Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
Painted by the Finnish symbolist artist Hugo Simberg, the cover art for The Garden Dream predates the record it’s attached to by roughly 130 years. “The Fairytale II” is a minor but beguiling work by Simberg, best known for his macabre depictions of personified death going about the business and pleasures of living, including tending to a garden, dancing at sunset, or listening to music. It makes for a natural fit: gglum, aka Ella Smoker, is half-Finnish, and on her full-length debut The Garden Dream, she eagerly tries her hand at making similarly intriguing yet disquieting compositions.
The Garden Dream is proof that Smoker always needed the breadth of a full-length LP to actualize her ideas. Both her debut EP once the edge has worn off and its more confident follow-up Weak Teeth were palatable but not overly ambitious bedroom pop offerings that slid seamlessly into the sad girl indie playlists of the internet. That’s not an underhanded swipe—Smoker herself credited the success of debut single “Why Don’t I Care” to its hitting “the algorithm at the right millisecond” in an interview with The Line of Best Fit. But on The Garden Dream and with the encouragement of producer Karma Kid, she’s audibly moving beyond that.
Here Smoker trots out Dry Cleaning-style post-punk on “Easy Fun,” stomp-y sincere indie on “Eating Rust,” and zippy pop-punk on “Second Best.” Elsewhere she ascends to Magnetic Fields levels of lo-fi twee on the plucky “Honeybee.” She douses her vocals in effects and plays with ambient intros. Lyrically, she offers what you’d expect from a songwriter stumbling through her early 20s, such as incurable melancholy, notes on the messy ecstasy of a night out, and bottomless self-loathing and insecurity. She hates herself in plain sight on “Glue”—“I am nothing/ So disgusting”—and then in the context of an already-lost competition with another girl on the Charli XCX-influenced “Second Best”: “I can’t do it better than the way that she did/ Underneath the covers and underneath the skin.”
All this makes for a compelling listen, swirling the heady emotional turmoil of being a newfangled adult with a smorgasbord of musical influences drawn as much from Soundcloud as from your parents’ old records. The Garden Dream demonstrates the growth befitting its title while also delving into something evergreen: the beauty and pain and strangeness of being young and alive in any era. In Smoker’s hands, it’s fertile ground.
