Santa Fe Americana-rock duo Whiskey Flower – Holly Lucille and Julie Neumark, bandmates and life partners of eighteen years – drop their third EP, Double Yellow Lines, on March 27th. The project was recorded live at Grammy-winner John Would’s Los Angeles studio, the same Would who produced Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, and the choice to capture live performances rather than overdub everything into submission was clearly intentional. Drummer Kristen Gleeson-Prata (Børns) and Would himself on electric guitar, banjo, and lap steel fill out the sound. It follows their 2023 debut “Righteous Indignation” and 2024’s “Why Not?” – nominated for Best Rock Song at the Hollywood Independent Music Awards – and arrives with real momentum behind it: eight of their original songs appeared in Season 1 of Middlehood on Prime Video and Tubi, one of which was submitted for Emmy consideration.
This EP is surprisingly refreshing, though the sonic textures used on it are not new per se, but the way they are utilized is. Lyrically, it’s a very powerful record. Especially the title track. That’s my favorite song on the EP personally because the pacing of it is perfect. The way it starts and the way it evolves is just flawless – it’s a timeless feeling song.
It’s far from the catchiest song on the record, though. That award goes to “Stop Stereo” hands down. It’s a song that celebrates individuality. Thematically, it’s about how a person is almost never what they seem. There is always more going on under the surface because almost no human is that shallow. We are a collection of hundreds of thousands of experiences so naturally we can’t really fit into one box no matter how hard we try either to be accepted or to make sense of others. Though it is useful evolutionarily to look for patterns, one should recognize how limited that ability is when it comes to humans.
“Truth & Consequence” is where the EP stretches outward beyond the personal and looks at the wider landscape. It surveys the cultural divide without planting a flag on either side, which is harder to pull off than it sounds – it lands more as a pulse check than a protest song, and that restraint is what gives it weight. The drums anchor everything with real force, and the melody carries frustration and hope in equal measure without tipping too far in either direction. “Abilene” then brings things back inward, written as a letter to Neumark’s 2010 solo chapter and a Texas tour that never happened. Lucille’s bass lines do heavy emotional lifting here, and the duet harmonies between the two give the song an intimacy that suits the subject matter – grief becoming gratitude, self-doubt sitting alongside stubborn belief. It closes the EP on something that feels genuinely hard-won.
Four songs in, Double Yellow Lines makes a strong case that Whiskey Flower are hitting their stride. The live recording approach paid off – this sounds like a band fully comfortable in each other’s orbit, and that chemistry is audible in every track. With a release party already lined up in Santa Fe, this one deserves the room to breathe that a live setting will give it.
