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& Friends is the debut album from JNBO, the solo project of Melbourne musician Henry Jenkins. Jenkins is the bass player in Karate Boogaloo and the in-house recording and mix engineer at College of Knowledge Records, the Coburg label founded by Surprise Chef's Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin in 2019. Jenkins has tracked, mixed, or produced nearly every release in its catalogue, Surprise Chef, Karate Boogaloo, The Pro-Teens, Temporary Blessings, and Stuckey has said no engineer in Australia can match what he does in that room. He came up playing bass in The Cactus Channel alongside Hudson Whitlock, Callum Riley, and Darvid Thor, friends since their early teens. Triple R listeners will also know Jenkins as a formidable player for the Rockdogs in the Reclink Community Cup.

For all that output, Jenkins has always been the person behind the desk or holding down the bass line. & Friends is the first time he has put his own compositions and creative direction at the centre of a record, and the musicians on it are the same people he has spent a decade recording. He wrote every track for the same eight instruments: three guitars, piano, string synthesiser, Hammond organ, drums, and bass, all played by the same group on every song. That self-imposed constraint became the album's engine: how much variation can you find within the same eight voices? The sound draws on film composer Bernard Herrmann, lounge pioneer Les Baxter, and Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier, and the result moves between smoky late-night atmospheres and deep, steady funk grooves. The album is entirely instrumental, steeped in romance and sincerity, with track titles like ‘Missing,’ ‘Letting Down,’ ‘Letting Go,’ and ‘Close’ tracing a quiet emotional arc.

Jenkins also co-founded the Frollen Music Library with Thor and Whitlock, a production project that creates original analog recordings designed to be sampled by other artists. Their composition ‘The Hands of Time’ was sampled by Leon Thomas on his album Mutt, which won the Grammy for Best R&B Album and was nominated for Album of the Year.