What They Grow In The Garden

Equal Vision Records

Friday, September 18, 2026

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.  Losing a member only made them more willing to experiment: What They Grow In The Garden 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. This time around, they push their sound to the absolute limit: the riffs hit harder, the hooks are catchier, the stylistic shifts even more unexpected. Produced with Jordan Witzigreuter of emo-pop outfit The Ready Set, it’s a culmination of the band’s development while also entering uncharted territory.

After a series of covers – including Ginuwine’s R&B classic “Pony”, which landed them on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay Chart – and the kinky delirium of last year’s Wildcard EP, Leah Wellbaum gravitated toward demos that spoke to a more universal dissatisfaction. They thought of 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 on songs like “Ring The Bell”: “Stuck inside a cozy grave/Turn the key & crawl your way out”.

They bill this album “dystopian theater rock”, and the record’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. Wellbaum loved musical theater growing up, participating in productions of musicals like Sweeney Todd and Les Misérables, but Will Gorin, despite his father’s love of Todd, is a fan of metal; that tension powers a record simultaneously heavy and irreverent.

The camp serves a purpose: on “00101001”, Wellbaum channels Little Mermaid villain Ursula: like that character does to Ariel, the industry too often robs musicians of their individual agency, and yet compromises must be made for survival. It’s impossible not to internalize that: “Just when you think you’re rid of it/It will crawl out one ear into the other”, they warn. Most daring is the delightfully unhinged showtune-Reggae-Tom-Waits hybrid “Hearst Castle”, inspired by the real life kidnapping of Patty Hearst. The song takes the expression “if these walls could talk” literally, narrating from the point of view of William Randolph Hearst’s hilltop mansion. “History gets skewed from the perspective of whoever is telling the story,” Wellbaum explains, and anything – even a 1920s monument to wealth – can have its own bias.

These songs detail the impossibility of truly outrunning complicity, but they make some leeway into stepping away from the cold blue light of phone screens. The backlash against digital dependency extends to the production: Gorin noticed the overuse of drum samples in other mainstream rock to “sweeten” the live recording, and instead wanted to engineer his own to help make what he calls “the best drum sounds on a Slothrust record”. These are dynamic, enormous-sounding songs with the musicality fans have come to expect, like the 7/4 breakdown on “Keep Us Thirsty” and the drastic dynamic shifts on “What A Night”.

Slothrust has changed a lot over the years, but they’ve never lost their capacity for surprise. They prove they can go right back to their grunge roots on “The Lake”, but they’re most interested in pushing themselves: the very next song, closer “Dystopian Cemetery”, is a harmony-stacked stadium waltz, complete with pounding piano from longtime collaborator Willy Beaman. It only proves this is a band that can do anything – and they will.