Floral Tattoo

Creators of one of the most beautiful, yet unknown, albums of 2024, Floral Tattoo have a multifaceted and vibrant sound, which certainly has its most solid root in emocore, but which does nothing to hide its debts also towards indie-rock, shoegaze, psychedelia, progressive-rock and, when necessary, even some extreme metal. In short, we are in the midst of the so-called "fifth emo wave", this Seattle band is talented and so we decided to knock on their door to find out even more!

First of all, I wanted to tell you that I discovered you by listening to your last album, "The Circus Egotistica; or, How I Spent Most of my Life as a Lost Cause", which I consider to be your best record so far. So, I would say to start precisely from this last work of yours, which seems to me much more "free" and "progressive" than its two predecessors.
Numbers Power: Thanks! Yeah, we were going for something a little different this time.

Tell us something about yourself: what brought you to play together and what kind of musical experiences do you have behind you?
AA: I've been playing music my whole life, really. There are pictures of me at two years old smashing away on a drum kit and yelling into a microphone. I started learning how to play bass when I was nine, guitar when I was 12. Ryan Keyes and I are old friends from school and started our first band together when we were 12 or 13. That band broke up when we all graduated high school, then a year or so later in 2015 I started writing songs and playing them by myself with an acoustic guitar at various coffee shops, record stores, and friend’s basements. I always wanted it to be a band so I put the songs out under the name Floral Tattoo instead of just under my own name, somewhat aspirationally I guess. I met numbers at one of those early acoustic shows and we added each other on Facebook. I moved to California for a year, wrote some more and played some more shows, then moved home to Seattle. When I moved home in 2017 I started putting a band together to play these songs. I already knew I wanted to hit up my friends Nico Pellowski and Christian Taylor to play bass and drums respectively. Once we had learned a few of the songs, I made a Facebook post looking for someone to play second guitar and/or synth and numbers was the first one to respond. We didn't know each other well then but I'm eternally grateful that she hit me up because she quickly became one of my best friends and made us a far better band than we ever would have been otherwise. The four of us made approaching bearable, Nico left, Travis Powell joined on bass, the four of us made head start, then Christian left and Jacob Kelly joined on drums. Christian was an incredible drummer and there were no hard feelings when he wanted to stop playing music, but I feel like we were granted a second lease on life when Jacob joined the band. He was a missing piece for sure. Then Thom joined to flesh out the live sound and get it closer to what we sounded like on record, but very quickly they brought their unique brand of genius to the table and became a very integral part of our sound. Travis left and our friend Nik Butt did a short stint on bass but they left shortly after COVID hit. During the lockdown before shows started happening again we got together to record a live set for an e-gig and asked our friend Jan Sanford to sit in with us on keyboard. We loved playing with her so we kept playing with her and now I can't imagine playing without her. She wrote and sings one of the songs on the new record and I hope for her to write and sing even more on the next one. At some point after all the e-gigs but before the world opened back up we asked Ryan to play bass. It is one of the true joys of my life to be able to play music as an adult with one of my childhood best friends. I love when life comes full circle like that. In 2022 the six of us started recording circus egotistica. We got a couple of friends to do overdubs on the album, but no one showed up like Veni Visceral showed up. We had friends add guitar lead here or a bell part there, but Veni tracked multiple parts for every song. The parts she came up with immediately became so important to the songs that we couldn't not ask her to join the band. So now here we are, a seven headed monster, the nightmare of sound engineers everywhere.
NP: A lot of us played in concert band. I also sung in jazz choir in high school and acted, and wrote plays, most of which were quite abstract and none of which were very good. I met Alex at a venue called Ground Zero that no longer exists when I was 15 and she was just entering her 20s. She was opening for one of my friends' bands that also no longer exists as far as I am aware. We traded Facebooks and she put out an open call for people to join Floral Tattoo, and I jumped at the opportunity. People have come and gone since but it's at least always been me and her in the band.
Thos Carson: In 2017 I played a show at a tiny record shop with this psych-folk duo I was in at the time called Casparella. It just happened to be the first full-band Floral Tattoo show. Left at London and some more experimental/noise artists played too. I quickly bonded with Numbers over a love for psychedelic and ambient music and other more out-there stuff. Alex was really sweet and the group kinda took me under their wing over the next couple years. I joined on-and-off for little tours, but officially joined after Head Start came out. Outside of the psych-folk stuff, my roots are in more collage and experimental stuff, so I try to bring that to the mix with Floral Tattoo.
Ryan Keyes: Counting childhood I suppose I have about 20 years of musical experience, which is crazy for me to think about now. I’ve been playing music with Alex for nearly all of those 20 years. We grew up playing low brass together in school band, and later formed a garage band with two of our friends in high school. When I was studying music and recording arts at college, Alex came and lived with me for a year shortly after starting to put out songs under the Floral Tattoo name, and I helped her record some songs for a split EP during that time. I also ended up recording some melodica parts for that project, and played a few shows in Chico and one in Seattle accompanying Alex on melodica before Alex moved back to Seattle and started to form a full band around the project. Nico Pellowski, who played bass in the band initially, was one of my first friends in Chico when I moved there and I was happy to see him join Floral Tattoo up in Seattle after he moved out of Chico. I moved back to Seattle in 2019 less than a year before the pandemic. I joined the band in 2021 right when several of the new songs were being developed, and before others had even been conceptualized. It was about the same time that Jan joined as well. During the recording process, Deerdre recorded lap steel for "The Circus Egotistica and the Girl who Cried Bad Wolf" and I was blown away by her raw talent and what she brought to the song. Shortly after, I jovially asked the band when Deerdre was going to join as a permanent member and the rest is history! Over the course of writing and recording the record I’ve come to call everyone in the band among my closest personal friends and I always look forward to seeing everybody at our weekly practice. Making music here, now, with these individuals continues to be the brightest and most fulfilling part of my life these days and I’m thankful for everything that led to this group coming together as the artistic collective it is now.

