“We make music as we live life. Everything comes naturally”: Meet The Garden, hardcore’s audacious outsiders

Wyatt and Fletcher Shears are different. Defiantly so. Amongst the black eyes and burst lips of modern hardcore, the twin brothers and The Garden bandmates present intriguingly unblemished fresh faces. Their shapeshifting sound is a world away from the unchecked aggro and rippling machismo of many bands with whom they’ve shared stages of late. And where so many contemporaries are tied stiffly to ideas of making their bones through a grind of ‘hustle’, ‘integrity’ and ‘respect’, this dynamic duo are boldly unafraid to go their own way.

“It’s funny,” Fletcher begins, amused by so many fans’ presumptions they’re a ‘new’ band. “I don’t think a lot of our people nowadays realise that we started touring in late-2012 and were that 150-shows-a-year outfit for the first decade of our career. We’ve done full tours of China, Singapore, Indonesia and Russia. We’ve been around Europe and the U.S., Canada and Mexico a million times. A lot of our newer fans will say, ‘Come to our city, you’ve never been here!’ But normally we have – often three or four times already!”

Rocking up several hours late, inadvertently opening the third stage at 2024’s Outbreak Fest in Manchester, The Garden captivated and confounded in equal measure. A small army of devotees – many in the kind of make-up you’d expect at an Insane Clown Posse show – soaked up their proggy punk rock like mana from rock gods on the rise. Meanwhile, narrow-eyed gatekeepers branded them them pretty boy pretenders, chancing it in a set laden with backing tracks. Really, they were the same band they’d always been, continuing to cultivate and expand a shared vision as organically as their bucolic name suggests.

Compared to, say, breezy Californian indie-rockers Warpaint, with whom they toured the UK back in 2015, recent company has been more bloody-minded. On spring 2025’s massive U.S. tour main support to Knocked Loose, they felt like the calm before the storm. Fashionably late in Manchester again this evening, we catch up as they join Turnstile’s autumn European run with Scotland and Ireland already done. Fitting in with others’ agendas is not an option.

“We’ve never really been accepted,” Wyatt reckons. “We never really fit into that hardcore punk mould. But we did grow up in Orange County with O.C. punk. We make music as we live life. Everything comes naturally. That’s just how it’s always been. We play with older bands and I don’t always know if they dig it. But we play with the younger bands and I don’t always know if they get it, either. The analogy of ‘The Garden’ growing and evolving is really about us trying out different shit and not staying the same. It’s about never being predictable and making everything fun for ourselves.”

“We do have a lot of associations with the genre,” Fletcher adds, tacitly alluding to their father Steve’s history with legends like Corruption, Shattered Faith and Penalty Kill. “But I’ve never considered us ‘a punk band’. Wyatt and I have always felt a little bit isolated within the music world. We’ve always felt detached from everyone else. There’s something about the way we do things. We have tried to be a ‘buddy band’ with people we know, but it’s never really worked. So we’ve kind of locked ourselves away in the isolation chamber.”

Indeed, there’s very little about how The Garden do things that make them an easy match.

Uber-eclectic shared influence, built from early childhood, sees them name-checking acts as disparate and diverse as English industrial icons Killing Joke (from whom they picked up the fondness for face paint), Los Angeles jazz icons Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Chicago soul standards Earth, Wind & Fire, Texan country hero Buck Owens, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne jungle DJ Original Sin and San Pedro punks The Minutemen. Sharing a birthday right next to Halloween, they have an inherent taste for the spooky, and they love playing “rickety old theatres” and travelling into the desert to visit haunted hotels like Nevada’s The Goldfield and The Mizpah. Plus, there’s a glossier other side of the coin, with sporadic modelling for renowned fashion houses like YSL and Balenciaga sending them down seriously starry catwalks.

Creativity spills well beyond The Garden fences, too, with releases from the brothers’ solo projects Enjoy (Wyatt) and Puzzle (Fletcher) deep into double-digits collectively. Yet purity is paramount, and they’ve eschewed other bandmates for the last 10 years: the core pair switching frenetically between drums, bass and vocals with all other live parts pre-recorded.

“Initially, it felt kind of weird,” Wyatt admits. “Equally, it would feel weird to add another player to disrupt the flow between my brother and I. Sometimes people are like, ‘It’s a backing track. Fuck that! You should have a guitarist!’ I don’t know. I don’t want to ruin the vibe between us just for the sake of throwing in a guitar. It’s a good way to make more expansive music without having to deal with third parties.”

“We’re in our early 30s now, but we started out in our teens,” Fletcher picks up, explaining how they’ve taken ownership of everything from how they perform onstage to how often they choose to go out on tour. “We know what we want out of life a lot more than we did at the beginning. Back when we were touring ourselves into the ground, we were still trying to figure out what we wanted. Now we do what we actually need rather than what someone else tells you. It’s good to know what you want. If you’re busy all the time, you don’t get the chance to figure out who you really are – and you’re not happy because you don’t know.”

Safe to say, putting their foot down hasn’t hurt The Garden’s careers. On November 23, 2024, they sold out the 6,700 Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, for their Vada Vada event – named after an invented slogan of theirs that translates roughly as ‘Why not?’ On July 19 this year, they played the second edition of their hometown One Strange Night In Orange County concert at the O.C. Festival Grounds observatory, with an incredibly stacked support line-up including Ceremony, L7 and Fear. 2023’s first edition featured Alice Glass, JPEGMAFIA and British punk legends The Adicts – with whom Fletcher has since gone on to drum.

“We grew up with these bands,” Fletcher explains. “Like, if you grew up listening to The Beatles and you got a chance to take them out on tour, you would definitely want to do it. Plus, we grew up seeing all those old-school punk flyers lying around our house and garage. It’s also just so fun to make a flyer with your band and then all the bands that you love!”

So where do the Brothers Shears go from here? Having seen their popularity boom over the last few years, catapulting them from 600-cap rooms onto the grand stages they currently inhabit, it would be understandable to stay close to the relatively defined indie-punk sounds of 2022’s fifth album Horseshit On Route 66 and 2024 EP Six Desperate Ballads. Then again, that just wouldn’t be The Garden. Latest single Ugly – a treatise on how both life in California and work in the music industry can be defined by ugliness masquerading as glamour – is the first taste of a record emboldened by success to be even weirder and more freewheeling.

Whether it leads to superstardom or back to sweaty clubs simply isn’t worth worrying about.

“I always look at the Garden as a small band,” laughs Fletcher. “Every time that we go out and play, I wonder if anybody is going to buy tickets. It’s about staying grateful and remembering all the stages you’ve gone through to get to this point. Every step has been a blessing, all the way from driving a crappy broken down van around the country, sleeping on floors – one time, even on a couch in the middle of the desert – to having a tour bus of our own.”

“We record everything by ourselves,” Wyatt signs off, reflectively. “By the time music comes out into the world, we’ve already spent a lot of time with it. Think of it like getting into a relationship with somebody. In the first place, you go on dates and learn about each other; then you introduce them to your friends and tell them this is who you’ve been seeing for the last few years. Soon we’ll tell everyone how in love with this record we are. Then we’ll probably tour it into the ground and end up breaking up. If other people like it, that’s great. If they don’t, we’ll just keep moving. It’s still all about growing in that forward direction…”

Ugly is out now via Vada Vada.

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