Video: Alana Yorke Shares 'All The Flowers' Single Ahead of Upcoming LP

Last month, Alana Yorke announced details on her forthcoming debut LP, Destroyer (due May 17 on Paper Bag Records) in addition to sharing "Marion", "Tidal Wave" and "Preludium."

Today, Yorke is sharing "All the Flowers". Speaking on the track itself, Yorke writes:

“All the Flowers is about grief and loss. The song began as very personal grief and loss, related to experiences of depression and PTSD. The need to express or materialize those feelings so that they could perhaps be understood by others led to the image of “all the flowers in the world floating on the ocean” which I just found so devastatingly beautiful. While writing this song, David Bowie left this earth, and that very public, shared grief became another dimension to the songwriting experience and helped me to re-enter the intensity of feeling to complete the song. When we produced this song, I had a clear vision for the rhythmic part of the choruses (and pre-choruses) being slightly abrasive and in-your-face to counter the beauty of the song and give it a more intense, uncomfortable dimension.”

In November 2022, Alana Yorke woke up one morning and realized she was unable to move her left arm. A few days (and numerous hospital tests) later, she discovered she'd had a hemorrhagic stroke that affected the right hemisphere of her brain (associated with creative expression) in the parietal lobe (responsible for receiving and filtering sensory input). What could have been an unmitigated disaster changed Yorke's life. The previous decade has been filled with profound challenges - during a sample-gathering scuba expedition as part of her academic work, she ran out of air and subsequently developed debilitating PTSD. The stroke, however, was a serendipitous force: the psychological heaviness suddenly lifted, and Yorke found herself freed from past emotional baggage and propelled by euphoric creativity. While the album that would become Destroyer had always been part of a process of plumbing the depths, Yorke was consumed by a desire to share what she had experienced on the other side of the veil. "The goal was to bring these images and stories back to our world," she explains.

Destroyer is an art-pop stunner that represents both a creative triumph and a personal transformation. From its genesis, the album was anchored in the idea of a solitary descent to face the self and come back wholly changed. The universe of Destroyer, created in collaboration with husband and co-producer Ian Bent, is an otherworld where snapshots of Yorke's psychic landscape are fanned out against a layered musical backdrop colored by a 21-piece string orchestra, the ultraviolet cool of '80s synth-pop, the austere grace and rhythmic cadences of minimalist contemporary composers and the whole-hearted reverberation of anthems that call forth echoes from the unconscious, somewhere between the tidal forces of Kate Bush and Philip Glass. Toward the end of the gargantuan multi-year effort of making the album, Yorke's survival of a stroke led to unparalleled experiences of existence, and an extraordinary journey of recovery. Now as she rises above the surface, Destroyer has become an offering from the depths, intended to transform emotions from her singular experience into a gift of the universal resonance.

TRACKLISTING

01. Tidal Wave
02. All the Flowers
03. Into the Night
04. Marion
05. Preludium
06. Léa
07. IRL
08. Sound
09. Let Me Go
10. Too Hard

Photo Credit: Paul McCurdy

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