Florist new self title album is coming out this friday! Repeat that out loud to yourself.
Florist are releasing their anticipated new self-titled album this Friday, July 29th, via Double Double Whammy.
Florist is hands down the strongest album of the band’s decade-long career, an immersive work that conveys the magic of the earth and of family, as showcased by the album’s singles “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning),” “Spring In Hours,” “Sci-Fi Silence,” and “Feathers.”
Florist has been named one of the most anticipated albums of the Summer by Pitchfork, The AV Club and Paste, with NPR All Songs Considered’s Bob Boilen calling it “the most beautiful music I’ve heard in 2022.”
TOUR DATES:
7/30 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
7/31 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe
8/1 - Ferndale, MI @ Otus Supply
8/2 - Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village
8/3 - St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club
8/5 - Denver, CO @ Lost Lake
8/6 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge
8/7 - Boise, ID @ Kin
8/8 - Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s
8/9 - Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
8/11 - San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
8/12 - Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon
8/13 - Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
8/15 - Tucson, AZ @ Hotel Congress
8/16 - Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf
8/18 - Austin, TX @ The Ballroom
8/19 - Fort Worth, TX @ Tulips
8/20 - Kansas City, MO @ Record Bar
8/22 - Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR
8/24 - Washington DC @ DC9
8/25 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Lounge at World Cafe Live
8/26 - Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s
8/27 - Buffalo, NY @ Silo City Readings (Solo)
Florist feels like the culmination of a decade-long journey, their fourth full-length album, but the first deserving of a self-titled designation. “We called it Florist because this is not just my songs with a backing band,” Sprague explains. “It’s a practice. It’s a collaboration. It’s our one life. These are my best friends and the music is the way that it is because of that.”
Florist arrives just after the cap of a winding journey. In 2017, shortly after the release of the band’s sophomore record, If Blue Could Be Happiness, Sprague sequestered herself in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from friends and family, and from the physical void and spiritual crisis left in the wake of her mother’s death. There, she took up surfing and released Emily Alone, which was essentially a solo album released under the Florist moniker.
Only after months of self-reflection and therapy did Sprague realize that life in a silo is no way to live. That a life directed by fear is not much of a life. “The trauma response to losing my best friend, my mom, was to feel really afraid to get close to anybody ever again,” she says. “It’s sort of cheesy, but I realized that life is better when you share it. The answer isn’t to isolate yourself and be alone.”
So she began writing Emily Alone’s companion, the other side of the binary, a record that rings distinctly of Sprague’s tender and poetic spirit, filled with nature and wonder and tears, but without all the loneliness and seclusion. She also adopted a dog, who, she says, “completely changed my life.” “My mind just started exploding with all these thoughts about what it means to live with others, and live with love and care collaboration.”
Then, for all of June of 2019, amid a hot and rainy summer, Sprague (guitar, synth, vocals), Jonnie Baker (guitar, synth, sampling, bass, saxophone, vocals), Rick Spataro (bass, piano, synth, vocals) and Felix Walworth (percussion, synth, guitar, vocals) convened in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, to live and work together. It was the first time the quartet recorded that way, and for that long. “In the past we’d meet up for a couple of days, or one day here and there,” Spague recalls. “Living together for a month is a really big part of why the arrangements are the way they are, and also why the instrumentals are such a huge part of the record.”
They set up their gear on the screened-in front porch, which looked out onto a canopy of trees, allowing the sounds of nature to play a leading role throughout. Then, they experimented. The production and recording of the album directly reflects the organic ways in which the band worked that month, with whispering voices, crickets, rain and birds accenting the aleatoric quality of the instrumentation, each player drawing from the communal energy of the woods and their interpersonal bonds.
The quartet played through muggy days and breezy nights, and often impromptu. “In between working on songs specifically, somebody would be sitting on the porch playing a little instrumental piece, and somebody else would be in the kitchen making dinner and stop, and go to the porch and pick up a random instrument,” Sprague explains. These creative bursts became the album’s ambient instrumental bridges, like “Variation” and “Jonnie on the Porch,” gentle moments that portray their life together in that particular moment. The bells heard throughout the album are from a collection housed in the rental, the animals were their neighbors.
After making the record they always knew they could, together, as one, Sprague could no longer live on the west coast without her band and blood. So, she returned home. Last year, she moved back to The Catskills to be closer to her father and her creative collaborators. She misses surfing, but finds peace in the area’s natural landscapes, and through a strengthening sense of physical reconnection. “A goal is to share the band’s connectedness and relationship, but also how we’re all connected,” she says. With Florist, Emily is no longer alone.