Green Gardens – ‘Thistlesifting’ album review: A beautiful and nuanced landscape of feeling

Posted On September 3, 2025September 3, 2025

When you’re in an art gallery, there’s the temptation to skip past the landscapes.

People race to get to the impressionists or the surrealists, something modern and brightly coloured and bold and angular. But there is beauty and nuance, unlike anything else in the paintings of nature, where simplicity and unending variety exist hand in hand. Leeds’ Green Gardens are a band that feel like that.

Nature is an endlessly underestimated force. Sure, that can be taken literally in that we still do not know, or do not appreciate, the power this world holds. But I’m talking about it artistically. It would be easy to shrug off its use as a cliché now as for as long as art has been around (which is forever), its creators have looked to the world around them for images and a new language to use to convey the one inside them.

“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary,” Emily Brontë wrote in Wuthering Heights. “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Wordsworth said. Love, loneliness, rage, joy, guilt, fear, grief: the world gives us a scene for them all. 

On Thistlesifting, Green Gardens turn towards all of them: glaciers, trees, newborn animals, mountains. In their instrumentals too, as their sonic landscape broadens from their 2023 debut, This Is Not Your Fault, so does the weather. On this offering, there’s everything from thunderstorms of heavier guitars, into the sun breaking through the clouds in more ambient moments, to the clear skies of folk details. Meandering through melody and tempo changes with incredible skill, all of it still feels led by feeling like the wind changing.

But to drop all the metaphors and imagery, Thistlesifting is a great album made with real consideration. From the way Chris Aitchison and Jacob Cracknell pass the vocals back and forth, to the incredibly textured nest of guitar sounds that Jacob Beaman crafts, there is so much intrigue to be found that sits outside of any clear sonic influences or reference points. Instead, it’s an album that follows its own vision and its own heart, clearly built with obvious care and carefulness.

Like a person deciding exactly where to put their paint in order to create the most seamless painting where you can’t even see the brushstrokes amongst its perfection, Thistlesifting exhibits the same intense care, resulting in something effortless. Evocative in such a specific way, like a perfect depiction of light or clouds or the ocean, it belongs in a gallery, or at least in your record collection. 

The perfect listening experience: This album is being released at the perfect time. I listened front to back as the rain hammered down. Then, as it started over again, the rain cleared, and the fresh smell of it on the pavement floated in through the window. Listen to it as the season turns, and give it your attention.

For fans of: The weather reflecting your mood.

Release date: 5th September | Producer: Joel Johnson | Label: Tiny Library Records

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