Full Flower Moon Band - After Dark - BLACKOUT EXCLUSIVE Vinyl LP

Megaflower finds Full Flower Moon Band in full bloom: wild, expansive and impossible to pin down. It’s a record that feels both grounded and cosmic, where fuzzed-out guitars, hypnotic grooves and a kind of beautiful unruliness keep pushing the songs somewhere bigger than themselves. There’s real heat in it, but also real atmosphere - the sense of a band stretching toward something luminous, strange and alive. Megaflower doesn’t just sound like growth; it sounds like transformation.

Kate Dillon knows exactly what she's doing. The frontwoman, figurehead and chief songwriter of Brisbane rock outfit Full Flower Moon Band – better known as simply 'Babyshakes' when she steps to the mic – is all about subverting expectations and offering a new reality in its stead. So it goes with FFMB's third studio album Megaflower. On paper, an allusion to the megaflora – particularly giant plants, suggests ‘everything that's come before, to the nth degree’… or so you'd think.

“When you think about Full Flower going 'mega', I don't want you to think about us going harder and heavier,” Dillon explains. “I want you to think about us going in every direction. Acts like the Arctic Monkeys and David Bowie were able to define careers that went genre-less at as many intersections as they could. I want to have permission to do that as an Australian artist, and not get pigeon-holed. My mega is everything instead of one thing. I'm not saying that I'm doing it perfectly yet, but I am saying I will be moving in places that I want to, and we refuse to be just a heavy-rock band. That's our mega.”

Dillon, who also produced it, recorded Megaflower with the full five-piece, triple-guitar line-up that audiences have grown accustomed to over the last two years of must-see live shows. Mixing, meanwhile, was handled by the award-winning Tony Buchen (Smashing Pumpkins, Montaigne) – a connection Dillon has described as “fate providing a true mentor”. What lies therein is the most diverse sonic array under the Full Flower umbrella to date.

“Most songs went through a metamorphosis, which I've never really done on previous albums,” says Dillon. “It was a concerted effort to write more – like, write, write. I could have easily not done that, and just have everything on the album be what-you-see-is-what-you-get. The conclusion that I came to is that it ultimately just wouldn't have been a challenge.”

This subversion of expectations even extends to the album cover, which sees Dillon posed beside a giant construction with familial ties. “My father, who's a metal worker, made a huge metal monolith that stood 2.6 metres high,” she explains. “Me standing next to it looks very meaningful; like I'm really saying something deep. 'She's really going there! She's really doing it!' Then, at every turn of the record, I'm like, 'Sike! Gotcha! Think again!' I'm not just standing on the shoulders of giants. Nah, dude: I'm everywhere.”

So, aside from expecting the unexpected, what does Dillon want from listeners of Megaflower? “I would hope that ideally, people put this on and hit a sense of pleasurable listening. Every single song feels like it's there for a reason. I hope they feel liberated listening to it, because we go everywhere together. I hope people enjoy the generosity of that emotion and pick up on the fearlessness of it, and get a sense of fearlessness themselves – because that's what it took.”

Full Flower Moon Band is Babyshakes Dillon vocals + guitar, Marli Smales bass + bvs, Luke Hanson drums, Christian Driscoll & Caleb Widener guitars.

140GRAM BLACK VINYL.

Tracklisting:

1.        Super Like Me

2.        Illegal Things

3.        Cowboy

4.        Devil

5.        Baby

6.        West Side

7.        Enemy

8.        Man Hands

9.        Alpha

10.  Come and Be

11.  Kiss Him Goodbye