Now we’re at the real halfway mark of the year (not just the mid-June “music blog mid-year list season” mark of the year), it’s time to wrap up all the good music I heard in June of this year. This month’s playlist has a bunch of stuff I’ve written about already in some form, as well as some brand-new faces and a few welcome returns. It’s a good one!
Nobody has more than one song on this playlist. Forty different songs, forty different artists.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing a song), BNDCMPR (missing two songs). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Forward March”, Laybrum
From Hungry for the Other Thing (2024, Pleasure Tapes)
The debut album from Philadelphia’s Andrew Santora (aka Laybrum) is an impressively disparate collection of songs, and it saves one of its best tricks for last. Hungry for the Other Thing closes with “Forward March”, which stretches to six minutes, but–like its title suggests–it’s rolling full steam ahead for the majority of its length. Santora and crew pound out a massive, fuzzed-out hookfest from the starting gate and largely keep the song’s structure intact as they progress–a swarm of synths eventually surfaces at its big finish, but only after Laybrum have gotten everything they needed out of it. Read more about Hungry for the Other Thing here.
“Every Time I Hear”, Sharp Pins
From Radio DDR (2024, Hallogallo)
The second Sharp Pins album, Radio DDR, was initially released only on Bandcamp in May to benefit the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, but now that the record (one of my favorites of 2024 so far, by the way) is streaming, it’s time to throw “Every Time I Hear”, its brilliant opening song, onto a playlist. Chicago’s Kai Slater had already established himself as an emergent power pop talent with last year’s Turtle Rock, and he begins Radio DDR with a song that feels like a huge step forward. Triumphant electric guitars blast forward a path that traverses jangly college rock and the wistful melodies of early Guided by Voices with a sound that’s bigger than anything Sharp Pins has offered up before now.
“Hallelujah”, Bad Moves
From Wearing Out the Refrain (2024, Don Giovanni)
We don’t need to overcomplicate this: every Bad Moves album thus far has been an exhilarating, massive rock and roll success, and we’re receiving every indication that the D.C. power-pop-punk quartet’s third record is going to keep the streak alive. No shade to the bummer pop anthem “New Year’s Reprieve”, but “Hallelujah” is my favorite piece of Wearing Out the Refrain (due in September) thus far. One of my favorite strengths of Bad Moves has been their ability to power through some high-concept writing while remaining fun, boisterous, and danceable, and “Hallelujah” follows in the grand tradition of Bad Moves classics like “Spirit FM” and “Party With the Kids Who Wanna Party With You”. It’s Bad Moves’ world, and we’re just trying to keep up with it.
“Vital Signs”, Grr Ant
From Once Upon a Time in Battersea (2024, Crafting Room)
Once Upon a Time in Battersea is an overstuffed, eager album of guitar pop anthems. London’s Grant Gillingham has made no secret of his love of 80s underground music–post-punk, C86 indie pop, college rock–and his debut solo album pulls together all of these influences ambitiously and successfully (if you like bright, clanging guitar leads, solid post-punk basslines, galloping drumbeats, and low-key but melodic vocals–they’re all here!). “Vital Signs” kicks off the record with a gigantic statement, sounding trebly and warbly and yet absolutely huge at the same time, with synthesizers braying over the tuneful wall of sound and Gillingham’s steady vocal performance. Read more about Once Upon a Time in Battersea here.
“Texting & Driving”, GUPPY
From Something Is Happening… (2024, Lauren)
I’d like to thank GUPPY for writing the song of my intrusive thoughts’ summer. In just about every aspect, “Texting & Driving” sounds like a cartoon come to life–the music, which sounds bouncy and colorful and gooey, the fairly impressive yet concerning vocal performance from frontperson J Lebow, and the lyrics, which do indeed concern the titular activity but also contain detours into catching Kony and Osama Bin Laden and “texting God in my head / (also known as praying)”. I’ll probably never be free of “Texting & Driving”–the question is whether or not the last thing I hear on my deathbed will be “Why would they let a bitch like me operate heavy machinery?” or “Mission accomplished, because America’s awesome”.
