“Every day I wake, wait for the tragedy.” The lyric with which Emily Sprague has chosen to open Florist’s latest album Jellywish could easily be read as melodramatic, were it not for her understated delivery: softly-spoken and matter-of-fact, an unfiltered early-morning thought over gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar. “The album starts that way because it’s important to call attention to the fact that we’re dysfunctional as humans on earth,” says Sprague, Florist’s vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter. “We’re not really symbiotically living on this planet and with each other. We get stuck in these ways of believing what we think is true. But it doesn’t have to be so narrow.”
“Every day I wake, wait for the tragedy.” The lyric with which Emily Sprague has chosen to open Florist’s latest album Jellywish could easily be read as melodramatic, were it not for her understated delivery: softly-spoken and matter-of-fact, an unfiltered early-morning thought over gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar. “The album starts that way because it’s important to call attention to the fact that we’re dysfunctional as humans on earth,” says Sprague, Florist’s vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter. “We’re not really symbiotically living on this planet and with each other. We get stuck in these ways of believing what we think is true. But it doesn’t have to be so narrow.”
The band formed 12 years ago in Albany, New York. Originally they were a trio, with Rick Spataro on bass and Jonnie Baker on additional guitar and keyboard, playing house shows with songs that Sprague had written to perform under her own name. “But it felt like the three of us were doing something more than just them playing as my band,” says Sprague. “It was really this friendship between us that was so much of what the music was about.” Drummer Felix Walworth joined shortly after Florist self-released their first EP We Have Been This Way Forever in the spring of 2013, and since then, that collaboration has been “growing, changing and going through all kinds of different life chapters together.”
Jellywish is more succinct and song-driven than its self-titled 19-track predecessor of 2022. It finds the band juxtaposing their exploration of modern anxieties – technology, ageing, loss, climate catastrophe – with quietly joyful melodies, like an otherworldly version of fellow East Coast indie-folkers Big Thief. While acoustic guitar, softly-brushed cymbals and resonant harmonies do much of the work, regular flashes of understated electronics add textures that call back to the band’s more experimental beginnings, as well as the modular ambient compositions Sprague has released under her own name; witness the ethereal squall from which “Our Hearts In A Room” emerges, or the undulating, music-box sound that peppers “Jellyfish”.
While Sprague has always written alone, it’s once she takes the material to the rest of the band that the “alchemy” that transforms them into Florist songs begins. “We’ve recorded every album ourselves, as Rick is a professional recording engineer with his own studio,” explains Sprague. “A huge part of what makes Florist recordings sound the way that they do is that it’s the four of us together in a house somewhere, hanging out and having ideas and committing them to tape.” Gradually, over the course of the band’s existence, Sprague has become “more comfortable writing in the same space that we’re recording. I don’t feel as nervous, or as much pressure, about it as I used to.”
Album opener “Levitate” – with that striking first line – was one of the songs that came together during those recording sessions, a month overlapping the April 2024 solar eclipse which the band spent together in a house in the Catskill Mountains. Time apart from the world allowed the band to “deep dive” into the music, developing their own shorthand. “We used the word ‘jellyfish’ a lot: like, ‘Let’s give this song a jellyfish vibe’, this sort of undulating, watery feel,” says Sprague.
The band has a heavy tour schedule over the coming months, and Sprague is excited to see how these songs land outside of that room. “In the early days, I used to be more worried about whether people would like the music,” she admits. “But now? I’m proud of this whole record. I’m proud of us.”
Jellywish is out on April 4 via Double Double Whammy
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