Tomato Flower - No (Black Vinyl)

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.