“Will you be my bouquet?” sounds romantic until you reach the bridge where Dorian Park and Jack Keck admit “I’ve got nothing left in the tank / I’m circling the drain.” This isn’t a love song—it’s a transfer of dependency from substances to a person who probably can’t save you either. The New York/New Jersey duo describes “Bouquet” as processing addiction and recovery, specifically the moment when you ask someone to keep the pain away after pills and powder stop working.
The imagery starts graphic: “Been spending my nights sniffing ash / Losing my grip, choking on the past.” Park and Keck are ex-members of CRUELLA, and they’ve channeled years apart into something that blends emo, post-hardcore, and screamo without flinching from the ugliness. Lines like “You jumped on that pill like a hand grenade” and “You’re an infection that I can’t kick” treat addiction as violence—both self-inflicted and received. The metaphor of being “a piano without any keys / All my strings are out of tune” captures what substances do: dismantle the instrument until you can’t remember what you were built to do.
What makes the song devastating is how it acknowledges the selfishness while continuing anyway. “Am I nothing to you? / Because I’m nothing to me” repeats through the outro, and the answer doesn’t matter—the question itself reveals someone who’s already accepted their own worthlessness and needs external validation to exist at all. The title’s floral imagery gets corrupted immediately: “We can shed all our petals / And say we meant to do it that way.” Recovery looks like growth until you realize you’re just finding more beautiful ways to fall apart. JOY DRIP may be sober now, but they remember being hollow, and “Bouquet” documents what happens when love becomes the new substance you can’t afford to lose.
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