Droneflower

In 2014 Stephen Brodsky, of Cave In and Mutoid Man, went to Saint Vitus in Brooklyn to see Marissa Nadler play on her July tour. Both came from Massachusetts, and Nadler says they had lived in Boston at the same time without ever meeting. One of their first ideas was a horror film soundtrack. What they made instead is Droneflower: ten songs, two of them covers, released by Sacred Bones on April 26, 2019, in its Alliance Series of collaborations. The name was meant for the band as well as the album, but they put their own names on the sleeve because, Brodsky told Bandcamp Daily, “the record would get a stronger push with our names attached”.

The work stretched over three years, in person and through file exchanges. The first song was “Dead West”, built on an acoustic guitar piece Brodsky wrote while he lived on Spy Pond, outside Boston. By the time they worked on it he had moved to Brooklyn, and Nadler wrote the lyrics and vocal melody remotely. Most of the rest was recorded in the home studio Nadler had set up in her Boston apartment, where Brodsky stopped by whenever he was in town visiting family. Nadler had written most of her solo records on guitar, and she called a track that arrived with its instrumentation already in place “very freeing”. The recording is credited to the duo, and they mixed it with Drew Arndt and Pat McCusker.

“For the Sun”, the first single, came fastest. They wrote and recorded it in one day at her old apartment. By Brodsky’s account she found the lyrics and melody almost at once while they listened to the track together, and his only reference point was Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”. Reviewers described a chugging guitar and no drums under her line about waiting for the sun to fall. “Space Ghost I” and “Space Ghost II” started as piano pieces by Brodsky and were filled out later with other instruments and Nadler’s voice. Andrea Calderon adds violin to “Dead West”.

“Estranged” was Nadler’s idea. She had been fixated since she was young on the Guns N’ Roses video in which Axl Rose swims with dolphins. Brodsky worked out the first 30 seconds, posted a teaser on Twitter and tagged her to check the direction before taking on a nine-minute song, and she says they almost gave up a few times. Problems with her hands left her happy to just sing it. Their version cuts the 9:23 original from Use Your Illusion II to 7:28, still more than twice as long as anything else here, and it was the second single. The album closes with Morphine’s “In Spite of Me”, from Cure for Pain, with saxophone by the band’s Dana Colley, who did not play on the original recording.

The reviews in 2019 were positive. PopMatters and Soundblab gave it 8 out of 10, Atwood Magazine 7, Cryptic Rock 4.5 out of 5 and The Thin Air 3.5 out of 5. “Estranged” was the track singled out most often, by Soundblab, Cryptic Rock and mxdwn, and PopMatters wrote that the duo turned its heartbreak into “icier grief”. PopMatters also found the album pulled in too many directions to follow any of them far, Cryptic Rock wanted longer songs, and Everything Is Noise wanted a change of pace well before “Shades Apart” arrived and heard Nadler on more familiar ground than Brodsky. The Thin Air pointed to an economy in the writing, where a repeated phrase carries a whole song. The album spent a week at number 36 on the UK’s Official Record Store Chart.

Those reservations are fair, and the way the record was made explains them. Droneflower is a first meeting more than a finished band: ten tracks in 31 minutes, six of them under three, two of them other people’s songs, put together between tours. Its best moments are its least planned ones, a song written and recorded in a day and a cover that began as a 30-second test on Twitter. Nadler said it sounds like neither of them in their other work; the critics agreed about Brodsky more than about her. In 2019 Brodsky said that next time it might flip, with Droneflower as the artist and their names as the title. In October 2026 the name came back on a two-song single, Burials, with Shearwater’s Emily Lee on keyboards, and Nadler wrote to her Bandcamp followers that a second album is in the works.