I speak from a lens of wanting hope and joy and love, but those terms have become very fluffy in people’s minds, as if they’re just something cuddly and nice. They’re not. They’re incredibly important, and if you lose them, you lose yourself really hard.
When you hear a name like Flint Moore and see their stunning art, with its conjuring of gnarly rainforests and sparks flying in the night, you’d be forgiven if you expected black metal. The bigger themes of grief and dread inherent to the genre are there, but stylistically, the Norfolk band has in time created a sound entirely their own. It was a journey: Francis and Lawrence met in college, and the rest of the band came together like a gravitational pull, experimenting with styles, assuaging wide-ranging tastes, resulting in their first EP, Two Part Sky.
Lawrence: It felt like two different bands even within the same EP. We’d have these very anthemic accessible songs, then we’d have these proggier, 11-12 minute songs, which we loved, but then you put them in the same EP and it’s like an identity crisis.
A crisis completely resolved in the unique sound and cohesive storytelling of their debut album, The Aches and the End, released in 2024.
Francis: I think the main reason why they’re so different is honesty. Up until the debut album, I wasn’t being entirely honest with what I wanted to write. We had some happier sounding stuff, because I felt that’s what people wanted to hear, but during COVID, we spent a lot of time thinking about who are we now? What is our common ground that we’re all enjoying?
Reaching this level of honesty didn’t come easy.
Francis: God, it was impossible. We’ve got a lot of individualistic energy in the band. We work well together, but we also each have very strong individual ideas of what we like. So when things come together, there’s friction and there’s a lot of joy too, because it means the ideas that make it through, we really thought through. When we were making this album, I felt super insecure, coming to the band with some of these very personal feelings, because I had had a longer history of hiding behind words and music, and this time around, I didn’t want to do that. And that was daunting, because it meant having to translate these ideas and then explain to everyone in the band my incredibly vulnerable emotions and why they were important in the songs.
Lawrence: When you play live, you wanna play something that you’re all proud of and you’ve all made a healthy compromise on. We want to make sure that we’re always challenging each other and not being too prideful in what we do. Just because we’ve done it for a long time doesn’t mean we can’t have terrible ideas, you gotta know when to put something to one side and pick something else.
Francis: [It’s a] fully collaborative process. I love collaboration. It’s why I’m in a band. I love curveballs. I’ve got a phrase called “compromise soup”, which is if we keep compromising on every decision within the band and not be truthful to the direction of the song, it ruins the song entirely. So if someone’s added a part that changes the feel entirely, we go “okay, why don’t we just restart and make a new song using these bits?”
An early release off the debut album was Undermask, an acoustically driven descent into mayhem.
Francis: I have to give a bit of context. The Aches and the End, the whole feel of the album, the concept of the album is having a crisis and then going right down to the point of your lowest – feeling incredibly depressed and suicidal – and then making our way back up again toward hope and joy and life. A lot of these experiences and energy map onto my own experiences – diving and losing everything that was personal to me. For me, Undermask marks the moment where you realize things are wrong and you really don’t want them to be wrong. Having ideas and a worldview that served you so well break is disastrous.
Lawrence: It does feel like you’re trying to keep something under the rug. You’re in that sense of belief that things can still be held together as they were, but you’re slowly realizing that that might not be the case. It’s almost like cognitive dissonance. So there’s parts of the song that are slightly atonal, with this sense of dread and malice, this feeling of drowning.
Wondering about the eternal question of whether art helps the artist…
Francis: I can’t think of it as helping, it’s just getting it out. Often, I start writing something before I realize what it is. It’s certainly cathartic to play and to get out, but it still feels weird to play something so personal. I can only hope when playing this stuff that it connects to those types of people, my kind of people, and that they find some kind of comfort in that.
There’s not a lot of space for the in between. There’s lots of bands that are really dark and dire, and then there’s the ones that are like “life is wonderful, get up and dance”. Where are the people that shit hits the fan and you want to find yourself back in a good place, but you can’t pretend. You’ve had a horrible time, you’re having a horrible time, and telling me to get up and dance now feels like opening the curtains and the sun’s too bright.
A standout moment in Me Alive, the fourth track on the album, is the bass solo that feeds into the final chorus and then closes off the song.
Francis: Maddy gave that one life. It started off a lot slower with a different rhythm. I brought it to Noah, who gave it an entirely different rhythm, and I started moulding the entire song around it, even changed the key to fit it, but it was still not quite clicking. It was Maddie’s idea how to finish the song, with a funkier, pushier feel to it. It was perfect for Me Alive, which was all about uncertainty and feeling rushed.
When I first heard Long Way, Same Ground, perhaps the most aggressively raw song off the whole album, there was an overwhelming sense of release and relief palpable in its construction, like after a long time of barely keeping it together, you can finally let that go in one throat-shattering wail.
Francis: That song is the confession of a breakdown, of “oh my God, it’s gone. It’s gone and it’s not coming back”. Even the title [refers back to] “I’ve come all this way and I’m in exactly the same place”.
Lawrence: It sounds like you’ve hit a wall and you’ve tried everything, thrown everything you can at it. The chaotic bit towards the end, it’s like when things really ramp up and you just don’t know where you’re going with whatever you’re going through, whatever you’re feeling.
Just as emotionally raw is the ballad Be Enough, which had the striking verse “I’m as vain as I remember”.
Francis: “Be Enough” is a very lonely song. It’s an interesting thing for me when I get to grief, there’s two things that can happen: on the one side, I’m in it and it’s difficult, and at the same time it can feel almost self-pitying. There’s the “woe is me” side and then it’s the fact you’re horribly upset and grieving, and there’s not much you can do about it. So talking about being “as vain as I remember”, it’s this idea of thinking of yourself as something more grandiose, “what, did I expect life never to serve me a difficult time? Did I think I’d never be sad?”
Striking a balance between vulnerability and explosive energy release was an exercise in distilling essence, in part refined with Liverpool producer Tom Peters, over at Trapdoor Studios.
Francis: He is gorgeous. He’s wonderful to work with. And he was the one who mixed and produced it and made sure that it was going all together. We tried in the past to self-produce and it always led to arguments, it turned into ego. He’s just so good. He’s able to express opinions in a very soft kind way, but he then stands by it.
Lawrence: We were talking about creating these cinematic soundscapes. I think what really helped us and made us grow a lot as musicians is having that time to pre-develop the songs and not experimenting too soon. I think some of our older songs, we were collaborating in such a short span of time that we would get some really good ideas out, but then others could have been fleshed out more.
Flint Moore is already in the early stages of writing new material for their upcoming album, while balancing touring schedules and life. Many thanks to Francis and Lawrence for their generosity with this interview, recorded before their amazing show at JT Soar, Nottingham, with support from [slab] and Teiger.
Listen to the interview in full:
Bonus Question: How did you find your voice?
Francis: I remember one person yelling at me that they couldn’t hear me because I sung too soft, so I started learning how to belt and shout-sing. At that point, I was doing it so horribly, I’d get terrible headaches and I was feeling faint, I nearly fell over a couple of times. I did it wrong for so long that I slowly got to doing it well. My voice is a result of me desperately trying to push emotion more and more and more into it. I love some of the sounds of the folk vulnerability. I love the fury and anger that comes from rock and metal.