Family Garden
Family Garden is a DIY Punk-Metal three-piece, crafting a sound that is as eclectic as it is powerful. Hailing from the underground Philly scene, the trio has a long-standing musical partnership, but Family Garden marks their most personal and enduring venture yet.
The band’s origins trace back to earlier projects, whose collapse led into a time of uncertainty during the pandemic, after which they determined to start fresh and create something new. Emerging from such a precarious era, the trio of Chubbrock on vocals and guitars, Ryan Flannery on bass and vocals, and Evan Madden on drums, strengthened their bonds through a slow and steady journey of songwriting and recording, leading up to the band’s debut in 2022, Born From The Heavens, a raw EP of Family Garden’s emergence into the world.
Dreams Beyond Control, the band’s new full-length album in 2025, is a collection of abstract, surreal short stories wrapped in powerful metal and punk textures. Tracks like “Jesus Was a Spider”, a conceptual exploration of an arachnid god, and “Stomping Grounds”, a fever-dream narrative about returning to a hometown with dark secrets, demonstrate Family Garden’s ability to craft vivid horror vignettes through their music. Themes of growth, loss, and strange realities echo throughout their music, tying into the band’s identity. These realistic portrayals of the paranormal are driven by thick and dirty guitars, massive, pounding drums, and captivating vocals, with an experimental touch complemented by the eerie synth contributions of James Daniel Horn.
The name Family Garden originated from the band’s guitar player, when his mother sent him a childhood drawing he had made of a garden with his siblings, parents, and pets, titled “A Family’s Garden”. This resonated with the band and became a nod to family, roots, and personal history. Chubbrock’s artwork plays a significant part in Family Garden’s vision, exploring artistic freedom with no rules or obligations, only paint to canvas, and eventually, to album covers.
Throughout their history of collaboration, the trio’s creative process remains unified, with each member having an equal say in every aspect of creation. Chubbrock and Ryan F. craft a uniquely dark guitar and bass sound, often layering multiple tones and
effects to create a massive sonic presence. Evan’s drums anchor the chaos with strength and precision, while Chubbrock and Ryan F.’s vocals carry gripping narratives inspired by sci-fi, horror, real-life tragedy, and the supernatural.
With each new creation, Family Garden offers a sound that breaks free from tradition and stays true to their DIY roots. Their latest album was an arduous but rewarding journey, recorded at Permanent Hearing Damage in South Philly with Steve Roche, and releasing on Strange Mono Records, whose charitable efforts were a part of the band’s decision to work with the label. Family Garden has chosen PAWS – Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society – as their charity to benefit from the proceeds of Dreams Beyond Control.
Looking ahead, Family Garden is already pondering future releases, with discussions around another full-length album or potential EP. They’ve recently shared the stage with Vile Form, Cesarian, and Thin in Philadelphia, and continue to expand their presence in the punk and metal scenes, and beyond.
“It was in the crumbling, labyrinthine depths of Philadelphia-a city steeped in the whispers of forgotten centuries and the weight of unspoken horrors-that I first heard the name Family Garden. This blasphemous triad, composed of three figures who seemed less like men and more like vessels for some unfathomable cosmic will, had emerged as if spat forth from the gullet of a ravenous void. Chubbrock, Ryan Flannery, and Evan Madden, though cloaked in the guise of human flesh, bore within them the taint of something far older and more sinister. Their veins pulsed not with blood, but with the eldritch ichor of heaven’s forbidden magic, a dark gift that bound them to their unholy purpose. Their music, a grotesque fusion of black metal’s glacial malevolence, crust punk’s feral rage, and the disorienting, acid-fueled chaos of a mind unraveling, was no mere performance. It was a ritual, a ceaseless call to the cultivation of an earthly garden whose roots delved deep into the abyss, sprouting tendrils of cosmic dread that threatened to ensnare any that dared to listen.
Scrawled note found on South St.
I learned of their past affiliations with ill-reputed harbingers of sonic annihilation YDI, Eat The Turnbuckle, Crackhouse, Woods of Ypres, and Woe yet it was clear that Family Garden represented something far more debauched and terrifying. Chubbrock’s guitar shrieked like the death throes of a dying star, his vocals a ululating invocation of entities best left forgotten. Ryan’s basslines throbbed with the rhythm of a world submerged, his voice a guttural blasphemy that intertwined with the cacophony like a serpent coiling around its prey. Evan’s drums were the heartbeat of the void itself, a relentless, chaotic pulse that seemed to echo the madness of the cosmos blasting deeper into my psyche with each turbulent kick. Together, they tended their garden, a grotesque parody of Eden where the fruits of their labor were not life, but the sweet, rotting nectar of existential despair. To witness Family Garden was to feel the roots of their creation burrow deep into your soul, twisting and spreading until escape was impossible. I know it must have been a dream, for it to be a reality this bleak, this dominating and vile could not exist on Gods earth. And yet, even as I write these words, I cannot shake the feeling that their garden is still growing, its tendrils reaching ever further into the unsuspecting world…
CONTACT
Everything: Instagram
Booking: familygardenphilly@gmail.com
Press
“Family Garden arrive surrounded in chaos and debauchery, doling out a combination of black metal, crust, thrash and hardcore.”-Decibel Magazine
“I got mental images of a deranged Big Band, of blizzards capable of cutting flesh, of menacing titans rising from the earth, of punks bouncing off each other on grimy concrete, of criminally insane inmates who’ve taken over the asylum.” – No Clean Singing