Interview: Flooding
Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Photo by Fabian Rosales
Kansas City noise rock trio Flooding returned this year with the pummeling lead single “your silence is my favorite song,” and it was one of the few songs I had heard all year that felt particularly appropriate with its prickly ridicule of narcissistic abusers. After the release of two albums, the band arrive on their new EP object 1 with more urgency and a poppy take on their sinister sound. It’s a trip deep down into the muck, only it roils with more clarity as each punch is emphasized by jarring feedback for some of their strongest songs yet. I spoke with vocalist/guitarist Rose Brown about the EP below.
On object 1 it sounds like you all lean into the more aggressive, heavy aspects of your music while vocally it sounds more self-assured. I would even say the first two singles are more accessible than past releases. What are some things that have contributed to the band’s progression since the last album in 2023?
I think a huge thing that pushed Flooding forward was shifting the perspective on how to write a cathartic song. I got more inspired by pop music than I had ever been while writing the EP and it made me realize that there are a lot of different ways to elicit a visceral feeling through music. Flooding has always been all about using extreme dynamics to make that happen and we still do that. But our last album also achieved that through intuitive song structure, which created a lot of linear, story-like songs that were sometimes drawn out for pretty long. With this EP, pop structure really spoke to me because of how pop songs are literally formulated to give you the maximum emotional reaction, which felt appropriate to incorporate with the dynamics of Flooding. It also felt fitting to write hook-forward songs with the themes of the EP.
For the first two albums, the writing was mostly done by you (Rose) before Cole and Zach added finishing touches to the songs. Was the writing process for the EP similar in that way?
I realized that a lot of what makes a rock song good is the drums. I was very inspired by songs with moments of just really good drums, bass, and vocals. In the past I have written songs that could stand alone with just guitar and vocals, but it felt like the right moment to try to incorporate guitar into the songs in a different way so that the rhythm could stand out. The title track of the EP is the only Flooding song that we’ve written together truly as a band and I think you can probably tell. I could not for the life of me figure out how to incorporate vocals into it. It felt wrong because of how impersonal the song was to me compared to everything else I’ve written. So it became an instrumental track, which kind of felt perfectly ironic and apathetic for the EP.
Previously, your first album was self-produced and it had been mentioned before that it was something you would want to continue to do as long as you could do it yourselves. How did working with someone else change that? Was it fairly easy to work with Corey Coffman for the last album and this EP in a way that didn’t feel like it would compromise the band’s sound?
It was a joint production effort between the three of us and working with Corey for mixing just made the recordings sound better because we aren’t professional audio engineers. There’s not really a reason why we didn’t outsource the mixing/mastering aspect of our first album besides that we couldn’t afford it. I don’t really believe that having the music mixed professionally could compromise the band’s sound because I’m still in that producer role, but I think that recording the music in a DIY way gives it a certain quality that feels important to the music.
The themes addressed on the EP target male narcissism on the first single “your silence is my favorite song”, while the second single “depictions of the female body” divulges in lust and hopelessness. It seems as if every aspect of the music is a juxtaposition of a lot of things (harsh vs soft, highs vs lows, etc) with the main goal being absolute catharsis. What inspired you to write this collection of songs in that regard? Whether that be musical or other artistic reference points or purely personal mitigations?
A few of my favorite artists at the time had recently been exposed for some abusive behavior and it was really sad to think that people I’ve looked up to and have been inspired by could do things like that. And that stirs something in me deep down that has to do with betrayal I guess. So it got me thinking a lot about narcissism and self-obsession in general, and how the most narcissistic, grandiose people are also the most insecure and self-hating, and how ironic that is. But self-obsession is also more relevant than ever for everyone right now. I’m not talking about the evil self-obsession, I’m talking about the depressing self-obsession. And with Flooding, my goal has always been to make people feel seen, and that includes the parts of ourselves that we’re a little ashamed and scared of, too, and that’s the cathartic thing about it.
What other plans does Flooding have coming up this year?
We’ll be playing some shows with Slow Crush and Faetooth in September and some with Teethe in October.
object 1 is out now.
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Loan Pham | @x_loanp
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