Floral Tattoo - Reminders of those things you try to forget

Creators of one of the finest, though still underrated, albums of 2024, the American band Floral Tattoo craft a multifaceted, vibrant sound that is certainly rooted most firmly in emocore, but which makes no effort to hide its debts to indie-rock, shoegaze, psychedelia, progressive rock and, when the occasion calls for it, even some extreme metal. In short, we're right in the middle of the so-called “fifth wave of emo”, and the Seattle band has talent to spare, so we decided to knock on their door to find out more!

First of all, I wanted to tell you that I discovered you precisely by listening to your latest album, “The Circus Egotistica; Or, How I Spent Most Of My Life As A Lost Cause”, which I consider to be your best record, at least so far. So, I'd say let's start right from this latest work of yours, which strikes me as much more “free” and “progressive” compared to its two predecessors.

Numbers Power: Thanks! Yeah, this time we wanted to do something a bit different.

Tell us a bit about yourselves: what brought you together to play music, and what kind of musical experiences do you have behind you?

Alex Anderson: I've been playing my whole life, really. There are photos of me at two years old throwing myself at the drums and screaming into a microphone. I started learning bass when I was nine, guitar when I was twelve. Ryan Keyes and I are old school friends, and we started our first band together when we were twelve or thirteen. That band broke up once we'd all graduated high school; then, about a year later, in 2015, I started writing songs and playing them solo with an acoustic guitar in various bars, record stores and friends' basements. I always wanted it to be a band, so I released the songs under the name Floral Tattoo instead of my own name, and I think that came from a certain ambition on my part. I met Numbers Power at one of those early acoustic shows, and we added each other on Facebook. Then I moved to California for a year, wrote more stuff and played more shows, before eventually moving back to Seattle. When I got back home in 2017, I started putting together a band to play these songs. I already knew I wanted to reach out to my friends Nico Pellowski and Christian Taylor to play bass and drums, respectively.

After learning some songs, I posted on Facebook looking for someone to play second guitar and/or synth, and Numbers was the first to respond. We didn't know each other well at the time, but I'm eternally grateful she reached out, because she quickly became one of my best friends and made us a much better band than we ever would have been otherwise. The four of us recorded "Approaching Bearable", then Nico left and Travis Powell joined on bass… and so the four of us took over. Christian also left at some point, and Jacob Kelly came in to play drums. Christian was an incredible drummer and there were no hard feelings when he wanted to stop playing, but I feel like we were given a second lease on life when Jacob joined the band. He was definitely a missing piece. Then Thom came in to flesh out the live sound and bring it closer to what we played on record, but very quickly all these new members stamped their own genius onto our sound, becoming an integral part of it. Then Travis quit and our friend Nik Butt did a short stint on bass, but shortly after Covid hit he decided to leave.

During lockdown, before shows started up again, we got together to record a live set for an electronic show and asked our friend Jan Sanford to play keys. We loved playing with her, so we kept doing it, and now I can't imagine playing without her. She wrote and sings one of the songs on the new record, and I hope she writes and sings even more on the next one. At some point, after all the electronic shows but before the pandemic ended, we asked Ryan to play bass. Getting to play music with one of my best childhood friends is one of the true joys of my life. I love it when life hands you these opportunities!

In 2022, the six of us started recording "Circus Egotistica". We asked a couple of friends to do overdubs on the album, but no one stood out like Veni Visceral. We had friends adding a guitar part here or a percussion part there, but Veni recorded multiple parts for every song. The parts she came up with instantly became so essential to the songs that we couldn't not ask her to join the band. So here we are now: a seven-headed monster, the nightmare of every sound engineer!

NP: A lot of us played in concert band. I also sang in jazz choir in high school and acted in and wrote plays, most of which were pretty abstract and none of which were very good. I met Alex when I was fifteen (she was about to turn twenty), at a venue called Ground Zero that doesn't exist anymore. She was opening for one of my friend's bands. We exchanged Facebook info and she put out a call inviting people to join Floral Tattoo, so I jumped at the opportunity. Since then, people have come and gone, but she and I have always stayed on board.

