Toronto indie pop trio Valley walk us through their breathtakingly vulnerable and therapeutic third LP ‘Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden,’ a sonically and emotionally charged triumph that is part ‘breakup’ album, part ‘soul-searching’ mission, and the truest, most authentic version of the band.
Stream: “Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden” – Valley
Together in a secluded cabin somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains, three best friends processed their grief together, and grew stronger as a result.
In truth, Valley didn’t expect to make a third album so soon after their second one. The Toronto indie pop band released the 15-track Lost in Translation in June 2023, and had just wrapped up an intense year of touring across North America, Asia, and Australia, when lead guitarist Mickey Brandolino announced he was leaving the group he’d co-founded ten years earlier with three of his closest friends.
“There were a lot of hard moments going on in the band, a lot of it coming from doing a lot of really big things for the first time and still not feeling necessarily fulfilled by it,” lead singer Rob Laska tells Atwood Magazine. “We felt like maybe we were a bit misrepresented in terms who we actually are, and that was mixing with band members wanting to leave and people going through really intense breakups in the band and then being unhappy there. It created a lot of hurt and questioning that we needed to get back to writing as soon as possible, ‘cause that’s the only way we know how to process things. We just knew we needed to write.”
In January, Valley decided to go make an album, and in February, the three band members – Laska, bassist Alex Dimauro, and drummer Karah James – decamped to a remote studio in Tennessee together with longtime friend, producer, and COIN frontman Chase Lawrence.
“Things aligned really purely because there was a lot of hurt and grief, and a lot of processing that we had to do together,” Laska says. “The title track is the only song on the record that started years ago – we always carry one thing over to each record. We just knew we needed to process a lot and be miserable together for a little while, and then the album was born. The songs just poured out of us, and I think that’s a true sign of when you’re making something special.”
Released August 30th via Capitol Records / Universal Music Canada, Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden sees Valley closing one door and opening another as they grieve together, grow together, and relearn how to be a band together. Their third studio album is the trio’s most intimate and vulnerable offering to date – a catchy, beautifully cathartic collection of songs that sees them actively, and in real time, working through their collective pain and sadness.
Part ‘breakup’ album and part ‘soul-searching’ mission, Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden is a sonically and emotionally charged triumph from a band that, at the top of the year, wasn’t sure who they were anymore and didn’t know quite what their future looked like. That’s all (mostly) in the rearview now, thanks in large part to these songs. As Laska explains, writing and recording them was truly a form of group therapy.
“Yes, Mickey left the band and that was really difficult and still is,” he says. “It’s not something where all of a sudden, we’re healed and we’re fine. We lost a best friend and someone that we thought we would be doing this with forever, and that’s never an easy thing to process. On top of that, it was the first time we as a band were grieving something together. We’ve always been there for each other to grieve something, but this is the first time where we’re in a room together and we’re all feeling the same thing, and we’re all needing to process the same type of grief. And we all need to also process support and love for our friend! Balancing those two acts – I’m so upset and I’m hurt and I feel let down and abandoned, but I also feel like joy and happiness for you because you’re moving on – that’s important to change! It’s such a crazy set of emotions to tug-of-war with.”
“On top of that, we were a little deflated,” he continues. “Lost in Translation really popped a few balloons in our sky. We had a high to low descent of feeling, ‘Did we take this too far? Did we step just over the line a little bit too much, where people don’t know who we are anymore or where we fit in?’ That was really difficult, and we were feeling a little let down by the whole thing. We had so much anxiety of how people perceived us, and that was really hard.”
An ambitious and sprawling record in its own right, Lost in Translation received considerable acclaim upon its release last year; Atwood Magazine praised it as “a breathtakingly beautiful – and equally heartrending – display of musical talent and raw humanity,” calling it “the soundtrack to a movie that we haven’t seen yet.” The album fared moderately with fans, with only a few breakout tracks – “Throwback Tears” and “Break for You” among them. The specter of Valley’s 2021 single “Like 1999,” a worldwide smash that has racked up over 90 million global streams in the three years since its release, loomed over the band.
