gglum, the moniker of rising London-born songwriter Ella Smoker, announces her debut album and first for Secretly Canadian, The Garden Dream, out 29th March.
The Garden Dream feels like a deep moment of realization for Smoker. Coming after previous, formative 8-track projects Weak Teeth (2022) and once the edge has worn off (2021) it has opened up space for her to reach out to her past self and confront the ill ease that still lingers there. Though she wouldn’t call it a concept album per se, she describes the narrative of her full debut, The Garden Dream, as a kind of fever dream, toeing the line between potent memory and repressed imagination.
“At the time of writing it, I was having so many nightmares, just straight-up graphic and disturbing stuff. I think it was my subconscious telling me I had shit I needed to deal with, a lot of the mistrust I’ve had since I was a teenager. It was weirdly good timing, because I’m at a point in my life now where I’m actually pretty happy, and am in a good place to look back.”
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.
Lead single ‘Do You See Me Different?’ is intimate and atmospheric, “about the confusion, chaos and deflation you feel during a difficult relationship,” Smoker explains. She’s also shared the instantly memorable ‘Glue,’ a song about “the desperation of wanting a broken relationship to be fixed again. Frantically scrambling to ‘glue’ things back together, but also feeling hopeless and numbing out.”
Last year, she announced her signing with ‘SPLAT!’, which was praised by The FADER, who named it a ‘Song You Need in Your Life,’ Stereogum, and Paste Magazine who called it “a dashing, noisy fit of emo-inspired garage rock with tints of TRL-obsessed pop hooks.” She closed out 2023 with the industrial, riotous ‘Easy Fun,’ which Billboard called “a bold new vision of indie-pop.”
WATCH THE ‘DO YOU SEE ME DIFFERENT?’ VIDEO
The 21-year old Ella Smoker first broke out with 2020’s viral pandemic-era hit ‘Why Don’t I Care.’ Inspired by the likes of Alex G, Phil Elverum and Adrianne Lenker, gglum’s music positions Smoker as an artist who can wield atmospheric disturbance at her fingertips, crafting soundscapes that allow her to reconcile with a tumultuous coming-of-age. With flickers of electronica, dream pop and discordant garage-punk, her acoustic guitar becomes a sturdy ally, the base of a versatile, lo-fi sound that manages to feel simultaneously escapist and immersive.
Raised on everything from rockabilly and soul to MTV-era emo, she was drawn to music that offered a sense of safety, a feeling of being held within the layers of detailed instrumentation. But when she tried to write herself, she wasn’t quite sure how to conjure this sense of comfort, to make music that could adequately deal with the issues bothering her subconscious at night.
“At the time I was 17, going out all the time, bunking school, feeling really rubbish about myself,” she says. “I think that’s what helped with writing a song I liked for the first time — I just started being honest. It was basically just me pouring my misery into a song, and that’s why I called myself gglum. At the time, I was just being all angsty teenager.”
The Garden Dream Album ArtTracklist:
- With You
- SPLAT!
- Late
- Pruning 1
- Pruning 2
- Easy Fun
- Glue
- Second Best
- He Laid His 97’s Neatly By The Door
- Honeybee
- Do You See Me Different? (Feat. Kamal)
- Eating Rust
- The Garden Dream
As she’s gotten older, 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 realize 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 realize was there.”
This kind of intuitive release feels fitting for an artist who got here seemingly by fate. Raised in London by parents whose musical interests ranged from rockabilly to gospel, Smoker’s interests in performance began fairly innocuously, auditioning for the church choir as a convenient way to swerve a looming school test. In a feat of divine intervention, she ended up being a chorister for three years, performing at weekly services and learning how to sight read. “A lot of that theory has kind of gone out of the window for me now, but the harmony stuff stuck. There’s something really fun about belting in a really huge space, being allowed to be that noisy.”
As her affection for harmonic layers mingled with 00s emo and big-budget Lady Gaga music videos (“a great way to fit in at school”), Smoker eventually found herself settling into a love of intricately-textured indie — Elliott Smith, Alex G and Big Thief. On quiet days, she’d challenge herself to make soundscapes or imaginary film scores, swerving lyrics in favour of “vocal harmonies just moving around”. When a school friend introduced her to 90s cult band The Microphones, it was a lightbulb moment of realization, unfurling a connective bridge between popular music and more experimental forms.
“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.”
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