Thos Carson: In 2017 I played at a small record store with this psych-folk duo I was in at the time called Casparella. That was Floral Tattoo's first full show. We went to London, and other more experimental/noise acts played too. I quickly bonded with Numbers over our shared love of psychedelic and ambient music and other stranger stuff. Alex was really sweet, and the group took me under its wing over the following two years. I played with them here and there for small tours, but I officially joined the band after the release of "Head Start". Aside from the psych-folk stuff, my roots are more in collage and experimental material, so I try to bring that into Floral Tattoo's sonic mix.

Ryan Keyes: Counting childhood, I guess I have about twenty years of musical experience, which, now that I think about it, is wild. I've played with Alex for almost all of those twenty 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 in college, Alex came to live with me for a year shortly after she started putting out songs under the name Floral Tattoo, and during that time I helped her record some songs for a split EP. I also ended up recording some melodica parts for that project and played a few shows in Chico and one in Seattle, backing Alex on melodica, before she moved back to Seattle and started putting together a full band around the project. Nico Pellowski, who originally played bass in the band, was one of my first friends in Chico when I moved there, and I was happy to see him join Floral Tattoo in Seattle after he relocated from Chico.

I moved back to Seattle in 2019, less than a year before the pandemic. I joined the band in 2021, right as a lot of the new songs were being developed and before others had even been conceptualized. It was around the same time Jan joined too. During the recording process, Deerdre recorded lap steel for the track "The Circus Egotistica And The Girl Who Cried Bad Wolf" and I was floored by her raw talent and what she brought to the song. Shortly after, I happily asked the band when Deerdre would be joining as a permanent member, and the rest is history! During the writing and recording of the record, I came to consider all the band members among my closest personal friends, and I can't wait to see everyone at our weekly rehearsals. Making music here, now, with these people continues to be the brightest and most fulfilling part of my life, and I'm grateful for everything that led this group to become the artistic collective it is today.

By the way, what does "circus egotistica" mean?

NP: "Circus Egotistica" is a concept I borrowed from a Homestuck fanfiction called "Godfeels", in which the main character goes through a kind of simulated process in their mind. That had a profound impact on my mental state and on the record itself, since the main character of Godfeels is also a transgender woman and a system of alters. At its core, there's the idea of a "circus of one's own mind", the reflection of the different aspects of the self manifested in a physical place, a space made of ideas, if you will.

Who sings most of your songs: Alex or Numbers Power?

NP: On the first record, "Approaching Bearable", every song except one was written and sung by Alex. The one I sang, we'd written all together. On "…Head Start", on the other hand, we split the songs evenly between the two of us. On "Circus Egotistica", I sing the lead parts and wrote the lyrics for ten songs on my own: of those ten, four we worked out musically together as a band. Alex has one song on this record, and my partner and keyboardist Jan also has one, to which I contributed a bridge where I also sing. For the next record, I think we'll do things a bit more democratically.

While still very dark in terms of the themes it tackles, "The Circus Egotistica" has a cover that, compared to the autumnal one of "You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start", is full of color. Why that choice?

NP: The cover for the "Circus" album was actually originally intended for "You Can Never Have A Long Enough Head Start"! It was much worse back then. I slowly sculpted and improved it over about five years, from 2018 to 2023, using a variety of digital art programs (Photoshop, Paint Tool SAI, some final touch-ups in GIMP and Paint.net) and an old, cheap Wacom tablet. I put in a lot of digital and physical collage elements, adding an image or representation of every band member that you can only spot if you look closely. There's also a collage of naked Santas in there. I won't tell you where. That said, I wanted it to represent the culmination of everything Floral Tattoo is about: there are pieces of unused single, album, and live bootleg covers scattered throughout all the artwork I made for that period of the band. There are also a couple of single covers we couldn't use that have a lot more references to Floral Tattoo's past and unreleased material, like our first photo shoot, which is where the Nintendo Wii/keyboard combo in the top right corner of the "Circus" cover comes from. At the end of the day, though, I just wanted to make something that looked cool and grabbed people's attention, and I think I hit the mark.