By the way, what is a "egotistica circus"?
NP: The "Circus Egotistica" is a concept I borrowed from a Homestuck fan-fiction called "Godfeels" where the main character goes through a sort of mock trial in her mind. This had a profound impact on my own mental state and the work, as the main character of Godfeels is also a transgender woman and a system of alters. But the idea is the sort of circus of one's own mind, the reflection of the different aspects of ones self manifest in a physical location - a space made of ideas, if you will.

Who is singing most of your songs: Alex or Numbers Power?
AA: On this new record, numbers. On head start it was roughly half and half. On approaching bearable it was mostly me.
NP: On the first record, "Approaching Bearable", all of the songs except for one of them were written and sung by Alex - I had one, which we wrote as a band. On "...Head Start" it was split pretty evenly down the middle between the two of us. On "Circus Egotistica", I sing lead parts and wrote the lyrics for 10 songs by myself - 6 songs I wrote entirely by myself, 4 we worked out together as a band musically. Alex has one song on this record, and my partner and our keyboardist Jan has one as well that I contributed a bridge that I sing to. For the next one, I think we'll do things a bit more democratically.

Although still very dark, at the level of topics treated, "The Circus Egotistica" presents a cover that, compared to the fall one of "You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start", is rich in colors. Why this choice?
NP: The album cover for "Circus" was a piece I had initially intended to be the album cover for "...Head Start"! It was much worse back then. I slowly carved away at and improved the piece for about 5 years, from 2018 to 2023, using a variety of digital art programs (Photoshop, Paint Tool SAI, some finishing touches in GIMP and Paint.net) and an old cheap Wacom tablet. I added a bunch of digital and physical collage elements, adding a picture or representation of every member in the band that you can only really see if you look closely. There's also a collage of nude Santas in there. I won't tell you where. That being said, I wanted it to represent the culmination of all things Floral Tattoo - there's bits of unused single and album and live bootleg covers across all the artwork I did for this era of the band. There are a couple single covers we didn't get to use, even, that have a lot more references to past and unreleased Floral Tattoo stuff, like our first photoshoot, which is where the Nintendo Wii/Keyboard combination in the top right corner of the "Circus" cover comes from. At the end of the day, though, I kinda just wanted to make something that looked cool and caught people's attention, and I think I achieved that.

