gglum The Garden Dream Vinyl LP Clear Orange Colour 2024

SIDE A
1. With You
2. SPLAT!
3. Late
4. Pruning 1
5. Pruning 2
6. Easy Fun

SIDE B
7. Glue
8. Second Best
9. He Laid His 97's Neatly By The Door
10. Honeybee
11. Do You See Me Different? feat. Kamal.
12. Eating Rust
13. The Garden Dream

As she’s gotten older, Ella Smoker has found that her subconscious
has been trying to tell her “some pretty wacky stuff”. Thoughts will
come to the 21-year-old singer-songwriter in dreams, or as she
writes lyrics in studio sessions, words floating onto the page before
she’s really had a moment to realise what they are. “As soon as we
start making the music, my brain sort of turns off,” she explains. “I’ll
be sitting there, writing all this stuff that feels like a load of
nonsense, and a month later, I'll look back and be like ‘oh’. It all
comes from a place I didn’t even realise was there.”

In learning how to open up to herself, gglum ended up finding a
kindred spirit in producer Karma Kid (Maisie Peters, Shygirl, Connie
Constance), pushing past her natural bedroom-pop introversion to
find joy in the process of collaboration. Whether it’s the ragged
radio-rock of ‘SPLAT!’ (“basically about realising that somebody you
held up very highly is actually just a massive shambles of a
person”) or the riotous, industrial energy of ‘Easy Fun’, Smoker is
able to reshape her vocal around the mood, creating a record which
expertly balances light and shade. “I've never really done anything
in like that vocal style before,” she says of ‘Easy Fun’s near-spoken
delivery. “I love that song because it’s not something I would have
come up with on my own, but Karma Kid was great at pushing me
out of my comfort zone. I just thought like, look: I can be a little
silly with this.”

The release of ‘The Garden Dream’ will offer gglum plenty more
opportunity to get both silly and serious, to be bold in her
exploration of new ideas and sounds. But it will also offer the
opportunity to further accept herself as the dreamlike artist she
always wanted to be; confidently embellishing acoustic worlds that
her listeners can burrow safely within.
“I feel like I naturally gravitate towards wanting to make musical
spaces that you can feel like you’re living in, rather than trying to
make songs”, she says. “That's something I really wanted to solidify
with this album: I basically want to make music that feels like when
you're looking out the window and it's the end of the film and
you're imagining what comes next. That's the sound of what I want
to be doing.”