“That song changed a lot for us and opened up a lot for us on a career level,” Laska says of “Like 1999,” “But it also left us feeling empty at the end of the day, because as that song started taking off more and more, it felt like a misrepresentation of what the whole point of why we started this band was.”
“‘Like 1999’ served its purpose, where it brought a lot of people into the Valley sphere and introduced them to what that version of Valley was at the time,” Alex Dimauro reflects. “But the reality is there’s been different variations of us over our career. There’s a lot more people who will go and just listen to one song of ours, than there are who will go and listen to a whole catalog. At some point in a band’s career, you have to come to terms with the fac that there are some people who will come to a show to hear one song – and there are some people who will come to hear a lot of them.”
“Maybe misrepresentation is a harsh word,” Laska pauses. “It’s a perfect representation of where we were at that time, but we might not be there right now, and that’s okay. I think we’ve learned to come to terms with that. It’s like your first tattoo: You regret a little bit, but it’s still on you and you’re still okay with it because it represents that time, and yes, it might be a little kitschy or whatever. You’re still proud of the moment and who you were when you got it, and you’ve moved on and it’s still on you and it fades and it’s fine. I think that’s the way we look at it. I’m still proud of the songs we’ve made because they’re concise and they’re clever. There was a part of us that wanted to prove to people that we can write a pop record, and we can also write really concise songs.”
“We can write you a pop song if we want to, but this record is much more than us writing songs for you. We’re telling you how it is. Like we’re giving you our life. We’re giving you a piece of us that is so personal and something that has really been weighing on us, and I think that’s the big difference. It’s the most authentic version of us that’s ever existed, wholeheartedly, this record.”
All of these thoughts were weighing on Valley when they reconnected with Chase Lawrence in January.
Valley had opened for Lawrence’s band, COIN, in 2021, and they’d become friends over the course of that tour. Since then, Lawrence had been dabbling in production more and more, and there were talks of him making the next Valley record.
“That’s where Chase really stepped in, in January, the week after Mike left and everything happened,” Laska recalls. “We got on the phone and he said, ‘Listen, you have two options here. You can either stop and it’s done. You guys had a great run! Or you can go, okay, what am I gonna do differently now? And what are we gonna do? What are we gonna put down on the table as absolutes to make this the best version of a band that we can?’ And that came down to three things: He said, ‘You’re gonna go make music for the first time with zero expectations. We can make whatever, make what you want. You need to ask nothing from it. You need to just enjoy it as three people going through some of the shittiest times of your lives; you need to enjoy something. Two, we’re gonna make music because we love to make music, and we’re gonna write about truth, and we’re gonna put authenticity first over anything, because that’s all people want from you.”
“And three, you’re gonna let all the fans out of the room. You’re gonna let everybody out of the room. It’s just gonna be us secluded in a cabin, and we’re just gonna create together and forget about everything. I think that was a big thing for me is he made me realize that I do let a lot of people in the room when we’re writing – subconsciously, you’re always thinking about everyone from your core fan base to that one person that said ‘your record sucked last year.’ This was the first time we were said, no one is coming in here. No one’s coming in the good old brain, and it really changed our life. Chase really pushed that on us and said, ‘If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this the way that feels the most truthful to you guys. What a shame it is to go make another album and not feel like it’s your best. You guys deserve to feel you’re 110% proud of something.’ He did play therapist and producer and dad and everything. He was really helping to take care of us when we were really fragile.”
Valley kept these these instructions close to heart as they went about making this record.
While the song “Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden” actually predates the Smoky Mountains sessions – it was written (but then shelved) the day after they wrote “Like 1999,” as fate would have it – the title itself has taken on new meaning to the band members as they’ve found their way forward through this rough patch.