The lyrics of "The Circus Egotistica" are, compared to those of your first two albums, much, much longer. They make me think of real stories. Why this choice?
NP: I'm a very lyrics-forward writer and I was heavily influenced by a lot of other verbose and elaborate lyricists, in particular folks like Isaac Wood (formerly of Black Country, New Road), Adam Demirjan (formerly of Brave Little Abacus), and Molly Rankin (of Alvvays). The 6 songs I wrote by myself were written primarly as lyrics in a word document with no chords or structures at first, I just knew how the structures were gonna sound in my head and spun the songs around until I thought they were perfect. And I just love to tell a story.
RK: That’s the thing, a lot of these songs are real stories involving real heartbreak and genuine catharsis. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to seemingly arbitrary time limits or goals. I don’t think it was necessarily an intentional decision to make some of the songs so long, they just evolved to be that way through the writing process. We purposefully didn’t keep track of how long the songs were until we realized that we may be getting close to the limit of what a single CD can hold, so we made sure the total wasn’t going to exceed 80 minutes.



Sometimes, in the way of singing/declamating the lyrics, I hear the echo of Slint. Am I crazy?
AA: Slint rules!
NP: Slint is a core influence for me, and an influence on a lot of the music I enjoy. I picked up a vinyl copy of Spiderland when I was 16 off the internet and put the sticker on my first guitar - it's worn off quite a bit now and just says "Lint" and "Iderland". I fell back in love with that record earlier this year. One of those records that makes life worth living. Tweez is fine, still haven't heard the new mix.
Veni Visceral: You're not crazy at all. We love Slint and other post-rock of that period. Personally I'm a big fan of Moonshake and Disco Inferno, and those bands definitely influenced the way I play and sample.

On the new album, your line-up has been set around seven elements. More than a band, it’s now an ensemble! Where do you want to go?
AA: I want to go wherever the muse takes us. That's kind of a joke but not really a joke? I like to be open to possibility and with seven people there are a lot of possibilities.
NP: I think we're at a good place as far as the size of the band goes, haha. Where I want to go from here is to really explore what this seven-headed behemoth can do.
Jan Davis: If current trends continue, we can expect to see an additional 39 members of Floral Tattoo by the year 2050. In all seriousness, balance is a thing we constantly have to consider. Whenever I think about what sound or part to add into the fray, I’m thinking about what Thom (our other keyboardist) is doing and making sure we don’t clash. My contributions are more piano oriented while theirs is focused on synth riffs and sound design, so I think it works quite nicely for our maximalist sound.
TC: I hope to continue basing songs around stuff thats not just guitar-oriented rock. Maybe use samples as a base rather than a garnish on some tracks. Maybe more keyboard and piano led songs. The possibilities are endless with a unit this big!
RK: I love what we’re doing now, and I’m really excited to start developing new songs together! Some are already in the works, and I really do think that this current iteration of floral tattoo is bringing out the absolute best in all of us individually! We are all being challenged in some ways, but that’s good! We bring out the best in each other and we are constantly growing and evolving as musicians together, and I think that it’s a really beautiful and unique thing we have together and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Where does the name Floral Tattoo come from?
AA: When I started playing acoustic shows I knew I didn't want to be playing solo forever. “Floral Tattoos” was the name of a collaborative Spotify playlist that my friend Shelby had made for our little inseparable-at-the-time friend group and I thought it sounded like a decent band name so i stole it. Thank you Shelby!

On Bandcamp it says that yours is "music for sad trans people who grew up at the dawn of the digital age". Let’s go into this definition a little bit...
NP: We're sad. We're transgender. We are in the digital age and most of us grew up in its earlier days. I wrote that description a long time ago when I didn't really know how to describe Floral Tattoo but it stands. Life is changing all around us and we're just trying to catch up.