“Bruised”, Laughing
From Because It’s True (2024, Meritorio/Celluloid Lunch)
A power pop star has been born on Because It’s True, the debut album from Montreal’s Laughing. It’s a collision of ragged pop music, an album that fires up a seemingly-endless bag of tricks to hook the listener immediately and keep the engines running long past the initial burst. The classic power pop balance between electric bluster and practiced shyness is struck in single and obvious “hit” “Bruised”, which is absolutely brimming with winning melodies and professional losers. Read more about Because It’s True here.
“Enredados (Misty’s Mix)”, Las Nubes
From Tormentas Malsanas (2024, Spinda/Godless America/Sweat)
Tormentas Malsanas is loud and crunchy rock and roll music at its loudest and crunchiest. Miami’s Las Nubes deal in the more massive end of the 90s alt-rock spectrum, incorporating shoegaze and dream pop atmospherics with even a bit of punk energy–Breeders comparisons aren’t inaccurate, but, there’s a grunge-y heaviness to their sound and it packs a punch as strong as good psych-rock does, too. Right in the middle of the record is Las Nubes’ most “accessible” moment in the form of “Enredados (Misty’s Mix)”, finding the band dealing in “digestible” punky alt-rock that’s nonetheless sturdy enough to stand up against some of the more towering compositions found on Tormentas Malsanas. Read more about Tormentas Malsanas here.
“She’s Leaving You”, MJ Lenderman
From Manning Fireworks (2024, Anti-)
You’re supposed to start sucking after you blow up and jump to a bigger label, I think, but MJ Lenderman clearly hasn’t gotten the memo yet. “She’s Leaving You” accompanied the announcement of September’s upcoming Manning Fireworks (which will also feature last year’s superb “Rudolph”), and it’s done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for the record. As Lenderman gets more and more of a leash to make his solo music, he’s inching closer to the grandiosity of his north star, the Drive-By Truckers–and that’s perfectly fine by me, especially when he brings the energy like he does in “She’s Leaving You”. “It falls apart, we all got work to do,” is far from the most instantly memorable Lenderman refrain, but it plays along with the rest of the song nicely, a deceptively astute combination that bodes well for Lenderman’s fire in the long haul.
“Left in the Sun”, Local Drags
From City in a Room (2024, Stardumb)
This song rules. Power pop wizards Local Drags first showed up on my radar last year via the excellent Mess of Everything, one of my favorite albums of 2023, and they’ve solidified their status as the best thing to come out of Springfield, Illinois since that guy with the tall hat by putting out another solid collection of exquisite Midwestern guitar pop a year later in City in a Room. Like Mess of Everything, it’s short and sweet, but my favorite song on the album, “Left in the Sun”, really only needs a few seconds to get its hooks in you. With a chorus as strong as the one this song has, it’s impressive that Local Drags wait a whole thirty seconds before launching into it, but thankfully the New Miserable Experience-level opening guitar lead and the effortless melodies in the verses both hold up their parts, too.
“Midcoast Kids”, Hayes Noble
From As It Was, As We Were (2024, 2-2-1 Press)
Hayes Noble recently relocated from the small northwestern Illinois town in which he grew up to Spokane, but the teenage fuzz rock devotee couldn’t help but lay down one more massive Midwestern rock and roll statement before leaving the Driftless Area. Noble’s second full-length, As It Was, As We Were, sounds like a freight train counterbalanced by the earnest writing at the center of the storm. The most cathartic moment on As It Was, As We Were is “Midcoast Kids”, a song that deals with everything by turning the guitars up loud and driving around all over town “till curfew”. Noble situates us along the Mississippi, but between the guitars and attitude, it’s timeless and universal. Read more about As It Was, As We Were here.
“Simply the Best”, Swiftumz
From Simply the Best (2024, Empty Cellar)
Simply the Best is the first record from Swiftumz’s Christopher McVicker since 2015, but the “songwriter’s songwriter” has remained beloved in his Bay Area home in the intervening years. The LP provides ten shining examples of McVicker’s ability to come up with and execute a sublime pop song–sometimes fuzzy and distorted, other times sweet and jangly, Simply the Best is precisely-focused on hooks while also retaining the earnest intimacy of bedroom pop. The mid-tempo, electric power pop strut of the opening title track is an instant ‘hit’, and even though there’s a lot else to like on Simply the Best, I think this song is still my favorite. Read more about Simply the Best here.