“It felt like this gavel that was just being pounded – like an arrival,” Karah James says of the phrase. “I think the sentiment really resonated with what we were going through as a band. There was enough juice there to dive in so many different directions, and I think that’s what we look for in an album, is just, what are the themes? Sometimes people write a record about one person in their breakup, but for this album, and for our band, there’s three band members and there’s a lot of spinning plots. So this concept of this garden, and there’s weeds in it, there’s beautiful flowers, there’s dirt, there’s pests, there’s rocks here and there. It’s all just a culmination of everything in somebody’s life.”
“And when you step back, what you see is a garden; it’s the idea of looking at one pixel and not really being able to understand what the image is. You can really only understand that image if you zoom out, and if there’s time there; everything, everyone needs time on their side. We oftentimes forget how important a slow burn or a process of anything is, and we want things right away and we want to see the meaning in something right away. We weren’t ready for any of that as a band, but now we’re in our late 20s and we’re looking back at the last several years of Valley as a band and all of the wonderful things we’ve done, all of the shitty things that have happened, the shitty things that we’ve done, and you just see this actual, beautiful garden.”
“I think it’s just literally about putting faith in the seeds that you sow and knowing that if you plant a sweet seed, then the fruit of that seed is gonna be sweet,” she smiles. “And if you plant a bitter seed, the fruit of that seed is going to be bitter. And it’s nature. Nature is impersonal. Nature does not care whether you’re kind or cruel. It literally manifests what you have planted and put out there.”
“The universe gives you some love and things happen because they happen, and you just have to see it that way,” Laska nods in agreement. “I think it gives us a lot of leveling and empathy for ourselves, knowing that things are just going to grow and take their course, but as long as we tend to the things that matter, everything else will grow regardless.”
The album itself acts a reset for Valley, both because of their new three-piece dynamic, and also because of how unfiltered and unencumbered they were while making the songs themselves.
“As much as it is a new chapter, it also is closing a chapter,” Dimauro affirms, “and coming to accept where things kind of have landed in terms of plot and storytelling on the record, because it definitely has a lot of that. It is very raw and very real. I think this record serves a different purpose than any of our other records that have preceded this one. It just sits differently. It serves a completely different purpose for us than anything else. I think it represents us very well, and it represents where we wanted to be for a long time, which is where a lot of inner struggle, not even just with band members or anything, but within ourselves, has come from. Songwriting, authenticity, I think those things stand out on this record, and that’s where we wanted to be a while ago, and it’s where we landed now.”
Highlights abound on the journey from the opening title track to album closer “Cocoon,” as Valley wrestle with their rawest emotions, learn to accept life and the things they cannot change, and plant a few hopeful seeds of their own. “When You Know Someone,” the record’s lead single, sees them channeling those salient feelings of betrayal and abandonment, heartache and helplessness into a fiery, impassioned, and emotionally charged anthem.
“It’s anthemic, it’s big, it’s sad and happy at the same time,” Laska says, offering that song as the one he hopes newcomers will really listen to. “That’s what we would play if you put us in a room and gave us instruments and plugged in amps and you said, ‘Okay, make a song right now.’ It’s Karah and me doing the vocal thing that we’ve done since being in the band. It’s Alex’s driving base. That song really just wraps up who we are in quite a quintessential way.”
“When You Know Someone” is joined on the record by other standouts like the breathtaking “Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden” (with its visceral chorus line, “I guess that I’d rather laugh than cry ‘bout my problems, when honestly I don’t know how to solve ‘em. I’ll water the flowers and pray for a garden, ’cause honestly I’m just all out of options“), the buoyant and upbeat empathy-fueled “Crawlspace,” the bittersweet upheaval “Growing (Apart),” the dreamy, dramatic life-sucker “Mosquito,” the achingly emotive “Bop Ba,” and the spirited story-song “Bass Player’s Brother.”