I have read carefully the lyrics of your songs and I was faced with themes such as suffering, the confusion of gender transition, youth bullying, broken love, anguish to live, even if there are sparks of hope and light. The music you have chosen to play and the way it is played I would say is perfect for sounding out the above themes. So, for you too, can music really be a prodigious cathartic force?
AA: Music is the ultimate cathartic force. The most spiritually healing moments of my life have all been in practice rooms, loud rock clubs, and diy recording studios.
NP: I have been caught evil-laughing, ugly-crying, and giggling with glee after playing Floral Tattoo music. To say it brings me catharsis would be a massive understatement.
RK: Music has been my primary way of finding cathartic release since childhood. Certain music makes me feel things very strongly. I recently attended a Modest Mouse concert in Seattle where they played their 2004 album front-to-back. I didn’t realize until I was at the concert that I hadn’t listened to many of these songs since I was going through my own traumatic period, and hearing them live brought me to tears. It wasn’t that I was sad, it was just that the music was making me feel things very strongly that I hadn’t felt or remembered since first listening to those songs. That kind of catharsis is honestly why I listen to and make music. I’ve felt a lot of different feelings very strongly over the course of making this record and I’m sure everyone else in Floral Tattoo has to some degree had the same feelings about making this record.

At the momente, you live in Seattle. What’s left of the great season of grunge? Is it a genre of music that you like and that has taught you something?
AA: Grunge is a psy-op. Mudhoney sounds nothing like Pearl Jam. Nirvana sounds nothing like Alice in Chains. None of them really sound like anything that I here in Seattle in the year 2024.
NP: Grunge really doesn't have any affect on what we do. I like Nirvana, and Alice in Chains, and a lot of the stuff that predicated grunge like Melvins/Flipper/Dinosaur Jr., but like most people in Seattle, I don't really think about Grunge all that of.
JD: I saw a mural of Eddie Vedder on a bathroom wall of an overpriced bistro once. Scared the shit out of me.
VV: There are bands here that we like that are influenced by grunge, like Black Ends.
RK: Grunge was influential for me growing up here. Today it doesn’t play as much of a role for me personally, but the spirit of grunge in Seattle helped pave the way for today’s DIY music scene in Seattle and frankly a lot of the bands that have come out of the PNW would not have been around had it not been for the punk and grunge scenes that came before us.

Listening to your songs, especially those of "The Circus Egotistica", I have the feeling that they were born from free improvisations or, anyway, starting from a small initial cue that was then developed in jam more or less free. Am I wrong?
AA: That hasn't always been true but i think it is true of all of our best work.
NP: We wrote 4 of the songs on the latest record through jamming. Everything else was pre-written. We tend to elaborate on certain songs in a live concert setting as well.
JD: A handful of tracks, mostly in the first half, came from some jam sessions where we’d set up in our basement and show each other what ideas we’d come up with. Then we built on those ideas and added different sections and someone would add lyrics. It was quite a joyful experience, there was an attitude of “woah, we’ve really got something here.”
TC: You are partially right. Lots of my personal favorite songs from the album absolutely came about this way. Yeller came from a drum part Jake had. Songs like Backyards and I Died came from the group jamming in practice. Jan wrote Arkbuilder, and we workshopped it as a group until it became a new beast. Huge portions of the album were meticulously written by Numbers though, in terms of the cord changes, lyrics, and track list. In every song we all brought lots to the table when it came to instrumentation.
RK: Not wrong at all. Several of our songs on this record were written around improvisational sessions and structure was added later. Oftentimes the lyrics were already written, but several of the melodies and harmonies were initially improvised on several of the new songs. We improvise and jam together and when something really hits us right, we make note of it and start branching off of that. We usually record our practices and improvisational jams so that when something magical happens, we can listen back to it and hopefully re-create it.

