Our take: The first release on Peace of Mind Records is a new two-song 7” by New York city’s Flower. While this 7” has a much rawer recording than Flower’s excellent 2022 album Hardly a Dream, it otherwise continues the path Flower forged on that record, and the band’s existing fans will love it. Heel of the Next / Physical God is a two-song single, but it’s quite long, its two songs’ running times adding up to well over 8 minutes of 90s-inspired metallic punk. While Nausea is the band everyone references when talking about Flower, I hear plenty of other bands who fuse metal and punk in their sound, particularly Amebix and early Neurosis. Like those bands, there’s an epic sweep to Flower’s music, that quality manifesting in the song’s ornate structures—both tracks have many parts that build and circle back on one another in interesting ways—and in the grandiosity of their chord progressions and riffs, which evoke wide-open landscapes more than the hemmed-in feeling of New York city’s streets. As on Hardly a Dream, there’s also a bouncy quality to some riffs that I might find off-putting if the members had huge muscles and basketball jerseys, but knowing they’re dyed-in-the-wool crusties, I’m able to bop along without the feeling that I’m compromising my scene affiliation. (By the way, their bass player once told me Biohazard was a key influence for them… I do not know if they were joking or not.) The powerful lyrics and strong vocals, alternating between rapid-fire cadences and hooky chants, also carry over from Hardly a Dream, as does the incredible artwork, once again with a Crass Records-style poster sleeve, and the illustrations are even stronger this time. Flower is a great band who has carved out a lane for themselves that few other bands occupy, and if you’re a fan, you definitely shouldn’t to skip this excellent record.