Sung Tongs

Only Portner and Lennox play on it, the first time since Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished. They lived in a house in rural Colorado for the sessions, with the engineer Rusty Santos, and Portner remembered a lot of singing and messing around with vocals in every part of a room. Acoustic guitars and voices went to an eight-track Tascam half-inch machine, then to Santos's laptop for overdubs, and the mix, with samples and electronics, was finished at Lennox's mother's place in Baltimore, where it was so cold they wore jackets. Portner recorded himself slamming the house door for the rhythm track of Kids on Holiday. Visiting Friends was influenced by Kompakt's Pop Ambient compilations and by Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, meant as a wall of hums with acoustic guitars.

Dominique Leone of Pitchfork called it a romantic album, one that celebrates innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge. Metacritic gives it 83. Pitchfork placed it second on its 2004 list, ninth among the albums of 2000 to 2004 and 27th among the best of the 2000s. The duo played it in full for Pitchfork's 21st birthday on 2 December 2017 and toured it in 2018.