James calls “Crawlspace” her personal favorite, both because of how fun it is to play and because of its heartfelt lyrics. “‘If you need space, I got room.’ I really like that,” she grins. “I was proud of us for writing that. It’s a really gentle way of saying, ‘I’m somebody that holds onto a lot of hope, and if you wanna come back, the door will always be left open a crack because, I just hold onto that – even if it hurts me.’ In the words of Morgan Freeman, hope is a dangerous thing.”
Laska cites the penultimate track “Life Goes on Without Me” as his own favorite. “I don’t know if people will listen to it, but I like that song a lot,” he says. “I just like how much that one takes you on a ride. It’s kind of the classic Valley thing where it starts very somber, like a guitar in a hotel room, and then it takes you to this whole other place, where you’re speeding down the road at 150 miles an hour, repeating a line back over and over. It has that thing that we love to do.”
It’s hard to quantify just how much Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden means to Valley; it most certainly saved the band from their own collapse, and now stands as a testament to all that they are: A group of three best friends, three humans, unpacking life together in song.
“This is just the beginning of us being us,” Laska shares. “How sweet is that? That is where you’ve won. You’re playing with house money. If there was something to be won, we’ve won because we’ve been our most authentic selves. Our takeaway from this album is that you will always – the universe, the people around you, just life – life will always, always, always reward you for being the most authentic version of yourself, no matter how hard that is to do. If you feel ashamed for it, if you feel like you’ll be made fun of it, if you feel like you’re just gonna be slapped on the wrist for being who you are, life will always reward you for that.”
“But it will never reward you for hiding that, or for not putting that forward and letting people see you for who you really are. That’s where it gets really scary, and it did for us for a second. I hope this album inspires people to just make something that they want to make – start the company, start your business that you’ve thinking about for 10 years that you’re scared to do. Or if you’re making music, whatever you’re doing, just try to really put your honest truth out there. You will be rewarded for it in many different ways.”
“I think this album represents that growth and that change – that just being yourself is really so rewarding. You really win. You win! There’s no game of life, but you win the internal struggle of how that feels. I’m sure a lot of people reading know what that feels like to be struggling with putting your authenticity in front of yourself and the people around you. It’s a weird struggle that you have with yourself. Just be you and be authentic and put your truth out there. People just want to know who you are and know what you’re up to; the rest doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. They just want you.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Valley’s Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden with Atwood Magazine as Rob Laska, Alex Dimauro, and Karah James take us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of their third studio album!
Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden is out now via Universal Music Canada.
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:: stream/purchase Water the Flowers… here ::
:: connect with Valley here ::
Stream: ‘Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden’ – Valley
:: Inside Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden ::
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Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden
“Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden” is the initial seed planted that began this entire record. We started writing it in 2021. We had the chorus mostly but nothing else. The demo honestly was sort of forgotten about until we went on tour again last year and played it on the bus one night. In that moment we knew (after having years of space from it) that it was special. This song encapsulates something that we talked about a lot leading up to making this album as we went through so much drastic change and growth together as friends; In the tapestry of life, there exists a profound interconnectedness that binds all living beings together. Just as water sustains the growth of flowers, human connections nourish the soul. The album explores stages of grief and the need for nurturing relationships, drawing parallels to the cyclic nature of life and the transformative process of death and rebirth. While prayers for a garden may hold religious connotations for some, the essence lies in our desire to nurture and cultivate the truest most authentic versions of ourselves. Just as careful tending is required for a garden to flourish, human connections thrive when they are nurtured through love, understanding, and empathy.
A Little More
A song fully dedicated to the band and how grateful we are to have found each other. Being in a band is such a precious and delicate journey of balancing so many emotions together. But it’s also one of the greatest privileges to be able to create together and love one another the way we do now. It took almost 10 years to figure out what was missing and uncover the root of what makes Valley so special to us and our universe. This album really explores that in depth, with “A Little More” being a window into the band’s life and how much everything has changed but also nothing changing at the same time.
