Photos by Dylan Simmons
For angsty Orange County youths seeking refuge from some of California’s reddest towns, The Garden has become a household name. The band of OC natives — composed of twin brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears — is as idiosyncratic as the county itself: a strangely conservative bubble wedged between the progressive urban centers of San Diego and Los Angeles. Growing up where it’s easy to feel shunned for belonging to any marginalized identity — whether that be racial, sexual, or political — it’s clear why Orange County necessitates a thriving punk subculture of its own.
As such, I was hardly surprised by fans’ eager reception of the Shears brothers when they took over the Observatory in December. The twins sold out two consecutive shows at their hometown venue, dual-headlining not as The Garden, but as both of their side projects: Enjoy, Wyatt Shears’s bass-heavy catalogue with a classic punk sound; and Puzzle, Fletcher Shears’s electronic persona featuring catchy drum beats and eclectic samples. Their solo projects are wholly distinct, with Enjoy’s set feeling like a typical rock concert overflowing with crowd surfers, while Puzzle’s electronic tracks and strobe lights turned the Observatory into a rave. Still, it’s always fun to identify these hallmarks of Wyatt and Fletcher’s individual creative visions in their joint project, culminating in The Garden’s unique sonic identity.
Enjoy was the first set of the two headliners, with Wyatt Shears and his band producing an instrument-forward performance. He interspersed songs from more recent LPs (like 2025’s The Sound of Deceit and 2023’s Exploited) with older hits (like “Small Car With Big Wheels”), to which the crowd moshed and sang along indiscriminately. The sheer length and variety of the twins’ setlists epitomizes not only their impressively prolific nature, but also their centrality to Orange County’s alternative scene for over a decade.
Fletcher Shears closed out the show with an upbeat setlist of Puzzle’s greatest hits. He also focused heavily on his more recent releases, with tracks like “love is a place to hide” (off 2023’s The Rotten Opera) and “Slobber of the Dog” (my favorite from 2025’s Damage Collection!).
After a cathartic night of dancing, singing, and moshing, the Observatory’s sweaty inhabitants spilled out into the parking lot. Surrounded by the brutalist concrete buildings of a corporate business center, the brisk walk back to my car snapped me back into the reality of OC culture. Coming home for winter break — away from my cherished liberal, artsy bubble in Los Angeles — always stirs up myriad contradictory feelings. Sitting in my childhood bedroom feels simultaneously isolating yet comforting, familiar but changed — the kinds of paradoxical feelings that still manage to coexist, much in the same way that Orange County’s conformist suburbia and underground alternative scene exist by sustaining one another. No one embodies these uniquely nostalgic feelings for me as well as The Garden, a group that’s followed me from high school in Orange County into my twenties spent in LA. The Shears, too, have left their OC hometown to reside in Los Angeles, but we always seem to find our way back home, never straying too far from our roots.
