White Flowers

White Flowers comprises Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, who fashion a mesmerizing contemporary take on dream pop and post-punk that draws from their heritage in Northern England. The pair’s releases, among them the single “Night Drive” from 2020 and the album Day by Day that arrived the next year, highlight crystalline atmospheres and ethereal vocals that demonstrate why those genres continue to resonate.

Cobb and Drew launched the project after departing their hometown of Preston in northwest England to attend art school in London. There they absorbed the local psych-rock milieu and started crafting material influenced by that environment together with Manchester’s post-punk from the 1980s, shoegaze textures, and the atmospheric electronics of Boards of Canada and Burial, constructing tracks around loops and drum machines.

Seeking renewed creative impetus from their origins, Drew and Cobb moved back to Preston. In an abandoned textile mill they refined their approach alongside Doves guitarist Jez Williams, who served as co-producer. Their first single, Night Drive/Portra, came out on Tough Love Records in February 2020. That May the duo issued “Day by Day,” which incorporated a cover of Red House Painters’ “Katy Song.” Working with producer Ali Chant, they prepared the January 2021 EP Within a Dream, a collection of home and studio recordings that featured a version of Cass Elliot’s “Didn't Want to Have to Do It.” Cobb and Drew again collaborated with Williams on the full-length Day by Day, released in June 2021, which merged the immediacy of their initial work with densely layered sonic detail.