Playgrounded "A Flower To Water" Snow Edition 12"

A flower bursts into life and withers away to nothing in the blink of an eye. Sheets of glass glitter with possibility as they shatter in slow motion. A Flower to Water, the staggering third full-length album from Greek Progressive-Post Metal outfit Playgrounded, finds the five-piece pushing their boundaries even further; welcoming the unquantifiable depths of loss, grief and finitude into their meticulous, fractal process as friends in defiance of neglect. A Flower to Water is the product of patience, of past mistakes, of nurturing; a token of, and totem for, time consciously offered.

Hailing from Athens, Greece but predominantly based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Playgrounded have never ceased to push the envelope of Post Metal with genre-defying contemporary electronic and cinematic neo-classical elements since the band's inception almost two decades ago. One of many criminally underrated creative outfits coming from Greece, Playgrounded’s immediate impact on the heavy scene is due in no small part to the formidable musical pedigree of the band’s members.

The quintet’s first release, 2012’s Athens EP saw a musically mature band writing modern, forward-thinking prog rock that found them compared to artists as diverse as Deftones, Massive Attack and Moderat. Years of touring nationally and international touring and opening for the likes of Riverside, Anathema and Nine Inch Nails led to Playgrounded’s 2017 debut full-length In Time with Gravity, a document of the band reveling in full flux as they continued to dive deeper into extended compositions weaving influences from cutting edge electronica into weighted riffs, fluid basslines and delicate yet driving drums.

Another five years of experimentation and refinement saw the band’s sophomore album and their first release on Pelagic, 2022’s The death of Death, demonstrate Playgrounded’s mastery of their form. A profound understanding of how the myriad sonic glitches and fragments that the quintet produce can be carved, sculpted and contorted into something so much greater than the sum of its parts; The death of Death presents Playgrounded as composers in the art of decomposition. The album was crowned Album of the Year at the 2022 Rotterdam Pop Music Awards and saw Playgrounded embark on a 36 date EU/UK Tour with labelmates The Ocean (Collective) and LLNN before bringing the cycle to a close with formidable performances at internationally renowned festivals such as ArcTanGent, Euroblast, Radar and more.

A Flower to Water is Playgrounded’s third full-length offering and sees the band thriving in their creative relationship with Pelagic Records. Recorded and produced by the band across multiple studios back home in Athens, Playgrounded enlisted the help of longtime collaborators C. Cederberg (Leprous, Anathema) who mixed the album at Cederberg Studios in Kristiansand, Norway and George Tanderø (Madrugada, Satyricon, Jaga Jazzist) who mastered it in Oslo.

An ever sharper refinement of the quintet’s inimitable process, which sees the band build splinters of noise into huge, sprawling soundscapes inspired in part by the work of experimental sound artists like German composer Orson Hentschel; A Flower to Water welcomes the emotional and physical toll of loss into the melee. Lead single ‘Counting Embers’ erupts with all of Playgrounded’s discordant distortion before abruptly folding back into itself, leaving just frontman Stavros Markonis’ growling baritone alone in your ear. From there the song begins to rebuild itself, but slowly, tentatively as Playgrounded incorporate the weight of silence into their sonic palette before one final, cataclysmic chorus. Second single 'Snow', a dreamy beat in 15/16, quietly unravels Playgrounded's electronic introspective core, stripped of the heavy tones that usually adorn it.

This profound sense of patience is keenly felt throughout the album. The deliberate spaces between each hammerblow guitar riff, pulsing bass line or hypnotic drum groove; each heavy, breathless pause and fizzing glitchy whisper all tell of unspoken loss and absence as an indelible part of A Flower to Water and indeed of Playgrounded forever more. In marking this absence however, in embracing loss head on, Playgrounded reify memory in defiance of neglect. By extracting such a colossal, breathtaking piece of work from a seemingly unassuming collection of sounds, clips and sonics; the quintet slow time to a standstill to present grief in bloom; a beautiful, perpetual flower with its roots in loved ones lost.

FOR FANS OF

Karnivool, Katatonia, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, Moderat, The Ocean, Vola, Leprous, Skyharbor, Anathema