Which bands have inspired you the most?
AA: AJJ, Joy Division, Modest Mouse, SEACATS, Jeff Rosenstock, Nana Grizol, DEVO, old school hardcore (Black Flag, Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, et all), Neil Young, a million others that I'm blanking on at the moment
NP: Oh, jeez, where do I even begin. Car Seat Headrest, Gorillaz, Stereolab, Phil Elverum, Sufjan Stevens, The Beatles, Fishmans. Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Modest Mouse. Slint. Animal Collective. Indian Summer and Moss Icon. The Beach Boys. Massive Attack. The Specials, Cardiacs, Buzzcocks, The Cure and Wipers. Death Grips. My first concert when I was 3 was the Wiggles and I saw Murray Cook shred like a motherfucker and it changed my life. I've seen two of the "big four" of shoegaze live in concert - Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, but never Lush or Ride. They're also hugely influential though. Them and the Stone Roses. Agent Orange were one of the first American punk bands I heard, them and Germs and My Chemical Romance. They are one of the reasons I'm even alive right now.
JD: When it comes to my playing for Floral Tattoo, my main inspirations are Stereolab, Animal Collective, and My Chemical Romance.
VV: Grateful Dead and Moss Icon.
TC: For me it's easily Animal Collective. Their relentless exploration of sound and texture combined with a great pop sensibility is something I hope is reflected in the group. I also personally love the German bands of the 70s. Neu, Cluster, and early Kraftwerk especially inform what I do.
RK: For me personally, I’d say Modest Mouse and Joy Division are my two primary influences/inspirations. For this record in particular I would say I was also influenced somewhat by Somewhere City by Origami Angel and during the production I was listening to a lot of PUP, Modern Baseball, Mom Jeans, stuff along those lines.




Do you have any other type of inspiration (cinema, books, painting, etc.)?
TC: Paintings and cinema can definitely inform what I contribute to the longer tracks. Something like Arkbuilder or I Died almost function as an atmosphere you can get lost in, like staring at a Bruegel painting or watching a Tarkovsky movie. Large landscapes with big strokes, but lotsa great character detail and such too.
RK: I love cinema and longer-form TV releases! I think a lot of my enjoyment comes from the music in these films and tv shows. I’ve discovered a lot of great music from watching independent film and the way directors pair certain songs with emotional and/or dramatic scenes absolutely blows me away sometimes. Music and film are so intrinsically connected in that way. Sometimes on its own, a film scene doesn’t make you feel much. Sometimes a song on its own won’t make you feel much. But pair that specific film scene with that specific song and suddenly you’re pulling on people’s heartstrings like a puppeteer pulls the strings of their characters and it’s really magical to me.

Ten records without which Floral Tattoo would never have existed…
AA:
Andrew Jackson Jihad - Knife Man
Joy Division - Heart and Soul (boxset)
Modest Mouse - Building Nothing Out of Something  
Nana Grizol - Love It Love It
SEACATS - SEACATS 2.0

NP:
Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy
Gorillaz - Demon Days
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band
Agent Orange - Living in Darkness
Ride – Nowhere

RK: for me personally, one record is “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About”. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, I just somehow know its personal significance.

Despite being heavily influenced by emo (and, in particular, its Midwest variant), your music is not content to stay in that enclosure, but rather, as your last album shows, likes to push itself further, towards the shoegaze, post-rock, psychedelia, noise-rock, progressive music, punk-pop, power-pop and even metal (I think, for example, to the second part of "I Died (Again)", where I heard echoes of black-metal). Was it a choice matured over time, or the band was born with this intention to range between different genres?
AA: I very intentionally did not ever want this band to be confined by any genre labels or markers or anything. When I was making folk punk by myself I never could've imagined ending up in seven piece psychedelic shoegaze emo band that sometimes plays hardcore and sometimes plays black metal and I can't pretend to know where we'll end up in another album or two.
NP: Floral Tattoo didn't even start out as an emo band, it was a folk punk project. I came in and got the music all wet and weird. Things just kinda gradually got that way - there were elements of black metal on one song on "...Head Start" that no one picked up on (I tremolo pick during certain parts of "Oar House") so it was a natural evolution from the techniques I was already doing. All we really had to do was add blast beats. Now we can do whatever we want, and I think that's going to pay some huge artistic dividends.
TC: I know a few of the band members like emo-related stuff, but I know nothing about that music. I think it's really great that we draw from many influences, especially as the band has grown after the first record came out. We all find lots of different common ground too. Many of us have bonded over Neil Young and Devo. The big mix is just part of the process at this point.
RK: Genres have always been hard to define for me personally. When someone asks me what kind of music I play, it’s super hard for me to describe, I think in part because it isn’t intentional for me. We play and write songs that make us feel a certain way, and I think rather than aiming for a specific sonic aesthetic, we aim for a specific emotional effect from our sounds.

