Consequence’s recurring feature series CoSign highlights a rising artist that’s captured our eyes and ears with a great new release. This month, we’re celebrating the Canadian rock duo Softcult and their politically-charged debut album, When a Flower Doesn’t Grow, which arrives on Friday, January 30th.
There’s a certain kind of quiet that’s more unsettling than any scream. Phoenix Arn-Horn, who alongside their twin sibling Mercedes forms the Canadian duo Softcult, understands this instinctively. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone quietly and calmly was kind of reading you the riot act as opposed to yelling in your face,” they explain. “It’s like 10 times scarier. I feel like that’s our vibe sometimes.”
While shoegaze bands are often known for their wall-of-sound volume tactics, there’s a clever amount of distance employed in Softcult’s style. When a Flower Doesn’t Grow, the duo’s long-awaited debut album, relishes in the contrast between delivering harsh truths about trauma, oppression, and growth and cloaking those ideas in a pillowy-soft exterior; throughout its 11 tracks, the album channels windswept beauty and fierce intensity, containing Mercedes and Phoenix’s most illuminating meditations on personal and systemic injustice yet.
The record takes its title from Alexander Den Heijer’s quote, “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” The image of decay and rebirth is evocative, and Softcult have no problem channeling the awesome power of natural beauty. They can escalate towards punk-like aggression, exemplified by heavier tracks “Tired!” and “She Said, He Said,” but for the most part, the justified anger in Softcult’s sound is less an outburst and more a powerful summoning. “We’re both Scorpios, so every emotion feels like a force of nature,” Mercedes says with a laugh. “For a lot of these songs, it kind of felt like the dam was ready to break and it did overflow. But in a way, it’s not this kind of violent outburst. It’s more just empowering and freeing to do it.”
Take “16/25,” one of the lead singles from When a Flower Doesn’t Grow (and one of the best songs of 2025). Over a quick, hypnotic drum line from Phoenix and woozy, fuzzy guitar work from Mercedes, they bemoan the audacity of 25-year-old men attempting to date 16-year-old girls — an unfortunately common move from groomers and predators throughout music scenes everywhere. “She doesn’t know how to love you/ she doesn’t know how to drive,” sings Mercedes as the chords turn from sweet to sour. It’s a detail so specific, so damning in its implications, that it makes the imbalanced dynamic at the song’s center impossible to ignore, even if the music behind it radiates with warmth.
Though Phoenix, who wrote much of the song’s lyrics, confesses they don’t have a drivers license, they emphasize that this detail is not about driving — it’s about power. “A 16-year-old doesn’t have the same life experience that a 26-year-old has,” Mercedes adds. “And doesn’t know how to handle certain situations in a relationship. There’s an obvious power dynamic there that’s getting abused, and I’m sure that it is a problem in every industry, but in the music industry — or just entertainment in general — it just seems to be kind of accepted and it’s gross.”
