WHITE FLOWERS announce details of debut album, ‘Day By Day’

WHITE FLOWERS announce details of debut album, 'Day By Day' 2

White Flowers announce details of their debut album, Day By Day, which will be released on Friday 7th May 2021 on Tough Love Records.

Having previously released album tracks Portra, Night Drive and Day By Day as limited edition 12”s, the band have now shared the latest track from the album, Daylight.

The story of Day By Day begins when songwriting duo Joey Cobb and Katie Drew of White Flowers returned to their native Preston after studying art in London. In part, drawing inspiration from their stint in the capital the pair’s creative focus and direction was primarily sharpened by their experiences on returning north.

“There’s something uniquely bleak about the North,” says Joey, speaking from the abandoned textile mill that White Flowers call home, “but in that bleakness, there’s a certain beauty.”

Whilst leaning into the North’s post-punk past and inspired by their own post-industrial Preston experiences the pair began both writing the tracks that would become Day By Day and honing the essence and approach which would define the band.

Creating all of their artwork, visuals and overall aesthetic, they began building a world that stretched beyond the music alone – in an unusual circular fashion, this auteurist-like approach became a way of translating their environment and experiences into a form of escapism from the very place that inspired them.

“We’ve always taken care to control every aspect of the White Flowers ‘world’, and because we’ve developed this over time, it feels to us like there’s a separate realm for White Flowers music to exist in,” observes Joey. “More than anything, the isolation that a place like Preston provides means that what we do is very much its own, separate thing”.

Watch ‘Daylight’ – BELOW:

Hooking up with album producer Jez Williams also proved to be another creative breakthrough as the pair clicked artistically with the erstwhile member of Doves. Recording at his Manchester studio they built the album during on-off sessions across two years – sometimes leaving the studio for a couple of months to work on ideas, other times crafting the minutiae of details across all-night studio sessions.

The access to flexible studio time was telling, and the band were able to develop an aesthetic that, whilst indebted to the various sounds that defined their youth, also leaned heavily into Kevin Shields’ droning wall of noise guitars, the palimpsestic hauntology of early Burial, and the ghost box sampleadelia of Boards of Canada.

The result is one of the most exciting and hauntingly beautiful releases of 2021, an intuitive collection of songs augmented by Jez Williams’ impossibly diaphanous production and inspired by the constant upheaval of, well, everything.

“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.

“Everything’s surrounded by uncertainty” adds Joey, “but it isn’t all doom and gloom, there are positives, rules are out the window and you can do what you want. There’s some hope in there.”

Day By Day

Co-produced by the band and Jez Williams of Doves, the tracklisting of the 10-track album is as follows:

1. Intro
2. Night Drive
3. Daylight
4. Stars
5. Tried To Call
6. Help Me Help Myself
7. Day By Day
8. Different Time, Different Place
9. Portra
10. Nightfall

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

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