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Sooper Artist

Anthony Fremont's Garden Solutions

Anthony Fremont is a telepathic monster with god-like powers, inhabiting the body of a 6 year old boy. Originally documented in Jermone Bixby’s short story “It’s a Good Life” and later in an infamous episode of The Twilight Zone, Fremont has the power to alter reality, control any subject with his mind, and more recently - the power to express his disdain for our spiritually corrupt society through the musical output of Chicago polymath Marcus Drake’s post-hardcore project “Anthony Fremont’s Garden Solutions.”

In 2017 Drake released a collection of EP’s under the Fremont name, Anthony Fremont’s Good Life / American Dream, a cassette anthology that has garnered a cult following among physical media heads. Soon after its release, Marcus left his hometown with a camper full of musical equipment hitched to his truck in search of inspiration and self discovery. He instead found himself lost in the desert, both in a literal sense when his truck broke down in a Mojave sand dune, and in the metaphorical liminal space between self actualization and spiritual violence that followed. Working in town to save up for car repairs, Marcus battled a full on identity crisis as he struggled through anxiety, depression and destructive coping methods. When he finally returned home, Marcus brought back more questions than answers, but the cosmic irony of this odyssey led to the birth of his first LP outside of the Anthony Fremont universe. 2024’s Save Point 1 showcased a brand new production style for the artist. Sparkling guitars, warped low-end, and heartwrenching synth breakdowns alchemized Marcus’s philosophical musings into glitchy arena-pop anthems.

With newfound perspective, Marcus Drake taps back into the creative wellspring of Anthony Fremont’s Garden Solutions for his new EP Maelström arriving August 21st via Chicago art-freak label Sooper Records. In an impressively dense 15 minutes, Marcus Drake's newest offering teems with frenetic math-metal riffs and airtight grooves that sound like Drake is playing the drums with four arms. Every second of Maelström is packed with enough musical ideas to define an entire artistic identity, but Marcus tosses them to the side as soon as they’ve materialized, relentlessly barreling towards the next unexplored dimension. While predominantly performed with rock instrumentation, Maelström is arranged with cartoonish elasticity that defies genre definition, in the compositional lineage of Looney Tunes musical director Carl Stalling, an important influence according to Drake. The EP eases up on the gas, if only slightly, for noise-funk groover “Indifference” which sounds, at times, like a Sheryl Crow classic on a bad trip, but as soon as you’ve caught the reference, Drake has already pulled the rug out from under you. Maelström was entirely performed, produced and mixed by Marcus himself, resulting in a vividly unique sound that can only come from deep within an artist’s most private inner world. Avant-rock mutates through electronic processors, every vibration obsessively fine-tuned to shake the listener's skull.

Lyrically Maelström walks a wickedly delightful line between tongue-in-cheek societal callouts and sincerely humanistic poetry. “We're getting sick from licking screens, two static tongues behind the scenes" Marcus coos as he glides from chill new-wave delivery to a full on rap-rock bark, “Hit em with a 1, hit em with an 0, hit ‘em with the buzz, hit ‘em with a dose.” A close look at the lyrics behind songs like “Indifference” reveal an entire novel of AnthonyFremont lore, while others like “Script” use this lens to hold a mirror up to our content-driven era, “That's just showbiz, take your place, assimilate…you’ve got to eat shit and generate.” The cathartic crux of Marcus Drake’s alter ego Anthony Fremont (or is it the other way around?) is that the outrage in his lyrics and explosive instrumentation, despite their combative tone, are rooted in a benevolent wish for the good of humankind. The EP’s finale “Long Last” lays it all out as Anthony’s narration calls out the sins of the wealthy elite, and the ease with which we are distracted by the spectacle of modern life. “Pop music, warfare, fear of God, prophet, control, fair pay, A.I.” Marcus sings, “your phone, your script, your nature, your indifference, your clock will stop ticking, but go on licking. Die for their good life.” Maelström takes on the overwhelming evils of the world with pure idealism, mischievous with good intention, true to the perspective of a 6 year old boy trying to control a senseless world.

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