Shaped by (and for) moments of stillness and longing, Scottish singer/songwriter Theo Bleak’s quietly devastating EP ‘Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers’ transforms achingly intimate reflections into soul-stirring reckonings, inviting deeper awareness by letting feelings move at their own pace.

Stream: “Peach Sky” – Theo Bleak

I couldn’t sleep / I saw a bird in the kitchen / But in my room / That girl’s sadness still lived in…

There’s something about the beginning of a year that invites stillness – a pause where old feelings surface before anything new fully takes shape.

Reflection has a way of sharpening our self-awareness; of focusing our attention on all that remains unresolved. Theo Bleak’s songwriting lives in that liminal space – inward-facing, attentive, and quietly devastating – her words entering the conscious like a thought you didn’t know you were already having. The opening lines of “Peach Sky” arrive this way, suspended between the ordinary and the uncanny, grounding us immediately in the interior world of Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers – a record that listens closely to fleeting moments, private symbols, and the ache of feelings that refuse to settle.

Last night the hotel lost power
Bad luck is two yellow flowers
I’m still waiting on a letter
Don’t think that you would remember

Peach sky, stars so sharp they cut my eyes
I couldn’t see it for the rain
But I saw myself in the best
I saw myself in the best way

– “Peach Sky,” Theo Bleak

Released last spring, Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers feels less like a collection of songs than a series of emotional impressions – spiritual, subconscious, and somber, as Theo Bleak herself describes it. Across five achingly intimate, brutally melancholic tracks, the Dundee-based artist turns familiar feelings – from longing and superstition to heartache, nostalgia, regret, and self-reckoning – into a raw and breathtakingly human soundtrack. These songs move with the softness of memory and the weight of realization, tracing the uneasy space between desire and disappointment, intimacy and distance.

For Theo Bleak – the musical project of Katie Lynch – this EP marked a moment of creative alignment. Following earlier releases Fragments, For Seasons, Iliad, and Pain, Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers arrived at the right time, in the right place – a body of work shaped less by conscious intent than by her unconscious mind finally revealing what had been plaguing her.

“I obviously cringe at most things I’ve done previously, but I also understand that’s how people find their creativity,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “I think at the stage I am in my life, along with all the things that have happened, this EP feels for the first time, the correct way forward.” Written across places like the Isle of Skye and Perthshire, the record draws deeply from landscape, impermanence, and inner weather, allowing environment and emotion to bleed into one another.

This inward clarity extends beyond process and into perspective, as Bleak describes the EP not simply as self-portraiture, but as an act of imaginative empathy –

– a way of inhabiting someone else’s emotional interior while subtly reckoning with her own. “Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers is an EP of my imaginings of my friend’s inner life,” the artist explains. “Each song is a different facet of our blurry friendship. The imagery behind my EP title is concerned with superstition, astrology and the feeling of deep unwavering longing.”

That imagined distance, however, quickly begins to collapse, revealing how closely observation and confession are intertwined throughout the record. “I guess it’s hard to explain because you’d have to know the person, but it’s kind of about me as well,” she continues. “I go into themes of astrology, longing, and it’s a bit of scolding at points, too. Every song is a different facet, and the EP ultimately ends in disappointment with ‘You Don’t Want Me.’ All for nothing, kind of.”

Rather than setting out with a fixed concept or narrative, Bleak says the emotional throughline only became clear once the songs had already taken shape. “My unconscious mind did a lot of the work for me,” she admits. “It wasn’t until the songs came together I realised what had been plaguing me and therefore the EP was a coherent piece. ‘Peach Sky’ was the first thing we wrote, and it sort of set the tone of confusion, desperation and subconscious thoughts.”

The EP’s title itself holds the same intimate, symbolic gravity as the songs it contains. Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers comes from a superstition Bleak encountered while living and working on the Isle of Skye – one that lingered with her long after the moment passed. “When I worked and lived on Skye, my Romanian colleague warned me of putting two yellow flowers together in a vase as it brings bad fortune,” she recalls. “The flowers needed to be separated at once, she said. It felt poignant for many reasons, mainly that I had to part them and it made me sad.” Like so much of the record, the image is small but devastating – a gesture of care that requires separation, a beauty that cannot safely remain whole.

That tension – between closeness and rupture, intimacy and inevitability – courses through the EP’s sound as much as its symbolism.

Across Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers, Bleak crafts a hushed, atmospheric indie folk landscape that feels both larger than life and achingly close to the bone. There are echoes here of artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Samia, and Lizzy McAlpine – music that swells and recedes with emotion, balancing haunting expansiveness with devastating restraint. The record rises and falls in waves, oscillating between aching, electric guitar-driven moments and softer, stripped-back passages where Bleak’s voice and words sit naked in the foreground.

That emotional arc begins with “Peach Sky,” a dramatic, hushed opening that feels like both an arrival and a reckoning. Written from fragmented thoughts and observations Bleak kept while reflecting on her second stint living on Skye, the song captures the fragile impermanence of feeling in motion. “The morning I left the island to return home, the sky was a beautiful peach colour,” she explains. “I reflected on how impermanent my feelings were.” The track’s slow burn and spectral beauty set the EP’s tone immediately – confusion, desperation, and subconscious thought rendered with breathtaking clarity.

