Pressing Concerns: Cloud Nothings, Ekko Astral, Sun Kin, The Juniper Berries

Today, Rosy Overdrive is closing out the biggest week on the blog in a while with the fourth blog post in as many days. Today, we’re looking at three albums that come out tomorrow, April 19th–new LPs from Cloud Nothings, Sun Kin, and The Juniper Berries–and an album from Ekko Astral that came out yesterday. If you missed any of the other posts that came out earlier this week (Monday’s post featured Mythical Motors, Bill Baird, Hour, and Trummors, Tuesday’s looked at Rain Recordings, Virgins, Jay Alan Kay, and Squiggly Lines, and on Wednesday, we took a deeper look at 90s Bay Area singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus), be sure to check those out, too.

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.

Cloud Nothings – Final Summer

Release date: April 19^th
Record label: Pure Noise
Genre: Garage rock, punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Thank Me for Playing

Although Cloud Nothings haven’t formally appeared in Pressing Concerns before now, the Cleveland rock band certainly haven’t been absent from Rosy Overdrive in the past–you’ll find both 2021’s The Shadow I Remember and 2020’s The Black Hole Understands on their respective years’ year-end lists (and had the blog been alive before 2020, I certainly would’ve been talking about 2018’s Last Building Burning and–especially–2017’s underrated Life Without Sound). In a world where Greg Sage and Robert Pollard are Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, vocalist/guitarist Dylan Baldi would be a folk hero, churning out loud, pummeling, hooky rock music at a steady clip for a decade and a half now, aided deftly by longtime drummer Jayson Gerycz (also of Knowso) and bassist Chris Brown (who’s been with the band for the majority of its existence at this point). The three year gap between the band’s last album and their latest, Final Summer, is their largest yet, and it’s also their first for Pure Noise Records after leaving their longtime home of Carpark–but despite the strange krautrock-y introduction to the record, any fears of a huge departure for the band have been assuaged before the first half of the opening track is over.

One could cherry pick a few details from the record–like the way that krautrock-y intro of the opening title track gives way to a big-sounding, saxophone-featuring “heartland rock”-ish version of the Cloud Nothings sound–and spin a “Cloud Nothings as you’ve never heard them before” narrative, but to me Final Summer sounds like the band at their most comfortable. Ringers at this point, the trio are confident in their abilities to do things like the title track and putting the gear-shift, mid-tempo “Daggers of Light” in the record’s number two slot without having an identity crisis. They still retain the edge that caused Attack on Memory to jump out in a crowded field a dozen years ago, whether they’re moving through the 90s alt-rock-indebted “I’d Get Along” or the vintage Baldi-esque fuzzed-out pop of “Silence” or classic, fizzy power-pop-punk in the vein of “Thank Me for Playing” or noisy workouts like “The Golden Halo”.

Listening to the wall-of-sound guitarwork that rises up in between pop hooks in “I’d Get Along” and “On the Chain”, I start to wonder if Cloud Nothings are perhaps underappreciated in how they’ve shaped this current wave of shoegaze-y noise pop bands. We don’t think of Cloud Nothings in that context because they don’t sound like shoegaze; they sound like Cloud Nothings–even in 2024, they feel like a unique blip on the landscape of indie rock despite their discernible influences. “Common Mistake” is a surprisingly clear-sounding pop rock song hidden as Final Summer’s final song, although it makes sense as such–when Baldi sings “You’ll be alright, just give more than you take” in the chorus, it’s an invitation to take a step back and look at Cloud Nothings’ career as a whole (and, perhaps, zooming out even further to see what they’ve touched) and confirm that Baldi knows what he’s talking about with this advice. (Bandcamp link)

Ekko Astral – Pink Balloons

Release date: April 17^th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, fuzz rock, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Devorah

Ekko Astral are a Washington, D.C.-based quintet led by vocalist/guitarist Jael Holzman and rounded out by guitarists Liam Hughes and Sam Elmore, drummer Miri Taylor, and bassist Guinevere Tully. I’ve had my eye on the group since their 2022 debut EP, Quartz, a scrappy glam-tinged punk rock record. The group have jumped to Topshelf Records off the strength of those songs, and have now put together their first full-length album, called Pink Balloons. Their first EP was pretty good, but the leap that Ekko Astral have taken in between that record and what they sound like on Pink Balloons is remarkable–their base-level sound has expanded and mutated into a full-on assault of heavy fuzz-punk, and they also push and explore beyond that aspect of themselves across the record’s eleven songs and 35 minutes. Holzman is a remarkable frontperson–her lyrics are all over the map, frequently necessitating me consulting the lyric sheet to confirm that, yes, she did say what I thought she just said, and her vocal performance absolutely matches them. Sometimes she’ll sound like a droll Kill Rock Stars rocker, sometimes like a demented punk cheerleader, and other times she just sounds like herself.

Pink Balloons is a varied-sounding record, but Ekko Astral seem to have deliberately stacked the album so that we’re all pummeled into submission by its first half. The first two tracks, “Head Empty Blues” and “Baethoven”, both bash away at the listener via Holzman’s frenetic decision to grab onto a phrase and ride it out for all its worth–in the former, it’s the title line, which fills the space in between the series of intrusive-thought jumpscares running through Holzmann’s mind, and in the latter, it’s “the pain of being myself” laid up against the external pain described in the rest of the track. The truly bizarre-sounding “Uwu Type Beat” and the sheer antipathy of “On Brand” don’t let up, and the spoken-word “Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between L’Enfant and Eastern Market” is a funeral procession that hits even harder in its own way.

