After a five-year hiatus, indie grunge pop band Gardens is back with a new single, “Dream House,” and a new musical direction. Band members Ilana Glyman, Jordan Brasko, Jackson Mills and Jake Newling say the break was transformative, not just for the band members as a whole, but also for how the group wants to pursue music in the future. Gone are the days of chasing record label contracts and financial gains. No, Gardens is interested in something much simpler: music for music’s sake. “Dream House” debuts July 25.
After forming during their college years in 2013, Gardens immediately released an EP in January 2014. Soon after, they then jumped into releasing an album. “Writing has always been the part that I really enjoy and thrive on,” Glyman said about their rush to release more music. After recording in the Bay Area, their debut record was released by the end of 2014. Soon after, they played a series of house and DIY shows before embarking on another record, “Maricopa,” which they recorded at the same studio in the Bay Area and released in 2017.
“It was kind of a weird time after we recorded the album. It just took a really, really long time for us to get it back. Like, almost a year,” Glyman recalled about the state of the group. “And by that point, it was hard to keep people engaged. And we were all just kind of starting to focus more on other things in our life.”
In 2017, after much consideration, the group took an indefinite hiatus. Many of the group members were in transitional stages in their life. Jackson Mills, for example, planned on quitting the group after accepting his first salaried job and the band was in search of a replacement.
“For me, a big part of it was coming out of this trance. I had felt like I needed to take time for myself and just focus on me and it just was kind of feeling like a natural time to put a pause on Gardens,” recalled Glyman. She later came out as trans and moved to Austin, Texas, for a few years for a fresh start and a change of scenery.
While the group joked about reuniting in the years following the announcement of their hiatus, talk of reforming did not come up until earlier this year. In January, Glyman began working on a new song. After showing it to the band members, she asked if they had an interest in recording a single.
“And even at that point, I was kind of presenting it within this frame of, ‘We kind of fizzled out after ‘Maricopa’ and it was a weird ending. Maybe let’s just do one last single as a capstone to Gardens,'” recalled Glyman.
Luckily, the other band members were on board to work on the track immediately. As they began practicing together, they also recaptured their old groove, leading to the creation of another track, their new single “Dream House.”
Recorded in April, the new track is the band’s strongest work yet. Embodying the best elements of their past music (particularly their penchant for strong, intelligent songwriting and Glyman’s warm vocals), the track mixes elements of both grunge and indie pop for a nostalgic wonder. It’s a track that will immediately sound familiar to listeners of late 90s/early aughts indie pop, but it is not trapped in the past.
If “Maricopa” was a creative as well as a personal transitional moment for the band and primary songwriter Glyman, then their new music like “Dream House” is what happens when one is on the other side of it all. Unlike their experiences as a band in their early 20s, which were driven by a desire to get signed by a label and get paid to create, the band now said they are operating with “a mindset of no parameters.”
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“We’re not touring, we’re not planning on playing shows. We would if it came to that,” Mills said. “But we’re kind of just writing and recording the way we want to.”
Gardens’ music sounds accomplished and sure of itself, something that can only come after years of personal and interpersonal growth. “I feel more liberated as a person now, and I feel like our mindset with the band has also kind of gone with that,” Glyman said. “We are who we are at this point, and whatever we make is cool if we’re happy with it.”
Britt Julious is a freelance critic.
