No by Tomato Flower

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 debut album, those trees have become haunted, thorny, stormy. It takes Tomato Flower from buttoned-up psych pop to something more urgent, raw, and 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, tracked in a studio instead of in a bedroom. It is a highly collaborative record written and recorded by everyone. 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.

Lead single “Destroyer” has co-lead vocalist Jamison Murphy practically screaming over angular guitars. The song feels like kicking a soccer ball through wet cement, impossible, Sisyphean, but also weirdly beautiful. Saint” explores the aphasia and resentment that follows a tumultuous love affair, intense feelings on every end of every spectrum. The baseline stumbles and falls into the earth, almost unable to pick itself back up again. Wohlers’ voice sounds like it is being caught in her throat. “In time/I found that you/started it,” she sings. As a whole, the album oscillates in a sonic space somewhere between the prettiness of Broadcast and the sludge of Jesus Lizard.

No is a record about negation: I will not do this, you cannot tell me what to do, we are not living in a utopia, don’t be delusional. It embraces a kind of brutal realism: a confrontation with life that only happens when you wizen up a little bit. It not only has its foot in emotional realism, but, as in Tomato’s Flower’s previously work, the fantastical, too. “Sally & Me” employs images from the writer Gerard de Nerval, with its stone-light and metal, its angel wings and terror. “Harlequin” treats a bumbling friend like a pierrot, a titular harlequin where their fuck ups get weirder and weirder in each passing second. “Lost Lunar One” is a love song told through the metaphor of a long-lost changeling.

All of it is a brutal delight, a departure from the past, a nod to the startling present. Tomato Flower is no longer a pop band. Long live Tomato Flower.

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