WMUC Watchlist: Flowers for the Dead
They looked like they had just crawled out of the Goodwill bins: vintage and mismatched, but timeless. Their pedal boards were made out of a skateboard deck and an old briefcase, their setlist, at their feet on the old weathered carpet, was written on the bassist’s sandwich wrapper from dinner with a thick Sharpie, and in front of the drum kit sat a guitar amp with spray paint across the speaker. It read, in all caps, “a foolish woman is noisy.”
Jessie Szegö started the D.C.-based band Flowers for the Dead in 2021. She had been playing in an indie band since she was 14 and was sick of the style of music she was making, so she pulled a complete 180 and turned towards alternative rock. The band’s first release, an EP titled “Nova,” is best described as thrifted-porcelain-doll-core— soft, lilting vocals over grungy rock tracks. Flowers for the Dead’s first full-length album, “Quiet Corrosion in the Dancing Hall,” was released in June 2022.
After the band’s two releases, Szegö was joined by seasoned musicians from the DMV scene: Häuser drummer Ricky “Ten Bears” Martinez and Colo’s guitar and vocalist Marco Borda on bass. Since then, they’ve been on the up and up, working on new music and playing shows all over the east coast. In January of this year, they opened for Joy Again, an indie band with over 3 million monthly Spotify listeners, at Songbyrd Music Hall, which catalyzed their popularity outside of their local fanbase.
“Ray Brown hit us up to play the Joy Again show … my first thought was, ‘I’m scared,’” Szegö said. “But it was definitely really exciting because as a small band, it’s hard to get people to watch you, because people usually don’t care if you’re the opening band. But if people are there and they paid for tickets to see whoever, they have to be there. They have to listen to you.”
And listen they did. Szegö said the band saw an increase of followers and Spotify listeners after the show, despite their genre being so different from Joy Again’s. They were invited back to play at Songbyrd with another larger artist, Hello Mary, that following March.
It wasn’t always playing big shows for the members of Flowers, though. For Szegö, it started with Paper Jamz. Oddly enough, it was the thin, plastic fake guitar that played trashy rock hits that made her fall in love with music. After a lot of asking, she got a real acoustic guitar and was put into lessons.
“I didn’t really like playing guitar, honestly, when I first started,” she said. “I was just learning classical songs and I was so bored.”
That was, until a family friend was getting rid of an electric guitar and gifted it to her. At 13, plugging her guitar into an amp for the first time was one of the coolest things she had experienced. Naturally, the next step at this point was joining a band.
So, like many other young, musically-minded alt kids across the nation, Szegö found herself at School of Rock. She found herself in the real-world equivalent of the inside of her childhood Paper Jamz guitar— learning classic rock hits with other young musicians. It was there where she found the soon-to-be members of her first musical endeavor, an indie band whose name is so 2018-core, it would be embarrassing to publish.
Fast forward to Flowers for the Dead’s conception in 2021. While working on “Nova,” the urge to break out of her past as a soft indie singer was strong for Szegö, so she put all her repressed-School-of-Rock-kid energy into creating the creepiest, eeriest thing she could.
“After years of making beachy, bop music, I was like, let me get it all out,” she said. “After I put it out, though, I thought it was a bit much. Like, our name is already Flowers for the Dead, the allegations are never going to stop.”
Despite being a little over the top, “Nova” set the tone for Flowers’ development as a band, and the naïve sound from the EP is still held near and dear to the hearts of fans and the band itself. With their much-needed rock catharsis out of the way, Szegö and her former band members were able to refine their sound with “Quiet Corrosion in the Dancing Hall.”
Their album was met with enthusiasm in the scene, with their single “They Ran Like Dogs” amassing nearly 5,000 streams on Spotify since its release last year.
This set the band up for success. After gaining Martinez and Borda, Flowers for the Dead was set on making new music and playing shows.
“We’ve changed so much, and the music we have out doesn’t represent where we are now. We have so much new music to share with people, so I want to get new music out, like, ASAP,” Szegö said.
They’ve already played various locations in the area, including Ottobar in Baltimore, Quarry House Tavern in Silver Spring, and WMUC’s own Third Rail Radio. As they packed up their eclectic setup and headed down the graffitied, yellow staircase to the elevator after their show, it was obvious to onlookers that this is only the beginning for Flowers for the Dead.
photo credit: @cyberbae.studio, posted on @fftdmusic on Instagram