“High on the Job”, Workers Comp
From Workers Comp (2024, Ever/Never)
Between 2022 and 2023, Workers Comp released three different four-song cassette EPs and a 7” single, all of which displayed a strong grasp of distorted, blustery lo-fi garage rock. Their first long-player is a compilation of this previously-released material, put out through Ever/Never Records, and Workers Comp is an excellent addition to the world of blown-out, ragged Americana and rock and roll. Workers Comp emerged fully formed on their debut EP, One Horse Pony, which includes the simple rock and roll throwback “High on the Job”, my favorite song on the whole compilation. The verses chug with an incredibly potent, dry patience, and the chorus (little more than the song’s title) sends us home (even if we’re all at our respective workplaces). Read more about Workers Comp here.
“Golden Sedan”, Grocer
From Bless Me (2024, Grind Select)
Grocer have been an intriguing band to me for a while now–a Philadelphia trio seemingly splitting vocal duties evenly among themselves and playing with Exploding in Sound-extended-universe groups like Kal Marks, Pile, and Speedy Ortiz. Their third album, Bless Me, is a solid collection of indie rock that’s both “art” and “pop”, and the deceptive slacker vibes contained in “Golden Sedan” have powered the song towards being one of my favorite new discoveries in recent memory. Sort of sounding like if Pile was a pop band, “Golden Sedan” is a restrained, neatly-organized rock and roll track that is polished and well-executed right up to the controlled demolition at the song’s close.
“Write It in the Sky”, The Umbrellas
From Write It in the Sky (2022, Slumberland)
I had the extremely good fortune of seeing The Umbrellas live last month, and while I already knew that their most recent album, Fairweather Friend, ruled, witnessing the San Francisco jangle pop quartet live gave me a renewed appreciation for “Write It in the Sky”, their 2022 non-album single that bridged the gap between their first two LPs. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how “Write It in the Sky” broke things open for the group–there’s a barreling-forward, exhilarating energy to The Umbrellas’ performance of the song that indicated where they were going to go after the relatively-restrained guitar pop of their (still quite good) 2021 self-titled debut. Both live and in the studio, The Umbrellas have only uncovered more gold by following down the path “Write It in the Sky” set.
“In My Japanese Compact”, Planet 81
From Escape!! to…Planet 81 (2024)
The debut album from Justin Cohn’s Planet 81, Escape!!, embraces the music from the year implied by the project name (namely prog-pop, sophisti-pop, funk, R&B, disco, and power pop/new wave) incredibly enthusiastically. Escape!! has plenty of irons in its aural fire, merely one of which is a desire to make vintage 80s pop in a way that sounds huge and current. The Prince-wave “In My Japanese Compact”, a zippy, cool-as-hell 80s “car song” if I’ve ever heard one, is definitely in the running for the biggest pop success on Escape!!–look, it has plenty of competition, but this is one of those songs that really knows how to drill its way into your head. Read more about Escape!! here.
“Western Leisure”, Oh Boland
From Western Leisure (2024, Meritorio/Safe Suburban Home)
It’s been an incredible year for Meritorio Records between Dancer, Rural France, and Laughing, but don’t sleep on the latest record from Irish garage-punks Oh Boland, either. Their third full-length, Western Leisure, is a genuinely weird record that looks beyond the signature sound of the band (which is now effectively a Niall Murphy solo project) and does, indeed, snag a bit from the worlds of country and western music. The album’s title track is a particularly memorable diversion, a tipsy barroom rocker that has ringing piano and pedal steel in its arsenal, but they’re (particularly with the latter) deployed smartly and enthusiastically rather than merely as a gimmick.
“Live Without”, Program
From It’s a Sign (2024, Anti Fade)
It’s a Sign, the long-anticipated (by me, at least) second album from Melbourne guitar pop group Program is fresh off of an appearance in Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2024, So Far, so let’s hear a song from it, why don’t we? You can’t really go wrong on It’s a Sign, a collection of timeless laid-back pop songs with a Flying Nun influence, but “Live Without” in particular is an instantly-catchy success. Laying aside some of their more droning and post-punk impulses, “Live Without” is pure sugar, recalling the moments when bands like The Clean and Tall Dwarfs similarly followed their pop muses in the midst of more expansive records.
