Songfacts®:

• "Friends" features the voice of British singer-songwriter Anne-Marie, who was the co-vocalist on Clean Bandit's hit single "Rockabye."
• This ode to friend zoning finds Anne-Marie angry with her male pal for trying to move their friendship up to the next level.
  
  Haven't I made it obvious? (Have I not made it obvious?)
  Haven't I made it clear? (I made it very clear)
  Want me to spell it out for you? (yeah)
  F-R-I-EN-D-S (I said F-R-I-EN-D-S)
  
  The Essex singer has to spell it out for the dude who just doesn't get it.
• The song was inspired by an actual male pal of Anne-Marie's who wanted to move their friendship up to the next level. She told The Evening Standard: "The idea came from a boy that I know that's my friend and he kind of he wanted to be more than my friend and I was like 'look brother how many times to I have to tell you we're just friends.'"
• Anne-Marie hopes this doesn't ruin the friendship with the pal who inspired the tune. "I don't ever want him to know that it's about him because it's awkward," she said. "I do feel a bit bad but I'm trying to forget that it's about him and think about how funny it is about the situation."
• Anne-Marie previously collaborated with Marshmello when the American DJ remixed the English singer's breakthrough solo single "Alarm" back in 2016.
• When Marshmello was visiting London in 2017, Anne-Marie popped into the studio to thank him for doing the remix. Her visit produced "Friends," even though she hadn't planned on a session. The English songstress recalled to Billboard:
  
  "While he was there, he brought his laptop out and started playing some riffs he had done recently. That little guitar riff you hear in the song - he started playing that, and I was like, 'OK, I need to write a song right now.' We literally wrote it that night, and he worked on it for the next three days in LA, and it was done.
  
  We wrote it to the guitar riff, and it was kind of a Spanish vibe. And then he came back and it was kind of like hip-hoppy - I couldn't believe what he had done to it."
• Anne-Marie explained why she literally spells out the title word in the song;
  
  "I think it just came into my head, like 'F-R-I-E-N-D-S,' and everyone went mad, so we ended up sticking with it. It's fun, although people do think I'm spelling it wrong [Laughs], so I have to make it clear that I am spelling it 'F-R-I-E-N-D-S' - I think they can't hear the 'E.' But then some people say it actually helps them to spell 'friends' because it's quite difficult. I've read a few tweets thanking me for helping them spell it out."
• This was the most-searched-for track in a single day in 2018 on the music identification app Shazam, with 800,000 people Shazaming the song on April 8, 2018.
• The guitar loop came from a purchasable sample pack on Splice made by Prime Loops. All samples downloaded from Splice's marketplace are acquired royalty-free.