The band recorded the album at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco with engineer Garry Creiman, working at the same unhurried pace the songs themselves move at.

Will Shatter, who co-founded the band and played bass on the track, died in 1987 of a heroin overdose, just three years after “In Life My Friends” came out. Later pressings of the album included a printed tribute to him, which gives the song’s title a weight the band could not have intended at the time it was written.

Flipper never had a hit, and that was never really the point. The dirge tempos and walls of distortion on records like Gone Fishin’ are now cited as part of the genesis of sludge metal, years before the genre had a name. The Melvins carried that lineage forward directly, covering three Flipper songs across their own catalog, including “Sacrifice” on Lysol. The same slow, bottom-heavy blueprint runs through The Jesus Lizard and Unsane, bands that built entire careers on ground Flipper broke first. Four decades on, “In Life My Friends” still sounds like a band working entirely on its own terms, unconcerned with whether anyone outside the room was listening.