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, 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.

“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.”