The Garden are veterans of the creative impulse

Now, Tonopah is home to a small population of just over two thousand people and a reputation for unexplained happenings. Though not technically a true “ghost town”, it’s considered one of America’s most haunted locations due to a track record of mining accidents, a plague, and the infamous Clown Motel positioned right next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, making it a hotspot for those who find themselves fascinated with the paranormal.

Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, the twin brothers behind The Garden, know this pull all too well. Despite being based in Orange County, California, they have made a handful of pilgrimages to Tonopah and similar locations with haunted histories. “Without trying to be like, ‘Hey, we’re the haunted guys’, we do live that life,” Wyatt tells me. “We like that stuff. We collect tons of shit, we stay in haunted hotels, it’s stuff we’ve liked since we were kids. It's just sort of who we are.”

Even through the music, they honour their interest in the otherworldly. For over a decade, The Garden have maintained a spectral mystique with their self-described “Vada Vada” sound, which shapeshifts across their work. Dedicated to making music with unadulterated creativity, the pair's freeform, maximalist punk sound spirals with phantasmagorical unpredictability — much like flying down the asphalt of a lost highway — fuelled by the upheaved rumble of Wyatt's bass in fervent conversation with Fletcher’s cataclysmic drum beats. Live, they carry themselves with eclectic pageantry — often donning leather, ripped denim, and signature black-and-white jester makeup that you’ll typically find members of the audience replicating. There’s an allure to the pandemonium of The Garden, and over the years, a cult following has developed around it.

When I speak to Wyatt and Fletcher, it’s just a few days after the release of their new album, Bootleg, their first full-length release in four years, following 2022’s Horseshit on Route 66, and also their return to Epitaph Records. By this point, they’ve had ample time to sit with the songs. Now out in the world, the album exists in a sort of liminal mental headspace for the brothers. “My opinion on it changes every day,” Fletcher says. “Some days I forget that it’s out, and some days I’m excited about it. It’s kind of a weird feeling. Once it’s out, I move on with my life.”

“We’ve been engaging with it for a long time already, so for us it’s special, but also slightly redundant to keep listening to it once it’s out,” he adds, with Wyatt in agreement. “At this point, I think ‘Okay, it’s time to let everybody else have it’.”

The pair describe Bootleg as their “slice of life” album. After releasing their EP Six Desperate Ballads in 2024, which was a collection of songs simply “sitting around that we really liked”, as Wyatt tells me, they found themselves in a period of constantly exchanging songs with each other. “A lot of stuff in our personal lives had changed, so it had kind of taken us a while to get a full-length record out,” he continues. “We were constantly working on it a lot last summer, and then we were just ready to make something a lot more structured.”

“It was focused, but kind of unfocused at times, and adjacent to our daily life,” Fletcher adds. “We didn’t get together every time a song was made. It was just like thinking, ‘Oh, I’m hungry, so I’m gonna eat a sandwich,’ So you’d have a day where it was like, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna write this song, and I don’t know why’, and then it becomes part of the album.”

Ultimately, the songs on Bootleg were simply creatively satiating. They don’t follow a particular concept or theme, as the pair explain, but are a culmination of a stream-of-consciousness writing flow based on their day-to-day emotions. Each song exists as a chapter or journal entry, creating a casual compilation of different outtakes from Wyatt and Fletcher’s lives.

The duo’s spur-of-the-moment approach to writing is felt in the knee-jerk twists that are taken throughout the fourteen tracks on Bootleg. One throughline, however, takes them back to Tonopah. The album cover is an image of an abandoned house in what used to be a neighbourhood in the area. In the video for lead single and album opener “Ugly”, the brothers are captured not just in front of the house, but also wandering around the town’s eerie attractions. When Wyatt and Fletcher speak about their experiences there, it’s with some trepidation, but an unavoidable curiosity.

“That house was straight cursed,” Wyatt asserts. “We were hearing all kinds of stuff around it. When we were shooting in front of it, it was pitch black around that house. A lot of the houses around it were also abandoned, and some of them would have little glowing lights on inside, so you couldn’t tell if someone was in there. It was a creepy night.”