“Said Like a Poet” shifts the energy without breaking the spell, emerging as the EP’s most immediate and propulsive moment. Driven by dynamic electric guitars and a steady, insistent beat, the song interrogates the distance between intellect and emotion, its refrain – “man, I could have been someone” – looping like a mantra that aches from the inside out. As Bleak puts it, the track is “a scathing look at how much I idealise intellect, even though I’m entirely emotionally driven,” capturing the frustration of knowing how to articulate feeling without knowing how to ask for what you need.

Said like a poet, drawn as a sketch
Not in a way, that frames you the best
But in the dark, you say what you like
It could be anyone,
when you turn out the light

Man, I could have been someone
Man, I could have been someone

If “Said Like a Poet” pulses outward, “Katie You’re A Liar” turns sharply inward. One of the most stripped-back and raw moments on the EP, the song is written from the imagined perspective of those who judge and resent her – an unflinching act of self-beratement that feels as vulnerable as it is confrontational. “It’s a song written from the perspective of those who hate me, about me,” Bleak says plainly, letting the weight of the idea speak for itself.

“Look Out The Window” arrives as another emotional rupture, blending alternative bliss with deep, aching introspection. The song explores the unhealthiness of obsessive longing, capturing the way fantasy can become both refuge and trap. Here, Bleak’s voice feels like a beacon, pouring heartache into every line with soul-stirring finesse as the music swells and recedes around her.

The EP closes with “You Don’t Want Me,” a song that feels both poignant and tragic in its simplicity. Though carefully built from a production standpoint – minimalist in appearance but rich in texture – the track distills rejection into its most honest form: “You don’t want me, yeah I’m fine with it.” It’s a line Bleak has pointed to as her favorite across the entire EP, delivered without dramatics or defense, allowing resignation to feel both tender and final. There’s no attempt to soften the blow or reframe the outcome – only the solemn acknowledgment of what is, and what can never be. As she puts it succinctly, “‘You Don’t Want Me’ is the inevitable outcome.” It’s a quiet gut-punch of an ending, but a definitive one, leaving the listener suspended in the aftermath rather than offering full-circle resolution.

Taken as a whole, Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers doesn’t seek to explain itself or soften its truths. It listens, it observes, and it sits with longing and other hard feelings until they become something else entirely – a snapshot shaped by sorrow and the fragile beauty of impermanence, still resonating long after the flowers have been pulled apart.

“I truly, truly love it all, and I think along with the artwork and memories of creation, it is just a piece I love in its entirety,” Bleak says of her EP. “Its meaning has changed even for me since it was recorded, and I hope it resonates with whatever is happening in someone’s life. I don’t really mind though; I would have made it anyway.”

At the beginning of the year, when reflection sharpens and unresolved feelings tend to surface, Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers feels especially vital.

These five songs don’t chase clarity or catharsis; they linger in the in-between, honoring the truths that emerge when we stop trying to explain ourselves. What Theo Bleak captures here is not an ending, but a moment of recognition – a willingness to sit with her thoughts and feelings without rushing toward relief.

Even as Theo Bleak’s artistic world has since expanded outward – most recently with the release of her debut mixtape Bargaining (for which we will have many more words some other day) – Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers remains a crucial emotional cornerstone. It’s the intimate document that precedes that wider reckoning, shaped by intuition rather than intention, and guided by the same trust in honesty that continues to define her work. In its stillness and vulnerability, the EP endures as a reminder that not every feeling needs resolution to be meaningful – sometimes, being witnessed is enough.

For all those who need it, this EP will forever be a stirring document of inwardness: A snapshot of an artist listening closely to herself, following symbols where they lead, and trusting that honesty – however quiet, however painful – can be enough. Below, Theo Bleak takes us track-by-track through Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers, unpacking the fragmented thoughts, imagined inner lives, and emotional truths that shaped each song.

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:: stream/purchase Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers here ::

:: connect with Theo Bleak here ::

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Stream: ‘Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers’ – Theo Bleak

:: Inside Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers ::

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Peach Sky

I wrote “Peach Sky” from fragmented thoughts and observations I had kept record of, while reflecting on the second time I lived and worked on the Isle of Skye. The morning I left the island to return home, the sky was a beautiful peach colour. I reflected on how impermanent my feelings were.

Said Like a Poet

“Said Like A Poet” is a scathing look at how much I idealise intellect, even though I’m entirely emotionally driven. I think ideas can be put beautifully written between people, but there are ultimately concepts which lack properness regardless how pretentiously you write it out. I wrote the song about very human things, things I wish I knew how to ask for. I wrote this with Mark, Megan and Dan and the way all our ideas aligned for it was something I can’t forget.

Katie You’re a Liar

“Katie You’re A Liar” is a song written from the perspective of those who hate me, about me. A lot of my music berates my own character anyway, however, a lot of people I’ve quarrelled with over the years are not songwriters who can publicly release opinion pieces about me. So I did it for them.

Look Out the Window

“Look Out The Window” is a song about the unhealthiness of obsessive longing. As I’ve got older I tend to retreat in my own fantasies about an ideal world, a lot of that revolves around being a kid again. I foolishly entered a situation which evoked intense pining about an alternative life path, which brought me great unhappiness. My mental withdrawal was worse than ever before and I guess this song was inspired by comparing my internal expectations with visceral reality.

You Don’t Want Me

“You Don’t Want Me” was written first musically, about Perthshire. The lyrics I added were the most simple incarnation of rejection. I walk in Perthshire a lot, and it’s where I can escape that embarrassment.

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:: connect with Theo Bleak here ::

:: stream/purchase Bargaining here ::

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