Today, we’re closing out Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 editorial lists with my favorite reissues and compilations from this year. As this list encompasses a fairly wide range of releases, it is unranked, unlike my Top Albums and Top EPs lists. This isn’t the end of all year-end lists on the site, however: the results of the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll will go up next week (you have until midnight EST tomorrow to get your ballot in if you haven’t already!). Plus, there’ll be one last Pressing Concerns before the New Year.

Here are links to stream this list on various services: Spotify, Tidal. To read about much more music beyond what’s on this list, check out the site directory, and if you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. Thanks again for reading.

American Football – American Football (25th Anniversary)

Release date: October 18^th
Record label: Polyvinyl
Genre: Midwest emo, jazz-rock, math rock, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Hey, have you listened to the American Football album recently? It still sounds very good! It’s hard to believe, but it’s still a very fresh-feeling LP, legions of imitators be damned. Actually sitting down with this one for the purposes of putting this list together, it’s clearer than ever to me that all the bands who’ve attempted to use this record as a blueprint (some of which have ended up with something quite good in their own right, mind you) miss the deft aimlessness, the lost quality to American Football that makes it sound so timeless. It’s, like, barely an emo album, right? Even two and a half decades of newer bands attempting to shift the Emoverton Window in its direction haven’t really changed that. So, yeah, American Football–check ‘em out!

Big Ups – Eighteen Hours of Static

Release date: September 20^th
Record label: Dead Labour
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock, garage rock, experimental
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Big Ups were indisputably key figures in a specific era of 2010s East Coast DIY indie rock/punk. Drummer Brendan Finn, vocalist Joe Galarraga, guitarist Amar Lal, and bassist Carlos Salguero Jr. were already a whirlwind of a band on the twenty-eight minute original version of Eighteen Hours of Static, a live-wire record that slams together meaty noise rock, sinewy, claustrophobic 90s post-hardcore/post-rock, and Black Flag-like self-combusting punk rock. The liner notes for the tenth anniversary reissue, written by Dayna Evans, do (knowingly) contain the phrase “man, you just had to be there”, but even those who came to Big Ups later don’t have to close our eyes and imagine that we’re in Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium to get rocked by Eighteen Hours of Static ten years later. (Read more)

The Cat’s Miaow – Skipping Stones: The Cassette Years ‘92-’93

Release date: May 3^rd
Record label: World of Echo
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, lo-fi pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Another collection of early music from the great Australian indie pop group The Cat’s Miaow? Don’t mind if I do! Two years after the Songs ‘94-’98 compilation pulled from songs from the mid-to-late era of the Melbourne band’s run (and one year after Selected Songs 1997-2003, a compilation from three of the members’ post Cat’s Miaow band, Hydroplane), World of Echo has returned to this fertile soil with Skipping Stones: The Cassette Years ‘92-’93. This may comprise some of The Cat’s Miaow’s earliest recordings, but there are no signs of growing pains on this thirty-three-track, hour-long release; the band’s ability to turn brief, minimal snippets of indie rock into charmed, amber-frozen pop music was apparent from the get-go.

Cloud Nothings – Here and Nowhere Else (10th Anniversary)

Release date: October 2^nd
Record label: Pure Noise
Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

What’s your favorite Cloud Nothings album? Push comes to shove, I’d probably have to go with 2012’s Attack on Memory, but I’m not going to look at you askance if you ride for Here and Nowhere Else, Dylan Baldi’s seemingly-Sisiphian attempt to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle conditions of their breakthrough album and more or less succeeding. I do my best to not take the humming consistency of the modern version of the band (as seen on this year’s Final Summer) for granted, and listening to Cloud Nothings hammer out the contours of their desperate, pounding pop music as they had to do on Here and Nowhere Else only confirms just how impressive the whole Cloud Nothings “thing” is. Oh, and “I’m Not Part of Me” is maybe the best rock song of the 2010s, so it has that going for it, too.

Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera (Deluxe)

Release date: July 26^th
Record label: New West
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, southern rock
Formats: Vinyl

With an appreciative nod towards the Jason Isbell-featuring winning streak on which they’d embark immediately afterwards, Southern Rock Opera is nonetheless my favorite Drive-By Truckers album some twenty-odd years after its initial release. The ugliness, the ambition, the mythology, the lightning-rod writing, and, of course, the rock and roll are all high water marks for what “southern rock” or “alt-country” or “country rock” (pick your flag to wave) can and should be. And for all the band’s understandable seeking to distance themselves from “The Southern Thing” (or more accurately, what “The Southern Thing” became for a certain subset), there’s no shortage of more prescient and nuanced moments (plus there’s “Wallace”, the other end of the spectrum). And even if Southern Rock Opera didn’t hold up in that regard, a cemetery full of songs like “Women Without Whiskey”, “Zip City”, and “72 (This Highway’s Mean)” (and those are just the Cooley ones!) would be a great haunting indeed.

