Columbus band For Your Health have released a new banger “Flowers For The Worst Of Them,” from their upcoming full-length This Bitter Garden, arriving June 6 on 3DOT Recordings. The track is the second preview of the album, accompanied by a visualizer directed by guitarist Nick Marzluf.
Vocalist Hayden Rodriguez explains that the song explores his ongoing reckoning with religion, particularly his childhood experience with Catholicism. “I’m examining what it means to me as an adult who has spent many years away from the church,” he says. “In the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about faith and how it relates to my life and the lives of others.”
Themes of disillusionment and decay run through This Bitter Garden. Rodriguez offers a central image: “You can grow fruits and vegetables in a garden to feed people, or you can grow poisonous plants.
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One of the main thematic elements is, ‘What happens when a place where you grow nourishment turns rotten?’” That metaphor extends to ideas of unresolved anger and bitterness: “You continue to nurture resentment even when it’s so far past what you intended it to be. You end up on a path.”
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Guitarist Rosa Delgado frames the record as a synthesis of their past work. “These songs are a true distillation of all the sonic ideas we’ve explored previously and our different interests. 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.”
She calls the record “an expansion of everything before.”
The album was tracked in 15 days with producer Eric Hudson at a studio located in a repurposed church in rural Illinois. The band’s lineup includes Rodriguez (vocals), Marzluf (guitar), Delgado (guitar), Johnny Deborde (bass), and Sim Morales (keys, vocals).
Last month, the band shared “Davenport (A Rotten Pear),” with a video directed by indie horror filmmaker Nick Holland (Wronged, An Intrusion). Stereogum described it as “a violent freakout that reaches Blood Brothers levels of euphoric anxiety.”
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This Bitter Garden is available for pre-order through 3DOT Recordings on various vinyl formats, cassette, and digital. The 13-track album follows 2021’s In Spite Of, which drew praise for its genre-defiant intensity and raw experimentation.
For Your Health will tour with awakebutstillinbed across the U.S. this summer, starting June 19 in Pittsburgh and wrapping July 8 in Cincinnati. Tickets are available now.
Tour dates with awakebutstillinbed:
June 19 – Pittsburgh, PA – Roboto Project
June 20 – Baltimore, MD – Undercroft
June 21 – Philadelphia, PA – Warehouse on Watts
June 22 – Providence, RI – The Parlour
June 23 – Boston, MA – Warehouse IX
June 24 – Brooklyn, NY – Trans Pecos
June 25 – Rochester, NY – The Psychic Garden
June 26 – Lakewood, OH – Mahall’s
June 27 – Ferndale, MI – Pug Fest @ Orchid Theatre
June 29 – Grand Rapids, MI – Zabhaz
July 1 – Chicago, IL – Subterranean
July 2 – Milwaukee, WI – X-Ray Arcade
July 3 – Minneapolis, MN – Pilllar Forum
July 4 – Des Moines, IA – The Church
July 5 – Kansas City, MO – Farewell
July 6 – St. Louis, MO – Sinkhole
July 7 – Indianapolis, IN – Healer
July 8 – Cincinnati, OH – Northside Tavern
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