Jellywish, Florist's fifth studio album, runs exactly 33 minutes and 33 seconds. Whether Emily Sprague intended that symmetry is not confirmed anywhere in print, but it is the first thing you notice when you check the track lengths, and it sets an expectation the album then fulfills: every decision here was considered. Released April 4, 2025, on Double Double Whammy, the record collects ten songs written entirely by Sprague and recorded with her three longtime collaborators Jonnie Baker, Rick Spataro, and Felix Walworth. The Brooklyn band has made music together for over a decade. The result of that duration is not comfort or familiarity in any soft sense. It is precision. Jellywish is an album about uncertainty that is itself entirely certain about what it wants to be.
What the Quiet Is Actually Doing
Indie folk has trained listeners to expect a particular kind of restraint. Strum patterns that signal sincerity. Vocals pitched toward confession. Florist takes that framework and tests its assumptions without abandoning them entirely. Sprague is sincere, but sincerity in her hands is not a substitute for precision. It is the material precision works with. Jellywish opens with "Levitate," a song that begins with one sustained observation: "I could read your eyes for the rest of my life." That line is not ornamental. It establishes the album's central tension, the desire to stay inside a moment set against the knowledge that moments pass. Jonnie Baker's guitar lines do not resolve where you expect them to. Rick Spataro's bass sits low in the mix, present the way facts are present rather than the way arguments are present. Felix Walworth's percussion does not announce itself. Walworth's drumming on this record is the best argument for restraint I can think of.
The Album's Actual Subject
Calling Jellywish existentialist is not wrong. But the word tends to suggest a certain coldness of address, music that thinks rather than feels. Florist does not work that way. "This Was a Gift" treats impermanence not as a concept but as a sensation you have already had and are now recognizing from the inside. The melody does not climb. It returns to its opening phrase the way memory returns to a specific afternoon you cannot fully reconstruct. Sprague sings about light and time in concrete terms without announcing what she means. She renders it. "Sparkle Song" runs two minutes and forty six seconds and occupies a mood that resembles joy without being comfortable enough to call itself happy. The album earned every favorable review it received by refusing to give listeners a position of safety from which to observe emotion at a distance. You are in it or you are not.
Production as a Set of Commitments
Rick Spataro handled recording and mixing on Jellywish, and that dual role shapes the record's texture in ways that are audible if you pay attention. A person who captures sound and a person who shapes it are, in most productions, two different people with two different sets of priorities. When they are the same person, the decisions run in a single continuous direction. Spataro's choices create a version of intimacy that is not the same as proximity. The album does not sound close in the sense of being immediate or intrusive. It sounds present, which is a different quality entirely. Josh Bonati's mastering holds volume levels that do not spike for effect. The record does not swell at its emotional peaks. It remains level, which turns out to be more affecting than conventional dynamics would have been. Vera Haddad's album artwork reinforces the same approach: deliberate and unadorned.
The Tracks That Will Not Summarize
"Moon, Sea, Devil" is two minutes and sixteen seconds long and contains more feeling per second than most albums manage across their full length. "All the Same Light" is the track I have returned to most often, not because it is the best thing here but because it states what Florist does with unusual directness: it holds two incompatible emotional states in suspension without resolving them into something easier to hold. "Our Hearts in a Room" closes the record on a note of connection that arrives without announcement. It does not feel earned in the conventional sense of songs building toward emotional payoff. It feels found. The ten tracks are sequenced so that the album ends at exactly the right moment, which is another way of saying it does not run one beat too long. That kind of discipline is harder to achieve than it looks.
Where This Band Is and Why It Matters
Florist formed in 2013 in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York and have been a Brooklyn band for most of the decade since. Jellywish is their fifth record and their most deliberate one. That observation is not a criticism. Deliberateness becomes a problem in music only when it stops the music from breathing, and Jellywish breathes continuously. The record arrived three years after their 2022 self titled album, which also received strong critical attention, and it shows a band with no interest in repeating what it has already done. Double Double Whammy has been Florist's label since the debut. The relationship is audible. Jellywish sounds like a band that was given the space to decide exactly what it wanted to make and then made exactly that. That kind of alignment between artist and context is rarer than it should be, and Florist's consistency in finding it across five records is the most reliable thing about them.