Growing (Apart)
A song that really documents the early stages of grief we were going through together as a band. We wrote it stranded in Charlotte, NC. Chase Lawrence (who produced the album with us) drove out to us super early that morning and walked into the room humming the melody of the chorus. We were upset and looking for answers. Feeling lost, confused and abandoned. For how distorted and fuzzy the ending of the song sounds, I like to think the soft banjo part is a juxtaposed beacon of hope. I still remember the tacky art on the walls of the AirBnb and thinking to myself, what is happening, are we still gonna be a band? Why are we here?
When You Know Someone
A song about abandonment and the realization that the person you think you know and love so much is no longer that person in your life. All that’s left is the mundane turned beautiful which has so many emotions woven into it. Their toothpaste, their headphones, the first letter of their name, the street they grew up on, their clothes. They’re everywhere except in front of you. Really proud of this song. It feels alive and very much timeless to me.
Let It Rain
“Let It Rain” is a song about acceptance. Accepting that our lives are changing but we have each other to get through it. Embracing the lows and not taking the highs for granted. Some of my favourite production on the album. The piano sounds like it’s crying on this one. A really specific feeling was captured while recording this one that feels so quintessential Valley to me.
Crawlspace
A song about always holding space for the people you love, no matter how much you’ve fallen away from each other. We talked a lot about our parents while writing it. Every time we go home after we haven’t seen them in a while, it really hits you that they’re getting older and time is so precious. As we get older and the band takes us further and further away from home and our friends, leaving space for the people that matter is important. Life is so precious and can be taken away from you at any given moment. No matter how much someone changes when you least expect it, you’ll always be around for them when you get home. The love you have for them is endless.
Mosquito
There is no enemy but the enemy of our own mind. Sometimes we think we are the voices in our mind but really we are just the one that listens to them. It’s hard to not react to the things we tell ourselves, just like it’s hard to not swat the mosquito buzzing around your ear, it’s instinctual. What if we just let the mosquito buzz and buzz until it flies away.
Bop Ba
A song about dependency and letting nature take its course, as much as it hurts to let go. This one is gonna age well. A Valley staple to me.
I Didn’t Even Ask For This
This song was originally called ‘Walking the Dog’ and we wrote it sorta as a joke. Making the album in general was quite emotionally heavy at times. We had to in real time process what had happened the last few months while also trying to capture it truthfully and as real as possible. “I Didn’t Even Ask For This” is almost a sonic representation of Valley taking a lunch break on the album. It’s us forgetting about what we were emotionally dealing with for a min and just having fun together in the room. Karah played the best bass part ever on this one!!! Also, we kinda didn’t even ask for this??? so idk
Bass Player’s Brother
A story about a girl named Janie getting her heart broken. It’s heartache, it’s toxic and it’s cyclical. It’s often harder to stay than leave. We’ve all been there at some point in our lives.
Life Goes on Without Me
A song about being on tour, really far away from home and feeling deflated, fake and replaceable by death. It’s about the moment you feel like you’ve lost touch completely with who you are and what you’ve become. While writing it, we talked about the perspective of the chorus being the literal idea of music, like a being. I often see it as the universe questioning ‘how do you sleep at night?’ how are you continuing to live like this. Something needs to change because life goes on whether you want it to or not. What will you leave behind?
Cocoon
A final goodbye to our best friend. A song about seeing grief as something that you grow into and carry your whole life, but it also being a beautiful superpower when you let it come along with you wherever you go in life. I’ll never forget coming home from making the album and thinking about this song when a butterfly landed on my shoulder outside. At that point I knew that everything we’ll be ok. The song is representative of how much we grew as best friends, bandmates and just people who are lucky enough to still be here. We’re forever in debt to the universe for allowing us to make music together.
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:: stream/purchase Water the Flowers… here ::
:: connect with Valley here ::
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© Becca Hamel
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