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.
“Hey Baby” finds Florry’s full-band sound growing ten-fold, with Medosch’s influences of the Jackass theme song and country-fried Minutemen serving as a raw-hemmed, honking template for her and her crew. “Hey Baby” is an up-to-no-good, fully-cooked country-rock ditty beefed up with a raving guitar solo and Medosch’s barmy vocal. “If I could turn back time,” they sing over and over, and Florry nearly gets all the way there—uniting the sounds of Philly, Asheville and the Santa Monica Mountains into one blistering, catchy-as-all-get-out, jerried barn-burner. “Truck Flipped Over ‘19,” Medosch’s self-coined “Beach Boys suite,” is a scuzzy, helter-skelter monsoon of snarling riffs and a pedal steel/fiddle melody crying in cursive. She tells a story about watching a semi-truck “take flight” like a “miracle of life” onto the parallel side of the freeway. Medosch illustrates PTSD through incomplete memory, admitting to forgetting the crash “by the time we pulled into the Richmond parking lot” yet remembering her backseat trauma years later: “Don’t think I’ll ever forget that sound, how could anything be so loud?”
“Pretty Eyes Lorraine” watches a story fall through once a lifetime begins. Our titular fascination, the Alsace-Lorraine region of France (previously a territory of the German empire), “looks like Barbie, not some discount Robbie with those green eyes.” It’s historical and revelatory, a result of Medosch learning that not only is serial killer H.H. Holmes is a blood relative, but that her German family isn’t German at all—that her elders left Ireland for Alsace-Lorraine, “changed their name from Mud/Mudgett to Medosch, learned German, and then got kicked out for not knowing French,” she said in a press release. And yet she turns the double entendre of “Lorraine” aglow, serving up a wise-cracking combination of teeth-sucking desire and an imagined life now without an anchor. “Ooh, baby, rides my motorbike,” she purrs. “I blow her flag and she blows my mind. Come on baby, that’s just life!” The song cracks open thanks to Henriksen’s fiddle, biting the rust of Medosch’s bruised wails.
Packed between the white-knuckled bombast of “Hey Baby,” “Truck Flipped Over ‘19,” and “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone” are quieter, punchier moments of openness. The acoustic “Sexy,” scored by Cox’s lovesick pedal steel, is tame in the residue of “Hey Baby,” but Medosch’s voice cracks and quavers over slow strums. “Big Something” isn’t stripped bare but lingers in the playful, where the band’s shuffling isn’t taut but it is spiritual. They’re comedown songs, gusts of traditionalism that may swell into rabble-rousing whirls but never fully twist—like Murray’s solo near the end of “Big Something,” which may well be the sweetest part of Sounds Like…
“First it was a movie, then it was a book” is a sentence-case dream of rollicking gravitas. Medosch and Murray’s guitars collide into each other, stretching two-ton riffs around organ, pedal steel, and homespun, jammy crescendos. Medosch sings about her life turning into a Hollywood picture that made her sad “cause I saw myself in everyone.” “How’d they make a movie like that?” she wails, her voice splitting in two. There’s a Holly Hunter mention in here, and there’s emptiness too. Caught someplace between the Stones’ honky-tonk crashouts, a migraine-addled Wilco, and the twin-guitar, distorted debauchery of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, “First it was a movie, then it was a book” is a six-string car-crash heavy on the abandon. Florry become a paradox across seven minutes, twisting off the cliff like an avalanche in one ear yet rocketing towards something far above sea level in the other. This is everything I want rock music to sound like in 2025: no frills, gritty bedlam, and seven porch players cooking with gas.
Sounds Like… ends in “You Don’t Know,” a skyscraper song flirting with the 8-minute mark. It’s a doozy, waltzing into view like a scorned lover with a tail caught between their legs. Medosch stresses every syllable, coiling her accent around every vowel. The pronunciations, the cadence—it all had me singing along without even knowing the words. “Clearly you don’t know,” she wails, the imperfections in her voice turning colossal and handsome, “the love that goes and grows ‘round you day to day.” As the track rises, the guitars intensify and more voices join in with Medosch’s. And predictably, “You Don’t Know” tumbles into a stubborn, fire-lit solo. The singing nearly turns inaudible in the chasm of noise. Eventually, the flames collapse back into the earth, but the walls are still vibrating. This sort of unpretentious, unfiltered rock music will never go out of style. To borrow a phrase from Richard Williams’ review of Exile on Main St. in Melody Maker way back in ‘72: Sounds Like… will take its place in history.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
