B-Side Guys

Boston’s indie veterans Hallelujah The Hills have built their reputation on confounding expectations. Their latest single, “Fake Flowers at Sunset,” continues this tradition by pairing folk sensibilities with disco rhythms—a combination that shouldn’t work but somehow becomes essential to the song’s underlying thesis about artificial constructs and natural phenomena.

Released as a herald for their ambitious 52-song project DECK, “Fake Flowers at Sunset” functions simultaneously as standalone statement and thematic introduction. Frontman Ryan H. Walsh—whose literary credentials include the acclaimed book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968—brings writerly precision to a composition that questions our reflexive tendency to use nature as relationship shorthand.

The track’s philosophical weight finds perfect counterbalance in Cassie Berman’s haunting guest vocals. Her presence creates a poignant connection to the band’s history—Hallelujah The Hills being among the select few to have toured with Silver Jews—while adding crucial tonal complexity to the song’s examination of love’s contradictory impulses.

This exploration of emotional ambivalence manifests in the production itself. Engineers at Pawtucket’s Machines with Magnets have captured a sound that occupies multiple states simultaneously: intimate yet expansive, folk-rooted yet rhythm-driven, nostalgic yet stubbornly present-tense. The track’s refusal to settle into comfortable categorization mirrors its lyrical interrogation of relationships that resist easy natural metaphors.

Behind this single lies a remarkably democratic creative process. Funded through Patreon with supporters credited as executive producers, DECK represents a direct artistic conversation between band and audience—an increasingly rare dynamic in today’s algorithmic music landscape. This community-driven approach feels particularly fitting for a band once described by Spin as “criminally underappreciated” despite consistent critical acclaim.

“Fake Flowers at Sunset” arrives as both invitation and challenge—a doorway into Hallelujah The Hills’ most ambitious project yet, and a thoughtful provocation about the language we use to describe our most complicated emotions. As the first card played from their upcoming four-suit opus, it suggests that DECK will be worth the two-and-a-half-year wait.