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Flower Face

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Ruby McKinnon's Ontario project, writing hushed folk with a gothic streak and building it out into dream pop. An audience found largely online.

Ruby McKinnon was born in Windsor, Ontario, to a father who worked in radio as a band musician and a mother who wrote short fiction. She began classical piano training at five and stayed in lessons and conservatory study until she was sixteen, before turning toward the DIY songwriting that would become Flower Face.

The stage name came from a nickname her grandmother used for her. As a teenager active on Tumblr, McKinnon posted lo-fi recordings to Bandcamp from her bedroom, close-mic'd guitar and voice carrying lyrics built from fairy tales, girlhood and death, and slowly built an audience through the platform alone.

At seventeen she was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer and went through chemotherapy, an experience she has said pushed her to commit to music full-time rather than delay it. Her album Fever Dreams followed roughly two years after the diagnosis.

Later records thickened the arrangements with layered vocals, keys and reverb, pushing the sound toward dream pop; The Shark in Your Water is often cited as her breakthrough. Songs including 'Angela' and 'Spiracle' spread widely online, and her audience continued to grow through streaming and platforms like TikTok rather than radio or touring.

Her 2024 album Girl Prometheus, a breakup record, paired her flowing, low vocal delivery with sharper lyrics, including on the single 'Maniac'. She now records and writes largely by herself, and is based in Montreal.

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