White Flowers - Dreams For Somebody Else

Five years on from their previous Dinked outing, the Preston duo have taken a “sketchbook” approach, rounding up fragments from the past ten years and stitching them seamlessly together into a fuzzy, warm blanket of oneiric sound.

With a literary bent that draws on the piercing work of Annie Ernaux, Dreams For Somebody Else branches out into more propulsive rhythms whilst maintaining the woozy pop melodies that have always been their calling card.

And these throughlines are explored even further in the 100 page dream diary and CD of bonus tracks, alternative takes, mixes, and demos included in this deluxe package.

White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings - snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.

On Dreams For Somebody Else, the band expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, this time channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”: a mosaic of soaring choruses swirl around imposing arrays of synths, guitars, and percussion. Drawing inspiration from Annie Ernaux’s The Years, the album delves into themes of isolation, dissociation and identity. “The album has that same feeling of disassociating from your own life, because you’re just blending into everyone else”, the band explains. “There’s a sadness there, because it’s as if you’re looking back on things that happened to you, and they feel like they don’t belong to you anymore”.

It’s the dull ache of nostalgia intertwined with a sense of wonder at what could lie ahead - the hopeful optimism and endless loss that defines the human experience. “It’s this idea of identity not being a fixed thing, but something that’s always changing. It’s a fluid thing, similar to time. Things aren’t really fixed, but rather in a constant state of change. It’s important to remember that we’re all going through that.”

For Fans Of: Still Corners / Chromatics / Beach House / Nightbus / Cigarettes After Sex