White Flowers have been an obsession of mine for some time now. It started with that ‘Night Drive’ single that I hunted for all over the internet. When I last wrote about the Preston duo back in 2021, it was for their Within a Dream EP, a four-song collection that placed Katie Drew and Joey Cobb somewhere between post punk shadow, dream pop glow and shoegaze haze. Even then, their sound felt highly defined. In 2022 I got to see them live for the first time as they supported Just Mustard in a tiny basement in Glasgow. Their set was so powerful it was hard to believe there was only two people on stage.
Five years on, they return with a new album. Dreams For Somebody Else feels like White Flowers expanding on that intimate sound they honed back then while keeping the lights down low. Cobb and Drew have been working together since they were 17, gathering small ideas, fragments and recordings over time, then returning to them when life has changed enough to hear them properly. Their debut album Day By Day arrived in 2021 during that strange suspended pandemic period, and the years since have taken them through exhaustion, touring, questions about why they were doing any of it, and then the strange encouragement of being asked to support Beach House. Now they return with Al Doyle of LCD Soundsystem helping shape the record, which feels fitting for an album that looks toward dance music while keeping one foot in dream pop melancholy.
The album also carries a clear literary thread through it, with Annie Ernaux’s The Years sitting close to the heart of how White Flowers think about memory, identity and time. Ernaux’s book pieces a life together through fragments, images, sensations and cultural markers, creating the feeling of someone watching their own existence from a slight distance. Cobb says.
“The album has that same feeling of disassociating from your own life, because you’re just blending into everyone else. 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.”
‘Spinning’ opens the album with that exact sensation. Synth notes glimmer at the front, small points of light against a wider wash, before guitar and bass begin to thicken the shape of the song. Drew’s vocal sits close to the surface, calm but marked by sadness, and the music keeps turning beneath her. It sets up the album’s central mood straight away. This is something new for sure but unmistakably White Flowers.
‘Heaven’ steps forward with a warmer glow. Things open up, and there is a softness to Drew’s voice that makes the song feel intimate. It has brightness in it that immediately shifts the mood. White Flowers have always understood how to place beauty inside a slightly haunted frame, and you can hear that here. The synths shimmer, the vocal remains gentle, and the song gives the album its first clear glimpse of hope without sanding away the ache underneath.
By the time ‘Backseat’ arrives, the record turns its gaze toward isolation in a more direct way. The opening line “I’m always watching from the back seat” says so much with very little. The albums’ theme of disassociation given a new light. The track moves with a sense of contained pressure. Whilst the motorik rhythm suggests travel, the vocal keeps returning to the same emotional seat, watching life through glass. I really like how the song avoids over explaining the feeling. It lets the image do the work, and that makes it hit harder.
‘Tear’ brings a more fragile pull to the record. Coming after the social distance of ‘Backseat’, it feels like the private moment after you get home and replay every small look, every word, every silence. The arrangement feels like it is built around the idea of something slowly giving way. The voice sits inside the synths and guitars rather than above them, which suits the album’s recurring sense of identity becoming blurred by memory. The drums feel like they’re built for the dance floor and as the song goes on the bass does too. The juxtaposition of the fragile lyric and vocal against that neon-soaked rhythm section is quite stark and packs a real punch.
After the night club we retreat with the acoustic warmth of ‘Lamp’ is one of those shorter pieces that can say plenty because it keeps its frame tight. The title gives you the image straight away, a small source of light in a dark room, and the song seems to understand that kind of scale. It doesn’t need to stretch out to make its point. It works as a little pool of illumination on the album, intimate but lonely. Cobb and Drew have a good instinct for sequencing, and ‘Lamp’ gives you a moment to breathe before the album moves into one of its largest emotional spaces.
That space arrives with ‘Heart Breaks’, which feels like a centrepiece. It has that pulsing melancholy that the band say you might associate with New Order, where the bassline keeps moving with purpose while the mood sits heavy across the shoulders. I think there’s a bit of Arcade Fire about that pulse. What gets me is the way it can suggest something beautiful, with images of green grass and blue skies, then fold back into loss. The extended ending gives you time to sit with that change. This is without doubt my album standout moment.
‘Visual’ sharpens the album’s anxious edge. The looped structure becomes more intense here, and the repetition starts to feel itchy and less comforting, more like a thought you cannot switch off. White Flowers are very good at using pretty sounds to explore uneasy states, and ‘Visual’ carries that idea right into the nervous system. The synths and percussion move in circles, the vocal seems caught inside the pattern, and the song creates a strange mixture of beauty and alarm. This is one of Drews most dynamic vocal performances and it really suits the song. It’s one of the places where the album’s dance influence feels less like release and more like compulsion.
‘In The Sky’ lifts the record again, though in a way that still feels slightly out of reach. This track feels lighter, more suspended, with the title hinting at distance and escape. White Flowers never make escape sound simple. Their music often reaches upward while the emotional weight remains present below, and that is what gives these songs their character. The use of an acoustic drum kit here also adds a sense of reality which again shows this band playing with juxtaposition to great effect.
The title track, ‘Dreams For Somebody Else’, brings the album’s ideas into focus. The phrase itself is a beauty. It suggests longing, memory, envy, disconnection and tenderness all at once. The synth tones are warm and uplifting, drums cold and almost like that old Casiotone sound. White Flowers turn the title into a feeling of emotional misplacement, where your own past looks familiar and distant at the same time.
‘Thinking Of You’ closes the album with a tender ache. This was the song specifically inspired by an LCD Soundsystem set at Primavera back in 2017, and with Al Doyle involved in the album, there is a lovely circularity to how it all comes together. The track uses layered vocals to create a sense of memory multiplying, as if one voice has become several versions of itself. The question “If I see you again, would you see right through me?” is such a quietly devastating line because it holds recognition and disappearance in the same breath. As a closer, it leaves the album with sadness, but also with hope.
What lingers after Dreams For Somebody Else is the way White Flowers make the repetition in their music reflect their human experience. These loops and phrases feel like memories returning at odd hours, like old diary pages read by older eyes, like a dancefloor moment that becomes meaningful years later because your life finally caught up with it. Cobb and Drew have made a second album that widens their sound without losing the private atmosphere that made them so intriguing in the first place. It has synths that pulse, guitars that glow at the edges, vocals that feel close enough to touch, and songs that understand how strange it is to live inside a changing self. White Flowers have made a record for anyone who has looked back and wondered whose life they were remembering. Maybe some dreams just need a wee bit of time before they find out who they were for.
Dreams For Somebody Else is out now on vinyl and CD via The state51 Conspiracy. You can check it out over on the White Flowers Bandcamp page.
You can follow White Flowers on social media here…
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