Badflower

The definition of home means something different to everyone. For some, home is a place. For others, it’s a person. For Badflower’s lead singer Josh Katz, home is a specific feeling he had in a different time. “It’s myself in a memory,” Katz says on No Place Like Home, the band’s forthcoming third studio album. “Everything in the world now, from my perspective, feels so foreign. I’ve learned that comes with growing up. It feels harder to fit in and feel like I belong.” Finding a sense of belonging is what has shaped Badflower — the Los Angeles-bred and Nashville based band that has grown from strength to strength thanks to two EPs, their debut album Ok, I'm Sick, and a feverish fan base — since forming in 2011. Brought together by a shared love of music, Katz, Joey Morrow [lead guitarist], Alex Espiritu [bass guitarist], and Anthony Sonetti [drummer] are now at a crossroads as men and as a band. They spent their 20s writing and releasing music, touring the globe, and pushing themselves as far as they could. Now in their 30s, they are acutely aware they’ve achieved their dreams. On No Place Like Home, they grapple with what it means when everything begins to feel like a recollection. Four years stand between the band’s last release, their 2021 sophomore album This Is How The World Ends and No Place Like Home. Three albums’ worth of songs were thrown out before No Place Like Home began taking shape, but even then, the record came together slowly. “It’s been quite a challenge trying to write with this new life,” admits Katz. The person— and songwriter — he once was became a distant memory. “I feel like I’m living a completely different existence now — post COVID, 34 years old, living in a world I never expected to be in, having some success in music… All of that has made me a different songwriter.” No Place Like Home is the catalyst of a time when Badflower was questioning everything: who are they without the chase or without the constant striving to be the biggest band in the world? You can hear it on tracks like “Number 1,” where they take aim at those who sell out for a hit song, and feel the full extent of Katz’s frustration and anger on “Swinging Hammer.” For a band known for writing about everything from sex to mental health to sleeplessness, it might be surprising that regret and memory are the main interwoven themes throughout No Place Like Home. Katz struggles with his inadequacies on “Butterfly,” a track that acknowledges the pressure that comes from fans declaring that Badflower’s music saved their lives. On “Don’t Be a Stranger,” Katz writes about having a daughter and not being around, a regret towards something that hasn’t even happened yet. With “Paws,” a poignant and powerful ode to the loss of a pet, Katz writes about his dog passing away, something else that hasn’t occurred. It’s a writing technique that also doubles as a defence mechanism of sorts for Katz.“ I feel more emotionally connected to imagined situations — things that could happen, or almost happened — than I do to the things happening in real life. That’s why I often write about hypothetical situations. Things that could’ve gone a different way or haven’t happened yet.” What ushered in the most change — and what makes No Place Like Home completely different from This Is How The World Ends and the band’s debut album — is that it was the first album Katz wrote completely sober. “That didn’t even occur to me when I was working on the first EP or the first two albums, but back then, I never wrote anything sober. Ever. It was just part of my process — what I did. With this album, I had every intention of gettingtotally messed up to write. I tried — and it just wasn’t fun anymore. It didn’t feel good. That was a real wake-up call.” Without the crutch of drugs and alcohol, Katz not only had to write songs in a new way but was forced to look at himself in the mirror and admit that changes needed to be made. In turn, it brought up insecurities he didn’t know he had. Throughout writing No Place Like Home, a theme that kept resurfacing is one that Katz can’t run away from: ageing. “My relationship with ageing isn’t good,” Katz admits. “Growing up, I had this vision of being in a band, making music, writing songs… and when I started doing all of that, I had a very specific image of what that looked like. That image never included me in my 30s. I haven’t come to terms with it. When you build your whole life around this idea of youth and ambition and becoming something, and then you get to this point where you’re already that something, it shifts the ground under you.” This newfound territory meant that Badflower had to approach their new album differently —Katz no longer felt tethered to a specific vision of how he wanted to be perceived or what he wanted to say. He no longer had a roadmap or script to lean on. “That’s made songwriting a lot harder but in a way, that’s made it more genuine. It’s just me trying to dig up something real without knowing exactly what it is.” Katz, alongside producer Nick Raskulinecz, produced every track on No Place Like Home, meticulously working on every iteration of each song to perfection. Still, the album represents a chapter closing for the band, knowing that, once it’s out, they relinquish their ownership of it, and it becomes the soundtrack of someone else’s life.““Every step of the way, I am working on these songs. I’m constantly listening to them until I can’t listen to them anymore because it begins to feel uncomfortable. It sucks at first,” admits Katz. “Releasing songs can have some good moments, but overall, it's not fun for me. I do all the production and recording myself, so I'm constantly listening — on every drive, at home, in every state the song goes through. By the time it's done, I've heard it a thousand different ways. And once it's out, I can't listen to it anymore. They become hard to listen to.” What has mattered most to Badflower is that, through the creation of No Place Like Home, Katz has been able to reconnect with why he loves music in the first place after years of feeling like he has to be a certain way. “It’s not about fame, or money, or any of that. I just love music. I love making it. I need to spend time alone, just playing — even if it’s bad. Just singing, messing around, doing whatever. That reminds me that I actually enjoy this, and that helps break through the mental block.” If the messages and themes of No Place Like Home feel anything but uplifting, Badflower knows they’ve done their job. “It’s typical for us — it's not meant to make you feel better about your situation. It’s more about people connecting to it because you’ve felt these things; it’s like having a friend when you need it."