Frankie Flowers Releases “let’s talk about last night,” A Breakthrough Moment From One Of Indie Sleaze’s Most Dangerous New Voices
It is 2 a.m. and the night has already gotten away from you. That is where Frankie Flowers lives. The Waterloo, Ontario-based artist releases her newest single “let’s talk about last night” from her upcoming EP my love is a dog from hell!, a coiled, post-punk-soaked indie sleaze track that feels like it was recorded in the back of a cab somewhere between the Lower East Side and a very bad decision you are absolutely going to make again. Written by Lauren Knapp, composed and produced by Sebastian Torres, mixed by Calvin Hartwick and Emily Baxter, mastered by Phil Demetro, and recorded at Dreamhouse Studios in Toronto, the song announces an artist who arrived fully formed and running.
The reference points are there if you know where to look. The Strokes at their most frayed. Yeah Yeah Yeahs at their most electric. LCD Soundsystem on the comedown. But Frankie Flowers is not doing nostalgia. She is doing something more interesting: she is taking the wreckage of the early 2000s New York scene, the cigarette smoke and the blown-out amps and the morning-after mythology and running it through something darker and more contemporary. Her bio says she is mutating indie sleaze, not reviving it. That is exactly right.
“‘let’s talk about last night’ came from thinking about the emotional aftermath of those nights where two people give in to the moment without really thinking about what happens next,” Flowers says. “In the moment it feels exciting and inevitable, but the morning after there’s usually one person left replaying everything, wondering what it actually meant.” She wrote it alone in her bedroom one evening and then took it into the studio, where the band leaned hard into what she calls the track’s “restless energy.” “I wanted the track to feel like a night out that keeps escalating, loud, messy, and a little unpredictable.”
The song delivers on that promise immediately. “She’s a twisted lullaby / see desire in her eyes / but we don’t talk about it” sets the scene in three lines, all tension and unspoken electricity. By the time the chorus hits, “let’s talk about last night / why’d you go and do that?” the track has already built something that feels like collective guilt and collective thrill in equal measure. The bridge goes somewhere even stranger: “Got stranded outside Brooklyn Steel / saw LCD / your city’s a sucker, just like me.” It is a lyric that could only have been written by someone who understands exactly what scene she is in conversation with and is not intimidated by it.
Flowers has been building toward this moment with purpose. She has opened for KennyHoopla on his Survivor’s Guilt Tour and supported The OBGMs at Toronto’s Velvet Underground. Her music has been featured on Hockey Night in Canada and received regional NPR-affiliated radio play. Indie88 put her on Songs You Need to Discover and Ones To Watch flagged her on their #NowWatching list. For an artist operating independently out of Ontario, the trajectory has been steep and it is pointing in exactly one direction.
Beneath the noise and the swagger, there is a writer at work who is genuinely interested in what desire does to people.
“A lot of my music explores romantic delusion and the strange things desire does to people,” Flowers says. “I’m fascinated by the tension between knowing something might not end well and choosing it anyway.”
That fascination gives the track staying power. You can play it loud at a party or alone at 3 a.m. and it will find you either way.
No tour dates are announced yet. They will come. Keep up.
Hi, Frankie! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hi! I’m Frankie Flowers, an alternative artist from Ontario. I make a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I try not to think about genre too much.
Your music has been described as “mutating indie sleaze, not reviving it.” What about that era still feels relevant to you, and what parts did you want to completely tear apart and rebuild?
I have this delusion that we’re all living WRONG right now, and that all the fun shit got left in the early 2000s. I romanticize that era a lot, but not because I think it was objectively better, I think I miss the feeling of it. People seemed less self-conscious, less curated, less obsessed with documenting themselves. We just went outside and touched grass, that was all. There was more room to just simply be present. That’s what still feels relevant to me. I’m not trying to recreate 2010. I’m interested in recreating how that music made people feel. If people listen to my music and feel even a fraction of what those records made me feel growing up, then I think I’ve done my job.
“let’s talk about last night” captures the moment where excitement turns into emotional fallout. Why do you think people are so drawn to relationships or situations they already know might end badly?
I think ultimately, we’re all just drawn to whatever makes us feel the most. Most of us just want to feel something, and sometimes the relationships we know won’t be good for us bring a certain intensity with them that’s kinda all consuming and addicting. At least, that’s what it feels like for me.
You reference bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem, but your music doesn’t feel nostalgic. What is it about that era of early 2000s that you love?
I started going to a lot of festivals in my early teens, and I remember seeing everyone dancing around in fields, high on whatever they were high on, loving whoever they were loving. It made me feel so free. Nobody seemed worried about what they looked like, people just moved and felt. When I think about bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem, I don’t think about nostalgia as much as I think about that feeling of freedom and intensity that came with discovering music at that age. My upcoming EP probably pulls from that feeling more than anything I’ve released before.
Your upcoming EP is called ‘my love is a dog from hell!’. That’s such a vivid title. What does love look like in the Frankie Flowers universe right now: dangerous, addictive, self-destructive, liberating, or all of the above?
Yeah, I’m definitely one for theatrics.
In all seriousness though, love in the Frankie Flowers universe is beautiful until.. it’s not.
A lot of this EP came from realizing relationships have brought out sides of me I don’t always love.
I think people love intensity until it stops being fun and starts becoming real. As a woman, I think there can be this pressure to stay desirable, effortless, and easy to hold..
A lot of this EP sits in that feeling. Being wanted until you stop being convenient. Being adored until you become emotional, difficult, insecure, jealous, messy, human.
Anyhow… My love is a dog from hell! Good luck.