Liana Flores brings back the age of flower power
On her debut album Flower of the soul, Liana Flores brings together bossa nova and traditional 60s folk songwriting techniques to create a fresh revival of the flower power era. Taking cues from greats like João Gilberto and Vashti Bunyan, Flores’s singular and beautiful wisp-sing packs a surprisingly strong emotional punch. The album follows the recent online breakout success of her 2019 track “rises the moon”, a stripped-back, mystical lullaby. But that success was almost entirely accidental. Almost.
In her late teens, Flores felt boxed-in by life and needed an outlet. She directed that angst towards music, taking refuge in it and using it as a bulwark against feelings of isolation. Much of her early work was written while she was still in high school and then put away – meant only, at first, as diary-like creative expressions. When she did decide to release the work, she produced the tracks herself on GarageBand and uploaded them to streaming through DistroKid, where they sat online, virtually undiscovered, for years.
“I was not consciously trying to be anything,” she says. “The stuff that I have out at the moment, apart from the songs on the new album, was just me singing about my feelings because I had to. Nobody was really listening to it.”
In her final year of university, though, that changed. While wrapping up her degree in zoology at St. Andrew’s (where, in a rare but deserved burst of pride, she shares that she graduated with a first), her roommate alerted her to the fact that she kept seeing her song “rises the moon” all over TikTok. At first, Flores dismissed the phenomenon as pure coincidence. She didn’t have TikTok herself, but she assumed her friends were being shown her song because of “the algorithm”. Eventually, she says, she realised there was more at play.
“At first, I was like, ‘Oh, this is so fab, and this is going to be over in maximum one week,’” she jokes. When the noise didn’t die down – the melancholy snippet still reverberates all across the internet even today – she realised she had more serious choices at hand. “I didn’t know what to do with it,” she says. When label emails started coming in, she contemplated leaving school immediately, but decided to stay and finish at the recommendation of her father, who had dropped out of university as a young man and always regretted it. “At the time, I was like, I would rather have a career cutting this one hit out on the road than have to get an office job. So I decided to graduate and do that.”
Lava La Rue is exploring identity through psychedelia
Next week, West-London born artist Lava La Rue will finally release their debut record, STARFACE. Building on the versatile and visionary foundations they have built over six years in the industry, the concept project will follow the journey of eponymous lead character who is, in La Rue’s own words, “a genderfluid psychedelic musical space alien, sent to planet Earth to understand why humans are so self-destructive,” falling in love with a human girl along the way and “becoming self-destructive in their own travels.”
“I wanted to have multiple narratives going,” La Rue explains, musing on the reason behind choosing to release a concept album as their debut. “I wanted to have a larger-than-life storyline, [where] people can interpret their own meaning, and then there's also my actual personal meaning behind the project [which] allowed some separation.”
That much is true for STARFACE. It's a record that feels explosively fantastical, whilst remaining deep-rooted in very intimate and personal topics excavating humanity and identity. “I really poured my heart out into how I'm feeling about the world, about relationships, about myself,” they share. The venture was, in some ways, informed by the time in which it was written, as the world was coming out of lockdown. “A lot of music then was very instantaneous, bedroom-like; short, two-minute songs,” La Rue explains. “I thought that was really cool, but it made me want to do the opposite. I want it to be larger than life, this big fantasy to escape to and be a bit nerdy with.”
“I wanted to create something a bit ambiguous and kind of psychedelic”. Citing inspirations including David Bowie, Prince, Yves Tumor and Andre 3000, La Rue ultimately explains that the record is really just an effort to further unpack and come to terms with their own identity. “There are people who have explored it without having to be so on the nose. In those last examples, their blackness and cultural identity is also mixed in, which is its own conversation.”
Khruangbin’s Laura Lee on Jane Birkin
The whole album Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg is a huge part of my musical DNA. I was introduced to it by Mark around the time that I met him. It became my favorite album at the time, and then it led me on a Serge Gainsbourg discovery. With this particular album I love the combination of Jane Birkin's innocence over Serge Gainsbourg’s expert-level arrangement and direction.
In my early days of Khruangbin, when I was feeling particularly insecure playing next to Mark and DJ who have been playing music their whole life, I always looked to Jane Birkin as inspiration for how naivety can be a strength. It gave me that sort of power at that time, but I'm somebody who is pretty comfortable jumping into different things or into new worlds. DJ especially likes to think of me as somebody who has had nine lives, and I think I found music as great of an adventure as I did anything else. Now it's my greatest potential.
