foot foot – the garden
foot foot make the kind of art-rock that sounds like Black Country, New Road after a good night’s sleep: lighter, dreamier, still deeply strange underneath. The Bristol quartet call it “snail freak prog,” and “the garden,” their first new track in over a year, backs that up: folk-picked guitar at the start that gives way to angular drums, then sax and violin freak-outs from Evo Ethel and Amelia Gilmartin pulling the whole thing somewhere jazzier and less predictable by the final section.
Singer Esther Pollock wrote it after a bad Hinge date landed right on top of a breakup, in the middle of one of those cold, dark, wet British winters that makes everything feel worse than it is. You can hear 1970s prog in the bones of it, plus The Raincoats and Stereolab in how it holds the unsettling and the playful in the same breath without picking a side.
The video leans into the band’s namesake: they took the name foot foot from The Shaggs, and it shows up here in a kind of skewed, road-movie logic, all momentum toward a destination that never quite resolves. It was shot to match the raw, live-room sound they got recording in the basement of Louisiana, the Bristol venue where they also made their debut album, still waters, empty house, in a single seven-day stretch with producer Jack Ogbourne.
foot foot started in 2021 as a folk duo before doubling into its current lineup, and they’ve spent the time since opening for Deerhoof and The Bug Club around Bristol. “The garden” is billed as the first taste of a new EP, PREY TIME, and the band are playing Left of the Dial in October.
