Slothrust

Every Slothrust album is more ambitious than the last, from their lo-fi beginnings on 2012’sFeels Your Painto the polished rock on 2021’sParallel Timeline, produced by longtime Garbageengineer 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 aduo (drummer/multi-instrumentalist Will Gorin and guitarist/vocalist Leah Wellbaum), but it’stheir biggest and wildest record to date.Produced by Slothrust and Jordan Witzigreuter (The Ready Set),What They Grow in theGardenis the result of a band pushing itself to the absolute limit: the riffs hit harder, the hooksare catchier, the stylistic shifts even more unexpected. Billed as “dystopian theatre rock,” thealbum’s 12 tracks make good on that promise — a band once compared to Nirvana now soundsmore like a grungier Queen, or the best album Muse never made.Gravitating toward demos that spoke to a more universal dissatisfaction, Wellbaum kept inmind their musical peers suffering in a collapsing industry; they thought of the screen-addictionepidemic; they thought of life under late capitalism and overconsumption. All of these, ofcourse, are connected: it keeps us numbed. “We're getting further and further away fromtactile, organic humanity,”Wellbaum says, and urges listeners to access the agency they havewithin these systems. A backlash against digital dependency, the songs onWhat They Grow inthe Gardendetail the impossibility of truly outrunning complicity, but they make some leewayinto 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 theflickers of seemingly inescapable dread,” Wellbaum summarizes. "Despite the permeating bluelight of the external world, it is still possible to find your freedom and identify your core truths if you go within."