The Garden have announced Bootleg, their eighth studio album, and shared a new single called 5 Mile Ponytail. The 14-track record is due July 10, according to Consequence, and follows the previously released Ugly.
A Garden album called Bootleg already sounds like it is daring you to ask for a clean thesis. Wyatt and Fletcher Shears are not really thesis people anyway. They are better when they treat punk, electro, hardcore, jester-core, and whatever else got dragged into the room as stuff to throw at the wall until the wall starts throwing back.
The band’s own statement makes the lack of a single grand design sound intentional. “Bootleg is a compilation of songs written and recorded overtime with no particular intent or goal in mind,” the pair said in a statement quoted by Consequence. “This album is and was purely a pleasurable endeavor by us both. Every track has its own meaning or story, not unlike a chapter book of different narratives.”
5 Mile Ponytail fits that framing. Consequence calls it odd, jarring, lo-fi magic, and the Will Sipos-directed video apparently understands the assignment: roadside performance, vintage-car weirdness, and The Garden riding around with the titular ponytail. The joke lands because the band has spent years making nonsense feel weirdly rigorous.
Bootleg follows 2022’s HORSESHIT ON ROUTE 66 and the 2024 EP Six Desperate Ballads. That is a very Garden timeline: abrasive, silly, dead-serious, and allergic to becoming one thing for too long. If the new record really is a chapter book of different narratives, the first pages are already doing donuts in the parking lot.