For Your Health, who recently announced their signing to 3DOT Recordings, release their label debut, This Bitter Garden. on June 6. The band previews the 13-song collection with the video for “Davenport (A Rotten Pear)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wvAJ-o3ooI), a Southern Gothic-gone-wrong clip directed by indie horror filmmaker Nick Holland (“Wronged,” “An Intrusion”).
“These songs are a true distillation of all the sonic ideas we’ve explored previously and our different interests,” shares guitarist Rosa Delgado. “Hayden has a strong appreciation for film. We’re coupling his world-building and atmosphere with the immediacy, urgency, and brutality of our early material. We’re always striving to challenge ourselves. This Bitter Garden is an expansion of everything before.”
“This Bitter Garden is the first recording where we got to express ourselves as the full band we’ve been playing as for the last four years,” vocalist Hayden Rodriguez adds. “Everyone’s voice comes through. We’ve progressed, but it still feels like For Your Health.”
“In my head, This Bitter Garden has a dual nature,” Rodriguez continues. “You can grow fruits and vegetables in a garden to feed people, or you can grow poisonous plants. One of the main thematic elements is, ‘What happens when a place where you grow nourishment turns rotten?’ There are other themes too. You continue to nurture resentment even when it’s so far past what you intended it to be. You end up on a path.”
Pre-orders for This Bitter Garden are available now via 3DOT Recordings (https://store.3dotrecordings.com/), with the album offered on limited edition vinyl variants (white/cobalt with heavy splatter, and white/sea blue/black heavy splatter), cassette, and digitally.
This Bitter Garden follows the band’s acclaimed debut full-length, In Spite Of, which earned them “Band To Watch” status from Stereogum, praise from Pitchfork for their “screamo, post-hardcore, and genre-defying” sound, and was described by Brooklyn Vegan as “a vast array of sounds from under the umbrella of heavy music,” that “exists around the halfway point between early Daughters and the experimental late period of Fear Before the March of Flames.”
For Your Health recorded the album in 15 days, working with producer Eric Hudson at a studio “repurposed from an old church in the sticks of Illinois.”