Smoke and mirrors
Disguised in code
Wishing you had never known
In a season swollen with noise and pretense, Sacramento’s False Flowers arrive like a secret whispered behind closed doors. Their self-titled debut, released via Strange Club Records, bears the weight of its own conscience: taut, deliberate, and brimming with quiet accusation. The band—Lory Gil on vocals and keys, Brian Hanover on guitar, Conrad Melancon on bass, and Craig Hancock on drums—constructs their world from clean lines and smoldering restraint, each instrument tuned to tension rather than indulgence.
The lead single, “Chatham Rules,” takes its cue from the Chatham House Rule—a policy of secrecy that permits the powerful to speak freely behind closed doors while shielding their identities from public scrutiny. Once conceived as a diplomatic courtesy, it has long been criticized as a means by which the wealthy and well-connected can shape policy in the shadows. False Flowers turn that principle inside out, exposing the quiet complicity it engenders. “Smoke and mirrors disguised in code, wishing you had never known,” Gil sings—a line that weighs the moral dilemma of revelation versus silence, of exposing those who decide our fate or accepting the apocalypse they’ve already signed into motion.
The song’s rhythm is architectural. Hancock’s drumming marches with unrelenting precision, a bureaucrat’s heartbeat under fluorescent light. Melancon’s bass grinds out its low lament, patient and grim. Hanover’s guitar cuts like redacted text through a classified report, its serrated tone tearing at the edges of Gil’s measured delivery. Each element feels recorded in a sealed chamber where oxygen itself is rationed. The result is a mood of compression—the suffocating calm that precedes revelation or collapse.
False Flowers fuse the bite of post-punk with the grandiosity of early gothic rock and the chill of death rock minimalism. The music recalls the discipline of The Cult, the momentum of The Jam, and the theatrical precision of The Damned, yet their sensibility belongs firmly to the present: distrustful, watchful, aware that glamour is often a veil for conspiracy.
Lyrically, “Chatham Rules” is steeped in disillusionment: “hate it when you’re right, hate it when you’re wrong”—a bitter symmetry capturing the paralysis of knowing too much and saying too little. It is less a protest than a postmortem, a quiet inquest into systems built on secrecy, held under flickering lights, in a room where everyone knows the truth but no one dares to claim it.
The black-and-white video shows a nighttime romp through the suburbs, a slow-motion memory set to a soaring soundtrack.
Watch below:
Pre-order False Flower’s self-titled album via Bandcamp here and Strange Club Records here.
Live dates:
- Nov 14 Grass Valley CA @ Punk and Bunny Tattoo w/ Primitive Heads
- Nov 15 San Francisco CA @ House Show w/ Primitve Heads
- Nov 16 Albany CA @ Ivy Room w/ Primitive Heads, MUTT
- Nov 20 Sacramento CA @ Starlet Room w/ Home Front
- Nov 21 San Francisco CA @ Thee Parkside w/ Home Front
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