Pressing Concerns: Tough Age, Pretty Matty, Motorbike, Seriously

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Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! Today, it’s new albums from Tough Age, Pretty Matty, Motorbike, and Seriously that get spotlighted (spotlit?). This is a classic post! If you like the music I typically write about on this website, all of these will be up your alley!

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Tough Age – Waiting Here

Release date: June 16th
Record label: We Are Time/Bobo Integral
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Give It a Day

Tough Age are a trio based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, and they make some of the most exciting guitar pop music I’ve heard so far this year. Waiting Here is Tough Age’s fifth album–the band has weathered a move to and back from Toronto, as well as a few lineup changes. Singer-songwriter-guitarist Jarrett Evan Samson is joined by bassist Lauren Smith and drummer Jesse Locke on this album, and together they tear through ten spirited tracks of Flying Nun-inspired indie rock music. Samson is a gifted pop songwriter, capturing a range of emotions with his relatively barebones band setup, and Tough Age give these songs a full-band energy that’s missing from a lot of modern Dunedin-inspired bands.

Tough Age can pull off both the ruminative, pensive side of bands like The Clean, and their moments of pop euphoria as well–look no further than how Waiting Here’s understated opening track “In a Garden” transitions into the runaway hit of “Give It a Day”, a song that is bursting at the seams with hooks and pure excitement. “Hideaway” similarly runs around in circles giddily, and the Smith-led “Paradise by Another Name” is propulsive jangle pop at its best. Tough Age have some more dimensions to their sound, however–the light psychedelia of “Which Way Am I?” reminds me a little bit of Guided by Voices, “Time & Time” again recalls the melancholic side of The Bats, and “Narrative Text” features a hard-working rhythm section and a droning keyboard that puts it into Yo La Tengo or The Feelies territory. Tough Age are a full-on pop band on Waiting Here, executing these ideas in the way they deserve to be. (Bandcamp link)

Pretty Matty – Heavenly Sweetheart

Release date: June 14th
Record label: Self Aware
Genre: Pop punk, power pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Were

Matty Morand is half of the Toronto pop-punk-alt-rock duo PONY, whose excellent sophomore album Velveteen I wrote about just a month ago. In addition to their work in PONY, however, Morand also leads Pretty Matty, their own band that’s been around since 2018 and have an album and a couple EPs to their name already. Pretty Matty (also featuring PONY’s Sam Bielanski on bass, plus guitarist Christian Beale and drummer Josh Cassidy) explore a familiar but welcome style of hybrid pop punk/power pop on their second album, Heavenly Sweetheart, and it’s clear they’ve spent a lot of time listening and being moved by this kind of music. Morand sounds freaked out, strained, and bratty at various points on Heavenly Sweetheart–they’re a natural pop punk frontperson.

Morand covers a lot of ground on Heavenly Sweetheart–dealing with a stalker figure on “Changed My Number”, being broke for so long “that it doesn’t even faze [them]” on “Weird Year”, setting the record straight about a one-sided relationship in “Were”, and trying desperately to get in contact with someone in “After the Tone”. It’s all soundtracked by sweet and fuzzy-sounding pop rock with some fairly pleasing guitar work strewn about the instrumentals. Heavenly Sweetheart has a fairly uniform overcoat, but the songs differentiate each other within this context–“Been Worse” and “Life Support” are the louder pop punk tunes, “See You Around” is just a little jangly, “Changed My Number” and “After the Tone” cruise in mid-tempo. Morand makes sure to stuff more than enough to chew on in Heavenly Sweetheart’s 28 minutes–it doesn’t feel like being short-changed the way a few under half-hour albums might. (Bandcamp link)

Motorbike – Motorbike

Release date: June 16th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Life Is Hell

Motorbike are the latest rock band to come out of Feel It Records headquarters Cincinnati, Ohio, led by the Welsh singer Jamie Morrison and featuring members of bands like The Drin, Good Looking Son, and Vacation backing him up. The self-titled debut Motorbike album is a blast of a record that lives up to its name–the quintet tear through nine fiery garage punk tunes in 26 minutes, sounding ferocious but with a classic punk catchiness buried underneath the multi-guitar attack (provided by Dakota Carlyle and Philip Valois). Morrison’s vocals hold their own, but the guitars are the star of Motorbike, roaring over everything else and delivering both catchy riffs and sonic squalls.

Motorbike start Motorbike with “Motorbike”, a dark but propulsive piece of rock and roll whose lead guitar riff is incredibly catchy against an almost post-punk backdrop. The band break out plenty more vintage garage punk workouts in the first half, including the explosive “True Method”, the breakneck “Throttle”, and the appropriately-named “Off I Sped”. “Life Is Hell” surprisingly features a recurring jangly lead guitar, and the playing in  “Spring Grove” sounds triumphant–these songs are where the pop side of Motorbike peeks out most cleanly through the fuzz. Still, Motorbike save one of their best garage punk numbers towards the end (penultimate track “Pressure Cooker”), and close things out with the thorny burn-it-down anthem “The Language”. The whole thing rocks heavily and demands to be played loud. (Bandcamp link)

Seriously – Built Environment

Release date: June 16th
Record label: Earth Libraries
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Under the Boot of God

Seriously are a Birmingham, Alabama-based post-punk trio made up of guitarist/vocalist/synth player Michael Harp, guitarist/vocalist Jonathan Crain, and bassist/vocalist Chayse Porter (who now lives in San Francisco). I believe that Built Environment is the band’s first full-length album, following a couple of singles over the past few years. It comes out via Earth Libraries (Cash Langdon, Joe Kenkel, Pelvis Wrestley), and while the album certainly falls under the umbrella of post-punk, it resists settling into one lane or groove within that genre. Seriously deploy plenty of synths but remain a guitar-forward band, their songs typically have “normal” structures but they get a little experimental around the edges, and the songs range from noisy garage rock to smooth 80s new wave-esque numbers.

The first two songs of Built Environment are the sharp stomp of “Darkroom” and the floating bright colors of “With Delight”. Seriously don’t stop probing from there, offering up the bass-and-synths-led dance-punk of “No Salvation” in the record’s first half, and marking the midpoint with “The Architect”, an atmospheric synth instrumental that feels right out of 1982. Seriously shade their songs with a college rock/new wave-y sheen, with tracks like “What If the Dream Comes True?” plodding along its post-punk beginning to offer up a gorgeous, melodic chorus. The title track, meanwhile, evokes downer British jangle pop groups for its entire five minutes, and “Under the Boot of God” closes Built Environment out on a busy-sounding but slow-moving note. Seriously have clearly studied a lot of music from the early 1980s as Built Environment shows, but they move too quickly to ever get stuck making a mere recreation. (Bandcamp link)

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