Your Best Boy

Shpresa Lleshaj and Cole Randall came together in 2012 through an exchange of comments on Soundcloud. Lleshaj is from Kosovo, having fled to Sweden with her family as a child to escape war, while Randall is from Minneapolis, USA — and ever since, the name Flora Cash has carried a certain transatlantic estrangement, the feeling of two people recognizing each other across a screen. Their music sounds like two people, each having wandered on their own, letting their guard down after finding one another. The band’s melodies carry a faintly DIY recording texture — acoustic guitar, simple drums, and of course Lleshaj’s slightly fragile voice — giving off a strange beauty that is both candid and careful at once, a quality Flora Cash has never lost since their breakout song “You’re Somebody Else.”

Their newly released EP, Your Best Boy, is a work of increasingly settled style — plain-spoken yet faintly hesitant, its mood restrained and well-judged. The interplay of guitar and drums shows its own character across the different tracks. In the title track “Your Best Boy,” two verses lead into a chorus sung over and over — “I’m your best boy” repeated again and again — with harmonies that show a mature level of production. The line tucked at the end of a verse, “Don’t you wanna run?”, reads like an unsettled note on a feeling — at times certain, wanting to sing the promise with more conviction, at other times adrift, as if not yet ready to hand over complete trust.