Flower Face – Kill The Muse

Today, Montreal goth dream-pop artist Flower Face (Ruby McKinnon) announces her highly anticipated new album, Kill the Muse, arriving February 5th via Nettwerk, and shares the second single “Better the Devil.”

Flower Face reflects: “I remember so vividly the moment I wrote this song. I was walking home from the metro station after spending the day at my producer Marcus’s studio working on the finishing touches of my last album. I was living alone, and I had spent the better part of the last year isolating myself as much as possible (when I wasn’t partying or pursuing awful, destructive relationships). My friends had all started a sobriety kick on January 1st, which I wasn’t inclined to join. It was the dead of winter, the worst time of year, when the sun sets at 4 PM, and I spent most evenings counting down the minutes until I could go to sleep. That night a friend was supposed to stay over, but she canceled, and I knew it was because she was pursuing her own awful, destructive on-and-off relationship. Everything felt so bleak. I got home with my nose running and my hands numb and sat down in the dark in my studio and wrote this song… It’s hard for me to listen to this song, even now. I feel so sad for that small, scared, trapped person that I was. I couldn’t see a way out. We saved some parts of that original demo I recorded in the moment, because they were so raw, painful, and unflinching. It felt like the first time I was really reckoning with myself and the downward freefall I had found myself in. Really, it felt like the first time I was being fully honest in a song.”

After sharing the expansive new song “Bad Dream” in August, Flower Face returns with “Better the Devil,” a song that delves into the album’s central question of what is pain really worth?  Built on nervy fingerpicked guitar that gives way to a storm of strings and distorted bass, the track explores the heavy inertia of lingering in bad habits while everyone else moves on, touching on what McKinnon describes as the “familiarity in the pain” and feeling “stuck here with yourself.”

Kill the Muse follows 2024’s Girl Prometheus, a breakout moment for Flower Face that earned Stereogum’s Artist to Watch designation, Paste’s Best of What’s Next feature, and praise from AV Club, Billboard, CBC Music, The New York Times, and more, along with standout sets at All Things Go Toronto, Sommo Festival, Phillips Backyard, and others alongside artists like Lorde and Father John Misty. That momentum carries into her debut North American headline tour, now wrapping up with SOLD-OUT shows at Public Records in Brooklyn on November 5th, presented by Stereogum, and Schubas in Chicago on November 7th. From there, she heads to the UK and Europe, where her London show sold out in under an hour, and dates in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Cologne are also SOLD OUT.

As far back as her debut singles on Bandcamp, Ruby McKinnon approached music the way a blacksmith forges a sword: with thunderous blows of a hammer and searing flame. Whether cruel heartbreak or her own battles with illness, including a stage three cancer diagnosis at just seventeen, the songwriter behind Flower Face learned she could draw magic out of the most painful moments. On new album Kill The Muse, the Montreal artist confronts that self-destructive creative mythology head-on.

McKinnon wrote most of these songs while in the studio for Girl Prometheus, Flower Face’s acclaimed 2024 album about the “kind of heartbreak that could kill you.” Having exhausted that well of pain, she set out to refill it. “No matter what I did, or how much I hurt myself, it all felt worth it if I could get a song out of it,” she says. By the time she returned to the studio, that justification had worn thin. “My body and my heart have carried me through things in my life that have felt unsurvivable, so why am I betraying myself, betraying my body and heart by doing things that hurt me so much?”

Lead single “Bad Dream” views a broken relationship through a dreamy haze, McKinnon realizing the connection was only ever an illusion, a crutch. New single “Better the Devil” feels like looking around from the bottom of a bottle to find that everyone has moved on. “All my friends are getting sober / I guess that means I’m drinking alone,” she sings, before racing fingerpicked guitar is battered down by anxious violin and thunderous distorted bass. One of the first songs written for the new album, Ruby explains, “I was at a point where I could see the problem with the choices I was making, and I kept on making them for a while, but this song was the moment where something shifted. From there, I started working on this new album — writing some new songs, but also returning to some that I’d already written and reworking them with more clarity and more of a reflection on where I was when I had first started writing them.”

Kill The Muse isn’t about abandoning the darkness that made McKinnon such a compelling songwriter; it’s about refusing to let it define her. “If I want to grow as an artist, I have to learn how to write when I’m in a better place, too,” she says. The sword remains, but now she gets to decide what to do with it.

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