Biography
Forget sweeping narratives, elaborate concepts or grand gestures: with his spellbinding debut as flypaper, Rory Sear simply shares a snapshot of a year. Meditating on the precariousness of life in ones late-20s, and transforming the quiet mundanity of the everyday into something profound, Forget The Rush is a timely reminder to stop and take a breath, expressed in the bittersweet, sun-dappled vernacular of the singer-songwriter tradition.
If Sear’s creative vision seems out of step with a world moving at a million miles an hour, you can understand his motivation. Thanks to his father’s work, Sear’s was a particularly peripatetic childhood, divided between Scotland, North Carolina, Portsmouth and Somerset. One of his key emotional anchors during that period was guitar, which he first picked up aged seven and largely taught himself, bar a handful of classical lessons. The brash immediacy of pop-punk proved his earliest love, before he fell for the more sophisticated, narrative-driven songwriting of Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman in his teens.
You could say he drew on both schools of songwriting in Beachtape, the Brighton-based DIY four-piece he fronted while studying. Bringing a brilliantly breezy sensibility to melodic indie-rock, the quartet quietly fizzled out during the pandemic, following two EPs and a fistful of singles. Subsequently, Sear set about developing solo material as flypaper, stealing his pseudonym from a song by influential 90s noise-rockers Brainiac.
As Sear explains, flypaper actually began life as a piano project. “I was obsessed with Randy Newman so I bought a keyboard and had some friends help me record songs with a saxophone session guy.” He shudders, “It’s probably the worst idea I ever had.” Confronted by material he couldn’t stand behind, Sear scrapped the entire EP and started afresh, sans-piano. In his haste to make up for lost time, he stopped second-guessing his songwriting and stumbled upon flypaper’s sleepy, acoustic guitar-led aesthetic.
Sear shared debut EP big nada in August 2023, which was re-released in 2024 via influential, Stockholm-based indie PNKSLM (ShitKid, Chemtrails, Sudakistan), as a companion piece to his second EP, another orbit. Together, the 12 tracks chronicled the first year of the project, with winningly lo-fi indie-rock redolent of Elliott Smith. If big nada/another orbit is evocative of Either/Or-era Smith, Forget The Rush feels more spiritually akin to XO, offering meatier arrangements, albeit with far fewer personnel.
Remaining faithful to his DIY roots, Sear wrote, recorded and self-produced the album in his bedroom across the space of six months, playing every instrument except for drums. Listen carefully and you may well hear muffled voices or the distant slam of doors in his London house-share, both of which only enhance the sense of intimacy communicated in Sear’s diaristic lyrics and world-weary semi-whisper.
Album-opener ‘Fold’ finds him feeling rudderless, reeling off a stream of consciousness of conflicting actions summed up in lines like, “I wanna run, I wanna focus, I wanna make sense, I wanna think less.” ‘Oh Well’ develops the theme, seeing Sear resolve, “I swear
I'm gonna make a change this year,” over one of the album’s most undeniable melodies, hewn from ambling acoustic guitar and sparse piano, and climaxing in a sonorous electric guitar solo. During ‘On Your Mind’ he sounds chastened, tracing the acrimonious collapse of a relationship over gently dawdling guitar.
Throughout, there’s a sense of a neat resolution being just out of reach, but it’s perhaps never as clearly communicated as it is on ‘Come Down’. Featuring backing vocals from Swedish outfit 7ebra, its appeal to “forget the rush” is echoed in its languorous arrangement, pairing strummed chords with chiming top notes.
By his own admission, Sear is fascinated by the idea of juxtaposing quietly melancholic lyrics with bright melodies. It’s a technique he returns to again and again, semi-obscuring his confessions under the laid-back, banjo-flecked alt-folk of ‘Circus’ (“The joke that never ends / At what expense?”) or ‘Quite Right’’s hazy alt-country ( “I don't want to watch tv [to] see the strangers living my dreams / Or the latest tragedy in a terrifying HD quality.”) And yet for all its talk of change or the lack thereof, Sear sees stasis as less scary than it might sound. “I talk a lot about going backwards or not progressing but I don't think it's based on a fear of that. It's more about being fine with it, being aware of it, being content.”
Equal parts tender and truthful, Forget The Rush is as much a soundtrack to escape to, as it is an exploration of feeling unmoored. Take a step back from your reality and listen.
