“It’s the stages of grief in the context of bandhood” - Valley discuss their latest album, ‘Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden’
Toronto-based pop band Valley have entered a new era of alt-indie sound with their third and latest album, Water The Flowers, Pray for a Garden.
Released via Universal Music Canada/Interscope Capitol Labels Group on August 30th, the 12-track album vulnerably chronicles the band’s soul-search through heartbreak and growth, in hope of transformation.
Since forming in 2016, Valley have toured relentlessly across the world and accrued 1.1 billion global streams, but as they reached a decade of releasing and performing music, they had to re-learn how to be a band together.
Photo credit: Becca Hamel
Last fall, Valley were at a crossroads. They were in therapy, working the usual growing pains long-established bands face after years out on the road and the weight of viral success. While on tour with Dermot Kennedy, Rob Laska (lead vocalist), Alex Dimauro (bassist) and Karah James (drummer) found a beacon of hope: an old demo for the song Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden, a track about love, loss and finding the silver linings.
Valley first began working on the song while on tour, Zooming with COIN’s Chase Lawrence to help them flesh out the track, but it wasn’t until after guitarist Mickey Brandolino left the band that the trio had a new, raw and very vulnerable direction to explore on their new music.
“Chase told us to really trust the process,” Rob said. “We’re learning a new language. We’re missing a limb.” Stuck in their feelings, the band processed their heartbreak and the future together. “The songs just poured out of us,” Rob continued. “I think that's a true sign of when you're making something special. We weren't looking for things to write about. We knew exactly what we needed to write about. This is the first time I think we've ever witnessed as a band where everything's there, we just have to reach and grab it.” And as Valley enters this new era, it feels like a fresh start.
At the beginning of this month, °1824 held a press conference with Valley to delve behind the scenes into the creation process of their latest release:
What specifically inspired the themes of renewal and growth on the album?
“A lot of the themes are kind of that pivot point of being a kid into realising that you’re not a kid anymore,” Karah said. “But also, we don’t feel like adults so its kind of us trying to figure out why we’re continuing to live in this grey zone and resisting losing our youth and our youthful spirit, but having to deal with real adult problems. That’s where it stemmed from: How to not lose this inner, child-like spirit that we all connected over. We were all going through a similar period of growth and navigating that together.
The album’s about growing together and growing apart from people in our past and moving on. Looking back as friends and bandmates over the last 10 years and looking at this beautiful thing that we’ve been building, it hasn’t always been the most smooth thing, but we’re really proud of our friendship and our our band. Looking at that as a big garden is where it all stemmed from: you have your weeds, your pests, your flowers and vines. All these are things that make up a persons life, and when you step back you see that it’s a garden - a combination of everything and that’s a really beautiful thing. So, we wrote a garden-themed album.”
How has your dynamic as a band evolved from 2016 to now with this new album?
“I don’t know if it’s really changed as much as it’s just circled back as we’ve matured and honed into what parts of us feel the most authentic, honest and unfiltered,” Rob said. “It’s more of a return to the way that we made music when we started: we just made, we didn’t think.
What happens to a lot of artists as they go through record cycles is you lose a piece of you that you forget you had to protect, then have to spend a year re-engineering how to get it back. From January until now, [we’ve thought about] what turned those gears and that inspiration and dream and want we had originally. It was the idea of creating to create, without expectation.
So, I don’t think it’s changed much, we’ve just arrived back to a form that feels like a pair of shoes that we missed - it’s comfortable and we know how to create again on a level that’s honest and real and wholesome.”
If you had to describe the overall feeling of the album with one colour, which would you choose and why?
Reading each other’s minds, the band agreed on yellow. “The way that I see yellow is hopeful and bright and happy,” Alex said. “It represents sun and growth and all of the things that summarise this record.”
“On a literal level,” Rob added, “Yellow is a colour that poses the idea of hesitation. It’s like when you’re about to run a yellow and you just go for it just to get through the light. There’s something about yellow representing hesitation and uncertainty, but still pushing through. That’s a big part of this record - it’s just us running the light before it turns red.”
In that same vein, what kind of plant would the album be?
“Any type of wildflower, because the point of this record was returning to something that’s always growing and that had always been there. It wouldn’t be a flower that was planted, it’s something that the universe already put there and grows no matter what,” Rob said.
You often hide layers of different sounds and songs under your music, so do you have a favourite fun sound that you've added to your music over the years?
