This album was released on May 17^th, 2019 on Fearless Records.

Eat Your Heart Out has worked very hard to get to the point that they are at now. With their debut extended play Mind Games being a breath of fresh air in the alternative rock world, relentless touring, and spots on big festivals like Download Australia, there shouldn’t have been room in their schedules to record their debut album. Regardless, the five-piece found a way to get into the studio and put out an album that is sure to catapult them to the top of their label’s roster, and to the front of the rock world. Does the album do anything that’s out of the box or unordinary? Not particularly. Florescent isn’t here to reinvent the wheel, it’s here to keep it rolling and give us a good time.

As mentioned before, EYHO doesn’t progress much from a sonic perspective – Mind Games and Florescent are not drastically different from each other. The music is still very well-composed despite this observation. A big Paramore influence is present in the writing, and the bombastic choruses are harking back to some older anthems like “Misery Business”. There are some tracks that carry a bit of a heavier weight to them (“Heavy with Envy”) and some smaller-scale semi-ballad-like songs (“Pear Tree”) that switch up the pace of the album just enough to keep it unpredictable and exciting. The riffs on this album are also a high point of the listening, as every song feels a bit different and contains some major earworm melodies (one in particular being “Blinded”, where the guitar can be prominently heard in the backdrop of the mix) and all contain just enough of an edge to satisfy those who aren’t exclusively pop listeners. The closing song “Cold Hands” works in perfect symbiosis between vocals and instruments more than any other song on the album, as the emphatic final minutes of the album carries an emotionally heavy, PVRIS-like impact.

Caitlin Henry’s vocal performance on Florescence may be one of my favorite female-fronted performances as a lead singer on an album ever. Her delivery is belted across the tracks with such a sense of ease that when you think of her range, it’s crazy to imagine the octaves being spanned and performed so fluidly. Some of her standout moments are on songs like “Closer to the Sun”, where Henry’s soaring chorus is all over the place, weaving together a somewhat-standard progression with some over-the-top intonation. Her lyrics are honest and vulnerable, which is the case with several artists, but this dependable formula has not let a lot of people down; Henry bet safe writing about her experiences.

Florescence draws from a lot of influences from EYHO’s predecessors, and the work they have put into this album shows. As is the case with pop-punk, it is very hard to create a sound that stands out from the contemporaries, and this record is very far from making that kind of impact. Despite some of the shortcomings of the album, such as some of the songs simply not being as memorable as others due to a genre-fatigued formula (examples being “Daydreamer” and “Nowhere”), the Newcastle quintet hit more than they missed. They will have no problem keeping the wheel moving at the pace they are moving, and at this rate, why need to reinvent your sound when what you’ve been releasing is working?

Rating: 8/10

Favorite Songs: “Spinning”, “Constellations”, “Pear Tree”