It’s really tough to figure out where to go from Somewhere at the Bottom of the River…”, but Ekko Astral come out the other side with an ambitious and strong closing stretch–the six-minute stitched-together art-punk of “Devorah” is a fiery flag-waver, and the band enlist Salt Lake City singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett to sing co-lead vocals on Pink Balloons’ final, song “i90”. In the first few minutes of the eight-and-a-half minute song, the duo of Pollett and Holzmann drift in and out of a hazy instrumental, recounting similarly blurry memories of Torah verses and billboards seen outside of Chicago–and they then revisit some of the most uncomfortable moments of “Somewhere at the Bottom of the River…” together as the song navigates towards a huge finish. It’s at this moment that Ekko Astral are as far from their initial fuzz-punk as they’ve gotten yet–and at the same time, it makes even more sense to me than the rest of Pink Balloons. (Bandcamp link)

Sun Kin – Sunset World

Release date: April 19^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, indie pop, synthpop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I’m in the Band

Sun Kin is the project of Bombay-originating, Los Angeles-based Kabir Kumar, who first became known to me through their frequent collaborations with Pacing, playing guitar, bass, and singing on their most recent record, which was one of my favorite albums of 2023. As of late, Kumar has also gained some notoriety as the guitarist of buzzy indie rockers GUPPY, although Sun Kin remains their longest-running and most prolific project. Over the past dozen years, Kumar has amassed an impressively large and varied back catalog as Sun Kin, and even though it’s been a few years since their last proper album (2021’s After the House), they’ve been busy in the meantime with a steady stream of EPs and singles. Some of these songs show up on Sunset World, an ambitious pop album in which Kumar corrals a ton of his musical collaborators and acquaintances–including members of Cheekface, Sweet Dreams Nadine, Illuminati Hotties, their bandmates in GUPPY, and their partner Nicole Levin–in service of an eleven-song, thirty-minute record with boundless energy.

As a songwriter and frontperson, Kumar has a wide-encompassing nature that finds them jumping across genres (folk, pop, and electronic among the most prominent), subjects, and personal proximity to their own material in a way that reminds me (very pleasingly) of Emperor X. Opening track “Big Window” leaps out of it in an exhilarating way to kick off Sunset World, and even though “I’m in the Band” (featuring GUPPY and Illuminati Hotties’s Sarah Tudzin) is decidedly lower-stakes in its depiction of awkwardness and minor indignities that come with being a musician, Kumar doesn’t approach the song like that’s the case at all. The R&B/trip hop-influenced “Fave Please” and the quiet acoustic “Til I’m Whole” both practice saying a lot with relatively little, and that’s all well and good, because “All the WeWorks Are Dead!” comes along not long afterwards, and it’s Kumar at their all-over-the-place, mile-a-minute best (“All the WeWorks are dead, WePlay now / Drinking lemonade in the ruins of downtown” are the first two lines of that one, and that’s just the beginning). The press release for Sunset World namedrops Steely Dan and Frank Ocean as fellow “apocalyptic LA pop” practitioners, and when Kumar smooths out their sound in “Small Gestures” and “I Wanna Believe”, it’s not crazy to see them in the same light (even as the latter of the two songs reminds me of Todd Rundgren more than anything else). Sunset World is a record about destruction, but it’s bright and sunny and never loses sight of the positives involved in ruins and decay–it’s just clearing more space for what really matters. (Bandcamp link)

The Juniper Berries – Death and Texas

Release date: April 19^th
Record label: Earth Libraries
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Stephanie

The latest release from prolific Alabama label Earth Libraries is the third album from The Juniper Berries, the project of singer-songwriter Joshua Stirm. Like another Earth Libraries artist, Pelvis Wrestley, Stirm originated in the Pacific Northwest (he grew up in southern Oregon) before eventually settling in Austin, Texas. Death and Texas is the first I’ve heard from The Juniper Berries, but it feels like it fits comfortably in the vein of singer-songwriter-centric pop records that have come out on Earth Libraries in recent years from acts like Pelvis, Bory, and Cash Langdon. Stirm’s writing is sharp but friendly, incorporating shades of folk rock, alt-country, power pop, and dream-y psychedelia across Death and Texas’ eleven songs. The stated influence of Andy Shauf feels about right, and these songs remind me of “Anywhere, USA” pop songwriters like Brian Mietz, Matthew Milia, and Collingwood and Schlesinger–but Death and Texas also has a rambling looseness to it, not being afraid to extend and stretch things out rather than doggedly focusing on precision and conciseness.

Stirm drew from some dark and heavy experiences–namely, the passing of both his brother and grandfather–while writing Death and Texas, but it doesn’t read as a straight autobiographical record. It’s not hard to see how these events influenced songs like the country-tinged reminiscing of “Role Model” and the offbeat but oddly touching “Walk Home”, but the record as a whole deals in crafted scenes, characters, and locations that are primarily held together by The Juniper Berries’ pop instincts. Stirm’s writing excels when it’s staging memorable settings, like the diner in the laid-back folk rock opening track “Tom, Dick, and Harry’s”, the intriguing marriage of football metaphors and 60s ornate folk pop on “The Home Team”, the slow-burn real-time collapse of “The Drunk Philosopher”, or the delirious, all-in pop rock of “Colleen”. “Colleen” and “Role Model” are Death and Texas at its most musically immediate, although “Stephanie”–which manages to turn in a pop anthem out of humbler ingredients–might actually be the peak of the hooky side of The Juniper Berries. On the other end of the spectrum, “Darkness” is a six-minute Okkervil River-esque ornate folk-country-rock song that isn’t overly concerned with catchiness (although it certainly is at times). “Darkness” casts a compounding shadow over the record, but as all-consuming as it feels, it’s just another moment captured by The Juniper Berries–as the last song’s title states, “Sad Songs Outlive Their Mother’s Pain”. (Bandcamp link)

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