Liana Flores is a singer from the United Kingdom who has scored one of the biggest folk hits of recent years. ‘rises the moon’, her 2019 track, took off on TikTok and today has more than 500 million plays on Spotify. Not bad for an emerging artist and especially for a song in her style that, in fact, is not far from what Jessica Pratt does, for example. Flores and Pratt also have an interest in bossa nova melodies, with the difference that Flores actually has Brazilian ancestry, on her mother’s side.
‘rises the moon’ is a song that captivates from the very first second. Its beautiful melody and Flores’ magnetic voice, clean and elegant like Connie Converse’s, make up a masterful composition that Flores also decides to decorate with a beautiful 40s-style chorus.
The success of ‘rises the moon’ and other songs such as ‘recently’ have earned Flores a contract with Universal Records and the international release of her first album, ‘Flower of the soul’, last June. An album that smells of a cult folk classic all around; it almost seems to have been signed by Linda Perhacs or Vashti Bunyan, sounding just as timeless as they do.
In a collection of “vignettes from her intimate world,” Liana Flores gives free rein to her influences from British folk and bossa nova. Sometimes, she also draws on 1950s pop; “I wish for the rain,” the most listened to song on the album, could have been sung by Connie Stevens on her album “Conchetta.” Above all, sensitively strummed acoustic guitars dominate “Flower of the moon,” produced by Noah Georgeson, who has worked with Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart and Natalia Lafourcade, demanding your attention just like Flores’ voice.
There are also echoes of jazz in this “fantasy world” of Flores in cuts like “Nightvisions.” In the Song of the Day, on the other hand, a violin arrangement emerges that dialogues with the acoustic guitars, while the drums provide a caressed rhythm. “Nightvisions” is a loving, even cheesy song, in which Flores has “visions” of his beloved person joining his hand with hers. Flores feels “in a trance” because of the “dissonance” he is experiencing and feels as if he is living “on another planet.” Only a talent like the one Flores displays in this first stage of his career can be from another planet.