Willie Dunn – Son of the Sun

Release date: August 14^th
Record label: Light in the Attic
Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital

Light in the Attic’s work resurfacing the catalog of Mi’kmaq folk singer Willie Dunn has been one of the most vital reissue campaigns that anybody’s done thus far this decade, from the career-spanning Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies compilation in 2021 to the streaming availability of his 1970s albums to the crown jewel of this year, a digital reissue of his hour-long 2004 album Son of the Sun. Every newly-available Willie Dunn record confirms that the singer-songwriter was too large of a figure to be captured by a single release, and this album, which contains then-contemporary recordings, decades-old takes from the 1980s, and a couple of live tracks from Berlin, is a huge piece of the puzzle. Whether Dunn is helming sparse, meandering folk diatribes or relatively polished-up country songs, he’s always a commanding voice.

Elf Power – When the Red King Comes

Release date: May 3^rd
Record label: Orange Twin/Elephant 6
Genre: Psychedelic pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

This year in Elephant 6 and associated acts included the debut of a new project from The Olivia Tremor Control’s Derek Almstead, a deluxe reissue of The Ladybug Transistor’s The Albemarle Sound, and the first new OTC songs in a decade (and, sadly, the last to be released before co-founder Will Cullen Hart passed away in November). I want to focus on the often-underappreciated Elf Power here, whose second album, 1997’s When the Red King Comes, saw a remixed and remastered re-release this year. I’ve come to think of it as one of the great indie rock “transitional” albums, midway between the lo-fi bedroom rock of 1995’s Vainly Clutching at Phantom Limbs and the polished pop-rock of 1999’s A Dream in Sound. Neutral Milk Hotel-esque acoustic adventurousness combines with Apples in Stereo-like 60s-inspired pop songwriting, creating a forty-minute blast of an LP.

Fust – Songs of the Rail

Release date: January 5^th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital

Before North Carolina alt-country band Fust became one of the best practitioners of the genre in the early 2020s, bandleader Aaron Dowdy put out seven EPs (featuring four songs each) on his own in 2017 and 2018. When Fust became more than Dowdy and his computer, Dowdy began writing for a full band and decided to “leave the computer songs alone”, shelving his initial desire to expand these twenty-eight songs beyond their initial, raw forms. After 2023’s Genevieve brought a certain amount of spotlight on the band, however, Fust and Dear Life put together Songs of the Rail, a digital compilation of all seven EPs–nearly 90 minutes of music–in one place. Dowdy’s intimate, lo-fi bedroom pop take on alt-country here results in a blurry picture, with songs running into each other as Fust moves from one sleepy-sounding idea to the next. (Read more)

Heavenly – The Decline and Fall of Heavenly

Release date: February 2^nd
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, twee, jangle pop, power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl

After their first two records, 1991’s Vs. Satan and 1992’s Le Jardin de Heavenly, saw vinyl re-pressings in 2022 and 2023, respectively, Skep Wax has moved onto the twee legends’ 1994 album The Decline and Fall of Heavenly this year. Even for a Heavenly album, the proper The Decline and Fall of Heavenly is a short one (about twenty-five minutes), but the band’s momentum hadn’t slowed down a bit on the original eight songs. Although all the Heavenly vinyl reissues have featured bonus tracks drawn from non-album singles released concurrently, this reissue’s extra material is particularly notable. 1993’s “P.U.N.K. Girl” and “Atta Girl” singles and their B-sides both appear on side two of The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, ensuring that those five songs–regarded as some of the best the band ever put to tape–aren’t left out of this reissue series. (Read more)

Hell Trash – SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Experimental rock, art pop, psych pop, folktronica, synthpop, lo-fi pop
Formats: CD, digital

