New album, “What They Grow In The Garden”!
Produced by Slothrust and Jordan Witzigreuter (The Ready Set), What They Grow In The Garden, the band’s forthcoming Equal Vision Records debut, is the result of a band pushing itself to the absolute limit: the riffs hit harder, the hooks are catchier, the stylistic shifts even more unexpected. Billed as “dystopian theatre rock,” the album’s 12 tracks make good on that promise — a band once compared to Nirvana now sounds more like a grungier Queen, or the best album Muse never made.
Lyrically, the album is also an examination of the hive mind that explores what it means to be human and live in a system designed to exploit our perceived weaknesses by means of capitalism. The band wanted to explore old archetypal places like “the garden” and “the lake” through an allegorical and surrealist lens that encourages listeners to look inward for their big truths instead of at their phones. “We really want people to take away a message from this album of self-liberation amidst the flickers of seemingly inescapable dread,” Leah Wellbaum and Will Gorin of Slothrust said. “Despite the permeating blue light of the external world, it is still possible to find your freedom and identify your core truths if you go within.”
Gravitating toward demos that spoke to a more universal dissatisfaction, Wellbaum kept in mind their musical peers suffering in a collapsing industry; they thought of the screen-addiction epidemic; they thought of life under late capitalism and overconsumption. All of these, of course, are connected: it keeps us numbed. “We’re getting further and further away from tactile, organic humanity,” Wellbaum says, and urges listeners to access the agency they have within these systems. A backlash against digital dependency, the songs on What They Grow In The Garden detail the impossibility of truly outrunning complicity, but they make some leeway into stepping away from the cold blue light of phone screens.
Every Slothrust album is more ambitious than the last, from their lo-fi beginnings on 2012’s Feels Your Pain to the polished rock on 2021’s Parallel Timeline, produced by longtime Garbage engineer Billy Bush. While the band has changed a lot over the years, they’ve never lost their capacity for surprise. What They Grow In The Garden may be Slothrust’s first album as a duo, but it’s their biggest and wildest record to date.
(Photograph by Levi Price)
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