“Dying,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her poem, ‘Lady Lazarus’, “Is an art, like everything else. /
I do it exceptionally well.” The piece partly inspired the latest release from Zoe Mead’s Wyldest project. After working as a trio for debut record Dream Chaos, Mead decided to make Wyldest an entirely solo endeavour for follow-up Monthly Friend. The creative control might have proved liberating, but working alone came with its own cost, causing Mead to reconsider her working practice. Despite initially working on demos under the confinement of lockdown, Mead eventually passed her newest material on to musician and producer Luciano Rossi, and soon found herself sharing the load of creation once more. “It immediately felt like an epiphany moment,” Mead explains. “We wrote the song that’s now the title track. It existed as a very bare, minimal version and then it became the version it is now in just half a day. It all happened so quickly.”
What emerged from the period is Feed the Flowers Nightmares, an album out later this year on Hand in Hive which serves both as a testament to the power of collaboration and an exploration of the personal transformations which mark a life. Just as Sylvia Plath described rebirth with each passing decade, Wyldest embraces the shifts and changes, willing to let go of what was in order to become something new. Feed the Flowers Nightmares not the final version of Wyldest, but what we have at this point in time. As the Plath poem continues: “And I a smiling woman / I am only thirty / And like the cat I have nine times to die // This is Number Three.”
Lead single ‘Abilene’ is indicative of the record. A bright synth pop track shadowed by a sense of loss, as though both beginnings and ends exist side by side. Namely a friendship in this case, a loved one moving away and triggering fondness for what was alongside the mourning of what will be lost, as well as the dawning change of whatever comes next. Check out the video directed and edited by Mark Van Heusden with cinematography by Max Conran:
Feed the Flowers Nightmares is out on the 9th September via Hand In Hive and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Eva Bowen