Los Angeles-based band The Pretty Flowers are excited to announce their new album Never Felt Bitter, out March 27 via Chicago’s Forge Again Records (pre-order). Today, the band is sharing the album’s lead single, “Came Back Kicking.”
On the song, vocalist and guitarist Noah Green says, “‘Came Back Kicking’ was one of the first songs I wrote after moving from the Los Angeles Koreatown neighborhood where I’d lived for 13 years to the sleepy foothill city of Sierra Madre in 2024. Inspired equally by my new surroundings, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the ‘big music’ of The Waterboys, I wanted something that felt direct and had a lot of room to breathe musically, something that, in some other decade or dimension, could have been a hit on the radio. As a band, we each quickly figured out what the song needed and added our individual stamp to it to bring it to life. Lyrically, it’s about accepting your place in the world and acknowledging the bones of history that are always beneath our feet.”
That relocation proved formative for Never Felt Bitter, The Pretty Flowers’ upcoming full-length album and their first for Forge Again Records. Trading sirens and street noise for the quiet sprawl of the San Gabriel Mountains gave Green a sense of space that reshaped his songwriting. “I’d just never had space like that before,” he says. “It changed how I was writing.”
That expansion is felt throughout the record. The band’s power-pop foundation remains intact, but it’s reinforced by a heavier physicality and sharpened urgency—from the towering hooks of “Ocean Swimming” and the buzzsaw rush of “Never Felt Bitter (We Burn)” to the industrial pulse of “Ring True” and the ferocious momentum of “To Be So Cool.” Recorded at Adam Lasus’s Studio Red in North Hollywood and in a borrowed hilltop house overlooking the Pacific, the songs are built to match their wide-screen settings, with slow builds like “Thief of Time” cresting into tidal-wave choruses.
Lyrically, Never Felt Bitter moves through anxiety, regret, and resolve via vivid, fragmentary images that linger long after the final chord. While the band avoids direct emulation, echoes of The Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, and Superchunk drift through the record, folded into a sound that feels both familiar and newly forceful. Written and recorded by four musicians balancing day jobs and devotion, the album captures The Pretty Flowers operating as a true unit—finding release, connection, and conviction in loud, communal songs at a moment when the world feels increasingly unsteady.
The album’s sense of scale extends beyond the music itself. Its cover image comes from Control Zone, Bonnie Donahue and Warner Wada’s landmark photo essay documenting a family living in Belfast during The Troubles, discovered by Green while browsing a Boston bookshop. That tension between private endurance and wider social unrest came into sharp focus in April 2025, when the band debuted “Thief of Time” on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall during the 50501 protests. In front of tens of thousands, a song born from doubt transformed into an anthem of collective release, underscoring a record that feels deeply attuned to both personal reckoning and the wider moment it inhabits.
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