Slothrust share ‘Hearst Castle’ ahead of their album ‘What They Grow In The Garden,’ out September 18 via Equal Vision
Slothrust have never been a band content to stand still, and their latest single is the last dispatch before their most ambitious transformation yet. On September 16, the Los Angeles alt-rock act shared “Hearst Castle,” the final preview of their new album What They Grow In The Garden, which arrives Friday, September 18 via Equal Vision Records. It is a fitting closing tease for a record that finds one of underground rock’s most reliably inventive acts reaching for something bigger, stranger, and more theatrical than anything in their catalog.
The album marks a genuine inflection point. What They Grow In The Garden is Slothrust’s first record as a duo, built by guitarist and vocalist Leah Wellbaum and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Will Gorin, who co-produced the 12 tracks with Jordan Witzigreuter of The Ready Set. The pair have described the album’s mission in almost spiritual terms.
We really want people to take away a message from this album of self-liberation amidst the flickers of seemingly inescapable dread” Wellbaum and Gorin 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.”
From Grunge Roots to ‘Dystopian Theatre Rock’
That mantra defines the album’s sound as much as its message. Slothrust are billing What They Grow In The Garden as “dystopian theatre rock,” a tag that captures how far the band has traveled from the jazz-inflected, Nirvana-indebted grunge of their early work. The riffs hit harder, the hooks land catchier, and the stylistic swerves arrive more unexpectedly, with the band once compared to Nirvana now evoking something closer to a grungier Queen. It is maximalist and gothy in a way that reframes what a Slothrust song can be.
The record’s conceptual architecture is equally deliberate. Wellbaum gravitated toward demos that spoke to a more universal dissatisfaction, keeping in mind peers suffering in a collapsing music industry, the screen-addiction epidemic, and life under late capitalism and overconsumption. The band explores old archetypal places, the garden, the lake, through an allegorical and surrealist lens that pushes listeners to look inward rather than at their phones. The album, by the band’s own account, wrestles with queer romance and sleep paralysis in a world trapped by late-stage capitalism.
An Evolution Years in the Making
Every Slothrust album has been more ambitious than the last, from their lo-fi 2012 beginnings on Feels Your Pain to the polished 2021 record Parallel Timeline, produced by longtime Garbage engineer Billy Bush. What They Grow In The Garden extends that trajectory into their boldest chapter, and notably their first for Equal Vision, the storied independent rock label.
The record’s evolution into a duo followed the 2021 departure of bassist Kyle Bann, whom the band said was no longer a part of Slothrust after sexual assault allegations surfaced, and Wellbaum and Gorin have channeled that leaner configuration into a fuller, wilder sound rather than a diminished one.
“Hearst Castle” arrives as the final single after a steady rollout that included “Ring the Bell,” “00101001,” “Burn the Deck,” “Twisted Paradise,” and the Willy Beaman-assisted “Dystopian Cemetery.” Each has sketched a different corner of the album’s widescreen ambition, and Wellbaum has framed the whole project as an invitation. “Don’t forget the joys that are possible within your own mind,” she said of one single. “Find your way back to the freedom you felt as a child.”
The release dovetails with the band’s fall Dystopian Theatre Tour, a North American run that launched September 15 in Omaha, stops at Riot Fest in Chicago on the album’s release day, and winds toward a November 18 finale at The Bellwether in Los Angeles, with support from The Velveteers and Um, Jennifer?. For a band this deep into a career of reinvention, What They Grow In The Garden is a bet that ambition and intimacy can coexist. On the strength of “Hearst Castle,” it is a bet worth taking seriously.
