Photo by: Robyn Skinner
A wilting plant isn’t necessarily dying. Sometimes it simply needs different conditions. That distinction becomes the emotional backbone of Dogviolet’s debut EP Wilting, a four-track exploration of what happens when people are expected to flourish inside environments that repeatedly work against them.
For the London quartet, nature becomes both imagery and argument. Flowers, trees and botanical references weave through songs about inherited trauma, misogyny, familial pressure and social collapse, allowing Dogviolet to move between intensely personal experiences and much wider frustrations without losing the connection between them.
Musically, Wilting thrives on similar contrasts. Post-punk abrasion meets shoegaze atmosphere, gothic darkness and grunge weight, while folk-inflected melodies occasionally surface beneath towering guitars. The record can feel spectral one moment and brutally physical the next.
‘Daughter’ demonstrates that tension particularly well. Written around the expectations placed upon the eldest daughter within a family, its floating verses eventually rupture into biting guitars and thunderous drums. Naz Toorabally’s vocal moves with them, shifting from haunted restraint towards confrontation as pressures that initially feel internal become impossible to contain.
That movement from quiet discomfort towards something louder runs throughout Wilting. ‘Fig Leaves’ turns its attention towards misogyny and feminist awakening through dark grunge textures, while ‘Black Walnut’ widens the lens further, confronting societal breakdown and failed leadership with psychedelic flourishes and theatrical urgency.
Then there is ‘Daisy Crowns’, which looks backwards. Its shoegaze-influenced haze captures the bittersweet distance between childhood freedom and adult responsibility, providing a softer kind of ache within an EP otherwise filled with sharper forms of resistance.
What connects these subjects is the question of environment. Toorabally describes Wilting as being about “not losing hope in the face of adversity”, recognising that a plant struggling to survive isn’t necessarily inherently weak. Give it the right conditions and recovery remains possible. Applied to people, that metaphor becomes more uncomfortable: how much of what we consider personal failure is actually the consequence of families, relationships or societies that never provided the conditions necessary to thrive?
Dogviolet never turn that question into empty optimism. Hope exists here, but it has to fight for space. That makes the EP’s heavier evolution feel purposeful. Produced by the band’s Ella Patenall and recorded and mixed alongside Tom Hill, Wilting retains the ethereal quality central to Dogviolet while giving its moments of anger considerably more force. The beauty doesn’t disguise the brutality; the two sharpen one another.
The relationship between those extremes also reflects a band becoming increasingly assured in its identity. Toorabally and Patenall’s creative partnership stretches back more than fifteen years, while the current quartet, completed by Lauren Allpress and Margot Cintract, have developed Dogviolet into a compelling presence within London’s alternative scene.
Ultimately, Wilting isn’t really an EP about dying. It’s about questioning the conditions under which we’re asked to live. Across four tracks, Dogviolet recognise that survival and flourishing are not the same thing. Sometimes resilience means enduring where you’re planted. Sometimes it means demanding better soil.