The lyrics on "The Circus Egotistica" are, compared to your first two albums, much, much longer. They make me think of actual short stories. Why that choice?

NP: I'm a very lyrics-focused writer and I've been heavily influenced by a lot of other wordy, elaborate lyricists, particularly people like Isaac Wood (formerly of Black Country, New Road), Adam Demirjan (formerly of Brave Little Abacus), and Molly Rankin (of Alvvays). The six songs I wrote on my own were composed mainly as lyrics in a Word document with no chords or structures: I just knew how the structures would sound in my head, and I waited until the songs were perfect. I also just like telling a story.

RK: The fact is that a lot of these songs are true stories involving real heartbreak and genuine catharsis. We didn't want to limit ourselves to seemingly arbitrary goals. I don't think it was necessarily a deliberate decision to make some songs so long: they just evolved that way through the writing process. We deliberately avoided tracking song lengths until we realized we were approaching the limit of what a single CD can hold, so we made sure the total didn't exceed 80 minutes.

At times, in the way the lyrics are sung/declaimed, I hear echoes of Slint. Am I crazy?

NP: Slint are a fundamental influence for me and they've also shaped a lot of the music I love. I bought a vinyl copy of "Spiderland" online when I was 16 and put their sticker on my first guitar, but now it's pretty worn out and all that's left reads "Lint" and "Iderland". I fell in love with that record all over again earlier this year. It's one of those records that makes life worth living. "Tweez" is great too, but I haven't heard the new mix yet.

Veni Visceral: You're not crazy at all. We love Slint and other post-rock from that era. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Moonshake and Disco Inferno, and those bands have definitely influenced the way I play and work with samples.

On the new record, your line-up has settled at seven members. At this point it's less a band than an ensemble! Where do you want to take it?

AA: I want to go wherever the muse takes us. That's kind of a joke, but is it really? I like staying open to possibilities, and with seven people there are a lot of possibilities.

NP: I think we're at a good point in terms of the band's size! (laughs, ed.) What I want is to fully explore what this seven-headed monster can do.

Jan Davis: If current trends continue, we can expect to see thirty-nine more members join Floral Tattoo by 2050. Joking aside, balance is something we constantly have to think about. Whenever I consider what sound or part to add to our sound, I think about what Thom (our other keyboardist) is doing and make sure we don't clash. My contributions lean more toward piano, while his are focused on synth riffs and sound design, so I think it works pretty well for our maximalist sound.

TC: I hope to keep building songs on more than just guitar-driven rock. Maybe using samples as a foundation rather than decoration on some tracks. Maybe more songs led by keyboards and piano. The possibilities are endless with a unit this big!

RK: I love what we're doing right now and I'm really excited to start developing new songs together! Some are already in the works, and I really think the current Floral Tattoo line-up is bringing out the absolute best in all of us. In a way, we're all being challenged, but it's a good thing. We bring out the best in each other, and together we're constantly growing and evolving as musicians, which I think is a really beautiful and unique thing — honestly, not something I'd trade for anything in the world.

Where does the name Floral Tattoo come from?

AA: When I started playing acoustic shows, I knew I didn't want to play alone forever. "Floral Tattoos" was the name of a collaborative Spotify playlist that my friend Shelby had made at the time for our tight little group of friends, and I thought it sounded decent as a band name, so I stole it. Thanks, Shelby!

As it says on Bandcamp, your music is "music for sad trans people who grew up at the dawn of the digital age". Let's dig into that definition a bit more...

NP: We're sad. We're transgender. We're in the digital age, and most of us grew up in its early days. I wrote that description a long time ago, back when I didn't really know how to describe Floral Tattoo, but it still holds up today. Life is changing around us, and we're just trying to keep up.

