More about: White Flowers

Rooted in the ache of the everyday, White Flowers’ debut serves as a stoic reminder to look for the stars in the pitch-black, semblances of hope, of love, of life standing alone in a blanket of darkness. 

The product of songwriting duo Katie Drew and Joey Cobb and their respective experiences of returning home to their native Preston after a stint studying art in the capital, Day By Day reflects on the rare-considered beauty of harsh reality - romanticising the mundane, the lustre of the monotone with a veiled melancholy. “There’s something uniquely bleak about the North,” says Joey, “but in that bleakness there’s a certain beauty.”

Quite literally created day by day, the record was pieced together over a period of two years, each track an iteration of the last, no definitive beginning or end. “The songs on the album were written from when we were teenagers up to our early 20s, so it’s come of age in this weird apocalyptic time,” says Katie.

Honing their dreamy aesthetic into a haze of moody swirls and bruising soundscapes, the release revels in dark, murky, dream-pop, fraught with moments of savoured tranquillity. Its opening tracks are serene, but overcast - delicately oppressive in their ability to capture feelings of uncertainty and hopelessness, ‘Night Drive’ with lyrics so affecting as “the sky is falling now” sung with a numb carefreeness, ‘Stars’ and its “ice cold sunrise”.

Juxtaposing light and dark throughout, the record yearns for a reprieve of it’s dead-eyed smile, something which seems fathomless until the warped, far-off beats of album highlights ‘Porta,’ with it’s drifting reverie, the glittering relief of ‘Different Time, Different Place,’ albeit offering more acceptance than respite.

Sprawling, wistful and otherworldly, Day By Day is a record of rumination and (subdued) illumination in equal measure, a personal listen with little to fault save that, although striking in its own right, it fails to distinguish itself from others in the well-trodden genre that is dream-pop, leaving them trailing ever-so-slightly behind those that have come before. But when White Flowers come out from their own shadows, it will be blinding.

Day By Day arrives 11 June via Tough Love Records.

More about: White Flowers