Between 2020 and 2021 you released three live albums! Why this choice? Do you like to play concerts? If I came to your concert, what should I expect?
AA: You should expect me to jump around a lot and get grossly sweaty and probably lose my voice. And you should probably expect us to play everything a little too fast but, like, in an endearing way.
NP: We played a lot of online shows in 2020-2021 and wanted to archive them, and then when we finally did get back to playing shows in person we wanted to archive those too. There will be another live album on the way soon as well. If you came to a Floral Tattoo show, expect loudness and emotion and at least one pretty long song. We like the long ones.
TC: I think lots of us have an interest in archives and record keeping. It's exciting as a fan to follow a band with a large output of more loose stuff, so it follows that we'd like to do it from a creative perspective.
RK: We love playing shows! They can be exhausting but it’s impossible to replicate the electrifying energy of a live audience. Most of the live albums were recorded prior to me joining the band, but I imagine the live albums were an effort to reach out and connect with people digitally during the isolation of the pandemic lockdowns during 2020 and 2021. Since then we’ve been releasing live albums when we’re able to get a good recording and when we collectively think it was a particularly good or significant performance.

What are your next moves? Have you already started thinking about a new album?
AA: We've been writing a bit individually but haven't started working on it in earnest as a group. I'm looking forward to doing that in the new year
NP: We're gonna take it easy for a little bit, play some shows here and there, write some new songs, and hopefully be prepared to get in the studio as soon as we possibly can. Whatever's next for us is a bit of a ways off, we all have lives and jobs and things to do, and I wouldn't say anything's set in stone yet, but we'll get there when we get there.
VV: The next record will be written in a more democratic way and, hopefully, will take much less time. As for what each of us wants to bring, I would like to bring elements of heavier music as well as country. I did it with four other members of this group for another record we worked on this year and last year, "Banned in Arkansas".
JD: I think the prevailing attitude amongst us is that we’d like to try a different approach to our next record. Less layers upon layers of recordings, more of a live feel. "Circus Egotistica" was such a beast to finally get finished that for our next record I think we’d all like to spend less time between principle recording sessions and finished product. I suppose long recording sessions comes with the territory for shoegaze, just look at My Bloody Valentine.

Is it true that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are your anti-capitalist heroes, as I read around? Do you have any more?
NP: I don't have any heroes. I just see the Rosenbergs as two people in the wrong place at the wrong time, as with anyone killed by the state. Ethel wasn't even a spy.
VV: Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Just these days, Donald Trump has become the 47th president of the USA. I bet you didn’t vote for him...
AA: The USA is a joke. It's always been a joke. It's a horrible, mean spirited joke that isn't and has never been funny. I am ashamed of where I was born.
NP: None of us voted for Trump. Why would we be interested in engineering our own deaths? I saw Trump Tower when we were in Las Vegas on tour, and it was really much uglier in person. I dislike everything about that man.
JD: Don’t blame me, I voted for John Brunch.
VV: We didn't vote for Trump and we fear for our age, for our friends and family. Personally, I can't stop thinking about my friends and loved ones at home in Alabama, many of whom are queer. Good and kind people like Francine Ulla and Evelyn Daggett, who contribute heavily to the hardcore scene down there. In the end I had to leave the state because of impending laws that affected me directly and it's a heavy burden on my heart. You just have to hope that God will see us through.
RK: God, no. I voted for Harris, and I was really hoping to avoid a repeat of 2016-2020. Here in the state of Washington we’re pretty well protected by local laws, but I fear for trans people living in states with fewer or no protections. I also fear that healthcare funding will be reduced again, and as someone with epilepsy who takes expensive medications and has to see a doctor regularly, federal funding for healthcare subsidies are the difference between me making the rent payment or not. I’m sad that we’re moving in the wrong direction with this election, but I’m doing my best to keep my spirits up.

Ok, thank you for everything and... we are waiting for you in Italy!
AA: Thank you for taking an interest in our gay little band. It really means the world. I hope we get to make it out there some day.
NP: We'd love to come there someday. Thanks for having us!
RK: I can’t wait until we’re able to get a trip to Europe funded! I sincerely hope we can play a show for y’all in the not-too-distant future.