Flora from Kansas confronts youthful rage on “The Ghost is Me”

Flora Kay — who records under the moniker Flora from Kansas — recently announced the release of debut EP, Homesick, due out March 14 via Melodic Records. Still in high school, she worked on these songs in-between schoolwork, developing an aesthetic driven by narratives of romance, familial conflict, and general teenage anxiety. Her latest single, “The Ghost is Me”, finds the artist recalling the pain and frustration of middle school, digging back into those memories and finding that her perception has changed in the intervening years — it’s ache tinged with self-awareness. Her voice rises and circles some rusted electric guitar lines and plaintive piano notes. Bounding percussion supports the surging rhythms and impending collapse, but the track remains vivid in its insight on youthful anger and desperation.

“‘The Ghost is Me’ is about all the rage I felt in middle school,” she explains, “so it’s basically from the perspective of a younger me. Now that I’m in high school I don’t necessarily still feel these things today, but it’s kind of a nod to my younger self”.

Speaking to the video she adds, “The music video turned out really cool and I had a lot of fun making it. It was nice working with the director [Marc Havener] because he’s done a lot of work on big Hollywood movies, but now lives in my hometown here in Kansas. We filmed the video at my church which is also where they filmed the old horror movie Carnival of Souls, so we patterned a lot of the video off of that movie.

Watch the clip below.

 

Homesick is due out March 14 via Melodic. You can pre-order the EP here. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.