Norwich, UK-based psych outfit Floral Image — Fergus Nolan (vocals, guitar), Jack Warner (vocals, keys), Matt Kennedy (bass guitar), Mitch Forsyth (drums, visuals), and Phil Whitton (guitar, visuals) — will be releasing their highly-anticipated full-length debut Gone Down Meadowland on April 25, 2025 through Fuzz Club.
After an extensive touring schedule throughout the course of 2023, the rising British quintet spent the following winter looking both inward and outward to the wide-skied rural landscape of their immediate environs with the aim of distilling their wide pool of influences. As it turned out, once the gigs started to expand outside of Norwich, a fear of musical inertia had left the band asking themselves what their own sound even was. The long nights of their touring break were used to reassess and reconnect with a sense of play that had disappeared while spending hours driving around in a tour van.
During Friday night jam sessions, with the band wrapped in coats and warmed by homemade cocktails, Phil Whitton’s freezing living room wound up providing the cultivation for the begging of a new musical shape for the band — a sound not just intending to be big and formidable live, but one that provides a softer, more subtle recorded companion for drunken hijinks with pals and unleashed self-introspection.
More than ever, the quintet wanted to produce a brand of East Coast psychedelia that reflected the lushness of their natural surroundings and the solitude of their immediate surroundings. Over 30 songs were written, considered and arranged before the band whittled that down to 10 songs that they felt truly epitomized what they do best — vivid hued colors and harnessed live energy and power woven together with fluid, lyrical harmonies inspired by Woods, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Stereolab and others.
Written and recorded over across a string of at-home recording sessions during a six week period of last summer, Gone Down Meadowland‘s material is anchored around a sense of mischief and dreaminess, informed by the band member’s own playful and loving friendship. Sonically, the material bends, grows and shifts between light, dark, malaise and excitement. There are moments of head-down ferocity, punctuated by moments of pulsing awe and wonder.
“Barns, basements and boxrooms across Norfolk were all utilised to unearth the songs from the soil of our collective minds. We practically lived with each other and buried ourselves in the music for what was almost a whole half year,” Floral Image explains. “We would cook for each other, learn from each other and laugh like we never could elsewhere. Even ‘that’ tricky period of cutting songs off went by with all of us in complete faith that the album’s needs seemed greater than our own. If it wasn’t for the fact that recording had almost become secondary to getting actually quite good at Frisbee, we might have been able to release a double LP.”
“A lot of themes are anti-establishment commentaries on the state of the modern world,” the band adds. It can feel isolating being bystanders of global concern in sleepy Norfolk, even though it’s easy to slip into a false comfort when you’re surrounded by vast space, natural beauty and friendly folks down the market. Gone Down Meadowland is that egoless escapist fantasy that still can’t escape the world caving in on itself; Norfolk isolationism.”
“Burning 305,” Gone Down Meadowland‘s latest single is a is a trippy and hook-driven mesh of 60s and 70s psych rock, krautrock and shoegaze, featuring a relentless motorik groove, swirling and painterly guitar textures paired with dreamy falsetto melodies and an arena rock friendly sense of bombast.
Directed and featuring animation by M. Forsyth and live-action camera operation from Alistair Nicholls, the accompanying video for “Burning 305” follows a bored janitor, listening to music on his phone while on the late night shift, when he encounters a discarded virtual reality headset. Once he puts the headset on, he’s transported to a mind-bending, surrealistic, psilocybin-fueled virtual reality world that’s first bright and sunny before quickly turning hellish.
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