Garden Walk didn’t ease into their debut. “Does It Feel Like Home?” opens with a sound that already feels worked through: guitars with enough air around them to breathe, bass pushed into the center without crowding anything, drums that stay lively and human, and a mix that gives the whole thing weight without sanding off its edges. From the first song, the Amsterdam band sound less like a group trying on shoegaze, emo, alt rock and punk as references and more like four people who found a way to make those things sit together naturally.
That band came together through a series of near-misses and one last try. Drummer Ernesto says emo and punk were “a huge part of my coming of age years” and something he kept returning to on playlists and behind the kit, even after years of living in Amsterdam had made him almost give up on playing that kind of stuff again. He posted an open invite on Facebook one more time after a couple of failed attempts. “The third time was truly a charm,” he says.
Vadim was the one who answered. He had already been playing screamo in Ruona Neida, but wanted to do something “more gentle and dreamy” for a long time. He says it is rare to see anyone in Amsterdam looking to play anything emo-adjacent, “especially such a great drummer,” so he messaged Ernesto straight away. The two got together, jammed, and the chemistry was immediate. Ernesto became a fan of Vadim’s “dreamy and intense style” right away, and the first real result was the base draft of “Don’t Let It Burn Down.”
The lineup locked in almost as quickly. Vadim already knew Andrew through Andrew’s old band Full Lungs, and says they had actually written the final riff of what became “Don’t Let It Burn Down” together around three years earlier, during one of several failed attempts to start something. At almost the same time, Yulia posted a video of herself singing a Tigers Jaw cover. Vadim had known her for years too, but had no idea she could sing like that. By the third practice, Garden Walk were a full band and their first song was already in place.
Ernesto still sounds a little stunned by how cleanly it happened. “After 5 minutes playing all together I could not believe how great they all were and how right it felt,” he says. “Andrew’s base lines felt truly magical and Yulia’s heartfelt singing and lyrics were just the perfect complement.” Vadim puts it more simply: it all came together “in a kinda magical way,” and has continued to feel natural since.
That sense of timing matters because “Does It Feel Like Home?” is tied closely to Yulia’s writing, and to a period when putting difficult things into words became possible at the same moment the band was building the music around them.
She says the lyrical core of the record sits in “the feeling of alienation and the constant search for belonging: living far from the place of origin, longing for and losing connection with others and oneself.” Most of the lyrics were written over several months right after she joined the band. She describes the process as therapeutic: watching the others come up with instrumental ideas so easily, then fitting her own thoughts and experiences into them.
The title comes from a line in “Accents,” one of the album’s key songs. Yulia calls it “a reflection on my experience as a foreigner, trying to grow roots but still feeling like I can’t quite get settled or call it home.”
Her first home is in Ukraine, and that history runs directly through “Don’t Let It Burn Down,” a song about the guilt of being safe while family and friends remain under constant Russian attacks. She wrote those lyrics years before she knew she would be in a band. When Vadim sent her the first demo and asked her to join, those words finally found a place to live.
Other songs widened the record’s scope without losing that thread. “I’m Fine” deals with the strain of trying to function as usual, reaching for support, and having the person closest to you question the reality of what you are going through before pulling away completely. That then fed into “Strong Enough,” which Yulia describes as a song about losing connection with the person she used to associate with home, then realizing she might be better off on her own anyway. It moves toward accepting loneliness instead of fighting it.
“Roadtrip” came from a different impulse. Yulia says she decided it was time to write a happier song, and landed on long drives as the thing that reliably brought her joy, “with or without a clear purpose, sometimes skipping the exit to keep this fleeting feeling for longer.” Right before the band went into the studio, she wrote the opening “Feel Something” and the closing “If I Could Read Your Mind,” both shaped by unrequited love. Instead of treating that as pure sadness, she says the experience felt relieving and even hopeful — enough to make her happy to be writing what she calls “perhaps slightly corny love songs.”
So the album keeps returning to the same unresolved question from different angles: place, people, language, distance, safety, loneliness, heartbreak, the self. Yulia never tries to force a neat answer onto it. “Does It Feel Like Home?” remains open on purpose. “Is home defined by a place and the experiences in it, the people you share it with, or perhaps the only constant – yourself?” she says. “These are the topics I was circling around while writing the lyrics to this album. I didn’t find the answer.”
Garden Walk are based in Amsterdam, but the band’s picture of the Dutch scene is broader than one city. Andrew says he had mostly been around hardcore and hardcore-adjacent shows until recently, and that scene is “blooming,” but he is now seeing more attention around emo too. He points to 32elephants, Zakmes, all dogs go to heaven, and Snow Coats as current favorites. What stands out to him about the Netherlands is that there is no single city where everything is concentrated. Bands and shows are spread across the country.
For Vadim, though, Utrecht is the emotional center of it. He calls it his personal emo capital and says most of Garden Walk feel attached to ACU, the long-running political-cultural center there. Yulia volunteers at ACU as well. This month, the place turns 50.
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The album itself was recorded after roughly half a year of playing together. Garden Walk went to Far Out Studio in Rotterdam for two days with Niek Driesschen, who also handled the mixing and mastering.
Vadim had recorded there before with his other band and already knew what kind of atmosphere to expect. He calls the process “amazing and chill” and says Driesschen had a way of understanding what the band wanted before they had fully spelled it out.
“Just a few references and he helped us to level up our songs sonically to the sky,” he says. Late in the sessions, exhausted and close to midnight, the band thought they were done, and then Driesschen pushed for one more take: “wait, now you must play it again but crank up the shimmer – it should sound cool.” It did.
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You can hear that attention all over the record. Nothing feels over-packed, and nothing collapses into haze for the sake of it. The bass has real presence. The guitars move between density and open space without turning into mush. The drums keep the songs grounded and alive. It is the kind of production that makes its point immediately, then keeps backing it up across the full run.
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The band’s influences map that out without pinning the album down too neatly. Andrew says he was listening to a lot of post-punk and darkwave while writing and recording, pulling melodic bass ideas from bands like House of Harm, Soft Kill, The Ivy, and NVM. Vadim names Deftones, Downward, Nothing, and The December Drive as the biggest touchstones on the sound side, but adds that the people in Garden Walk were his biggest inspiration.
Ernesto traces his drumming back to staples like The Used, Silverstein, Underoath, The Dangerous Summer, and Angels & Airwaves, while also being especially into dream pop and more atmospheric, math-leaning pop around the time the band started — Hotel Apache, Lany, Uchu Conbini, Jyocho. Yulia was listening heavily to Lucy Dacus, especially “Forever Is A Feeling,” and also mentions seeing her play a small intimate show in Vondelkerk in Amsterdam. She calls Dacus “one of the greatest songwriters of our generation,” and also points to Julien Baker’s writing.
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All of that ends up inside a debut that is plainly introduced by the band as eight songs about war, being an immigrant, mental health, and heartbreak, but it lands with more range than a summary like that suggests.
The record is out now via Bandcamp and all streaming platforms, with artwork by dasha_noted. There is also a set of band, live, and other visuals prepared around the release.
Garden Walk are from Amsterdam, but “Does It Feel Like Home?” is mostly about what happens when home stops being a fixed location and turns into something less stable, less shareable, and harder to name.
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