Friday 9th October
WHITE FLOWERS
£13 | £15 [+10% booking fee]
Doors open 8pm
18+ show
Preston duo White Flowers – AKA Katie Drew and Joey Cobb – announce new album Dreams For Somebody Else for May 1st via The state51 Conspiracy. New single Thinking Of You is out now.
Dreams For Somebody Else came together via a circuitous, yet intentional process. For a decade, Drew and Cobb have enacted a dedicated archival and diaristic practice – storing snatches of musical and artistic ideas across hard drives and physical mediums. These fragments formed a primordial soup via which the 10 tracks that make up the LP have since coalesced.
Sonically, the two-piece embrace ‘sad euphoria’ – a palette starting from their well-established dream-pop sound, whilst adding the cathartic elements from dance music. The result is an album not backward in coming forward regarding its pop-sensibilities.
Alongside the sparks of inspiration that came from revisiting old ideas in their ‘sketchbook approach’, there are external influences that have helped drive the narrative. As they explain:
‘Whilst recording the songs for ‘Dreams For Somebody Else’, we really connected with the concept of Annie Ernaux’s book, ‘The Years’ – a ‘collective autobiography’ pieced together from mismatched fragments from her past, conjuring the effect that she’s merely an observer of her own life. This concept merges into the White Flowers world, where time, rather than being restrictive, is fluid and boundless, with our music existing as an endless conversation with versions of ourselves at different stages of our lives. ‘Thinking Of You’ embodies this theme, and the sense of hopeful optimism and eternal loss that comes with it.’
The genesis of any work in the White Flowers world (or “realm”, as they coin it) begins with the duo’s own creativity, before opening this up fills in the detail. Namely on Dreams For Somebody Else this came from working with Al Doyle of LCD Soundsystem on co-production – a serendipitous link-up given the profound effect a 2017 LCD set at Primavera had on the two-piece’s outlook. New single Thinking Of You was in fact specifically inspired by the performance, and was the first track they worked on together.
‘Thinking Of You’ arrives with a visual, which is similarly shaped by their recourse to personal collage:
‘The visual side of White Flowers is just as important to us as the music and helps us to fully express and realise ideas. For the Thinking Of You video, we pieced together footage from our own archive, spanning nearly a decade, mixed with hand-drawn animations.
Delving into our own past video footage provided a catharsis that tied in with the process of assembling the record, a process that involved gradually piecing together and building on fragments of ideas we’ve amassed over a long period.’
In another sliding-doors moment, as the grind of immediate post-pandemic touring was close to taking a crippling toll, the offer to join one of their favourite bands Beach House on tour came in – a sign to persevere. This perseverance has been rewarded with what feels like their most complete work yet – a holistic structure built from ephemeral foundations, couching themes of isolation, dissociation and identity in trance indebted rapture. Sad euphoria, indeed.
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