When Florry’s front person Francie Medosch was in high school, she skipped school to go on tour in her band. Recently, the twenty-something singer skipped out from her home town in Philadelphia to go work at a dispensary and a record store in Vermont. Florry sounds like the basement project, the garage project, the back-porch or front-porch project of someone who skipped class in high school and now works at the weed store in Vermont. “Sounds like . . .” is the name of the new Florry album.
“Sounds like . . .” is a provocative title, because we scribblers of reviews, we love those points of reference to lure folks in. This band you may have never heard of, they sound like this other band you might have heard of.
The synthy samply crunch clicks that open the album sound like late 90s R.E.M. and like nobody discouraged Florry from opening the album with a 7-minute track. Folks cannot seem to stop mentioning the likes of Dylan, Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones in their impressions. Florry is part of what writer and podcaster Steven Hyden calls the “Wednesday/MJ Lenderman Cinematic Universe” when he is not calling it “the same country rock solar system that includes Wednesday and MJ Lenderman.” Cinematic universe. Solar system. Florry sounds as cosmic as these metaphors.
If it’s a scene or a movement, Asheville’s Drop of Sun recording studio seems to be the common denominator to this shaggy sound, the freaky fulcrum, portal, thin place, and power spot that projects these woozy sonics on the bedroom-wall interstellar-lightshow of our dreams. Yes, this album also sounds like they could be the black sheep cousin that got kicked off the recent Wilco/Waxahatchee double bill for jamming out too long. (That’s just an image that came to me, they were not on that tour, but now that I have said this, I wish that they had been.)
To add to all these references, I hear remnants in this jam-session-not-jam-band sound of the jangly and subterranean at the intersection of the 1980s cowpunk and Paisley Underground and SST scenes. You know, sounds like twangy punk rock, floating above the stage on things even stronger than those THC gummies of today, maybe a heroic dose or several, spiraling and giggling off the sky on acid and shrooms. That last sentence sounds like I feel dangerous, yes dangerous to even write for this sober but still crazy and psychedelic consumer of dangerous sounds. You know, “Sounds like . . . “ sounds like I might tell my sponsor that I don’t need a white chip from just listening to this album, but the sounds are simmering, I am definitely buzzed.
Florry songs are fierce in their intimacy, drifting from sex to death to prayers. Early single “Hey Baby” growls with heartbreak and regret before chug chugging into dorky refrains sing-chanted over bar-rock burning guitars. “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” is a haunting meditation on highway fatalities. In fact, track 8 called “Say Your Prayers Rock” is a revision of “Say Your Prayers” from the band’s 2021 “Big Fall” album. “Dip Myself In Like an Ice Cream Cone” is a sexy summer skinny dipping song, dripping with more innuendo than the plaintive sad song simply called “Sexy,” as “Ice Cream Cone” slips into a slinky squelchy steamy conclusion.
Florry are a band for whom albums are mere captures of the in-person in-real-life thing, only an audio placeholder for fans waiting to tap into their more free-flowing, far-flung, and feral live sound. Mind you, I have not seen Florry live yet, but looking up some live recordings of festival sets in 2023 and 2024, these sets really gave tangible traction to the trippy vibe that has me wanting to start spinning like on the lawn at a Dead show.
Yes, there are at least six people on stage, seven in this press photo. Yes, I hope that their van is spacious enough for them all. Yes, there’s fiddle and pedal steel. Yes, this sounds like the alt-country hippy-punk hoedown that this summer needs.
Florry sound like all the 1970s albums in the discount bin, all the private-pressings that give a contact buzz from just fingering the moldy cardboard, all-wrapped-up in the primitive design of snapshots and scribbles, back when actual ball-point-pen doodles were better than fonts, long before the day of fonts that try to look like ball-point-pen doodles.
But all the bluesy woozy shambolic and shamanic aforementioned antecedents aside, the amazing part is that Francie writes songs and lyrics that actually don’t sound like anything before Francie and Florry existed, being wholly new, even in how old they sound. Florry sounds like they don’t give AF that Francie especially doesn’t sound like anyone else that I can think of, defying even our best hopes to capture what “Sounds Like . . .” sounds like in the flawed format of a record review.
Following the album’s late May 2025 release, Florry are going to spend most of June on the road, hopefully packing-out the smallish venues where they are scheduled throughout the east, south, and midwest, and I sure would love to capture one of their sets, to continue to aspire to and joyfully capture in rapturous prose what Florry sound like. -Andrew/Sunfrog