i give my friends flowers Opens the Portal to His upcoming Album “DOGSTAR 1” With the Chase Hudson-Animated “Pollen” Video
For Jacob Klein, i give my friends flowers has always sounded less like a conventional solo moniker than a philosophy of making things before time changes their meaning. The Asheville-based project officially describes itself as Klein’s creative outlet, with music moving through indie soul, lo-fi folk, dream pop and alt-hip-hop. That porous identity matters on DOGSTAR 1, a forthcoming 12-song album that turns years of upheaval into a strangely luminous indie-pop language rather than a linear diary. Klein’s background as a producer and engineer is audible in the record’s obsessive sense of atmosphere: sounds do not simply accompany the writing; they behave like memories. The album grew from a period marked by caretaking, grief, relocation, the loss of his dog, the end of a long relationship and the devastation Hurricane Helene brought to Asheville in 2024. Yet Klein resists making sorrow the project’s only grammar. Instead, DOGSTAR 1 treats instability as a physical environment, mirrored by its Sirius-inspired title and its larger story of altered timelines, familiar places becoming subtly wrong, and a protagonist learning that “home” may be less a destination than an acceptance of change.
That philosophy crystallizes most vividly in “Pollen,” whose new animated music video arrives today and gives DOGSTAR 1 its clearest visual doorway yet. Created, directed and animated by Chase Hudson, the film sends Jacob and his dog Sparrow through portals, thresholds and collapsing dimensions as an unknown force seems to pull them toward another form. Its announced touchstones are Richard Linklater and Haruki Murakami, a pairing that suits a video where ordinary tenderness keeps slipping into metaphysical dislocation; DOGSTAR 1 is due August 21. Musically, “Pollen” is equally unsettled. Soft cinematic pads and ethereal piano establish a suspended emotional space before heavily processed, sultry vocals and distant reverberant percussion meet an animated drum-and-bass pulse. Klein sounds contemplative while the rhythm keeps moving, as though the production refuses to let introspection become paralysis. Earlier coverage likewise traced the song’s evolution from piano-and-vocal intimacy toward warmer electronic territory, citing Sampha’s LAHAI as a production influence. The lyrics circle uncertainty, solitude and the desire to feel alive without demanding a tidy answer about what comes next. Hudson’s animation amplifies that tension rather than explaining it. Doorways become emotional mechanisms, while changing dimensions externalize the sensation of living through a life that is recognizable but no longer quite the same. “Pollen” becomes a compact thesis for DOGSTAR’s universe, where motion can be frightening, absurd, beautiful and necessary at once.
Across the rest of DOGSTAR 1, Klein keeps changing the furniture without abandoning the room. “Every Moment Something Beautiful Dies” pairs ethereal acoustic guitar with tender pads, playful synths and mid-tempo drums, while a lush, slightly surly lead vocal gives the song its bruised centre. “Cloud-hidden, chamomile” retreats into a warmer pocket of acoustic guitar, laidback percussion and subtle pads, making self-examination feel almost tactile. “Baby Fell In Love With A Star” is more buoyant and peculiar, using bouncy drums, spacey synthesizers and conspicuously Auto-Tuned vocals to turn romantic disorientation into cosmic pop. “Sara’s not a name for dogs” folds chopped vocal samples, gentle drums, airy pads and stacked harmonies around one of the record’s most evocative titles, while “Ashes” drifts through Rhodes-like keys, delicate plucks and feathered percussion with vocals treated as another spectral instrument. These songs reveal why Klein’s decade behind the boards matters: emotional detail can live inside timbre, stereo space and decay just as convincingly as inside a lyric. Even when arrangements grow dense, they rarely feel crowded; each sound seems placed for psychological rather than decorative reasons. Six additional tracks are better discovered inside the album itself, which will be available on Augus 21st. If “Pollen” is the portal, DOGSTAR 1 appears designed as the world on the other side — intimate but strange, grief-soaked without surrendering to grief, and convinced that choosing love despite impermanence can become its own quiet form of transcendence.
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For Jacob Klein, i give my friends flowers has always sounded less like a conventional solo moniker than a philosophy of making things before time changes their meaning. The Asheville-based project officially describes itself as Klein’s creative outlet, with music moving through indie soul, lo-fi folk, dream pop and alt-hip-hop…