Nanna.B - Don't Come If You Can't Bring No Flowers (2023)

Our lives are based on relationships. We make them, maintain them, end them, remember them. We navigate new relationships via old ones. They’re at the core of everything we do. Don’t Come If You Can’t Bring No Flowers, the latest and third full-length album from Nanna.B, is an intimate look at the lifespan of relationships. When we make ourselves vulnerable in love — romantic or otherwise — we transform ourselves. We may grow, bloom, and eventually wither. Like flowers, a well-known symbol for love and celebration. But also a symbol of regret, of apology, of condolences. Flowers are a symbol of care, a gift acknowledging a person being deserving of the world’s beauty.

On DCIYCBNF, Nanna.B explores her realization that that acknowledgment is a must for her: people we share ourselves with should bring flowers. In arriving at that understanding, she offers listeners sonic flowers of her own. Her 12 songs cover infatuation and lust, separation and longing, loss and acceptance, self-empowerment and self-love. The album is an evolution of Nanna.B’s signature of unusual song structures, lush keys, hypnotic bass lines, ear-catching percussion and visual lyrics combining around layered vocals. Contributions to the album come via features with music legend Raphael Saadiq (“Too Much”) and growing phenomenon Pink Siifu (“Artemis”). Much of the musical contributions are performed by members of the 9-piece jazz band Katalyst.

The majority of the DCIYCBNF was written and produced by Nanna.B. The album aesthetic — from each track’s photography, videos, album art and her one-of-a-kind, handmade merch — was helmed by Nanna.B and her background in visual art. Everything was created in her home in Los Angeles with friends.

“In many ways this is a very naked and intimate project for me, vulnerable but also very powerful. Transmuting something painful into something beautiful, pain into art. Which pretty much describes the process it’s been to write these songs: Alchemy.” - Nanna.B