The rollout of Philadelphia-originating, Chicago-based duo (now a quartet) Hell Trash has been decidedly unorthodox. After a two-song single and a live EP, 2024 has brought SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024, the most complete picture of Hell Trash thus far. The Hell Trash found here contains bits of the folkiness of their previous releases, but this isn’t even the primary mode of SMASH HITS! (and similarly, the experimental folk-pop of Noah Roth’s solo career and the fuzz rock of their other band, Mt. Worry, aren’t really all that close to these songs, either). It reminds me of a more “folk”-based version of late 90s indie pop, incorporating electronic and psychedelic touches and even some trip hop-esque beats into Rowan Roth’s songwriting. (Read more)

The Long Winters – The Worst You Can Do Is Harm / When I Pretend to Fall / Ultimatum / Putting the Days to Bed / So Good at Waiting (Rarities 2000-2017)

Release date: February 23^rd
Record label: Barsuk
Genre: 2000s indie rock, folk rock, psychedelic pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The Long Winters hovered around the periphery of Pacific Northwest indie and alternative rock music, recording three great albums and plenty of supplemental material in their heyday of the 2000s. This year, Barsuk reissued it all–all three albums plus the Ultimatum EP and a digital rarities compilation called So Good at Waiting. The three records are all distinct from one another–The Worst You Can Do Is Harm is the dark, uncertain post-90s debut, When I Pretend to Fall is the gorgeous orchestrated indie-pop-rock debutante ball, Putting the Days to Bed the streamlined, whittled-down final Hail Mary–but the unintuitive, singular writing of John Roderick connects all of them together. When I Pretend to Fall should’ve been the hit, yes, but it’s also the tip of an iceberg best examined as a whole.

Hannah Marcus – The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004

Release date: April 5^th
Record label: Bar None
Genre: Slowcore, sadcore, folk rock, singer-songwriter, jazzy/noire-y indie rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital

New York-originating singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus is a lifelong musician, but it wasn’t until she ended up in the Bay Area in the 1990s that she found the kind of music she’d end up making in her solo career–long, dramatic, drawn-out folk-indie-rock in the vein of American Music Club and Red House Painters (slowcore, or, as the micro-genre is even more specifically referred to, “sadcore”). From 1994 to 2004, Marcus released five albums and an EP recorded in San Francisco and Montreal. Bar None (who handled the American release for a couple of her albums) put together The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004, a career-spanning digital compilation featuring selections from both the Bar None albums and her earlier, still-unavailable-in-full discography (as well as one previously-unreleased track). (Read more)

Mclusky – The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire

Release date: October 4^th
Record label: Beggars/Too Pure
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital

We all know that 2002’s Mclusky Do Dallas is a masterpiece (write that one down if you don’t), but I will now use my admittedly small platform of this blog to proclaim that the third and (for now, at least) final album from the Welsh/English noise punks is just as good as that one, if not, perhaps, even better. Revisiting The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire twenty years later, it’s remarkable how white-hot and weird it still sounds. As abrasive and mean as Mclusky Do Dallas is, at the very least it makes sense, but The Difference Between Me and You… is a headscratcher. From the irresistible oddness of “She Will Only Bring You Happiness” to the creepy moments of silence of “Slay!” to the noise-punk thrashers that are as noisy and punk-like (and thrashing) as anything else the band put out–it’s all just as overwhelming to visit in 2024.

Rose Melberg – Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023)

Release date: August 2^nd
Record label: Antiquated Future/Two Plum Press
Genre: Twee, indie pop, indie punk, lo-fi indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital

Portland-based Antiquated Future Records has a series of cassettes called “Selected Songs” where they compile music from across an artist’s career in one cassette tape. Indie pop troubadour Rose Melberg, who has a sprawling discography stretched across several projects of varying notoriety, is a great choice for this kind of compilation–and it’s all laid out in one place as Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023). Per the Bandcamp page, the twenty-five-song cassette comes from ten different projects, twenty different records, and a dozen different labels, ranging from Melberg’s most well-known 1990s acts (Tiger Trap, The Softies, Go Sailor) to perhaps more overlooked bands from the 2010s (Knife Pleats, PUPS, Imaginary Pants). There’s more to Rose Melberg than Things We Tried to Hide, true, but if you’re unsure where to start with one of the greatest indie pop artists of all-time, it’s pretty perfect. (Read more)

The Mountain Goats – The Coroner’s Gambit

Release date: June 28^th
Record label: Merge
Genre: Lo-fi indie folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

My favorite era of the Mountain Goats is the late 1990s up until 2000–after the super early southern California duo-era recordings, before All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee (slowly but surely) became the earliest mile-markers for most fans of the band. The Coroner’s Gambit is the dark, breathtaking capstone of this era–after an uncharacteristic three year LP absence populated by strong EPs like New Asian Cinema and Isopanisad Radio Hour, John Darnielle returned with a mid-fi indie folk masterpiece that faced death outright, gasping through “Shadow Song” and “Bluejays and Cardinals” and ruminating on the title track and “Elijah”. “Baboon”, “Family Happiness”, and “Jaipur” are angrier and scarier than anything the Mountain Goats had done up until that point, and given the loss of these frayed edges in their music not long afterwards, they haven’t really been reached since, too.