“Purple Hearts Hardly Bruise”, Friends of Cesar Romero
From Last Summer a Year from Now (2024, Doomed Babe)
Another month, another great mini-release of strong power pop/garage rock from J. Waylon Porcupine. After March’s excellent “More Like Norman Fucking Mailer” single, the latest dispatch from the South Dakotan’s Friends of Cesar Romero project is Last Summer a Year from Now, a lightning-round, five-songs-in-under-ten-minutes EP. After leaning a bit into his punk/garage side in opening track “Kinetic Threat”, “Purple Hearts Hardly Bruise” is the no-strings-attached “hit” of the EP. The verse melody immediately establishes “Purple Hearts Hardly Bruise” as a surefire success–all Friends of Cesar Romero have to do is ride the momentum to nail another classic 90-second power pop song.
“I’m All Fucked Up”, This Is Lorelei
From Box for Buddy, Box for Star (2024, Double Double Whammy)
I truly do love This Is Lorelei. I listened to one of the countless EPs from Nate Amos’ solo project back in 2020, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Box for Buddy, Box for Star is the first This Is Lorelei album since his main band, Water from Your Eyes, has really blown up, and is subsequently the first This Is Lorelei album a lot of people have heard. Accordingly, Amos has cleaned up the frequently messy, anarchic pop instincts of the project into something resembling “respectful folk-tinged indie pop”, but this is still This Is Lorelei we’re talking about. You’ll never be able to chase stuff like “I’m All Fucked Up” out of him. Impossibly wordy, impossibly catchy, just plain weird–it’s everything I’ve come to love about This Is Lorelei, and there’s something disorienting about how little the shined-up acoustic guitars and the clarity in the various-toned Amoses (singing with himself) change the vibe.
“Fictional Environment Dream”, Guided by Voices
From Strut of Kings (2024, GBV, Inc.)
Strut of Kings, the so-called “only Guided by Voices album of 2024”, sounds pretty good to me so far! I’m not sure if it tops their trio of 2023 records as a whole, but the highlights feel very high this time around–in particular, lead single “Serene King”, excitable closing track “Bicycle Garden”, and “Fictional Environment Dream”, the one I’ve gone with for the playlist. It’s a mid-tempo rocker that has the wistfulness of Robert Pollard’s more “sensitive” writing but delivered with full-band backing–this describes a lot of recent Guided by Voices material, I know, but for whatever reason everything works together to let “Fictional Environment Dream” soar particularly high for four minutes.
“Closure”, Daniel Brouns
From Stock Music for the Cosmos (2024, Anxiety Blanket)
Most of the songs on Stock Music for the Cosmos, the debut solo album from Daniel Brouns, have acoustic, folk-ish skeletons, but Brouns isn’t afraid of using synths and rock instrumentation to tease them out. Combined with Brouns’ deep voice and his personal lyric-writing, the record reminds me a lot of Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan. Stock Music for the Cosmos is made up discrete moments from Brouns’ life presented chronologically–as Stock Music for the Cosmos advances, lines get blurred and the songs begin to bleed into each other. “Closure” is an beautiful-sounding song about something ugly and painful, namely a relationship that implodes so palpably that it permanently alters several friendships in both of the central players’ lives. Read more about Stock Music for the Cosmos here.
“If There’s Nothing Left to Say”, Polkadot
From …to Be Crushed (2024, Count Your Lucky Stars)
I’m not sure exactly what I would’ve expected a Bay Area indie rock group signed to a legendary emo imprint to sound like, but …to Be Crushed is a pretty good approximation of the midpoint between the indie pop scene around Polkadot and the emo-tinged 90s indie rock side of their label, Count Your Lucky Stars. …to Be Crushed suggests that the distance between twee and emo isn’t as great as it might seem, and the best song on the album is “If There’s Nothing Left to Say”, one of the band’s clearest embraces of indie pop. “I don’t wanna be stuck in this place anymore / Or maybe I do, I guess, now I’m not so sure,” vocalist Daney Espiritu sings in the song’s chorus–other Bay Area bands might use a dream pop haze to portray confusion, but for Polkadot, it’s crystal clear. Read more about …to Be Crushed here.
