Massachusetts singer-songwriter Ella Williams, a.k.a. Squirrel Flower, will release a new album called Planet (i) this summer. The follow-up to her 2020 debut album, I Was Born Swimming, which earned her a spot as a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know, arrives June 25th on Polyvinyl Records.
Squirrel Flower’s first single from the album is a grungy slow-burner called “Hurt a Fly,” where she sings about miscommunications over guitars that gradually build in intensity and distortion. “Took it too far again/Thought that you were my friend,” Williams begins, later pleading, “Have you never made a mistake?/Have you never said what you didn’t wanna say?”
In a statement, Williams explained that she wrote the lyrics in character: “‘Hurt a Fly’ is me embodying a persona of gaslighting, narcissistic soft-boy type shit. The classic, ‘Sorry I acted violently, I’m not mad that you got upset at me, wanna hang out next week?’ I wanted to see what it was like to be a character trying to skirt around accountability. It’s an angry and unhinged song.”
In the music video for “Hurt a Fly,” directed by Ryan Schnackenberg, Williams rolls around on the ground in a plastic bubble (sort of like a more psychologically unsettling version of the ones Flaming Lips use at their shows). The press statement includes a tale of an odd occurrence at the video shoot: “A stranger filmed me practicing choreography at a public park, submitted it to a meme page making fun of ‘influencers,’ and the video got 1,000,000 views, which in my mind is perfect thematically.”
Squirrel Flower recorded Planet (i) in Bristol, England, with producer Ali Chant and musicians including Portishead’s Adrian Utley. In her Artist You Need to Know interview last year, Williams mentioned some of the themes she was thinking about for her next LP: “I’d say now my relationship with water is one of being in awe and being terrified by the power of it. The power of there being too much of it, and also of there being none, in relation to climate change.”
MUSIC PREMIERES
The Dropkick Murphys’ Ken Casey paused one of the band’s annual St. Patrick’s Day shows at MGM Music Hall at Boston’s Fenway Park over the weekend to call out an attendee holding up a MAGA hat.
“If you’re in a room full of people and you want to know who’s in a cult, how do you know who’s in a cult?” Casey asked the crowd on Sunday (March 16), per a video shared to social media. “They’ve been holding up a f—ing hat the whole night to represent a president.”
He then told the Donald Trump-supporting fan, “This is America, there’s no kings here,” before adding, “Anyway, if you mind, sir, we’re gonna play a song about our grandparents and people who fought Nazis in the war and s—. So if you could just shut the f— up for five minutes.”
The “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” band has been open about their contempt for Trump for years. Back in 2022, they performed at the Great Allentown Fair in Pennsylvania and Casey told Rolling Stone, “I felt like we were playing a MAGA flea market. Every other table was selling the MAGA gear and the ‘F— Joe Biden’ gear and all this stuff. I was a little overwhelmed and befuddled. It was like I was dropped into another planet.”
While onstage at the event, Casey told the crowd in a viral moment, “If you’re out there buying these f—ing hats that these swindlers are selling…then you’re part of the problem! Because you’re being duped by the greatest swindler in the history of the world…and a bunch of grifters and billionaires who don’t give a s— about you or your family!”
