FLORAL IMAGE ANNOUNCE DEBUT ALBUM ‘GONE DOWN MEADOWLAND’ TO BE RELEASED APRIL 25TH VIA FUZZ CLUB
24th March 2025Gone Down Meadowland is the much-anticipated debut album release from Norwich, UK psych outfit Floral Image, released 25th April 2025 on the renowned Fuzz Club.
After an extensive touring schedule throughout 2023, the band spent the following winter looking both inward and outward to the wide-skied rural landscape to distill their wide pool of influences. Once the gigging horizons regularly started to expand beyond the sleepy shire of home, a fear of musical inertia had left the group asking themselves what their own sound even was. The long nights were used to re-assess and reconnect with a sense of play that had found itself shrunken in the rear-view mirror of a touring van. At Friday night jam sessions; wrapped in coats and warmed by homemade cocktails, Tex and Phil’s freezing living room provided the appropriate cultivation ground for the seeds of a new musical shape – one not solely intending to be big and formidable live, but provide a softer, more subtle recorded companion for both drunken gaieties with friends and unleashed introspection of the self.
More than ever, the band wanted to produce a brand of East-Coast psychedelia that reflected the natural lusciousness and glorious solitude of the immediate world around them. Coming fresh out of support shows with Holy Wave and Glass Beams and witnessing firsthand how the delicate, sonic precision they flex on recordings only excels their live shows further, real justification was found. Over 30 songs were conjured, considered, and arranged before being whittled down to a final 10 that epitomize what they do best – ten tracks of vivid hue, harnessed live power, all laced together in fluid lyrical harmonies. Taking inspiration from band favorites Woods, KGLW, and Stereolab, among many others, a string of at-home recording sessions commenced over a 6-week period across the summer of 2024.
“Barns, basements, and boxrooms across Norfolk were all utilized 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. 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.”
Side A is a sun-drenched journey through their whimsical Norfolk countryside, narrated with a surreal sense of lyricism that focuses on the undulating flow of the human psyche and the shape of relationships that can decide its fate. Burning 305 follows the mold of the band’s earlier creations with white-knuckled rhythms layered with dashing production and gritty guitars. The Score summarises their love of Revolver-era Beatles and infuses it with a hint of 90’s dance grooves. Side B is where the trip takes a heavier turn, the unhinged night-time of the record. It is where the band best shows the force with which their live reputation has been built on. Tiergarten – a motorik course through consciousness and Howling Dog Song – all raucous, scuzzy-garage riffing. The album concludes with the 7-minute epic Sun For Hire. Born out of a 30-minute live improvisation, it is the earliest written of all songs on GDM and a strong fan favorite for the audiences of the last 2 years.
“A lot of themes are anti-establishment commentaries on the state of the modern world. 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.”
There is a mischief and daydream to the character Floral Image, on full dynamic display across the record- a reflection of both the playful fraternity of band members Fergus Nolan (vocals, guitars), Jack Warner (vocals, keys), Matt Kennedy (bass guitar), Mitch Forsyth (drums, visuals), & Phil Whitton (guitars, visuals), and the ever-weaving textures they make together. It is an infrastructure that is unstructured; a body of work that bends and grows and shifts between light, dark, malaise, and excitement. There are moments of head-down ferocity and, right there beside them, pools of pulsing wonderment. Fist and feather, hand in hand.
Produced by the band themselves, mixed by Hugh Fothergill of Volleyball, and mastered by Joseph Carra at Crystal Mastering of KGLW fame, Gone Down Meadowland is Floral Image’s first full flourish. They take the record on the road across Europe and the UK throughout April & May 2025.
Pre-order ‘Gone Down Meadowland’ HERE:
‘Gone Down Meadowland’ track-listing:
- Meadowland
- The Dream
- Burning 305
- Call Up The Doctor
- The Score
- Boogietown
- Tiergarten
- Howling Dog Song
- Twist Of A Nerve
- Sun For Hire
Catch Floral Image live in 2025 at the following dates:
- 03/05 – Angers, FR @ Joker’s Pub
- 04/05 – Nantes, FR @ Ubik
- 06/05 – Ingolstadt, DE @ Neue Welt
- 07/05 – Kusel, DE @ Kinett
- 09/05 – Haarlem, NL @ Patronaat
- 10/05 – Eindhoven, NL @ Fuzz Club Festival
- 22/05 – Manchester, UK @ YES Basement
- 23/05 – Liverpool, UK @ Kazimer Stockroom
- 24/05 – Edinburgh, UK @ The Voodoo Rooms – The Speakeasy
- 25/05 – Newcastle, UK @ Zerox
- 28/05 – Bristol, UK @ The Lanes
- 29/05 – Brighton, UK @ Green Door Store
- 30/05 – London, UK @ MOTH Club
- 31/05 – Norwich, UK @ Norwich Arts Centre
- 03/08 – Kendal, UK @ Kendal Calling Festival