It's also one of the most incredible covers I've ever known. “Jane B.” is originally a Chopin Prelude and it's an incredible interpretation on what the actual musical word would be for the cover of this. I'm really picky about covers, because I think unless you're doing something different or new or better than the original, it should be left alone.
Obviously you have to be pretty ballsy to cover Chopin in this way, but it's so tasteful and beautifully done. I think it inspired me in that way as well. I played piano when I was a kid, and the bass in that album is my ideal bass; I'm always trying to get the tone on that record.
As told to Maddy Smith
Three things to get excited about this week
The album: Former Best Fit writer Asher White has dropped her latest record, Home Constellation Study . It’s an incredible album from the prolific 24-year-old Providence musician, who has racked up around 15 long-players since her mid-teens.
The book: The steady stream of genuinely exciting music books released this summer has been enough to make any amateur music historian — or even any passive fan — feel something like a kid in a candy store. Chris Stein’s memoir, Under a Rock, is no exception to that trend. Detailing his journey with Blondie, albeit with a surprisingly nonchalant tone (though, for a professional “cool guy,” maybe that makes sense), Stein offers readers an unvarnished look at one of America’s greatest bands.
The celebration: On Wednesday night, England won big in their Euro 2024 semi-final. Celebrations were kicking off on streets around the country, but there was perhaps no better party to be at than The Killers’ London show. As the final minutes of the game played out, the group paused their show, live-streamed the action and jumped straight into a celebratory rendition of “Mr. Brightside” when the final whistle blew.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of our writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Laura David reflects on Harry Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet (1968) and Superfan’s Lapse (2024).
It’s near impossible to hear the twinkling opening guitar lick of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and not see in your mind’s eye the jovial Joe Buck of Midnight Cowboy catching his bus to New York City. That quintessential “waaaaah, wah wah wah wah” bridge transports me to the buzzing but isolating streets of Manhattan, both as it is now and as it must have been back them. But more than being the title track of one of the great movies in the American film canon, “Everybody’s Talkin’” is also a masterclass work from one of America’s greatest albums, Aerial Ballet. But for the cultural cache of the scene Nilsson occupied (he was a close personal friend of all the Beatles, who called him their favourite American artist), his name and, in particular, this album are relatively under-appreciated by younger generations of music fans.
Released in 1968 and named after a circus act performed by his grandfather, Aerial Ballet was Nilsson’s second LP with RCA records. Following on the heels of his critically acclaimed debut, Pandemonium Shadow Show, Aerial Ballet saw Nilsson solidifying his sound. Vocal layering and left-field embellishments give the album a slightly zany feel, characteristic of Nilsson’s entire body of work. But thematically, the record cuts much deeper, dealing with emotional matter ranging from the trauma of parental abandonment (“Daddy’s Song”) to the tragedy of a busy signal (“One”).
Aerial Ballet is, by all accounts, Americana at its finest. And it might just be the greatest classic you’ve never heard — at least not in full.
When the moody guitars and charmingly cracked vocal lines of “Navy Blue” filtered through my headphones on my weekly shuffle through my Release Radar, I assumed I was listening to an artist I’d never heard before. But as I began to flip through the album — Tow Truck Jesus — and look into its maker — Superfan — I found myself sorely mistaken. Rather, the project was actually the debut album of Kali Flanagan, a singer/songwriter/producer wunderkind who had previously released a series of smash bedroom-pop singles under the name KALI. Most notable among this early collection was the TikTok-ready earworm “Back to the Start”, whose dreamy guitar hooks and Still Woozy-esque production tricks earned it a place as one of 2020’s songs of the summer.
But for Flanagan, Tow Truck Jesus, released in June under the name Superfan, is a rebirth. On this record, everything about Flanagan has changed, both in art and in life. For one thing, the record sonically has more common with Elliot Smith’s catalogue than the indie-pop phenoms of 2019 and 2020 that Flanagan came up with. For another, Flanagan himself has changed. This record is his first post-transition body of work, and it examines in depth the turbulent yet liberating experience of undergoing a medical transition. But it’s his willingness to deal with these complexities — sonically and thematically — that makes Tow Truck Jesus such a captivating album and makes the world of Superfan itself such an exciting artistic endeavour.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from LICE, Sam Akpro, Hello Mary, Joalin and coverstar Sarah Kinsley.