UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
Photo Courtesy of Flooding
Feeling spits onto power onto narcissism in Flooding’s latest EP, object 1. Following their album Silhouette Machine, the trio takes their time articulating their piece of psych across this four-track release. Rose, guitarist and vocalist of Flooding, sat down with UCLA Radio virtually to discuss the nuances of what it means to create a Flooding EP seeped with shame and power plays.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Chloe Gonzales
Chloe: You guys have a new EP coming out soon. How are you feeling about it?
Rose: Really excited. We’ve been working on it for a really long time. Like with everything we do, there’s quite a lot of time in between when we release stuff. It’s gonna be good.
It’s crazy because to me, going two to three years between releasing a project doesn’t feel very long at all. People are expecting artists to be releasing stuff multiple times a year now, and it’s like, “How do we keep up with that?”
Chloe: I read that you guys called yourself Flooding because of an exposure therapy technique where a patient exposes their fear all at once. Do you guys explore a lot of mental health themes? Because in “your silence is my favorite song” it seems to hint at a personality disorder or bipolar.
Rose: I think we do, in a way. I think it’s less about disorders and more so about being a human being and the emotional states that we go through.
Chloe: I also wanted to talk about your stylistic choice with using all lowercase in your lyrics and songs!
Rose: I don’t want to give some crazy meaning to every little that we do. For sure, it’s just like aesthetic choices. But I mean the EP definitely feels like a turning point, kind of like a capstone in our discography. So I kind of wanted to do something a little different, in a lot of different ways.
Chloe: [The lowercase] It feels more journal-y or intimate in a way.
Rose: Well yes and no, because it’s not necessarily like from my point of view, but I feel like the lyrics are very much way more intense with things that people don’t usually share with the rest of the world and more so would be like writing in a diary.
Chloe: Love that. And you guys were saying this EP feels like a turning point for you guys. I feel like sonically in particular, “depictions of the female body” feels a little different than the previous songs to me. Interesting way to describe it but other songs feel very low to me and this song feels more open, if that makes sense.
Rose: I also don’t have a very good music vocabulary. I never went to music school or really formally learned how to play my instrument. But I know how to describe music in that kind of way, through things like high frequencies and low frequencies, the energy of it. I feel like what we go for is more so focused on the energy of the music rather than , “Oh what genre is this? How is this in a concrete way?” But yeah, it’s definitely more sonically different for us. I think we made a lot of chill songs, a lot of sad songs, a lot of slow moving songs, but I’ve just been really inspired by a lot of pop music and fun heavy hitting stuff.
Chloe: I was going to say, genre wise it’s two different things or pathways: on one hand everyone genre bends these days, so genres are kind of pointless in a way; but on the other there are these really niche genres, so I like that you talk about it sonically, energy wise. So I don’t know, it kind of all gets smushed together.
Rose: I know, I think that matters a lot more. And I feel like you can make something way more unique if you’re not focusing on fitting into these crazy niche genres. The vast majority of people don’t know what the fuck slowcore is like. That’s not real to them. It’s like this is just like rock music to them.
Chloe: Which is so vast, they hear electric guitar and they’re like, “That’s rock.” But then it’s like, when you get to these really niche genres, it’s like, “Just play the damn song!!”
What pop music have you been tapping into?
Rose: Coco and Clair Clair and someone else, I was just listening to her yesterday…
Chloe: Have you seen Coco and Clair Clair live before?
Rose: Yes, twice!
Chloe: Did you enjoy them, I have heard mixed stuff about their live performance.
Rose: Okay, I went to Denver to see them the first time and the crowd was just horrible, so I feel like that’s very indicative of how their performance is going to be, because they need that. You know? I mean like everyone who’s performing their music, if the crowd is giving them nothing, it’s not going to be a very good show.
Though it’s crazy because a lot of the shows that we’ve played, I will be on stage and think, “Oh my God, these people hate us, no one gives a fuck about what we’re playing.” And then people will come up to us after and be like, “That was the best show I’ve ever seen.” So sometimes, people just don’t show it in the moment.
Chloe: How did the Midwest influence your sound?
Rose: I think that in a very subconscious way, it’s affected what I’ve made because it’s also like with the internet how you can be inspired and exposed to so many different things you would have no clue about. So I wouldn’t attribute it all to being in the Midwest, but I think it definitely gives a certain different element especially being from not a big music hub. So you kind of have to make your own way.
Chloe: No absolutely. Is it kind of nice being able to pave your own way because you’re like the first to do it or is it nervewracking, not having the rails on when you’re bowling. That’s a weird analogy *laughs*.
