Exploding Flowers @ The Waiting Room, London (Live Review) ^Featured

Exploding Flowers

The Waiting Room

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

The Wallflowers Are Ready To Bloom

The LA guitar-pop veterans bring three albums worth of jangling history — and a glimpse of what comes next — to The Waiting Room.

There are worse things than playing to a disappointingly small room. For Exploding Flowers, the consolation is that The Waiting Room feels almost perfectly suited to their particular brand of guitar-pop: intimate, unflashy and just a little bit tucked away from the main event.

And if the turnout is the first thing to disappoint, it’s also pretty much where the disappointment ends.

The Los Angeles quartet arrive sounding impressively rehearsed and, more importantly, optimistic. This is music built on the belief that a good guitar line, a proper rhythm section and a melody worth remembering remain perfectly adequate reasons to start a band. In 2026, that almost feels radical.

The set reaches back to their self-titled 2011 debut with ‘Capturing The New Frontier’, dips into 2020’s Stumbling Blocks with ‘A Daunting Thought’, then spends considerable time mining last year’s Watermelon/Peacock: ‘All In Stride’, ‘A Colour Box’, ‘The Grass Grows On’, ‘Beneath Our Feet’, ‘Life On A Timeline’, ‘Across A Sea’ and ‘Build A Bridge’ all get their moment.

For anyone already inside the Exploding Flowers universe, it’s a gratifying reminder of just how coherent that catalogue has become. For newcomers, it’s a pretty good argument for going back and doing your homework.

The oddest thing about watching them live is just how contemporary they sound without seemingly making any attempt to sound contemporary. Close your eyes and the effect is immediate: chiming guitars, subtle keyboards, a locked-in rhythm section and melodies that seem to arrive fully formed. Open them again and there’s a strange disconnect. In a musical landscape increasingly obsessed with blacked-out aesthetics, maximalist noise and looking like you've just escaped from a distressed denim factory, Exploding Flowers are dressed like a band who have accidentally wandered in from another decade.

But listen to the music and they’re arguably ahead of the curve. The newer material — including ‘The Middle Way’, ‘Space In Between’ and the recently released ‘Spinning Carousel’ — sits comfortably alongside the older songs, suggesting that the forthcoming fourth album isn't going to represent some dramatic left turn. Instead, Exploding Flowers appear to be refining a language they've been speaking for years.

There are no great surprises in the set, but there are no spoilers either. The band move through the songs with the rhythm and confidence of a particularly good house band, never overplaying their hand. It’s an entirely pleasant experience — perhaps too pleasant at times.

Because here's the nagging question: what makes Exploding Flowers stick out from the crowd?

They have the craft. They have the history. They have the influences — Big Star, The Soft Boys, Paisley Underground, Flying Nun — without sounding like a tribute act. And Watermelon/Peacock demonstrated that the songwriting can be genuinely gorgeous.

What they could use, perhaps, are a few more hooks capable of kicking the door down.

For now, Exploding Flowers remain the wallflowers of guitar-pop: quietly excellent, slightly overlooked and seemingly unconcerned by either fact. But with a fourth album on the way, perhaps it's time people started looking over. For now, they remain a quietly compelling band: familiar enough to feel like an old friend, strange enough to make you want to listen again. Pleasant? Absolutely. Entertaining? Certainly. But perhaps it’s time these Flowers grow outside their comfort zone.