“Line of Demarcation”, Blame Shifters
From Everyone Must Go (2024)
I’ll tell you what–I’ll always appreciate an obscure rock and roll band that’s performing like every eye in the world is upon them. Blame Shifters are a trio from Boston who draw equally from post-hardcore and guitar pop (it sounds a little bit like the classic “garage rock/post-punk” combo) on Everyone Must Go, and in recent years they’ve weathered the death of guitarist and songwriter Chris Simmons to continue making fiery, socially-conscious, globally-concerned rock music. “Line of Demarcation” is a Minutemen-style rant about redlining, inequality, and stark differences in affluence that can be found in their home city and its surrounding suburbs. One doesn’t need to know anything about the racist urban history of Boston to get the gist of Blame Shifters’ message here.
“Be Someone Else”, Extra Arms
From RADAR (2024, Setterwind)
Ryan Allen is a power pop/pop punk ringer from Detroit who’s been really churning out records lately, both under his own name and via his band Extra Arms. Extra Arms’ latest album is RADAR, a ten-song, twenty-minute storm of pop hooks that’s probably my favorite thing I’ve heard from the musician yet. Out of a few different options, I’ve gone with the massive opening track “Be Someone Else”, a smooth, retro-tinged power pop anthem in which Allen cajoles the subject of the song to give up their attempts to do what its title suggests. Extra Arms certainly borrow from the past to make “Be Someone Else” hit as strongly as it does, but it’s so enthusiastic and natural-feeling that they’re clearly only following their own advice.
“Something Looming”, Marcel Wave
From Something Looming (2024, Feel It/Upset the Rhythm)
Marcel Wave are a quintet from London who have been around since at least 2019 but have only just now offered up their first full-length, Something Looming. With it, the band have turned in a confident, polished, and accessible first statement following in the grand tradition of British “post-punk”/“indie pop” records, offbeat and keyboard-damaged but quite accessible. Something Looming is “catchy” in some form for pretty much its entire length, but sometimes it’s more traditionally so than others–the garage-pop bounce of the title track is one of the most immediate ones, hooking the listener early on in the runtime. Read more about Something Looming here.
“Bystander Apathy”, Silicone Values
From How to Survive When People Don’t Like You and You Don’t Like Them (2024, SDZ)
Whoa, a lo-fi garage rock album with a comically long title by a band that has “Silicone” in their name? I gotta check this out. Apparently, Silicone Values are a “collective” from Bristol that have been reliably churning out singles of this stuff since 2020, and How to Survive When People Don’t Like You and You Don’t Like Them collects the fifteen songs they’d put out thus far on vinyl via French label SDZ. “Bystander Apathy” is probably the “hit” of the album, taking the ornerier garage-punk elements of the band and concentrating it to the tune of a three-minute British guitar pop tune (it’s still got a post-punk bite, don’t worry, but those early punk rockers would’ve really enjoyed a really catchy chorus that proclaimed “Bystander apathy / what a total failure”).
“Country Song”, Growing Stone
From Death of a Momma’s Boy (2024, Near Mint)
Skylar Sarkis first became known to me as the frontperson of 90s indie rock/punk revivalists Taking Meds, but Death of a Mama’s Boy, the second album from his Growing Stone solo project, showcases a different side of Sarkis entirely. It’s acoustic guitar-based, featuring transparent, conversational lyricism, and darkly ornate in its arrangements. On Death of a Mama’s Boy, Sarkis tries on a few different aliases–orchestral pop singer, gothic folk troubadour, and, on one of my favorite songs on the record, a country balladeer. The slow-moving meditation of “Country Song” is shockingly straightforward (even on a record with plenty of such moments), and Sarkis’ lyrics are evocative enough that the song’s title isn’t a misleading advertisement. Read more about Death of a Mama’s Boy here.
“How the Ivy Crawls”, Perennial
From Art History (2024, Safe Suburban Home/Totally Real/Ernest Jenning Record Co.)
Their third album, Art History, finds dance punk/post-hardcore revivalists Perennial doing exactly what they do best–making excellent rock music and pushing just a bit forward. This time around, the 60s pop rock influence feels less “implied” than ever and more and more central to their sound, and the experimentation continues to erode into the pop music. “How the Ivy Crawls” is an excellent example of how the band, which can feel like a club bashing a piñata over and over again at times, can also weaponize dynamics when the moment calls for them–the first refrain of the song pulls back, creating a weird, spooky, feedback-laden blank space, and then explodes next time around. Read more about Art History here.