“It’s a sound that we’ve used in a lot of our songs, but at the end of When You Know Someone, there's a four-note melody. The mosquito buzzing in track seven, Mosquito was fun, too. I love doing stuff like that because it breaks the wall a bit and makes the music feel alive. I love that with movies and art like when you go to a museum and look at a painting, you notice things that you might never have noticed before - it’s the same with movie scenes. I just love that in everything we consume, so in the music it's like our obsession. We always think, how many things can we tuck in on the left or the right side?”
“In one of our first co-writes,” Rob added, “We recorded the pages of a book ripping. In Cocoon the snare sound is Karah’s dog Cosmo which is very subtle and the high hat is my dog cooper’s collar. It's stuff like that no one knows but we do it because we know. It’s for us, and maybe for someone else if they listen closely - it’s fun that way!”
Throughout your albums, your sound has consistently captured that nostalgic 90’s essence. In your opinion, do you think your sound has evolved over the years or have you aimed to maintain consistency across each project?
“We’ve never intentionally tried to do a genre shift or anything. We’ve always had that idea of ‘what if we just tried that?’ Even though it might not fit where we’re at right now, we think ‘let’s just do it anyway’, and that type of perspective is really important for growth and exploring. I’ll always take that type of openness and curiosity over setting rules of where were at sonically and how we do things.
Leading up to this record, we sort of took things away a little bit. What’s most important is that it’s us on our instruments, saying something that’s truthful and meaningful. We just stripped away layers that weren’t always needed and kept things because they felt right, not because there’s a bar set where it sonically has to be perfect and shiny and edited. We left room for curiosity mess - which was something we came back to from creating our first record - and that mess became something really beautiful. In terms of work flow, this record was about just letting go of the reins a little bit and letting things take you where they’ll go.”
Could you expand on the emotional thought process of the album?
“This record is the first time that I can remember as a band and as friends that we had to process something together,” said Rob. “We’ve been there for each other for a lot of things in life, but we had to hold this hurt and grief together and also be happy and proud for our friend and all of these things happening in our lives. It was difficult, and leaning into that we learned a lot of thing about ourselves that we didn’t know. We established a different understanding of what it feels to hold each other in that space and process life changing in front of us and the ‘band’ is that one constant that we can tend to and protect. A lot of it was us protecting each others feelings, holding space and having long conversations about how we were feeling and how we’d get through it together in this two-month process of writing the album. It was open communication, patience and letting the songs come into this space that we held together.”
Since Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden is such an honest record, did you feel nervous when it released?
“Leading up to it, there was some nervousness because with putting anything really vulnerable out it’s giving people entry into your diary a little bit and that’s scary, but the internal shame you feel for not doing that is much worse than being a little scared and doing it anyways,” Rob said.
Yes, it’s scary to put out so much personal music into the world, but all we’ve ever wanted to do is tell people real stories and what’s happening in our lives. That risk has much greater rewards emotionally and spiritually than suppressing that out of fear. It’s been a real breath of fresh air to be in our own skin right now. The songs talk about a lot of hardship and difficult things for us to still process, but we’re happy to have it out there because we know that someone out there is probably going through something similar and has this record to attach to now. Knowing that it is out there and people are connecting with it, that’s the bonus of this all. I’d say ‘relief’ is the word here. We’re just relieved that its finally out.”
Cocoon is a great song to close the album because it reminds listeners that everything will be alright eventually. So, what’s your self-care hack that makes things better on a bad day?
“It’s remembering this idea that when you let go, the universe rewards you in ways that are so unexpected. When you try to catch a butterfly, you never will, but when you’re sitting and enjoying life and being present, it’ll land on your shoulder. That’s what we closed the album with - this idea that you’re holding on so tightly to this thing that’s mean to grow, change, experience metamorphosis and leave to explore the world. If you really try to hold on, it’s not going to work. You’ve got to let life be life, and that’s something that we talked about a lot when finishing the album: letting go of expectations. When you do, you’re rewarded by the tiniest things and enjoy everything a little bit more until it feels less foggy. Letting go is really where nature says: ‘See? Look at everything you’re missing out on!’”
Speaking of not missing out, Valley is about to embark on their headline tour across North America, which you can buy tickets for here.
In early 2025, they’re also headed to Europe & the UK, all the dates of which you can find on their Instagram post below:
“Touring and playing live shows is the bread and butter of this band and we’ve always found that our music translates best in a venue with actual people singing along and connecting over that shared experience. This is the record we’ve always dreamed of making.”
