The Garden ‘Ugly’ Single Review
2025 has been a huge year for The Garden fans. With both Wyatt and Fletcher Shears coming out with complete new albums on their individual projects Enjoy and Puzzle and now, as of last Thursday, a new single entitled Ugly as The Garden. The California kid within me, moshing in Downtown LA’s The Smell, is screaming and desperate to reemerge.
Ugly is certainly not missing the band’s signature of fast paced drums contrasted with a pedal-heavy guitar that takes its time playing strained chords, the song goes back to the band’s trad punk roots; however, the single marks a new era for the duo, as it solidifies a newfound western, modern Easy Rider sort of influence. One could have seen this coming with the concept of Wyatt’s latest album, The Sound Of Deceit, revolving around a lonely, leather-jacket sporting biker character.
Musicians that love to take on a persona along with their art, Wyatt and Fletcher Shears have been everything from demented clowns in Mirror Might Steal Your Charm to grotesque goblins in Kiss My Superbowl Ring. This time, they went for a much less abstract yet strong concept of two men who roam the dead west.
The music video for Ugly explores a cemetery in a dry, flat western town, as well as a run-down, empty, and eerie motel. The Shears brothers were very clearly inspired by these middle-of-nowhere towns which are void of people and life yet carry a heavy energy of the past. Walking through empty streets in the cold, dark desert night, we get the feeling that this place is their own piece of America.
A fan commenting on their music video that they can “see the king of the hill influence” on the track, the vocals on the song mimic a niche western tongue spoken exclusively by the uneducated rednecks that unfortunately make up a good chunk of the American population. It’s clear to me that they are poking fun at this certain kind of person. “I don’t have anything to offer the general public”, they mumble before going into the song’s bridge; “It’s all twisted, you fucked it all up, now it’s too serious. You squeezed all the fun out of it all. You swung too hard and threw your back out. You kicked yourselves right in the ass,” They scream passionately.
One can’t choose any kind of Americana arena for art unless they want to speak about what’s happening in the U.S today. Although the Shears brothers are quite mysterious and don’t exactly shout the meaning of any of their songs from rooftops, I personally believe that this song is expressing an anger that we all feel toward the ignorant people of the older generation that are the biggest contributors to our country falling into a dictatorship. The people who would follow the current republican party to the ends of the earth to support their own ‘traditional’ values and have fucked everyone over in the process, including themselves.
Even the music video reflects the way that Americans feel now, isolated, alone, and hopeless; feeling like we’re walking around a ghost town where everyone and everything is already dead. The Garden expressed all of this the same way musicians have been for decades; through the passionate anger of a punk song.