The Devil Wears Prada’s drive to evolve bears plenty of fruit, but that ambition sometimes gets diluted along the way.
You’d think, with an album title like Flowers, The Devil Wears Prada are hoping to blossom. The assumption has some truth to it, given the conscious effort laced within their ninth album to keep progressing instead of becoming stagnant. After all, it’d be less than ideal to follow the triumph of 2022’s Color Decay with a damp squib. The problem is that in their case, it feels as if that there were some days where they may have left that ambition at the studio door.
The Dayton quintet’s fresher ideas, which are woven delicately throughout, generally offer the strongest moments. The symphonic overtones running through Where The Flowers Never Grow are a thoughtful touch, cleverly making its plunge into a slicing breakdown even more unexpected. Meanwhile, The Silence almost sounds like they’ve left the guitars at one side, in essence a TWDP pop song dominated by a pounding beat that proves surprisingly effective. Towards its conclusion, the plaintive Wave harnesses the underrated power of building a ballad around one electric guitar, peeling back the noise for a moment of quiet sorrow.
Their usual bread-and-butter material is still perfectly likeable, particularly All Out’s stamping rhythms and razor-edge riffs. While shiny and slick, songs like Everybody Knows and Ritual are fairly standard issue middle-of-the-road melodic numbers in which they try to edge to the head of the pack but end up falling behind. Lyrically, it occasionally becomes contrived. So Low’s central hook, ‘Tell me why the highs always feels so low,’ lacks some depth, whereas some of the lines from EYES even seem clunky. ‘Hell is a real place / When I’m running at an artificial pace’ is one awkward couplet and ‘Give me eyes / Let me realise’ isn’t much better.
As much as they’ve tried to march forward sonically, and props on them for doing so, they’ve landed on solid and dependable rather than reaching any particular new heights. For the devotees, that’ll be more than enough. For others, parts of the record aren’t that distinguishable from what else is out there.
Verdict: 3/5
For fans of: The Amity Affliction, I Prevail, We Came As Romans
Flowers is released on November 14 via Solid State