“Awake and Miserable”, Tigerblind
From It’s All Gonna Happen to You (2024)
It’s All Gonna Happen to You is self-released and self-recorded, like everything else put out by Dallas’ Cameron McCrary as Tigerblind. I like a lot of this music, but I was particularly struck by the album’s lo-fi pop whimsy delivered in a fluffy and somewhat sensitive package, reminding me of bands like Sparklehorse, early Grandaddy, and The Gerbils. It’s All Gonna Happen to You is a little bit punk, a little bit “confessional”, a little experimental, and late-record highlight “Awake and Miserable” has a lot of what makes the record work as well as it does. Tigerblind takes an uncertain but firm step forward with a steady bass guitar part and the track eventually blossoms into a mid-tempo, earnest, sweeping indie pop anthem. Of course, the song’s called “Awake and Miserable”, so don’t go into it expecting life-affirming lyrics. Read more about It’s All Gonna Happen to You here.
“Your Man”, Membrains
From Membrains (2024)
There are days where I find myself listening to a ton of music and not really taking anything from any of it. On those days, I need a jolt to get my head back in the game and start really engaging with it again. Thankfully, bands like Philly garage rock five-piece Membrains are still roaming the streets with their aural defibrillators. Their self-titled debut will almost certainly do the trick, and if you aren’t entirely convinced, I suggest you skip to the sixth (out of eight) song on the record, “Your Man”. This is the kind of lit fuse, punk-fluent garage rock and roll that the revivalists were attempting (and frequently failing, though not always) to reach in the 2000s. This is power pop at the “power” end of the spectrum, a helicopter of hooks passing just a bit too low over the City of Brotherly Love.
“The Drummer”, Alexei Shishkin
From Open Door Policy (2024, Candlepin)
Open Door Policy, the second Alexei Shishkin album of 2024, finds the Queens singer-songwriter cleaning and polishing up his sound. This time around Shishkin used both a proper studio (Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio) and a bunch of collaborators, ending up with a record that sounds like the more refined, pop-friendly sides of Shishkin’s 90s indie rock influences. The first half of Open Door Policy in particular feels like a lost underground “best of” compilation, with the laid-back pop of opening track “The Drummer” kicking off the festivities expertly. Read more about Open Door Policy here.
“Acting Tough”, Shit Present
From Acting Tough (2024, Specialist Subject)
You know I’m always down for some emo-tinged British indie-pop-punk–and the latest release from Exeter’s Shit Present is a potent dose of it. The six-song Acting Tough EP follows last year’s What Still Gets Me LP, and for whatever reason it gripped me in a way that the group’s previous releases hadn’t. The EP’s opening title track comes out of the gate roaring–it’s incredibly catchy and polished, true, but the refrain (“It’s such a shame to have to see you acting tough / Did somebody make you feel like you aren’t good enough”) finds Shit Present hardly holding back less-pleasant emotions and realizations.
“Sorry Signal”, Tamara Qaddoumi
From Sorry Signal (2024)
Tamara Qaddoumi is a Lebanese/Kuwaiti indie pop singer-songwriter who’s been steadily releasing EPs since the late 2010s. Sorry Signal is her third EP, and the four-song record is an intriguing collection of icy post-punk and synthpop. My favorite song on Sorry Signal is the title track, which closes the record with a skittering post-punk rhythm section combined with the brighter hues of Qaddoumi’s vocals. Eventually, “Sorry Signal” blossoms into a synth-driven darkwave-influenced track, although it’s a natural progression from its more plainly-adorned beginning.
“1000000th Song”, Night Court
From Shit Split Part Duh (2024, Hovercraft/Green Noise)
Earlier this year, Vancouver’s Night Court teamed up with like-minded punk-pop merchants The Dumpies to cram nine songs onto a split 7”. Of the two sides, Night Court’s is probably the less “punk” one, as the Canadians use their allotted time to run through a couple of brief but laser-focused power pop anthems. “1000000th Song” is a particularly potent display of the group’s power–it’s a punk-pop anthem that makes its mark in under a minute, with the flagging, spirited pessimism at its core giving it another dimension regardless. Read more about Shit Split Part Duh here.