The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice – Moon Colony Bloodbath

Release date: May 31^st
Record label: Cadmean Dawn
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital

There are days when Moon Colony Bloodbath is my favorite “studio-era” Mountain Goats-related release. The sub-twenty minute collaborative with John Vanderslice holds a unique place in both of their discographies, marrying the low-stakes (breezy singer-songwriter-y folk rock, at a time when both John Darnielle and Vanderslice were moving away from it in their respective works) and high-stakes (an absurd prog-level concept about organ-harvesting colonies on the moon, of which the record’s album art only gives us a small taste). It works in no small part due to the fact that both Darnielle and Vanderslice bring way too strong material for a tour-only vinyl EP (which is what it was in 2009); “Surrounded” is a Mountain Goats classic, “Sudden Oak Death” shouldn’t be far behind, and Vanderslice (whose solo material I also love, just to be clear) hasn’t written many more songs greater than “Lucifer Rising”.

Pulsars – Pulsars

Release date: September 13^th
Record label: Tiny Global Productions/Damaged Disco
Genre: Power pop, new wave, alt-rock, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Dave Trumfio is perhaps most well-known as a producer and engineer; as a frontperson and songwriter, however, his most beloved work is with The Pulsars, the 1990s technologically-minded new wave revival duo he led with only his brother Harry on drums. Chewed up and spat out by the post-grunge major label industry, The Pulsars managed to release one album in 1997 before their upstart label folded. However, Pulsars have resurfaced in recent years, with this year bringing a vinyl reissue of Pulsars a quarter-century later. Pulsars doesn’t sound like the late 1990s, but it’s undoubtedly a product of its time in an odd way; The Cars-y new wave/synthpop homage baked into the record’s sound is still laced with some irreverent Chicago 90s power pop/alt-rock. (Read more)

Skeet – Simple Reality

Release date: August 16^th
Record label: Efficient Space
Genre: Post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

It’s hard to believe that there are still excellent, unknown first-wave British post-punk bands to be unearthed, but that’s exactly what we have with Coventry trio Skeet and the band’s first ever officially-released music, the eight-song Simple Reality collection. Although it took some Australians to help Skeet’s discography see light of day (the prolific Mikey Young mastered it, and Melbourne’s Efficient Space put it out), Simple Reality indeed sounds like it was pulled straight from the minimal end of Britain’s post-punk scene (the Young Marble Giants comparison in the album’s bio is more than warranted, although Skeet were a bit more jammy). Skeet may have been a small part of this era of history (they played “as few as” ten shows and, guitarist Gary Meffen’s stint in early Oi! band Criminal Class aside, none of them went on to greater heights), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t create something strong enough to reverberate far beyond that with Simple Reality. 

Strange Magic – Slightest of Hands

Release date: May 3^rd
Record label: Mama Mañana
Genre: Power pop, lo-fi pop, college rock
Formats: Cassette, digital

An underappreciated member of the current power pop revival, one can’t say that Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Javier Romero hasn’t been busy as of late. Arising from a self-imposed mission to write, record, and mix one song a week for all of 2022, the following year saw the release of four different albums from his project Strange Magic. Admittedly, these initially slipped by me–but not to worry, as Romero teamed up with Mama Mañana Records to put together a cassette of twenty-two highlights from these albums called Slightest of Hands. There’s a lot to love on this hour-long treasure-trove of a tape–distorted, darkly-clouded guitars, delicately melodic vocals, a charmingly Elvis Costello-esque “toying with power pop” writing style, a southwestern desert-evoking expansiveness, to name a few of the qualities Slightest of Hands reveals over time.

