And so it goes…: Liana Flores, country girl in the city
Six tracks of bossa nova and folk-pop, recorded in LA with Paul Butler, and shaped by London and a first tour.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 6 2026 · 2 min readAnd so it goes… runs under eighteen minutes, and Liana Flores spends none of it on decoration. Six songs of bossa nova and folk-pop, built on a guitar and a voice that moves easily between registers. It is the cleanest thing she has put out, and the most restless.
Flores is British-Brazilian, raised in South Norfolk by a Brazilian mother and a British father, and she came to the guitar through bossa nova: Astrud Gilberto, Gal Costa, João Gilberto. Two self-released EPs arrived in 2018 and 2019, then "rises the moon" went viral in 2021 while she was finishing a zoology degree at St Andrews. Verve signed her, and Flower of the Soul, her debut album, landed in June 2024. Then came the touring, and a support slot for Ichiko Aoba at the Royal Albert Hall on 31 March 2026.
“This record is the story of the country girl moving to the city.”
She recorded it in LA with Paul Butler, and it is out now on Fiction / Verve, released 4 September, with eco-friendly vinyl and a Seaglass green cassette. "This record is the story of the country girl moving to the city," she says, and the songs came out of living in the city and touring for the first time.
The sound is bossa nova meets pop: jazz underneath, and the folk she grew up on. The arrangements leave room. A guitar figure sets the tempo and holds it, the vocal sits forward, and the bass and percussion stay light enough that you hear the strings and the breath.
"So it goes" opens with a shrug of a title and a melody that refuses to be sad about it. "Silvershoes" and "Gemini" follow quick and bright, chasing the strong-melody brief she set herself. "So mysterious" eases the tempo back. "Here to stay" is the long one, just past four minutes, and it earns the room. "The way I say goodbye" closes, and lands differently in a set of songs about leaving.
If you found Flores through "rises the moon", or through the Laufey and Ichiko Aoba shows, this is the one you were waiting for. It sits next to Astrud Gilberto and the gentler end of folk-pop, and it plays at 7am or on a walk with the traffic behind it.
The risk is weight. Eighteen minutes of pretty, nothing heavy, and the middle pair, "Gemini" and "So mysterious", blurs into one texture.
"Here to stay" and "The way I say goodbye" carry the most weight the EP allows. A confident set that never once risks being difficult: 3.5.