“Saturnia”, Max Blansjaar
From False Comforts (2024, Beanie Tapes)
The first LP from Oxford’s Max Blansjaar is a successful and personable pop album, spit-shined to enhance the emerging talent at the center of it all. Blansjaar is a quietly confident vocalist, and as a lyricist his aptitude is apparent from the beginning of False Comforts. His writing is reminiscent of more rambling corners of folk and rock music, but False Comforts turns the free-flowing narratives on their heads by corralling them with tight instrumentals and a stoic delivery from Blansjaar himself. The confident, arm-swinging studio pop of “Saturnia” has a few weird touches but is still a wildly engrossing start to the record (probably because of its few moments of chaos stitched alongside the zen found elsewhere in the track). Read more about False Comforts here.
“Beat Happened”, Blair Gun
From There Are No Rival Clones Here (2024, sonaBLAST!/Enabler No. 6)
First of all, great song title on this one. Blair Gun are a new (to me, at least) band from San Diego that’s got a bit of garage rock, post-punk, and classic 90s indie rock in the sound of their second album, There Are No Rival Clones Here. “Beat Happened” is the best of all worlds–there’s a smooth post-punk rhythm section, garage rock bluster rearing up every now and again, a catchy, Malkmusian deranged pop performance from the lead vocalist, and even a few moments of overdriven, fiery garage-post-hardcore that are the most “San Diego” moments here. It’s just an exciting pop song (of the “Rosy Overdrive-fluent” variety) and I’m interested to hear more from Blair Gun.
“Shoes for Runners”, The Co Founder
From Never Miss a Good Opportunity to Shut the Fuck Up (2024, Acrobat Unstable)
Out via stalwart emo label Acrobat Unstable, the latest album from Oakland’s The Co Founder is a striking record that combines dark but catchy alt-rock, anthemic pop punk, “heartland rock”, and, yes, a bit of emo in there, too. My favorite song from Never Miss a Good Opportunity to Shut the Fuck Up is “Shoes for Runners”, which contains a huge, brutal chorus “I buy shoes for runners / Knowing you don’t even walk home / I buy shoes for runners / Hypocrite”) that has stuck with me effectively since I first heard it. This band’s been around for nearly a decade now, so I suppose I’m somewhat late to the party, but it certainly bodes well that they’re still able to get it together to make something as potent as “Shoes for Runners”.
“Shed”, Sub*T
From Spring Skin (2024, If This Then)
On their latest EP, Brooklyn’s Sub*T plow through five songs that fully embrace the “90s-alt rock revival”–if you had heard that the group (Grace Bennett and Jade Alcantara) had previously recorded an EP with Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, chances are you could’ve made a fairly accurate guess as to what Spring Skin would sound like. That being said, just because Sub*T is in well-trod territory doesn’t lessen the impact of songs like “Shed”, the barreling, slicing semi-title track that’s my favorite one on the EP. The song chugs through a seamless alt-rock foundation, and the vocals are clear and polished but not overly showy. Bennett and Alcantara just hit on something with this one, simple is that.
“Figure Me Out”, Twikipedia
From For the Rest of Your Life (2024)
Back at the beginning of the year, I heard Still-Life, a charming lo-fi bedroom pop EP from Rio de Janeiro’s Twikipedia. As it turns out, the “20 year old experimental artist and producer” behind Twikipedia had an entire 50-minute full-length album coming merely months later in the form of For the Rest of Your Life, a record that takes a big step forward in the form of massive, fuzzed-out nü-shoegaze (but while still holding onto “pop” more than a lot of bigger bands in the genre do). “Figure Me Out” is the “pop hit” of the record to my ears, a distorted power pop tune with a studio pop streak and some stealthily charming synth hooks baked into its 2.5 minute humble-party vibes.
“Windshield Spider”, Riggings
From Egg (2024, Horse Complex)
It’s still fair to call Alex Riggs a folk artist on Egg, her debut full-length as Riggings, although that doesn’t exactly capture the blown-open sound that she’s lassoed into place here. The prolific North Carolina singer-songwriter has been pretty open about Chicago experimental folk and post-rock being influences on her sound, and Egg cracks that side of her music wide open with whirring space positioned alongside the songs’ acoustic foundations. After a pretty heavy-duty opening to the record, “Windshield Spider” is Riggings’ version of warm, welcoming folk rock, pulling back the curtain and letting the sun’s rays hit the cobwebs–just admiring it all for a minute before Egg gets back to it. Read more about Egg here.
Rosy Overdrive 