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Rolling Stone presents: Flower Face for the first time in Germany
Ruby McKinnon, who has been building her own universe of gentle voice and benevolent guitar sounds under the name Flower Face for over a decade, is coming to Germany in November for two headline shows. ROLLING STONE presents.
With six albums, the Canadian is anything but a newcomer, even if her path to international recognition was a quiet one for a long time. It all started in Windsor, Ontario, in the late Tumblr era. In which McKinnon read through the Bandcamp profiles of young songwriters recording at home and decided he could do it too. Her father, who worked in radio, had simple recording equipment in the house and showed her how to use it. What followed was a series of DIY publications that she uploaded onto the Internet without expectation – and which found an international, almost secret listenership over the years. Finally, 2017 saw the release of Fever Dreams, the first album with which she stepped out of the bedroom setup; The conceptually composed breakup album Baby Teeth followed in 2018. But the real breakthrough came in 2022 with The Shark in Your Water, lavishly arranged and critically acclaimed.
Her current album “Girl Prometheus” (2024) is a separation album and self-identification at the same time. Between whispered confessions and great, almost orchestral highs, a vulnerable, consciously staged cosmos unfolds in which string arrangements compete against sharp-edged lyrics. Stereogum consequently listed her as an “Artist To Watch” in the summer of 2024, and Paste listed her as “The Best of What’s Next”.
From synthetic sound to emotional climax
Songs like “Pushing Daisies” are particularly impressive with their climactic structure, which culminates in a large production with the help of strings. It was all the more surprising that McKinnon was initially not at all happy with the sound. She initially wrote the strings in notation software, whose synthetic sound she detested, according to Stereogum. She described the later recording with real musicians in the studio as the emotional highlight of the production.
If you would like to experience this sound profile of strings, piano and guitar live, you can do so on November 12th, 2026 in Cologne (YUCA) and on November 14th, 2026 in Berlin (LARK).