I read all your song lyrics carefully and found myself facing themes like suffering, the confusion stemming from gender transition, youth bullying, broken love, the anguish of living, though there's no shortage of flashes of hope and light. The music you've chosen to play, and the way you play it, seem perfect for conveying these themes. So for you too, can music really be a prodigious cathartic force?

AA: Music is the cathartic force par excellence. The most spiritually healing moments of my life have all happened in rehearsal spaces, loud rock clubs, and DIY recording studios.

NP: I've caught myself laughing hard, crying hard, and giggling with joy after playing Floral Tattoo's music. To call it cathartic music would be an understatement.

RK: Ever since childhood, music has been my main vehicle for cathartic release. Certain music makes me feel things very deeply. Recently, I saw a Modest Mouse show in Seattle, where they played their 2004 album ("Good News for People Who Love Bad News", ed.) front to back. Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I'd never really listened to many of those songs during my traumatic period, and hearing them live made me cry. It wasn't that I was sad, it was just that the music was making me feel things very strongly, things I hadn't felt or hadn't remembered the first time I heard them. That kind of catharsis is honestly why I listen to and make music. I felt a lot of different feelings, very deeply, over the course of making "Circus Egotistica", and I'm sure all the other members of Floral Tattoo somehow felt the same feelings while making it too.

Right now, you're based in Seattle. What's left of the great grunge era? Is it a genre of music you like and that has taught you something?

AA: Grunge is a psy-op. Mudhoney don't sound anything like Pearl Jam. Nirvana don't sound anything like Alice in Chains. None of them really sound like anything I hear in Seattle in 2025.

NP: Grunge really has no effect on what we do. I like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and a lot of stuff that came before grunge, like Melvins/Flipper/Dinosaur Jr., but like most people in Seattle, I don't think about grunge all that much.

JD: I once saw a mural of Eddie Vedder on the bathroom wall of a really pricey bistro. It scared the hell out of me.

VV: There are bands here that we like who are influenced by grunge, like Black Ends.

RK: Growing up in Seattle, grunge influenced me. That said, it doesn't play such a big role for me these days, but the spirit of grunge in Seattle helped pave the way for today's DIY music scene, and frankly, a lot of the bands to come out of the Pacific Northwest wouldn't exist if it weren't for the punk and grunge scenes that came before us.

Listening to your tracks, especially those on "The Circus Egotistica", I get the feeling they were born out of free improvisation, or at least out of some small initial idea, then developed through more or less free jams. Am I wrong?

AA: It hasn't always been like that, but I think it's true of all our best work.

NP: We wrote four of the songs on the latest record through jamming. Everything else was already written. We also tend to develop some songs in the context of our live shows.

JD: A handful of tracks, mostly in the first half, came out of some jam sessions we held in our basement, where we traded ideas that had come to us. We then developed those ideas and added different sections; then someone would work on the lyrics. It was a pretty joyful experience, there was this attitude of like: "Wow, we've actually got something here!".

TC: You're partly right. A lot of my favorite songs on the album came about this way. "Yeller" grew out of a drum part Jake had. Songs like "Backyards" and "I Died" developed out of the band's jams during rehearsals. Jan wrote "Arkbuilder" and we worked it up as a group until it turned into a whole new beast. Large chunks of the album were meticulously written by Numbers, in terms of chord changes, lyrics, and tracklisting. On every song, we all gave our all when it came to the instrumentation.

RK: Nothing wrong with that. A lot of the songs on this record were written during improv sessions, and the structure was added afterward. Often the lyrics were already written, but a lot of the melodies and harmonies on many of the new songs started out as improvisation. We improvise and play together, and when something really hits us the right way, we take note of it and start developing it. We usually record our rehearsals and improvised jams so that when something magical happens, we can go back and listen to it and, hopefully, recreate 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 and others), Neil Young and a million others I can't think of right now.

