How do you know when you’ve truly “made it”? This concept is relative and might relate to career goals, personal milestones, or any other number of preconceived achievements. For The Devil Wears Prada, they’ve been leveling up for two decades now and in that time have hit nearly every milestone they set out to achieve when they first formed the band. However, throughout their longstanding career, they still haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there is still some vacancy left to fill…one that often lends itself to destructive tendencies. Their new album Flowers, out November 14 on Solid State Records, is an exploration into those human qualities we all struggle with and working towards gratitude as an ongoing practice.
“When I was younger—I’m from rural Ohio—nobody had ever done anything cool where I’m from,” says vocalist and guitarist Jeremy DePoyster. “So when we were out traveling the world and seeing all these new places, it was super validating for a time. But if I look back, I was also wrestling with so much stuff in my personal life throughout those times that—while we enjoyed it—it was also conflicting. So, the album is reckoning with this thing that I do cannot be the entirety of who I am because it can’t actually make me happy. And the ending is just saying, I need to look around at my family and friends and the things that actually make me happy to find my peace from that. I think it has a good ending where it’s like, oh, I do have that, and it is enough for me.”
This group has always used their music as a platform to address sensitive issues and find ways to work through the many struggles they have faced over the years, in and outside of the band. Reflected by distinct compilations, each new record marks a different chapter that gives fans a glance into their journey. In their early albums you can hear the sheer ferocity coming from youthful spite, but as they have evolved as individuals, each subsequent release has taken on its own evolution of sound and proven what a powerful dynamism this group is capable of. While they still project the heaviness that put them on the map, their last couple albums have followed a much more melodic pattern and led to what has now blossomed into Flowers.
Although, for DePoyster, this type of sonic exploration is nothing new for DWP and just a natural progression that they have always followed. “We have taken really drastic departures often, I don’t think we’ve ever made two records that sounded exactly the same. I don’t personally feel like we are necessarily in control of what we’re able to access creatively. I think we’re more just in tune with stuff and we spit it out, so you don’t always have a say in what it’s like.”
What made it onto the track list with this record are raw untethered snapshots of their lived experiences, DePoyster and his co-vocalist Mike Hranica portrayed themselves as directly and literally as possible. What may have been more lyrically illustrative in the past is now as to-the-point as they have ever been. Two tracks off the record, “When You’re Gone” and “The Silence” are prime examples…the former is a song about DePoyster’s then fiancé, who is also a traveling musician, and the ongoing toll it takes when they have to be apart for extended periods of time on the road. The song is a grappling with those emotions but also a subtle love note to let her know that even when there’s distance, they will always come back to one another in the end.
Then, when he transitions into “The Silence,” DePoyster offers a look into the parts of himself that unravel when confronting that grief of separation and how turning to alcohol has often become a harmful way to deal with it. The kind of ebb and flow you get from these two tracks, going from chasing contentment but falling back into bad habits, is the way this whole album moves. The band’s intention was to try and accurately trace the volatility of thought and reactions we all tend to go through on a constant basis. This isn’t necessarily an uplifting album, but it’s one that strives to be uplifting while never straying from realness.
DePoyster expresses how proud he is of the end result both lyrically and instrumentally, “This record to me is something we’ve been pushing towards for the last five or six years. Trying to figure out how to mesh these sounds that we had from the past with a different way of songwriting and storytelling and bigger choruses that actually land with the impact we want. So I feel like we’ve just been trying to do that so much and never quite getting exactly to this point. When we finally did, it was mind blowing…like, yes, this is what I was trying to do, even on the last record, this is the course we were trying to take.”
Being able to take some time to themselves and detach from the rest of the world, even for a short stint of time, was a big part of how Flowers came together in such a serendipitous way. The band, consisting of Hranica, DePoyster, guitarist Kyle Sipress, drummer Giuseppe Capolupo and multi-instrumentalist/producer Jonathan Gering, are closer to brothers at this point than mere bandmates. They have been through hell and back by each other’s sides and before they even knew the album was ready to take shape, it unfolded before their eyes once they took some time away from touring and the daily grind to reconnect in a more leisurely setting.
“We go out to Arkansas and don’t know anybody there, It’s just a few of us. We started putting these songs on a board and we’re like, oh, there’s kind of a story here. Actually, there’s like a picture here that’s starting to unfold and it felt like a narrative of our experience over the last couple of years. I think just being out there allowed us to get into some emotional vulnerabilities with each other to be able to dive deeper,” DePoyster explains how the bones of the album initially took shape.
With this being their 10th full-length studio album, The Devil Wears Prada are still in their heyday as far as the success of the band goes but now its collective members are reaching a point where their overall fulfillment is defined by so much more than the band itself. Flowers is their combined heart-warming and somewhat heart-wrenching nod to the relationships that have made this lasting journey worth the while.
Flowers is out now and you can order it from Solid State Records. Follow TDWP on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Photos courtesy of The Devil Wears Prada
