Florry Burst With Country-Fried Color on Sounds Like…
Paste Pick: The septet’s second album with Dear Life Records is part hangout chatter, part guitar solo rummage sale, with door-kicking riffs and anecdotal psychedelia folded into a persistent, euphoric choogle.

God bless rock and roll music. Florry makes a whole lot of it, and it’s all quite good. The Philly-bred, Vermont-based septet sounds like a bunch of punks who can’t stop listening to Gram Parsons. Francie Medosch is one of the best Shakespeares that we’ve got nowadays, as her nasally croon sparks up with the best of them. She exists in the same contexts as songwriters like MJ Lenderman, Merce Lemon, and Fust’s Aaron Dowdy—good folk who are revitalizing a network of country music still cast to the margins by popular city cowboys doling out humungous, streaming-driven records written by nearly 50 people at a time. I adore Medosch’s language. I’d tuck it someplace between Lenderman’s absurd well of references and Dowdy’s historical fiction, as her anecdotal surveyance often rambles in spurts of psychedelic, non-linear, rural color. She’s not afraid to cite Broadcast News while singing about life needing an editor.
Florry made it on my radar in 2023, when my honeymoon with Dear Life Records’ roster was in full-gear. The band’s label debut, The Holey Bible, was traditional country music embroidered with lo-fi flair and pop hooks, thanks to tunes like “Cowgirl Giving,” “Take My Heart,” and “Big Winter.” But the material was especially galvanized by “Drunk and High,” a rough-around-the-edges singalong that’s as intoxicating and delirious as its title suggests. “Pull the car over, I gotta puke,” Medosch cried out, with a bevy of bandmates’ voices wrapping around hers. “You’re no good at driving high, kick me out the door as soon as we stop, I’m not tryna mess up my ride.” When Florry sing about blowing chunks on the side of the road, they make a nasty shindig sound like the coolest place to be.
Their follow-up, Sounds Like…, is as grand an upgrade that any ruckus-throwing batch of troublemakers could make. The sludgy accoutrements of “Waiting Around to Provide”—which hocks a phrase from Townes Van Zandt—wink into a big country stomp, with Jackson Browne’s melodicism splattered atop the humid parables of Drive-By Truckers. Harmonica puffs tattoo the air, while an organ hums like a guitar chord. “Say Your Prayers Rock” would have nestled in with the sensual and staggering looseness of the Rolling Stones‘ Exile on Main St.’s third side. Van Zandt swings back into view on “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone,” as Medosch turns into a gas station poet serenaded by a wah-wah talk box rippling like a bassline. But don’t mistake Sounds Like… for some phony imitation game. This music—part hangout chatter, part guitar solo rummage sale—is a persistent, euphoric choogle. The door-kicking riffs and road-worn fables come free of charge.
Medosch and her band—pedal steel player Jon Cox, guitarist John Murray, bassist Collin Dennen, fiddler Will Henriksen, vox handler Katya Malison, and drummer Joey Sullivan—holed up in Haw Creek, per the suggestion of producer Colin Miller (whose own album Losin’ is a lived-in triumph), to write their Holey Bible successor over three busy days near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sounds Like… was made at the center of the known musical universe, Drop of Sun Studios in West Asheville, the same place Lenderman made Manning Fireworks, Fust made Big Ugly, and Wednesday made Rat Saw God. If you need to record a good country-rock album, it’s tradition by now to flee in the Carolinas’ direction.
Turns out Alex Farrar’s touch makes the turbulence of Florry’s Americana truisms all the more righteous. “Took a little bit of a song but I made it something else,” Medosch sings at the top of “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone,” while a melody citing Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be” plucks and plunges behind her before oxidizing into a sequitur of hardwood-floor music. Medosch doesn’t buff out the scuffs. Her vocabulary pins into fantasy: “All I really wanna do is you with your pants off.” Medosch playing with Florry is like Dylan joining The Band, or Neil standing in front of Crazy Horse, or a concoction not yet imagined, like Aimee Mann heading Yo La Tengo, or Sonic Youth soundtracking Urban Cowboy.