Following on from their album This Is Not Your Fault, self-described feudal rock outfit Green Gardens are releasing a series of new singles via Tiny Library Records. Their debut “Combin[ed] swaying, laidback harmonies with fuzzy guitars and an almost Medieval preoccupation with heavy themes and gothic imagery,” as we put it back in 2023, and first new single ‘Year of Love’ saw the Leeds four-piece evolve this style, preserving the ambition and thematic depth but, as we described in February, “swapping out some of the grand scale in favour of increased intimacy.”
Now Green Gardens are back with ‘Ghost of a Tree’, another track which further solidifies this change. While This Is Not Your Fault displayed a certain level of spareness within its evocative sound, the latest track highlights the wider palette of their new material. Lo-fi guitars conjure a soundscape akin to those of The Microphones, while the insistent drum beat builds in intensity as the vocals rise across the track, embodying the spirit of a band who make no distinction between the intimate and the sublime. Indeed, such a balance between mundane human experience and something far larger and sweeping sits at the heart of the track, positioning an individual’s loves and losses within an almost geolgical span of time.
“’Ghost of a Tree’ feels to me as a layering of things, like sedimentary rock or bodies trapped in bogs,” as vocalist and bassist Jacob Cracknell explains. “I like seeing time illustrated so bluntly by those things and sometimes that can hit you hard in their rigidity. They don’t tell you that winter can drag its feet, they just show years pass all the same. I heard someone on the radio recently talking about how they can tell when solar flares happened centuries ago due to the rings in trees and I sometimes wonder if my head when I sleep is laying where one of those trees was swelling and growing. These things make me feel significant, part of it all.”
Watch the video by Joel Johnston with scans by Jacob Cracknell below:
‘Ghost of a Tree’ is out now via Tiny Library Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.