Pressing Concerns: Worriers, Subsonic Eye, Tony Jay, Advertisement

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Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! Today, we’ve got four new albums to discuss: rippers from Worriers, Tony Jay, and Advertisement come out tomorrow, and Subsonic Eye‘s new album came out earlier this week. In my opinion, this post rules, and it contains exactly the kind of bands I wanted to write about on my blog when I started this whole thing. I would also recommend checking out Monday’s blog post (featuring Swansea Sound, Proper., Melancolony, and Bark) and the August playlist/round-up (which went up on Tuesday).

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.

Worriers – Trust Your Gut

Release date: September 15th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Losing the Thread

The first half of 2023 saw the biggest curveball in the decade-plus history of Worriers. The Lauren Denitzio-led, Brooklyn-based group made their name with albums of sharp indie-pop-punk, releasing music on labels like Don Giovanni and SideOneDummy and collaborating with Laura Jane Grace, Mikey Erg, and members of Bad Moves–artists who doubled as sonic points of comparison for albums like 2017’s sublime Survival Pop. In April of this year, however, Denitzio (who had relocated to Los Angeles) put out Warm Blanket, which they had recorded entirely at home, resulting in a low-key, bedroom pop-adjacent Worriers album. There had perhaps been hints of this with 2020’s You or Someone You Know, but it still felt like a huge departure. It was an intriguing turn, but Worriers hadn’t abandoned their louder side, as Trust Your Gut proves mere months later. Aided by The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay and Against Me!’s Atom Willard, among others, Denitzio and crew hammer out a record of power pop and pop punk that unsurprisingly contains several layers under its surface.

Denitzio’s songwriting has always been the main draw of Worriers, rather than the clothes in which their songs are dressed, and Trust Your Gut is a reminder that their lyrics can resonate and echo just as effectively in a “polished” pop context as in “intimate” bedroom rock. That’s certainly not to say that Nicolay’s keyboard playing doesn’t add to songs like “Backyard Garden” and the title track, but it does so in a way such that Denitzio’s personality shines through just as easily. The subtler depths of Worriers are apparent in songs like “Cloudy and 55” and “Waste of Space”, and Denitzio’s decision to stick these songs in the first half of the record rather than bury them in side two is an indication that they’re growing comfortable merging the various “kinds” of Worriers songs on the same album. Some of the most classic Worriers-sounding songs come near the end, like the exhausted punk of “Charming”, and the entire world that Denitzio builds in under two minutes in “Losing the Thread” is soundtracked by surprisingly smooth pop rock. Truthfully, though, these distinctions feel as fuzzy as ever–when Denitzio is pouring this much of themself into every song on Trust Your Gut, it starts to feel like Worriers can encompass just about anything. (Bandcamp link)

Subsonic Eye – All Around You

Release date: September 13th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Circle

One of the first albums I ever wrote about in Pressing Concerns was Subsonic Eye’s Nature of Things, the third full-length from the Singaporean indie rock band. It was a compelling record of dreamy, jangly, perhaps even slightly emo-y East Asian rock music that got a good deal of buzz–that is to say, ripe to be picked up by Topshelf Records, who’ve brought bands like Elephant Gym and Sobs to the West in recent years. The all-too-brief Melt the Wax EP surfaced late last year as the quintet’s first release on the label, and now they’ve arrived with All Around You, the fourth Subsonic Eye full-length. The band (Nur Wahidah, Daniel Castro Borces, Jared Lim, Sam Venditti, and Lucas Tee) pick up where Nature of Things left off–it’s an album of wide-eyed, big-sky indie rock marked by Wahidah’s compelling, expressive vocals and hooks that work well with All Around You’s grandiose ambitions.

Although All Around You is only a couple minutes longer than their last album, it feels fuller and bigger, with the band packing a lot into a lot of these songs’ two-minute runtimes. It’s a natural progression for Subsonic Eye, and one that works for them. Although a lot of bands who dive headfirst into ornate and “pretty” “heartland rock” run the risk of smoothing out their sound to the point of homogeneity–blending in with countless other slick Americandie bands that receive glowing Uproxx write-ups–Subsonic Eye will never have that problem as long as Wahidah’s distinctive vocals remain at their helm. From the electric propulsion of the album’s first three songs to the laid-back, guitar-driven dream pop of second-half highlights like “Tender” and “Machine”, Subsonic Eye’s winning formula of putting Wahidah’s singing front-and-center ensures that their pop smarts don’t get swallowed up (and, in fact, the instrumentals only add to the catchiness). Wahidah is key in holding the multiple sides of Subsonic Eye together, although the band’s dexterity deserves acknowledgement as well–whether they’re trading in perked-up, amp-cranked fuzz-pop or wistful, wandering material, All Around You confidently presents it all as one. (Bandcamp link)

