Flasher's Utopian Joy Is For Everyone

Flasher's Utopian Joy Is For Everyone




In December 2021, Taylor Mulitz, one-half of the arty and infectious indie duo Flasher, left a digital marketing job he’d contained for per year. “Finally, I’m free!” He thought immediately after he gave notice. The timing fit: Flasher’s expansive second album, Love Is Yours, which he’d recorded with bandmate Emma Baker in mid-2020 as a pandemic summer raged, was nearly ready for release. (It’s out June 17 by means of the Domino.)


It had been almost four years since Flasher’s debut, and Mulitz felt prepared to jump back in. For fun, he made several goofy TikToks to plug the opening single drop in March, incorporating Barenaked Ladies’s eternal 1998 hit “One Week.” Although as he speedily discovered, the dialogue machine never helps in avoiding churning.


“Now that I'm promoting the album, I'm like, oh, this is so fucked up, because I'm taking everything that I learned from that [job] into [making TikToks],” he tells MTV News with a wry smile. “My mental health rejected so much because I was spending more time on TikTok than I ever had before.”


Thankfully, unlike celebrity pop stars beholden to corporate engines, Flasher are free to make at their own pace. If they desire to race cars in the desert or redeveloped the plot of National Treasure for their music videos, they can. The clip for the album’s elastic title track finds Baker, a former theater kid, donning excessive stage makeup to reflect the film’s iconic star. “I think we had a breakthrough moment While I realized the Nicolas Cage look is all in these weird creases,” Baker says, gesturing at her jaw.


The videos reflect the egalitarian joy that listening to Flasher can elicit. Mulitz and Baker often sing lead with each other, their voices melding into a solitary dreamy unit. (“Do I sound trustworthy? Do I make myself clear?” Goes the album’s first chorus.) Bass and guitar parts, played on the album by both of those and co-producer Owen Wuerker, design a danceable framework over which they layer hooks that knock the wind out of you. Every element feels eye catching and slightly out of focus, like the joyous artwork of the album itself.


Mulitz and Baker are childhood companions who grew up going to shows and playing music with each other. Any time as soon as they started the musical group in Washington, D.C. In 2016, their roles were more defined: Mulitz as guitarist and Baker on drums, with former member Daniel Saperstein on bass. Their acclaimed 2018 debut, Constant Image, radiated peppy post-punk plus a lifetime of finishing each other’s musical sentences. Immediately after touring the LP, Saperstein departed. The newly two-member Flasher regrouped at Wuerker’s D.C. Studio in summer 2020 to record Love Is Yours and embraced the uncertainty of figuring out their new constitution.


“It makes sense while you have a trio that there’s just going to be two people into one thing and another person that's like, ‘That's not it. Let's keep going,’” Baker says. This time, it was much easier. The ideas flowed, and the duo simply rode the wave. “I feel like I surprised myself at how several things I may do that I don't normally do.”


Though Love Is Yours is Flasher’s first statement as a duo, it sounds anything however binary. Their creative liberation yielded 13 songs that push their blended vocals to the face of the mix, fashioning a pop-forward collection that still relies on occasional experimentation. All ideas emanate from Mulitz and Baker, who initially demoed these songs with drum machines and GarageBand samples. Once it came time to lay down the album versions, they left in certain sonic ephemera that they’d gotten used to. “I Saw You,” the album opener, contains a boombox radio snippet recorded by Baker and later processed with a neat delay effect.


As obtainable because the music can be, agitation also creeps up in the lyrics. “The world is routinely ending,” goes the otherwise sprightly “I’m Better.” “Such a fucking waste of brain cells / attempting to prepare any sense at all.” It’s tempting to read the state of world within the past two years into those lines, although the song specifics a toxic relationship. For every bit of despair on the album — “I don’t wish to be here / Damage is everywhere” — optimism rushes in to counterbalance. The direct line “Love is yours in the event you want it” hits like an epiphany, as if you’d never believed the cosmos would be so uncomplicated.


“Especially compared to making the last record, this one felt so much easier and more fun,” Mulitz says. He attributes that partly to the recording setup — they returned to a former practice space where they’d tracked their first EP — however also the economic relief that stimulus unemployment checks offered. (The pair lost their jobs at the begin of the pandemic.) “It really felt utopian in that way,” he continues. “We were like, wow. Could you imagine if the government actually supported musicians and this was just typical? I think it shows.”


The celebration also bleeds through on the magnificently busy album cover. Created by artist Em Aull, who labels his fashion “equal parts Hieronymus Bosch and Richard Scarry,” it’s a vision of a neighborhood in harmony: People of all shades bike, shop, and eat ice cream. Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” sounds from a theater marquee. Dogs and children dot the sidewalk. Plus a police officer disappears down a manhole in front of an ice machine tagged with “Fuck ICE” graffiti.


“What we really wanted was something that felt like its own world, where you dive into it, and also you can listen to the full record and sit there and just stare at completely mask the complete time,” Mulitz says. It’s the sort of scene you may pore over as you attempt to unpack lightly psychedelic lyrics like those that lead off bustling first single “Sideways” (“At certain times of day / I can hear the lights ringing”) or that pack the humid “Dial Up” (“Invent the deception / A gaze you can’t evade”). Or perhaps you’ll care far less about the message as you let the narcotic delivery of two joined voices overtake you.


As such, Love Is Yours is likely to play like a patchwork of excellent ideas refined by close companions who, geographically, aren’t actually so close anymore. Baker remains in D.C., While Mulitz has since relocated to the West Coast (first Los Angeles, right now the Bay Area). Their house music scene has changed substantially, also. However it hasn’t made Flasher sound any much less spirited or much less in harmony with each other.


“Being the age that we are, where I feel like a lot of our peers have moved away or gone on to different types of careers or began families or whichever, it's just a lot of stuff all at once,” Baker says. “But I feel like it makes us not living in the same place feel OK as an alternative opposed to, I don't know, scary.”


“That's not to mention it didn't feel a little bit scary at times,” Mulitz adds. “I felt selfish for [leaving]. However having an idealistic outlook about it, I feel like there's plenty of bands that are bicoastal, or people that reside in different places and make it work.” The utopian ideal remains — in case you want it.









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