Rose: Such a good analogy. It’s hard especially with more music industry stuff, that’s an obstacle to get over being from a small city in the Midwest, because there’s not a lot of opportunities in our own city, so we have to travel. And people don’t really take bands seriously who aren’t from a major city.
Chloe: Jumping back into the EP, I feel like a lot of the thematics that you talked about surround power and positions of power.
Rose: Definitely a theme that I do talk about a lot, just because I have thought about that stuff a lot in my life and have been in situations where that’s a really big thing. I just find it really interesting from the other perspective of someone who has power over someone else. I like to explore that a lot and characterize being in that position because a lot of the time–it’s kind of funny and I talk about narcissism a lot in this EP because I’ve just been finding it really funny. It’s just really ironic how the most grandiose people are also the most insecure and self-hating. So it’s an interesting point of view to me.
Chloe: And are the lyrics themselves like poems in a way, or is it just songwriting to you?
Rose: Yeah, I think sometimes. I think that the way that I write lyrics feels a little poetic for sure.
Chloe: Yeah I was curious because it just gave off that vibe. Maybe it was because I was reading the lyrics in a Google Docs, where I read a lot of poems.
Rose: Honestly, I’ve never wanted to write poetry for the sake of writing poetry for it to be on a sheet of paper, but I like executing it with music.
Chloe: Yes, because it provides a lot of context with different layers, it makes it more 3D, so I definitely agree with you on that. Music is so funny because you can do a call and response with instruments and stuff like that, it’s so dynamic and fun.
Rose: Agreed. Definitely my favorite form of artistic expression because of that, and also to me, I didn’t really like visual art very much because it felt way more difficult to change what would eventually end up being the final product. But with music, it’s like an idea in your head until you record it. So you can change a lot about it just by using your imagination, which is really cool to me.
Chloe: Wait, I love that. I’ve never thought about it in that way! What are inanimate objects or non-musical things that inspired this EP?
Rose: Fun question! I don’t know if I’m necessarily inspired by objects, but–actually no I think that I am because I love interior design. I think your environment and the things around you play such a big role in your life and it affects your nervous system. So I don’t think that there’s really anything that I’ve thought about to be inspiring, but I’m sure on some level, like the things around me are affecting me creatively.
Chloe: What was around you during the process of this EP?
Rose: I wrote this EP in my house. I remember writing some of it back in our band practice room back there. And I really thought it was gonna turn out way different than it did. I was really struggling with writing stuff because when I first started trying to write for this EP, my cat had just died and I’ve actually never experienced the death of a loved one in my life before, so that was the first time I had ever experienced that. And she is buried in my backyard, and could see where she’s buried through the window from where I was writing. So maybe that affected me.
Chloe: It’s interesting, because I feel like a lot of stuff is subconscious and then you can come back and form connections to it and stuff. Also, I feel like in your previous album it was in a dark basement with still water and stuff but I feel like this new EP is more nighttime, maybe out in a field.
Rose: Yeah, our last album was so emotional and heavy and I think in general Flooding has a lot of dynamics within the songs and throughout each album or EP that we release. So I like to think about dynamics, not only sonically and in terms of volume in the intensity of a song, but also what the songs are about, and how the songs feel. So you can definitely, I think, tell from our first album that one felt kind of sad, a little bit sexy to me. Then the second album was sad as fuck and really angry and hopeless. The new EP, for sure still angry, but in a different way, more of a fun way.
Chloe: I also feel like the EP cover for object one is also very different from the others. This one’s more crystal clear and not as grungy.
Rose: For sure, everything else we’ve used has been like a painting. On the first album, we literally didn’t know how to use Photoshop at all, but I was like, “I have this vision.” I was like, “I have this photo of my childhood friend and her older sister and I love it so much, and I think that we could make it into a really cool album cover.” But we didn’t know how to do graphic design so it ended up not looking very good. But I think that is fine because it’s just like, that’s how it turned out. That’s a representation of us at that specific point in time. But yeah, there definitely is such a big difference using a painting or something graphic designed versus an image.
Chloe: To me, it reminds me, not of a crime scene per se, but like a piece of evidence.
Rose: What I was going for, was like in a museum, when they have objects in a case, they will be labelled like “object one.”
Chloe: I love that because it minimizes it down to just an object. Then you have the description and stuff but it’s identifiable, it diminishes it almost.
I have one last question for you though. Our radio members here who have a show have a DJ name. What would your DJ name be?
Rose: DJ *Bleep* like the sound you do when you cuss on the air. That’s what I would want mine to be.
Listen to the latest EP here:
And listen to our official Rising Artist Spotlight playlist here:
