Seemingly emerging from his bedroom, Flypaper mainman Rory Sear has announced that the debut album “Forget The Rush” will be released on 7th November via PNKSLM, and the lead single ‘Oh Well‘ is out now. Sear says, “This is a snapshot of a year. … the precariousness of life in one’s late-20s, and trying to transform the quiet mundanity of the everyday into something profound”. He explains the background to the project, “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. It’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever had.” Confronted by material he couldn’t stand behind, he scrapped the entire EP and started afresh, sans piano, and in his haste to make up for lost time, he stopped second-guessing his songwriting and stumbled upon his sleepy, acoustic guitar-led aesthetic.
If Sears’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, it was a particularly peripatetic childhood, divided between Scotland, North Carolina, Portsmouth, and Somerset. One of his key emotional anchors during that period was the 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.
He drew on both schools of songwriting as a member of Beachtape, the Brighton-based DIY four-piece he fronted while studying. Bringing a 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. 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”.
Rory Sear says of the single: “‘Oh Well’ is a reflective song – inward looking, looking at yourself or situations, and maybe laughing at how tragic they can be or just coming to terms with that. ‘Oh well, I guess that’s life’ is quite a simple sentiment, maybe said with a bit of irony, but still somewhat optimistic, maybe a little more optimistic than other songs on the record.” You can preorder the record from this link.
“Forget The Rush” Tracklist:
1. Fold
2. Oh Well
3. Come Down
4. Death Of Me
5. On Your Mind
6. Life Is Strange
7. Slow Down
8. Quite Right
9. Circus
Flypaper UK Dates 2025:
23rd August – London, UK – The Ivy House
28th August – Brighton, UK – Green Door Store
10th September – London, UK – Avalon Cafe
17th September – Bedford, UK – Esquires supporting Whitney K
20th November – Oxford, UK – The Library
25th November – Brighton, UK – Prince Albert
26th November – London, UK – Sebright Arms
