"A friendship project that was born in the Catskill Mountains," Florist began in 2013 as the bedroom recording project of songwriter and Epoch Collective member Emily Sprague. Since then, it has grown into a collaboration between bandmates Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth (of Told Slant), all of whom contribute massively to the framework of Sprague’s brutally honest musical meditations on themes of isolation and intimacy through delicately warbled guitars and gently sweeping synths.

The scope of Florist’s performance at Shea this past January for the release of their debut full-length record The Birds Outside Sang is simultaneously as infinitesimal as "little things living, floating around my room in my eyes, the dust inside the light" and as massive as the cosmos itself, as Sprague sings in a characteristically soft-spoken, wistful voice, "I wish that I could rip the roof to see the stars."

Finding beauty even in the most mundane of moments, Sprague’s richly sensitive songwriting and confessional lyricism welcome us to embrace the poignancy of lonesomeness not as a call to retreatism, but instead as a glue of sorts that binds all things small and large together. While successfully posturing itself as a stirring folk-pop record rife with unapologetic vulnerability, it is built upon a kind of tenderness difficult to put into words somehow articulated perfectly by Sprague. I challenge anyone to go through their chilling, dreamy set without reaching for a tissue at least once.
- Philip Anastassiou