“At some point we just heard some weird shit, and it was a voice,” Fletcher recalls. “I’m just gonna say that. And we got what we needed out of that spot, but we actually ended up pulling back up to that house that night by accident. And it was even scarier when we pulled back up on it, because we didn’t even realise we were in the same neighbourhood. We were like, ‘Hell no. We gotta get the fuck away from this house.”

Fletcher admits that despite believing in the supernatural, he and Wyatt maintain some scepticism. But they know their limits, and don’t deny the things that they hear, feel, or see. Filming the “Ugly” video nearly took them to a nearby town called Goldfield, which they say has an even darker energy than Tonopah. Wyatt briefly divulges the lore, explaining that the famous Goldfield Hotel is said to have a portal to hell in the basement.

“Fletcher and I were kind of high and mighty and had all of these ideas we were gonna shoot, but we honestly just fucking totally wussed out,” Wyatt recalls. “We were like, ‘Man, it’s two in the morning. We’ve been shooting all night. Do we really need to expose ourselves to Goldfield at this point?’ When it gets a little too 666, I’m out at that point.”

“Tonopah might be cursed,” he laughs. “There’s something about that place that we both like, but I almost resent it slightly.”

“We always say that we’re not going to go back, and then we just go back,” Fletcher adds. “We have a deep love for it, but are always a little bit in fear of it in some way. At the end of the day, we will always be tourists in that world. We appreciate it and respect it, but we will not put ourselves in harm’s way, because it gets gnarly.”

Wyatt attributes the intimidation that he feels to being too familiar with the history of the town and its monuments. Simply put: “It just ain't right”.

Despite the haunted imagery and storytelling associated with the band, The Garden don’t fuck with negative — namely, demonic — energy. They know when to get out of dodge. Wyatt specifically reveals that he's sensitive to the time that he and Fletcher spend in “the belly of the beast”, though they maintain what seems to be an inescapable desire to flirt with the apparitional world. “I wouldn’t want to get married to it or anything,” he notes. “I don’t love it so much that I would dedicate my life to it, but I like being a tourist in that zone,” Fletcher adds.

It would seem ironic that they would choose to immortalise Tonopah in a body of work so closely associated with their own personal worlds. But as Wyatt and Fletcher recount these moments, I find myself transported to the desert. Looking across The Garden’s catalogue, Bootleg is its own house on the outskirts. With no thematic script, written purely for pleasure, you open the door and feel your way through its dark halls with no true certainty of where it might lead.

Many of the songs lend themselves to frenetic, garage rock-tinged arrangements, much like “Pin Drop” or “Hansel and Gretel”. Elsewhere, the arrangements become more angular and deconstructed. On “5 Mile Ponytail”, the synths dig like nails into a wall behind the crash of Fletcher’s cymbal, a menacing instrumental to underpin Wyatt’s deadpan delivery. The song introduces one of the first samples on the album, a cut of “Ghosts, spirits, shades, spectres, and apparitions. There is not a corner of the world that they do not inhabit,” repeated sparingly as an ominous backbone for the album. Title track “Bootleg” incorporates more melodicism as Wyatt ponders, “I wonder what’s out there”, while the deceptive beach twang of “The Kockroach” escalates into an overdriven breakbeat. “Flailing on the Tracks” drags its heels into a dirty bassline, with distant echoes of laughter and wiry industrial textures unearthing a basement portal to existential dread.

The cohesive atmosphere of Bootleg feels like something captured in a room, but Wyatt and Fletcher actually worked with a more disjointed process. The brothers would typically find themselves in separate studios in Los Angeles and Long Beach, essentially developing the songs remotely. “We just sling tracks back and forth,” Wyatt says. “There would be days where I would finish a full track of bass guitar and vocals, and then he [Fletcher] would be like, ‘Hey, I’m ready, just send it to me whenever’, and then rip a bunch of drums on it. And then we’d have the bones of a song complete.”

