Type the “jellywish” into any electronic document and the program’s omniscient grammarian will immediately try to correct it.
Do you mean “jellyfish”?
It will ask this via a squiggly red line or an imposing highlight, ad infinitum, until you add the new word to its lexicon. It will reject this creative remodel of an everyday term until you convince it to work in a different way.
This is sort of the whole point of Florist’s new album.
With Jellywish, the quartet’s fourth full-length work, out April 4th on Double Double Whammy, the band invites listeners to question everything — to imagine a world where magic, surrealism, and the supernatural are our companions in day-to-day life. Jellywish dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful.
With the album, Florist explores life’s big questions without offering silver linings, morals, or definitive answers. Instead, the band asks perhaps the most difficult of questions: Is it possible to break free from our ingrained thought cycles and pedestrian way of life? That, Florist posits, may be the only way to be truly happy, fulfilled, and free.
Singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Emily Sprague says that the record is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” she explains. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.”
Jellywish is an exercise in multidimensional world building. The album’s panoramic cover art, which looks like something out of a Henry Darger volume, wraps the music in a collage of color that presents as science fiction-adjacent, hinting at something mysterious, fantastical, and mythological. Inside the album’s jacket, however, are tender and catchy sonic meditations on life’s most knotty subjects: life, death, earth, reality, relationships, joy, and pain. Taken together, Florist offers an acute sense of the band at this moment, one that worries about the world and its place in it. In contrast, it also presents an alternative to the doldrums of day-to-day life, and the necessary suggestion that very different things may be true at the same time.
Though this concept may seem a bit impenetrable, Florist delivers its new songs with an ease and thoughtfulness that will be familiar to its fans. The goal isn’t to alienate the listener, or force them onto the band’s particular wavelength. With Jellywish, Florist places supernatural worlds and spirit energies alongside very human issues and questions in order to trigger the listener’s imagination. What it ultimately aims for is the kind of out-of-box thinking that prompts a diversity of changes and freedoms. In doing so, it also demonstrates that we are all connected.
Sprague offers “Levitate,” the first song on Jellywish, and “Gloom Designs,” its last song, as the album’s two main thesis statements. They are very frank statements about being really tired and worried about whether or not life will add up to mean anything — the zoomed out version of Jellywish that acts as the album’s overarching theme. Between the end caps are small bits, and thought fragments, within that broader query. “We set out to try to make songs that are a very colorful but troubled kind of thought spiral about all of these questions,” she says.
Along the way, “Have Heaven,” with its sprightly acoustic guitar lines and beating-heart drumming, demonstrates how Jellywish lives between the dream world and reality. It underscores that everything is changing around us all the time, and some of it is absurd, strange, beautiful, or scary. “Jellyfish,” the pseudo title track, conveys a whimsical approach to hard questions. It’s bold sense of intimacy, spotlighting existential lyrical angst alongside ethereal music, slots in alongside acts such as Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie or Elliot Smith. “Sparkle Song,” with its warmth and fingerpicking, serves as an anchor to earth. It’s an homage to the beings who are right in front of us and are worth showing up for; how leading with love and living within collaborative structures is a gift. All of the songs are steered by Sprague’s gentle voice whose closeness doubles as a spiritual guide.
With Jellywish, Florist offers a complex album in a time that is anything but simple. In mining the chaos and wonder of physical and spiritual worlds, the band holds a mirror to itself to the great benefit of all. It tells us that we are not alone, and challenges us to believe in magic.
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