Last February, Garden Home released a Valentine’s Day split with American Bandit. As we all know, the world changed in unimaginable ways just a few weeks later.
In the months that followed, the Milwaukee screamo outfit—which had some partially-written songs to their name prior to shutdown—experienced many of the difficulties that countless bands faced during this unprecedented point in history. At some point, pandemic byproducts seemed to have thrown the very fate of Garden Home itself into question.
“I was seeing the effect that was having on my loved ones—the people I rely on so heavily,” Garden Home vocalist Dylan Mazurkiewicz says in a press release. “Milwaukee has been my home for over 10 years, but the early pandemic was the most I’d considered leaving.”
Fortunately, Garden Home is still standing. Much of that COVID-conveyed contemplation is actually evident on the band’s brand new EP.
The just-released postmortem pulls no punches, earnestly addressing some of the feelings of remorse, confinement, and helplessness Mazurkiewicz encountered of late. “Ghost” is a blunt and booming opening track, with bellowed references to feeling trapped capably commingling with roughly two minutes of punchy instrumentation. The second and final song on the release is “Uprooted,” a decidedly more melodic offering that relates Earth’s trauma to humankind’s, which brings the brief-but-potent EP to a memorable close.
While this release is short, Garden Home has wasted little time hitting stages in and around Milwaukee again in recent months to perform more material in a live setting. The band’s next show will take place at X-Ray Arcade on Sunday, December 5 when they open for Iowa hardcore mainstays Modern Life Is War in a show that also features a rare performance by Milwaukee’s own Get Rad. Before that show, we strongly recommend spending five minutes listening to the latest release from Garden Home.