This differs from their approach with previous albums made “9 to 5 style” during scheduled studio sessions at a friend’s space, and it works for them. “We’ve enjoyed it that way,” Fletcher says. “We don’t really work with an engineer anymore or anything; we are the engineers.”

“Bordering on control freaks, but at the end of the day, I think we just know what we want,” Wyatt adds. “So why bother with doing anything else when we can do it ourselves?” Fletcher agrees, continuing, “It’s pure in that way. It keeps it whole.”

Much of Wyatt and Fletcher’s DIY production knowledge comes from manning their own respective projects, Enjoy and Puzzle. Under the alias Enjoy, Wyatt leans further into indie punk, while Fletcher dabbles in more electronic textures as Puzzle. Over the years, they’ve found it relatively easy to compartmentalise their solo projects as independent entities, but recognise how their sound as artists shifts as they change as people.

“We’ve been switching things up about The Garden that, as we get older, we don't relate to anymore,” Fletcher explains. “The Garden, Puzzle, and Enjoy are reflective of who we are as people. If the sound changes, it’s because we are changing, and we don’t relate to the sound from the past record. It’s not even really a conscious decision, but the music moves how we move. It’s easy for us to differentiate between the three projects because I, as a solo person, am different to Wyatt as a solo person, and we’re both different when we come together.”

“Puzzle and Enjoy, respectively, have been around longer than The Garden, or at the same timeframe,” Wyatt adds. “For years we’ve called them side projects, but I’m kind of at a point where I’m almost tired of calling them side projects because they’re so up front in our lives. I love Puzzle, I love Enjoy, I love The Garden. It all has history and lore.”

Although Wyatt and Fletcher have been making music as The Garden for some time now, they still find themselves being introduced to new audiences beyond their established following. Last autumn, they supported Turnstile alongside High Vis during their European tour, and they’re currently looking ahead to supporting The Strokes for three shows in August. And as it stands, they don’t have expectations for what people should take away from what they’re offering — any reaction is a good reaction, as long as something is felt.

“I would never want to tell anybody what to think or how to view anything related to art or music,” Fletcher says. “I love when people come up to us, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I felt this way about this song’, and it’s completely not what I intended. But I’m not gonna tell them what to think. I like it when people come up with their own answers for things because Wyatt and I make music for ourselves, and that makes us happy.”

“Then everyone’s happy, or not happy, but making someone not happy with your music is just as good in my opinion,” he continues. “Making anybody feel anything is just cool. You can’t please everybody, and it’s a reaction. When we play shows and people think it was garbage, that just means it’s not for them. Sometimes it's more fun when the crowd doesn't like you because you play harder.”

If The Garden can play hard, they are content. Fletcher says that writing is a constant practice for them, and they record new songs nearly every day. “It’s just a part of our lives,” he notes. “Sometimes it’s just like, I gotta get to the studio to let a bunch of shit out,” Wyatt adds. “I gotta do it, it feels too good not to do. If I don’t for a week and a half, two weeks, three weeks, I’m like, ‘Who am I again?’. It’s too much fun. I love it, and I can do it for the rest of my life.”

The pair are open about the fickle nature of building a music career. “It’s important to love it and not expect anything from it,” Fletcher affirms. For roughly ten years, they didn’t make any money as musicians, they tell me. But they took it one day at a time, at points touring relentlessly and accepting that luck comes and goes. “We love it, so it didn’t matter.” They speak about music as an indomitable life force, as Fletcher continues: “You can’t expect anything from it. It’s a wild beast, and you cannot expect anything from a wild beast. Nor can you tame a wild beast. Do it for the love of the game. We always stick really close to that, and it's always led us in the right direction.”

Long-term, Wyatt admits to feeling a little bit lost but the duo have never shied away from unfamiliar terrain. Regardless of who’s paying attention, they have stories to tell, more demos than they know what to do with, and a primal instinct to keep creating. “It’s basically our religion, and this is how we live it.”