Stephen Montoya
From the left is Flowerbed drummer Charlie DeBolt, guitarist Steven Martinez, and bassist/vocalist Bobby Biggs out front.
It’s never an easy decision for a band to make a change to its sound. In some instances, timing has a lot to do with it. For example, the Rolling Stones, for better or worse, rode trends like waves throughout the years like genre hopping sponges, in an attempt to keep themselves in the conversation. What makes a move like this a bit riskier, is when the band is still fairly new. This is the exact scenario, the three members of the local band Flowerbed found themselves in when recording their new EP “come and adore”.
Set to be released on June 30, this new EP marks the arrival of a new sound for a band that started out as a shoegaze/dreampop act. Flowerbed consist of bassist/vocalist Bobby Biggs, guitarist Steven Martinez and drummer Charlie DeBolt. This iteration of Flowerbed has been together since 2021, and played with bands like Glare, Pretty Sick, Trauma Ray, Ringo Deathstarr, and Indigo de Souza. Flowerbed has also played festivals like Starshine, SXSW Spillover, and Thin Line.
So, when asked why the sudden change in their sound, Martinez replied, “I just wanted to keep up with everything else that was going on.”
What Martinez is referring to is the burgeoning Fort Worth hardcore scene, which pays homage to the metal sounds of the late 90s and early 2000s, remember Deftones and Korn?
Stephen Montoya
“We wanted this EP to sound sludgy, raw, and crisp, and above all true to our live sound,” DeBolt says. “We enlisted the help of producers Jonas Harvey (Jonas Harvey Music) and Phillip Odom (Bad Wolf Recordings) to do so. It’s taken us a while to find ‘our sound’, but we think we’ve done it with this EP.”
The new EP consists of four tracks, “Hide”, “Need”, “Shake”, and “Heavy Rain”, with “Hide” being the first single available on Spotify. Each track accomplishes a muddy sludgy sound with just a bit of pop for good measure. What gives this EP cohesion, is the dream like vocals supplied by Biggs. “I feel like my voice gets drowned out by the guitar and drums most of the time when we play live,” Biggs says. “But that’s kind of the point. My voice is just kind of like an added instrument to the mix.”
But nu metal isn’t the only the genre that inspired this North Texas trio. In fact, Biggs says noise pop, which is a bit louder and noisier that shoegaze, was also a big influence on the new batch of songs.
“It definitely feels like heavy music is starting to carve out a space for itself in the greater DFW area,” DeBolt says. Especially now, since the complacency in our society was shaken with a change in presidency and then add a global pandemic. People are realizing there’s still stuff out there to be angry about.”
For Martinez, this could’ve come at a better time for him personally. “When I began to write music from this standpoint it really conveyed the hardships I was going through,” he says.
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Flowerbed’s first foray into this new genre would take the form of an unreleased track titled “Shake”. “I had that song for about a year in the back of my mind before we started working on the new stuff,” Martinez says. “When I played it for the band for the first time, they said they thought it was pretty solid.”
Since then, Flowerbed has gone full force into a harder sound that they feel plays to their strengths as a trio. And just in the nick of time too.
According to DeBolt, the band was thinking about calling it quits when Martinez came into the jam space with a slew of new heavier material.
“After Steven showed us all the songs, me and Bobby were like, ‘Yeah sure, we can continue like this,’” DeBolt says. “I think it was fitting because the space we were all at, at that time.”
In the coming year Flowerbed is focusing its energy on playing more shows around Texas and the surrounding states, as well as planning its first tour.
“We are really working on putting ourselves out there, plus we are already working on new material,” Biggs says. “We have fun doing what we are doing and have no plans of slowing down.”