Swervedriver – 99^th Dream

Release date: January 19^th
Record label: Outer Battery
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, psychedelic pop, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

When we talk about how Swervedriver is the most underrated band of the original wave of shoegaze (“we” being me, yes, but I know that there are others out there), this is usually in the context of their gargantuan 1993 masterpiece Mezcal Head (and, to a lesser degree, its rough-sketch prequel Raise from 1991). But, perhaps just as remarkably, Swervedriver was able to weather the years after the shoegaze explosion subsided in a way that most of their peers weren’t–for a while, at least. The excellent 99^th Dream was the band’s fourth album, originally released in 1998, and it links their noisier, revved-up past with the expansive psychedelic pop of the then-present with a remarkable deftness. One must wonder what 99^th Dream’s legacy would’ve been if it hadn’t come from the minds of a band who were regarded as second-level on a genre that was yesterday’s news; this comprehensive re-release is an especially gregarious invitation to revisit it nonetheless.

Various Artists – From Far It All Seems Small: A Compilation from Seattle’s Underground

Release date: May 24^th
Record label: KR
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, power pop, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

There’s been a lot of talk about San Francisco, Philadelphia, even Cincinnati as of late, but a new compilation presents a strong argument that “Seattle, the major hub for indie and alternative rock” isn’t something that should be relegated to Sub Pop retrospectives. From Far It All Seems Small is a collection of fourteen new songs from fourteen Seattle-hailing bands which all pull from a few pleasingly-varied strains of modern indie rock. There’s a bit of the Bay Area’s foggy indie pop to this new “Seattle sound”, but it’s louder, more distorted, and blown-out in classic Washington state fashion. Big pop hooks abound, delivered in everything from shoegaze to fuzzy garage punk to 90s-style indie rock. (Read more)

Various Artists – Tales of a Kitchen Porter: A Tribute to Cleaners from Venus 

Release date: September 27^th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Assembled by Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records and featuring fifteen bands’ takes on songs from the Cleaners from Venus discography stretched across two sides of a vinyl record and a “special edition” extra 7″, Tales from a Kitchen Porter attempts to right a cosmic wrong (a deep underappreciation of its tribute subject and the project’s ringleader, Martin Newell). I’ve written extensively about the Bay Area indie pop scene from which many of these bands have originated, so it’s not exactly a huge surprise that I enjoy Tales from a Kitchen Porter front-to-back. It’s also not shocking that, given the amount of Newell in these bands’ DNA, that these covers are largely fairly faithful. That doesn’t mean that the acts don’t put their own unique stamps on them, however–some are dreamier, some are noisier, some are more polished, some are more ramshackle-sounding. (Read more)

Winston Hightower – Winston Hytwr

Release date: May 31^st
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The Columbus, Ohio-based Winston Hightower has been making lo-fi indie rock since the mid-2010s, sometimes just via uploading songs to his Bandcamp and other times via cassettes and CDRs on small labels. Hightower has never released a vinyl record and is still fairly unknown outside of his local region–two problems that K and Perennial Records sought to fix this year with Winston Hytwr, a vinyl compilation of a dozen Winston Hightower songs selected from across his career thus far. Hightower clearly deserves to be considered as an essential part of Ohio’s modern lo-fi pop scene, but Winston Hytwr paints a picture of a musician who isn’t constrained to power pop and 90s-style indie rock either. Plenty of that is there, of course, but Hightower also incorporates more experimental usage of synths and a bit of offbeat jazz sensibilities, among other influences. (Read more)

Workers Comp – Workers Comp

Release date: May 31^st
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, alt-country, lo-fi rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Between 2022 and 2023, three different four-song cassette EPs and a 7” single from power trio Workers Comp (singer/guitarist Joshua Gillis, drummer Ryan McKeever, bassist Luke Reddick) surfaced on the Baltimore-based Gillis’ own label, Glad Fact, 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 with the addition of one new song (“Basic Values”). Taken as a whole, Workers Comp evokes a specifically blown-out, ragged version of Americana and rock and roll practiced by the likes of Omaha’s David Nance (with whom the Nebraska-originating McKeever is associated). Wherever Workers Comp go from here, it seems likely they’ll be fuzz-fried and ramshackle to the end. (Read more)

Honorable mentions:

• 22 Beaches – Dust: Recordings 1980-1984
• Banned 37 – Banned 37
• Birdie – Some Dusty
• Dennis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds
• The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness – Dead Calm
• Dinosaur Jr. – Farm (15th Anniversary Edition)
• The Ergs – dorkrockcorkrod
• Eyelids – No Jigsaw
• Is/Ought Gap – SUA
• Joan of Arc – A Window & a Mirror
• The Ladybug Transistor – The Albemarle Sound
• Various Artists – Two Two Seven