| Tomato Flower is the result of long-lasting friendships and overlapping collaborations that found Austyn Wohlers, Mike Alfieri, and Jamison Murphy (and later adding bassist Ruby Mars) looking for the balance between taut guitars and experimental pop music. Their debut EP Gold Arc finds the band at multiple crossroads. Their sonic curiosity plays with tension between sweetness and destructive heaviness. Conceptually, Gold Arc hungers for an alternate reality. Sometimes that is a “sustainable paradise,” as drummer Mike Alfieri puts it. Or, on “Lovers Arc,” it’s a desire to be loved constantly. “It's not that all these songs are straightforwardly positive, though,” explains Austyn Wohlers. “I think all of the songs are about longing for a different world. But they take various shapes.” Playing freely with genre conventions and imagining different versions of the future, Tomato Flower’s songs are dynamic questions. A new guard of experimental pop, their music demonstrates where curiosity can take us, improving and expanding upon what came before with a bright outlook. Mike Alfieri (drums), Jamison Murphy (guitar/vox), and Austyn Wohlers (guitar/keys/vox) |
| Construction refers both to “constructedness,” processes of artifice and social construction, as well as the material activity of building. The music evokes something sculptural, reflecting the painstaking processes of material transformation that create physical objects. “Blue” weaves together economic anxiety with a desire for sublime beauty; “Fancy” considers the ambivalence of desiring success; “Aparecida” imagines a religious vision cut short by having to clock in to work. But for all their literary sensibility and taste for double meanings, Tomato Flower rejects ironic detachment. Feeling is always at the center of the songs, even when the feeling morphs and evades; “Bug” is simultaneously vulnerable and threatening, and “Taking My Time” moves from a plaintive love song to a joyous prophecy. Construction shows a band with a distinctive approach and a deep archive from which they reveal only the... more
credits: released August 5, 2022 Mike Alfieri: drums, bass on track 5 / Austyn Wohlers: Synth, guitar, vocals, flute on track 2 / Jamison Murphy: Guitar, vocals, bass on tracks 1-4, 6 All songs written by Mike Alfieri, Jamison Murphy, and Austyn Wohlers |
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Something happened on No. The early EPs from Baltimore’s Tomato Flower were a pretty, dreamy psychedelia. Warm to the touch, like looking up at the trees on a cloudless day. On No, the four-piece's (Mike Alfieri, Ruby Mars, Jamison Murphy, Austyn Wohlers) debut album, those trees, that cloudless sky, have become haunted, thorny, stormy. It takes Tomato Flower from buttoned-up, almost technically formalist psych pop to something more urgent, raw, emotionally immediate. No is messier, more expansive, and through all of its chaos, the band’s most rigorous artistic statement to date.
No is the band’s first effort made entirely in person, the first thing tracked in a studio instead of in a bedroom. It is a highly collaborative record written and recorded by everyone, partially made live. It is very much the byproduct of a band that has done some serious touring, following a coast-to-coast tour with Animal Collective in the summer of 2022. On No, the drums are aggressive, the bass is fuller and more direct. The guitars are distorted and disorientingly complex. Wohlers’ and Murphy’s vocals are meaty, fully loaded, in your face. releases March 8, 2024 Mike Alfieri: drums, piano on track 7, additional guitar on track 11 / Ruby Mars: bass, additional synth on tracks 7 and 8 / Jamison Murphy: guitar, vocals, additional synth on tracks 4, 6, 8 / Austyn Wohlers: guitar, vocals, synth, flute on track 4, piano on track 8 |