By every measure critics use, FLO have already won. They took the BBC Sound poll in 2023 and the BRITs Rising Star award the same year – becoming the first group ever to scoop both. Their debut, Access All Areas, entered the UK chart at No. 3, the highest a British R&B girl group had gone in 23 years, and earned a Grammy nomination for best progressive R&B album, the first for a British R&B act in two decades. In February they sang “The Boy Is Mine” to Brandy’s face at the Recording Academy Honors, and their Tiny Desk turned NPR’s office into a nightclub, disco balls and all.
However, by the measure the industry actually pays attention to, they have had one Top 40 single. Ever.
Jorja Douglas, Renée Downer and Stella Quaresma have spent seven years being called the future of the girl group by everyone except the charts, and they are done being polite about it. Downer has said plainly that the aim now is to break through the ceiling and become a household name on the order of the Spice Girls or Destiny’s Child. Quaresma added, only half joking, that then somebody might give them a budget.
Therapy at the Club is what that ambition sounds like. The most consequential fact about it is a name that barely appears in the credits. For four years the group’s sound was substantially the work of MNEK, who wrote and produced the bulk of everything they put out. Here he turns up once. In his place stands a lineup drawn from pop’s premier league: Julian Bunetta, who works with Teddy Swims and Gracie Abrams; Steph Jones, who writes for Sabrina Carpenter; Amy Allen; Boy Matthews. These are not R&B specialists. They are people whose job is to build songs that lodge in the skull on first contact.
The trio have been clear the trade was deliberate. Douglas describes the difference as one of involvement, of leaning on their own songwriting rather than someone else’s. Quaresma talks about learning to say she doesn’t like something in a room full of professionals, which sounds small and is not. Some sessions they attended as a unit, others alone, a separation Douglas compares to exposure therapy.
That word is not accidental. Look at the running order and the album’s real argument comes into focus, and it has nothing to do with dancing. “Side Effects”; “Small Doses”; “Remedied”; “Sober”; “Therapy at the Club”. The titles are a pharmacy. Love is the substance here, the club is the dose, and the record is organised around the question of how much of either a person can take before it starts doing damage. “Small Doses”, second in and one of the loveliest things they have recorded, states the thesis outright: something this good arrives with a warning label, and the sensible response is to ration it.
The opening third is the strongest FLO have sounded. “Cry Ugly” earns its title, a vocal that stops performing composure. “Leak It”, the lead single and the reason the pop writers were hired, works the way a good single works, a hook about oversharing that is itself impossible not to overshare, riding a rhythm that recalls the Sugababes at their sharpest. “Touché” follows with electric guitar and a chorus of unprintable self-regard, the most fun anyone in this group has had on record. Then “I can’t be high around you anymore” arrives, all West Coast G-funk drift, and it is the best song here: the point in the night where the substance stops working and the feeling underneath it turns up anyway.
The title track is where the concept resolves and where the trouble starts. Its subject is exact and painful, the ease of unloading on a stranger at 1am against the impossibility of saying the same thing to the person you love – and the harmonies are immaculate. Then it moves in three-four time over piano, dreamy and unhurried, and sounds less like a nightclub than a stroll. “Remedied” has horns and momentum and puts the group’s friendship at the centre of its own recovery, the album’s warmest idea. Even there, the lyric is preoccupied with the logistics of getting a taxi.
Side B is where the committee shows. “Pose” leans on an interpolation of “Pump Up the Jam” and sounds every one of that record’s years, hi-hats ticking like a phone in burst mode. “Sex In Peace” is somehow both sleepy and overstuffed, layered with ad-libs and vocal stacks until a good Kwn feature disappears beneath them. “Floating” is a genuine belter, three voices circling one another with the ease that made these women famous, and “Miss u Missing me” meanders through a ghosting whose logic starts to seem sound. “Don’t Break Her Heart”, all Xscape-style solidarity, would have been a highlight 10 tracks earlier. “Haterbooth” closes the album on 80s synth-pop and a shrug.
Sixteen tracks and 46 minutes is not long in the abstract. It is long when most of it sits at the same mid-tempo, and it exposes the record’s contradiction. It’s an album built on the shape of a night out has almost no interest in the part of the night when people dance. The confessional in the toilets, the taxi queue, the flat two hours later: all present, are all sharply observed, but the floor itself is barely there.
Whether that reads as a failure depends on what you wanted. FLO did not set out to make a dance record; they set out to make an emotionally literate one that happens to be set in a club, and on those terms much of it lands. But they also set out to get a hit, and hits require a kind of ruthlessness this record keeps declining. There are four or five songs here better than anything on their debut. There are also four or five that a firmer hand would have cut, which would have left something leaner, stranger and harder to ignore.
They are close. That has been true for a while now, which is starting to be the point.
