Apex Manor Returns with “Asked & Answered” (premiere)

Apex Manor is the indie rock project of Ross Flournoy, formerly of the LA indie rock band the Broken West. After the project’s debut back in 2011 with The Year of Magical Drinking, Flournoy found the drinking wasn’t so magical after all, and it was messing up his life. Moving back to his hometown of Memphis, Flournoy got sober and worked in his father’s pimento cheese business.

Sufficiently healed, Flournoy returned to LA and, in 2016, began writing
Apex Manor songs again. “It took me five or six years to learn how to rewrite songs, or at least how to write them sober. But in a span of nine months, I wrote something like 35 songs,” says Flournoy. That productivity has resulted in the new Apex Manor album Heartbreak City, releasing on 31 May via Merge. The record deals with the troubles that lead one down a dark path, but also uses these issues to come to terms with the past and Flournoy’s journey to a better place.

Break-up issues loom large on Heartbreak City, as the title would suggest, and it’s that particular trouble that powers Apex Manor’s latest single “Asked & Answered”. Like other songs on the album, “Asked & Answered” is steeped in the music of early 1990s alternative rock, but fronted with modern sensibilities in a way that negates the expected nostalgia one might feel hearing those sounds.

Director Cooper Vacheron says, “The video is a nostalgic ode to being a bored little kid. It’s home video meets undead cops? Ross allowed us total creative freedom to run around and make what we felt matched the energy of the song, and we had a great time doing it.”