British Alt Hip-hop band Monster Florence announce new album 'Master System' alongside new single 'Midnight Club' on November 2nd
LISTEN TO ‘MIDNIGHT CLUB’ HERE
NEW ALBUM ‘MASTER SYSTEM’, OUT FEBRUARY 10TH 2023 THROUGH PROJECT MELODY MUSIC
PRE-SAVE ‘MASTER SYSTEM’ HERE
"Monster Florence have had such a brilliant BBC introducing journey and with this new release and previous one Relax we should be really really excited about new music from Monster Florence"
BBC 6Music (Angelle Joseph)
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After ending their two-year hiatus with the unapologetic Kiss Fresh, BBC Introducing, and Amazing Radio supported single ‘Relax’ featuring legendary punk poet and fellow Colchester resident John Cooper Clarke, and their recent anthem ‘Borstal’, which has been praised by the likes of BBC Radio 1’s Gemma Bradley and Nels Hylton, and BBC 6Music’s Angelle Joseph, Monster Florence have now announced the details behind their eagerly-awaited new album ‘Master System’, showcased by the new track ‘Midnight Club’.
Following the enormous support for their 2020 EP ‘Cowboys & Idiots’, Monster Florence look set to make this new full-length their most impactful to date. Moving on from their more recent offerings, this new collection sees them venture into unexplored territory to deliver a rousing album that blurs the lines of contemporary music, continuing to push their sound ever forward.
Speaking about the new album, they said, “The quick rise of the digital age has opened a sort of Pandora’s box. Some innovations are designed to connect and enhance our lives, and others are a mockery of life itself. We hang digital art on digital walls to impress digital friends, and meanwhile the world burns.”
"Master System delves into the future effects of technology on the world by reaching to the past. Movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall were big inspirations. They imagined a retrofitted vision of the future; one where high-tech flying cars operate over a decayed industrial landscape. That’s something we tried to do with the sound of the album. We have distorted synths woven into full string sections. There are ghostly operatic vocals and saxophones beside robotic vocoders. It’s the idea that the future isn’t sterile and gleaming, but an accumulation of everything that came before.”
“Lyrically there is religious symbolism, epistemology and heartbreak. It’s a twisted love letter to our society and culture. The western world inches ever closer to an inherently digital existence, and the Master System is our idea of that eventuality. What does the human experience look like when completely disconnected from the earth?”
Featuring their newest opus ‘Midnight Club’, this new endeavour marks another fine example of their progressive direction to date. Matching warm and ethereal atmospheres with their own energetic flows throughout, their latest release perfectly illustrates the forward-thinking approach they have embedded within their forthcoming studio album.
Adding about ‘Midnight Club, the band’s Jonny Poole said, “Inspired by our collective love for the video game ‘Midnight Club’. We wanted to create a sound pallet that had a modern spin on retro arcade games. Using exclusively analogue synths and vintage drum machine samples, tying into the overall running theme of the album.”
While Wallace Rice added, “The song felt pacey, upbeat and urgent. It had a carefree element and I pictured myself in an organised street race with no stakes. The bystanders were my family and friends, and we all felt a togetherness.”
‘Master System’ Tracklist:
Widow
Bad Graphics
Borstal
Lag
Relax Featuring John Cooper Clarke
Somewhere (Interlude)
Spaceman
If Dreams Could Be Sold (Interlude)
Midnight Club
Jiggy Jiggy Featuring Dame
Tin Foil Girl
Wolf In A Woolly Hat
Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell? Featuring Louis The Hippie
Hailing from Colchester, the acclaimed six-piece behind ‘Deck of Cards’, ’26 Ghosts’ & ‘Beautiful Death’ have spent the last decade defying genres with their critically revered blend of rap, alt pop, punk, indie, psychedelic rock and more. What originally started off as a few studio sessions between producer Tom and vocalist Alex, soon turned into a full-blown musical project.
One of the pair’s first collaborations saw Alex bring along lifetime friends and fellow rappers Dream Mclean and Wallace Rice. The session also featured a surplus of live musicians, including drummer Cameron Morrell and multi-instrumentalist Jonny Poole. Within a handful of sessions, the number of musicians got progressively smaller until just six remained: Alex, Dream, Wallace, Tom, Jonny and Cameron. This is Monster Florence as it stands today.
As a six-member group, each with their own diverse individual backgrounds and mixed bag of musical styles makes Monster Florence somewhat of an anomaly in today’s musical climate. While it was common in the ‘90s for there to be an influx of multi-member acts, these have become more rare as the years go on. But for Monster Florence, drawing from a multitude of genres: hip-hop, punk, indie, psychedelic rock and anything in between is what makes this band so unique. Much like The Flaming Lips, Wu-Tang Clan and Los Angeles collective Odd Future, their strength lies in numbers - even if it did take a little time to find their feet.
When Monster Florence first started working on the album there was no title in mind. It wasn’t until after they recorded the tracks ‘Bad Graphics’ and ‘Lag’ that a loose concept started to form; to create an immersive world through their music, it also happened to coincide with the coronavirus pandemic, a period that gave rise to a digital revolution and saw a wave of new online activities and assets start to dominate the global conversation: NFTs, live streams, crypto currency and the Metaverse being a few of them.
The album’s artwork depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - only they’ve been replaced by two androids. Artist Scribbler explains: “The robots in the Garden of Eden represent the idea of man playing God. Artificial intelligence, the metaverse and etc are, in a way, a crude mockery of the natural world and the way we interface with it. The forbidden fruit can speak to many temptations with eventual catastrophic consequences. Whether that be climate change or AI sentience, that’s up to you. It’s more an observation than a point of view”
‘Master System’ is awash with stand out moments, many of which bring about deliberation. “Is the ashtray full or is the ashtray half empty?” Alex asks on ‘Borstal’, one of the group’s personal favourite tracks. Armed with an addictive bounce, it finds Monster Florence with some rare unoccupied time to reflect on previous missteps and a variety of other topics, and it marks the first time the group “set out to write a tune in a particular way and smashed it”.
Elsewhere, ’Wolf In A Woolly Hat’ is an unrepentant, guitar-laden track about presenting the real you regardless of your flaws, anchored by a stellar verse from Wallace, which the rest of the group were in awe of when they first heard it. “He brought his A-game on that one,” says Dream. The album also features an appearance from John Cooper Clarke on the lead single ‘Relax’. The legendary British ‘punk poet’, who has lived in Colchester for more than 20 years, is a regular at Tom’s studio.
“With this new album, I feel like we’ve arrived at a place where we’re a single unit working together,” says Dream, speaking about the group’s collaborative symmetry. “It feels more cohesive than a lot of our previous work; it’s without doubt our best work to date.” Tom adds: “We’re constantly evolving, and this album is the perfect example of that growth. I’d love to be in a situation where I hadn’t heard the album yet because that first listen is a real treat."
“Until recently, we didn’t think you could flourish by doing something a little left field. Our main goal is to continue to do that, push things forward and usher in new ways of doing things; that’s more important to us than having a Number One single.”
Monster Florence are:
Alex Osiris - vocals
Dream Mclean - vocals
Wallace Rice - vocals
Tom Donovan - production, guitars, keys, programming
Jonny Poole - sax, keys, guitar
Cameron Morrell - drums
https://www.instagram.com/monsterflorence/