Tony Jay – Perfect Worlds

Release date: September 15th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Just My Charm

Rosy Overdrive readers got a healthy dose of Michael Ramos last year–that’s when Mt. St. Mtn. reissued his solo project Tony Jay’s Hey There Flower, as well as Half Yesterday, a record from Flowertown (the band he co-leads with Cindy’s Karina Gill). Those twin releases are enough to get a sense of Ramos’ style of music–he falls on the dreamy, quiet, and sparse end of his city of San Francisco’s guitar pop scene, with his winning melodies being delivered with either patience-requiring slowness (particularly with Flowertown), heavy deployment of open space (with Tony Jay), or both of the above. Tony Jay has jumped to Slumberland for a brand new full-length, Perfect Worlds, and it’s yet another collection of pleasing pop music helmed by Ramos. Unlike Hey There Flower, however, Perfect Worlds features some other musical contributions  (Kelsey Faber on guitar, keys, and synth, Cameron Baker on percussion and glockenspiel), and it subsequently sounds a little cleaner–even though, yes, it was still recorded in Ramos’ bedroom.

Perfect Worlds is still a Tony Jay record, however, and enjoying it requires accepting Michael Ramos’ ideas of pop music. The album starts with the three minute noise piece of “Falling Sand”, for one–and while the first “proper” song”, “Isolated Visions” may have a steady drumbeat and a deliberate jangling guitar line, it still feels oh-so-fragile. Percussion drops in and out of these songs–side one highlight “Just My Charm” is just about as developed as Tony Jay has gotten, while tracks like “Conquered Certainty” and “Wonder Why” decline to dress themselves up and harken back to Hey There Flower. The title track offers up a piece of sparkling indie pop in the record’s second half, coming in the midst of a few songs (“Talking in My Sleep”, “Ice in the Jar”) that require a bit of a closer look in order to see their luster. There’s plenty to enjoy in Tony Jay’s less showy songs, however, and the fact that they’re interspersed with songs that take a step towards the listener makes coming back to them even more automatic. It’s never been easier–or more rewarding–to meet Tony Jay where he is. (Bandcamp link)

Advertisement – Escorts

Release date: September 15th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, krautrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Victory

As far as I know, all six members of Advertisement are fine, clean, upstanding members of society–and yet, their latest album, Escorts, just kind of feels dirty. Not in the loud gutter-punk way that some of their Feel It labelmates trade in, however–the band’s sophomore album has something more subtle but still quite potent going on. Advertisement–keyboardist/synth player Jesse Rosenthal, guitarist Ryan Mangione, drummer TJ Main, bassist Waylon Trim, and guitarist/vocalists Charlie Hoffman and Carl Marck–have spent the last half-decade cultivating a unique sound, a freewheeling, adventurous take on rock-and-roll that evokes everything from Lou Reed to Creedence Clearwater Revival to The Men to heavy psychedelia. Escorts is fairly uncategorizable–it’s a jammy album made by a band that doesn’t really sound like a “jam band”, it feels indebted to classic rock but is quite liberal with synths, and it frequently wanders but always feels on its way to somewhere.

The songs of Escorts were written remotely, as the sextet has become spread out over New York, Los Angeles, and their original hometown of Seattle, but they convened in southern California at Ty Segall’s home studio to record the album. Clearly, the band are locked in on Escorts–take any two random points on the album and one might say “is this the same band?”, but listening to it in order feels, somewhat improbably, like an incredibly smooth experience. Advertisement kick things off with the relatively straightforward garage-y “Victory”, but then they move into the six-minute groove of “Dancing Scrooge”–a swerve that nevertheless has nothing on their reinvention as a darkwave band on the next track, “Where Is My Baby?” Escorts moves toward the psychedelic and atmospheric as it progresses–there’s certainly some nice guitarplay on “Eat Your Heart Out”, and “Nobody’s Cop” is a deceptively pretty pop song, but the back end of Escorts kind of sounds like you’re watching the airport get smaller and smaller as the plane climbs higher. By the time closing track “Red Rocky Suite” comes roaring by, one might wonder if they even want to land. (Bandcamp link)

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