NP: Oh man, where do I start? Car Seat Headrest, Gorillaz, Stereolab, Phil Elverum, Sufjan Stevens, Beatles, Fishmans. Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Modest Mouse. Slint. Animal Collective. Indian Summer and Moss Icon. Beach Boys. Massive Attack. Specials, Cardiacs, Buzzcocks, Cure and Wipers. Death Grips. My first concert, when I was three, was the Wiggles, and I saw Murray Cook absolutely shred, and it changed my life. I've seen two of shoegaze's "big four" live: Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, but never Lush or Ride. They're also hugely influential. Then I'd say Them and Stone Roses. Agent Orange were one of the first American punk bands I ever listened to. Them, Germs and My Chemical Romance. They're one of the reasons I'm still alive right now.

JD: When it comes to 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 tireless exploration of sounds and textures, combined with a great pop sensibility, is something I hope comes through in the band. Personally, I also love the German bands of the 70s. In particular, Neu!, Cluster and early Kraftwerk influence what I do.

RK: As for me, I'd say Modest Mouse and Joy Division are my two main influences/inspirations. For this record in particular, I'd say I was also influenced somewhat by Origami Angel's "Somewhere City"; during production, though, I was listening to a lot of PUP, Modern Baseball, Mom Jeans and stuff like that.

Do you have any other kinds of inspiration (film, books, painting, etc.)?

TC: Paintings and film can definitely influence my contribution to the longer tracks. Songs like "Arkbuilder" or "I Died" work almost like an atmosphere you can get lost in, like looking at a Bruegel painting or a Tarkovsky film. Big landscapes, with big brushstrokes, but also a lot of great detail when it comes to character and things like that.

RK: I love film 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 ton of amazing music by watching indie films, and the way directors match certain songs to emotional and/or dramatic scenes sometimes leaves me completely speechless. In that sense, music and film are so intrinsically connected. Sometimes a film scene on its own doesn't tell you much. The same goes for a song. But pair that particular film scene with that certain song, and suddenly you're pulling at people's heartstrings like a puppeteer pulling the strings of his characters... and that, to me, is truly magical.

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

Beatles – Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band

Agent Orange – Living in Darkness

Ride – Nowhere

RK: I'll just say "This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About" by Modest Mouse. I can't quite figure out why, but somehow I know its personal meaning.

Even though your music is heavily influenced by emo (and, in particular, its Midwest variant), it doesn't settle for staying within that fence — quite the opposite: as your latest album especially shows, it loves pushing further, toward shoegaze, post-rock, psychedelia, noise-rock, progressive music, punk-pop, power-pop, and even metal (I'm thinking, for instance, of the second part of "I Died (Again)", where I picked up echoes of black metal). Was this a choice that developed over time, or was the band born with this intention of ranging across different genres from the start?

AA: I've never intentionally wanted this band to be limited by genre labels or markers or anything like that. When I was doing folk-punk on my own, I never could have imagined ending up in a seven-piece psychedelic emo/shoegaze band that sometimes sounds hardcore and sometimes black metal, and I can't pretend to know where we'll end up within an 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 made the music all excited and strange. So everything evolved gradually: there were black metal elements in a song from "…Head Start" that nobody picked up on (I used tremolo picking during some parts of "Oar House"), so it was a natural evolution from the techniques I was already using. All we had to do was add some blast beats. Now we can do whatever we want, and I think that will pay off a lot artistically.

TC: I know some members of the band are into emo stuff, but I don't know anything about that music. I think it's really great that we draw on so many influences, especially since the band grew after the first record came out. We've also found a lot in common. Many of us bonded over our shared love of Neil Young and Devo. At this point, the big mix is just part of the process.

RK: Genres have always been hard for me to pin down. When someone asks me what kind of music I play, I find it really tricky to describe. We play and write songs that make us feel a certain way, and I think that, rather than aiming for a specific sonic aesthetic, what interests us is achieving a specific emotional effect through our sound.

