SLOTHRUST

 

Every Slothrust album is more ambitious than the last, from their lo-fi beginnings on 2012’sFeels Your Pain to the polished rock on 2021’sParallel Timeline, produced by longtime Garbage engineer Billy Bush. Losing a member only made them more willing to experiment: What TheyGrow in the Garden, the band’s Equal Vision Records debut, may be Slothrust’s first album as a duo (drummer/multi-instrumentalist Will Gorin and guitarist/vocalist Leah Wellbaum), but it’s their biggest and wildest record to date. Produced by Slothrust and Jordan Witzigreuter (The Ready Set), What They Grow in the Garden 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. 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.”We really want people to take away a message from this album of self-liberation amidst the flickers of seemingly inescapable dread,” Wellbaum summarizes. “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.”