Album of the Month: April

Choosing the album of the month wasn’t easy. I was initially considering Nobody Lives Here by SYML, but the presence of too many non-acoustic elements made it feel like a less natural fit for what I usually highlight here. In contrast, Jellyfish by Florist leans fully into acoustic guitar and offers a powerful, raw emotional journey. It’s an album that doesn’t shy away from difficult questions, but also doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

Florist’s lead singer Emily Sprague shared this reflection about the album:

“This record is different from past Florist releases in that it does not offer the solution of inner peace or beautiful conclusions. It is instead turning over every stone to try and plant the seeds of thinking radically different… Jellywish is a gentle push out the door to start thinking about everything differently.”

Let’s dive into each track and explore the world they build together.

The album opens with a whisper — Levitate is a quiet, intimate track centered around a soft guitar arpeggio and Emily's voice, so delicate it's almost like she's singing from the other side of a dream. The lyrics ask big, existential questions: “Should anything be pleasure / When suffering is everywhere?” . This is not an album that warms you up slowly — it drops you right into a space of reflection, of mourning, of observation. It’s meditative and minimalist, but the emotional weight is immediate. That line “I would watch you cry for the rest of my life” is both unsettling and deeply human. You can already sense that this album is going to be more about looking at reality head-on than escaping it.

Have Heaven marks a shift in energy. Here, drums are introduced, and there’s an intertwining of acoustic and electric guitars that create a swirling, almost hypnotic atmosphere. It feels like stepping into a psychedelic folk trance — repetitive in the best way, like the looping of thoughts when you're trying to make sense of chaos. Sprague explained that this song was about dismantling harmful ways of thinking — from internalized shame to global crises like climate collapse and genocide. And yet, despite the heaviness, there's still a flicker of hope running through the track, a belief in humanity’s capacity for compassion and mutual care. The arrangement mirrors that tension — it's beautiful but restless.

Jellyfish, the title track, is deceptively upbeat. It begins with another delicate guitar line, but gradually, layers come in, building toward something lusher — and more conflicted. The melody is airy and light, but lyrically, it’s a reflection on destruction and survival. “Destroy everything on Earth” is a stark line, but it’s paired with “Destroy the feeling you are not enough,”flipping the perspective from despair to empowerment. There’s a duality here — awe for the natural world, and heartbreak at how much of it has been lost. In many ways, Jellyfish is the heart of the album: it holds both beauty and grief in equal measure.

Started to Glow slows things down again. Here the guitar shifts to open chords, and piano makes a quiet entrance. The song feels like a diary entry — spontaneous, honest, a little surreal. There's a juxtaposition between the mundane (“checking to see if the mail has come yet”) and the cosmic (“Are you an angel coming from the stars?”). It reads like someone trying to make peace with their own mortality, but finding small flashes of beauty and absurdity along the way. What really stands out is how unafraid it is to be emotionally raw — the kind of song you don’t just listen to, but sort of sit with.

The fifth track, This Was A Gift, returns to arpeggios and adds a fuller instrumental backing. The guitars carry the weight of the arrangement. This song is about emotional inheritance — the way we carry love, grief, and unspoken memories. The repeated line “Only the dead survive” hits like a quiet truth that sits just beneath the surface. But there’s also a tenderness in the lyrics: “I just want music in my life, I just want us to sing along.” It’s one of the more lyrically direct songs on the record, and that simplicity gives it an earnest warmth.

All the Same Light begins with open chords again and gradually builds, layering ambient textures and background vocals until it becomes almost cinematic. The lyrics revolve around images of roads, deserts, and dreams — a kind of American spiritual detour through memory and mortality. “What does it mean to dream of a car crash?” feels like a question both literal and symbolic. The song blurs the personal and the philosophical, pointing to how beginnings and endings are often indistinguishable. It’s haunting, but also comforting in its spaciousness.

Sparkle Song is the moment where the album lets in a little sunshine. The happiest arpeggio so far, soft piano, and shimmering guitar textures create something that feels almost like a lullaby for grown-ups. The lyrics focus on small joys — dogs in the yard, white rice and sweet potatoes, someone you love walking by your side. But there’s still an undertow of uncertainty and self-doubt: “Why is it so hard to be a good person?” It’s probably the most emotionally generous song on the album — not because it’s naive, but because it dares to be sincerely hopeful without ignoring the pain.

Moon, Sea, Devil pulls us back into the more abstract side of the album. The chords return, and full instrumentation adds emotional depth. Sprague described this song as being about multidimensional consciousness — how we all influence each other with tiny, invisible gestures and energies. It’s definitely one of the more metaphysical tracks, suggesting that empathy and connection aren’t just emotional experiences, but spiritual tools. The music mirrors this — gentle but purposeful, like it’s trying to pass through a veil into some other world.

Our Hearts In A Room feels like a deep exhale. The arpeggios are soft, and there’s a clear melodic line that instantly brought to mind Simple Song by Passenger — not just in the mood, but in the actual musical phrasing and guitar patterns. It’s calm, deliberate, and emotionally grounded. The lyrics ask simple but huge questions: “Is this all you’ve ever wanted? Is it all you believe is true?”  It’s like the aftermath of a long emotional storm, where you look around and realize you’re still here. There’s grief in that, but also grace. It could have easily been the closing track.

Instead, the album ends with Gloom Designs — a final thesis statement that circles back to the mood of the opening track. The arpeggio is more upbeat again, giving it a cyclical feel, like the album is starting over. Sprague called it “a macro reckoning with living,” and that’s exactly what it sounds like: tired, hopeful, angry, soft — all at once. It doesn’t tie anything up neatly, but it doesn’t need to. It leaves you in the same questioning space where you began, maybe a little more awake, maybe a little more okay with not having answers.

Jellyfish is an album that grows deeper with every listen. It doesn’t offer easy solutions or tidy narratives. Instead, it invites you to linger in discomfort, to observe, and to feel — all with the grounding comfort of fingerpicked guitar and sparse, spacious production. For an album this quiet, its impact is surprisingly loud. It’s not just music — it’s a process of reflection, and sometimes that’s exactly what we need.