Between 2020 and 2021 you released as many as three live albums! Why that choice? Do you really love playing shows? If I came to one of your gigs, what should I expect?

AA: You should expect me to jump around a lot and get really sweaty and probably lose my voice. And you should probably expect us to play everything a bit too fast, but in an engaging way regardless.

NP: We played a lot of shows online in 2020-2021 and we wanted to archive them, and then, when we finally got back to playing live, we decided to archive those too. There'll be another live album coming soon as well. If you come to a Floral Tattoo show, expect noise and emotion and at least one pretty long song. We like the long ones.

TC: I think a lot of us are interested in archives and recordings. It's exciting for a fan to follow a band with a big output of looser material, so it follows that we'd want to do that from a creative standpoint too.

RK: We love playing live! Shows can be exhausting, but there's no way to replicate the electrifying energy of a flesh-and-blood audience. Most of our live albums were recorded before I joined the band, but I imagine they were an attempt to reach out and connect with people during the isolation caused by the 2020/21 pandemic lockdown. Since then, we've only released live albums when we managed to get a good recording and when we all agreed we'd pulled off a particularly good or meaningful performance.

What are your next moves? Have you already started thinking about a new album? Will there be anything new, musically speaking?

AA: We've written a bit individually, but we haven't started working on it seriously as a group yet. I can't wait to get into it.

NP: We'll take some time off, do a few shows here and there, write new songs, and hopefully be ready to get into the studio as soon as possible. Whatever the future holds is still a way off; we all have lives, jobs and things to do, and I wouldn't say anything is set in stone yet, but we'll get there when we get there.

VV: The next record will be written more democratically and, hopefully, will take a lot less time. As for what each of us wants to bring to it, I'd say elements of heavier music and country. I did that with four other members of this group on another record we worked on this year and last, "Banned In Arkansas", under the name The Jender Eternal Light Revue.

JD: I think the prevailing attitude among us is that we'd like to try a different approach for our next record. Fewer layers upon layers of overdubs, more of a live feel.

Is it true that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are your anti-capitalist heroes, as I've read around? Do you have any others?

NP: I don't have heroes. I just see the Rosenbergs as two people in the wrong place at the wrong time, like anyone killed by the State. Ethel wasn't even a spy.

FTVV: Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Just in these past few days, Donald Trump became the forty-seventh president of the United States. I bet you didn't vote for him...

AA: The US is a joke. It's always been a joke. It's a horrible, mean-spirited joke that isn't and never has been funny. I'm ashamed of the place I was born.

NP: None of us voted for Trump. Why would we be interested in planning our own death? I saw Trump Tower when we were in Las Vegas on tour, and in person it's really so much uglier. I don't like anything 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 group, for our friends and our family. Personally, I can't stop thinking about my friends and loved ones back home in Alabama, many of whom are queer. Good, kind people like Francine Ulla and Evelyn Daggett, who contribute so much to the hardcore scene down there. In the end, I had to leave the state because of impending laws that directly affected me, and it's a weight on my heart. You just have to hope God helps us.

RK: God, no! I voted for Harris and was really hoping to avoid a repeat of the 2016-2020 period. Here in Washington State we're fairly protected by local laws, but I fear for trans people living in states with less protection or none at all. I'm also afraid healthcare funding will be cut again, and as someone with epilepsy who takes expensive medication and needs to see a doctor regularly, federal funding for health subsidies makes the difference between being able to pay rent or not. I'm sad, because after this election we're heading in the wrong direction, but I'm doing my best to keep morale up.

Okay, thanks for everything and... we'll be waiting for you in Italy!

AA: Thank you for taking an interest in our little gay band. It really means a lot. I hope one day we'll manage to make it out there!

NP: We'd love to come one day. Thanks for having us!

RK: I can't wait to be able to fund a trip to Europe! I sincerely hope we'll be able to play for all of you in the not-too-distant future.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google