What They Grow In The Garden Review

17 September 2026 Andrew Ellis

Slothrust What They Grow In The Garden Review

This Slothrust What They Grow In The Garden review starts from a simple point: it is not a timid record.

Out tomorrow via Equal Vision / Rude Records, it is the first Slothrust album as a duo and the first for Equal Vision. Leah Wellbaum and Will Gorin have spent a decade and a half moving from Boston lo-fi to polished LA alt-rock. This one wants the stage lights, the concept, and the chorus. They call it dystopian theatre rock. For once the tag is not just press-release fog.

Produced with Jordan Witzigreuter, the 12 tracks hit harder and swing bigger than Parallel Timeline. The Nirvana comparisons were always lazy. What you hear now is closer to the brief they wrote themselves — a grungier Queen, or Muse if Muse still wrote songs you could shout in a room.

The idea

The record is about the hive mind: screens, late capitalism, a music industry eating its own, the numbness that keeps everyone scrolling. Wellbaum and Gorin want you looking inward instead of at the blue light. That could have been a pamphlet. It isn’t, because they tell it through gardens, lakes, castles and seals rather than another lecture about your phone.

“We really want people to take away a message of self-liberation amidst the flickers of seemingly inescapable dread,” they said. The singles already carry that without wagging a finger.

The songs that prove it

“Hearst Castle” is the one that sticks as a single. A Patty Hearst story told by the building and the elephant seals around it sounds like a student film. On record it works — wealth, looking away, who holds the mic — and the hook is strong enough that you do not need the footnotes.

“Ring The Bell” is the wake-up call: Wellbaum over bombastic guitars and Gorin’s drums, “you’re running out of air.” “00101001” pushes the binary/digital dread without turning into a novelty. “Burn The Deck” was the early tell that the riffs had put on weight. “Twisted Paradise” opens the door to the stranger, dream-logic side of the album.

“Dystopian Cemetery” is the one that does it for me. Closing-track energy even if you play it mid-record — strange, heavy and the clearest shot of that theatre-rock idea without the concept getting in the way. It is the favourite track on What They Grow In The Garden, and the one that makes the rest of the record make sense.

The rest of the running order — “Dissolve The Delusion”, “Smile”, “The Lake”, “Absolute Power” — is built to move like a set, not a playlist of singles. That is the point of calling it theatre.

Does it work?

Yes, more often than it should.

Losing a bassist as a full member could have made this smaller. It made it louder and weirder. Wellbaum’s voice still cuts; Gorin still hits like the band has something to outrun. The risk is the same as every concept album: if you bounce off the thesis, twelve tracks of garden-and-lake allegory will feel long. If you meet it halfway, this is the most ambitious Slothrust record to date.

Any honest Slothrust What They Grow In The Garden review has to say that the concept could have sunk the songs. Here the songs win — and Dystopian Cemetery is the proof.

Pre-order: https://www.ruderecords.com/collections/what-they-grow-in-the-garden

Rock News gives What They Grow In The Garden A solid 9/10

Rock News final word: Slothrust What They Grow In The Garden lands on a proper swing, not a holding pattern. Big riffs, stranger stories, and a duo that refused to shrink. Dystopian Cemetery is my pick of the album — start there if you only have four minutes.