Softcult, formed by twins Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn, will release its debut album When a Flower Doesn't Grow on Friday.Kaylene Widdoes/Supplied
A debut album is always a statement: a shout into the crowded music marketplace that announces your presence and what you stand for. Naturally, debuts usually tend to show up at the start of a career. Not for Softcult.
Through patience, practice and a long run in a major-label band that started when they were teenagers, the 32-year-old Kitchener, Ont., twins Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn will release their debut album as Softcult on Friday. Draped in the gauzy, wall-of-sound guitar and vocal textures of eighties and nineties shoegaze and dream pop, When a Flower Doesn’t Grow is both massive and refined, DIY in attitude but meticulous in its craftmanship.
The Arn-Horns don’t seem to mind that it took them a little while to get here. “Not everybody gets a second chance at having a band after already being in one for 10 years,” says Phoenix, Softcult’s drummer-vocalist and the album’s producer.
Their first band was Courage My Love. Formed in 2009 and directly reflective of the twins’ teenage pop-punk influences, the band’s sound quickly earned them a deal with Warner Music Canada. But over the course of the 2010s, they became disillusioned with the expectations of the major-label system. Their personal influences were shifting toward harder-edged sounds and more boundary-pushing philosophies bred by feminist punk.
But Courage My Love didn’t sound like that. Their songs started sounding even less like punk, even, and more like the glimmering, indie rock-leaning radio pop of The 1975 and Haim.
“You can hear us losing our confidence a bit, because we were getting told, ‘Oh, you have to make something that will work on the radio,’ or we’re sending songs and demos to our label that are getting shot down, or not getting a positive reaction,” says Mercedes, vocalist and guitarist in both bands.
They began hoping to be dropped from their contract, Phoenix says. And in 2020, as the world shifted priorities to reckon with COVID-19 lockdowns, they managed an exit. So the twins hunkered down. They set up a home studio and began writing and recording for themselves.
They’d grown up by then; so had their tastes. Not to say that pop-punk doesn’t have its place among tastemakers – the Arn-Horns had just widened the scope of their listening. They found inspiration in the layered recordings of the Cocteau Twins, the buzz-saw guitars of My Bloody Valentine, and Slowdive’s jangly walls of sound. They took cues from grunge, too, though a more obvious early-nineties influence is the riot grrrl feminist punk movement. Once Mercedes got Phoenix into the band Bikini Kill, an ethos took shape atop their sound. They’ve described their music as riotgaze.
The Arn-Horns focus on themes in their music that they had trouble to get across back when their music was geared for the radio.Kaylene Widdoes/Supplied
The Arn-Horns became prolific home recordists, unleashing a handful of singles, and then a tetralogy of EPs, starting in 2021. Their songs interrogate the ways toxic masculinity permeates society, with a healthy dose of anti-capitalism – themes they struggled to get across back when their music was targeted for the radio.
“With the state of the world now, it almost feels impossible to look away and turn a blind eye,” Mercedes says. “Even though art can be a nice escape, we tend to use it as a form of catharsis.”
The past five – 15, really – years of all this work coalesce on When A Flower Doesn’t Grow, which is being released by Easy Life Records, a DIY label run by people they first met in the Courage My Love days. (They still have the same managers as those days, too.) Built-in hits such as Naive and 16/25 – referencing a problematic age-gap relationship that is all-too-commonly found in punk circles – bring the Arn-Horns’ vision for Softcult into full focus.
Flower‘s release benefits even further from its timing. Thanks to eager communities on TikTok and elsewhere online, shoegaze is experiencing a full-on revival. So, too, is hardcore punk, a once-very-male subgenre whose aggressiveness permeates the band’s sound, too. “A rising tide carries all boats,” Phoenix says.
Now deep into their careers, Mercedes and Phoenix have cast aside the dreams of major-label stardom and are thrilled to make art they can stand behind. “The goal,” Mercedes says, “is to maintain a pure and honest relationship with the art. And to never lose sight of our identity as artists again.”