Pressing Concerns: Cindy, Rotundos, TDA, zzzahara

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It’s the first Pressing Concerns of 2025! This Thursday post has a nice mix of records that have either come out since the beginning of the year or are slated to be released tomorrow (January 10th). We’ve got new albums from Rotundos and zzzahara, a vinyl release of the debut album from TDA (titsdickass), and a collection of demos from Cindy. The December 2024 playlist/round-up went up earlier this week, so check that one out if you didn’t catch it, 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.

Cindy – Saw It All Demos

Release date: January 1st
Record label: Paisley Shirt
Genre: Lo-fi pop, indie pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Violins

I last wrote about Cindy in 2023 with the release of Why Not Now?, the project’s fourth full-length album, but the San Francisco guitar pop band and its leader, Karina Gill, have hovered over Rosy Overdrive in the year-and-a-half since then–Gill’s other band, Flowertown, released an album last year, and she’s also appeared on records from Tony Jay and Sad Eyed Beatniks in the interim. Cindy has been busy since I last checked in on them, too–last year they put out a six-song EP called Swan Lake on Tough Love that Pitchfork (suddenly paying attention to a vibrant San Francisco-based indie pop movement that they’d ignored up until then) called “the scene’s best statement yet”. I’d disagree with that, but that’s not a knock on Swan Lake so much as an acknowledgement of the steep competition, much of which has come from Cindy and Gill themselves. I include Why Not Now? in that, of course, but now I can also add Saw It All Demos–a collection of bedroom recordings from around the time of Swan Lake that I actually like more than the “proper” record featuring most of these songs–to the conversation as well.

Considering how molasses-slow and minimal most of Cindy’s music is, one might not think that “demos” of their songs would dramatically alter their sound, but there’s a distinctly different feel to this seven-song cassette tape. Five of these tracks are entirely recorded by Gill alone (and in one of the others, “Saw It All”, she’s only accompanied by Flowertown bandmate Mike Ramos on a “cardboard box”), and the lack of a proper band and the introduction of some warm background noise do transform these songs. The proper Cindy albums sound like classic 60s pop songs slowed to a crawl and stripped of excess; as it turns out, it takes some work to make their music sound so deliberate and streamlined. The Saw It All Demos are in comparison looser and more meandering, the guitar chords free to reveal themselves at whatever speed they’d like.

The version of “All Weekend” early on the tape is a little clearer than most of the rest of these recordings, but by the time we’ve reached the particularly foggy stretch comprised of “The Bell”, “Party at the Atelier”, and “Consolation’s Test”, the occasional ringing of a synthetic version of the titular object in the former of those three songs is about the only thing tethering Saw It All Demos to any kind of reference point. Four of these songs ended up on Swan Lake and two of them on a bonus 7” that came with certain pressings of Why Not Now?; the seventh and final track is the only one not to appear anywhere else, and it’s also the only one with a full band on the recording. “The Violins” features Staizsh Rodrigues of Children Maybe Later on drums and Will Smith and Oli Lipton of Now on bass and lead guitar, respectively, and the upbeat (for Cindy) pop rock of the track is certainly in a different realm than the rest of Saw It All Demos. That being said, the song (for which all four players are given a writing credit) wouldn’t really fit on Swan Lake or Why Not Now?, either. I do think the intimacy and immediacy of Saw It All Demos is its greatest overall strength, but I wouldn’t trade the bright tribute to collaboration that ends it for another bedroom demo, either. (Bandcamp link)

Rotundos – Rotundos

Release date: January 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-hardcore, alt-rock, emo-grunge-gaze
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: It Feels Just Right

I’ve been writing a good deal about Chicago quartet Rotundos and their related projects as of late on this blog, but let it never be said that I punished any band for releasing too much good music. They first got my attention almost exactly a year ago with Fragments, an EP that managed to cover everything from art punk and garage rock to post-punk and post-hardcore in just four songs (sliding into my top 25 EPs of 2024 while doing so, too). The band’s vocalist, Jose Israel, put out a solo album last October that similarly felt like a grab-bag affair, even adding a bit of mid-tempo indie rock and jazz-pop into the mix. So of course Rotundos have started off 2025 with a brand new full-length album; the band (Israel, Harrison Campbell, Jacob Padilla-Caldero, and Henry Speer) have put out a lot of material over the past three years, but I believe Rotundos is their first proper album. Rotundos is by far the most cohesive and focused record yet I’ve heard from the band; zeroing in on some of their heavier influences, the quartet set to work hammering out a tight ten-song, twenty-eight minute record of chugging, dour-sounding alt-rock, moody post-hardcore, and emo-grunge-gaze. 

Rotundos kicks off with the appropriately-titled “It Feels Just Right”, and the band embrace Hum-style guitar riffs, heavy atmospheres, and post-hardcore angst like it’s the only kind of music they’ve ever made. The emo-flavored alt-rock/pop punk of “My Advice” is just a little bit lighter, but the slicing guitars of “Out of the Way” and the art punk meltdown of “Photo Frame” continue to raise the stakes of the record. The second half of Rotundos kicks off with “Jake’s Song” (presumably this means it’s Padilla-Caldero’s turn up front), and the titular band member helms a vintage 90s emo-punk-sounding track that’s one of the clearest callbacks to previous Rotundos material on the album to my ears. Speaking of previous Rotundos material, there’s also a new version of “Bring Me Back to Life”, which was one of my favorite songs from Israel’s solo album; the jazz-y rock/speedy punk of that song is kind of an odd choice to bring back to life for this album, but it’s a strong track that holds its own against the more substantially-built songs buffering it (the emo-punk explosion “Weightless” and the grunge-gaze closing power ballad “What Ya Say”). I don’t know if Rotundos augers a clear shift towards a defined sound for this band or if we’ll see them continue to hop across various genres, but regardless, Rotundos nailed this specific kind of music on this one. (Bandcamp link)

TDA – Fuck (Vinyl Release)

Release date: January 9th
Record label: Insecurity Hits/Dark Side Family Jams
Genre: Noise punk, art punk, noise rock, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No Way

We’re starting 2025 with a band called titsdickass. Well, they’re also called TDA if you need a shorter and more workplace-appropriate name, but we’ll all know what those letters stand for. Anyway, TDA formed in New York in 2019, and the trio (vocalist/guitarist Julia Pierce, bassist Seth Sosebee, drummer Sick Nick) played a bunch of shows around the city before linking up with engineer Paul Millar and producer Nick Noto to record their debut album, Fuck, in May of 2023. Fuck came out digitally later that year via Noto’s Dark Side Family Jams label, and the six-song LP captures a chaotic, frenetic noise punk group doing exactly we would expect them to do. On Fuck, TDA haphazardly throw together snotty, garage-y New York punk rock, biting no wave, blistering, assaulting noise rock, and a lengthy free jazz/noise/psychedelic rock jam in under a half-hour. Listening to Fuck, I’m not at all surprised somebody wanted to get this thing to a wider audience, and Brooklyn’s Insecurity Hits (Frida Kill, Stem Cham, Jordan/Martin Hell) are the ones who’ve stepped up to put out Fuck on vinyl to ring in the new year.

The first half of Fuck is the “punk” half–the first three songs are under two minutes long, and the longest one (“Cross Me”) is still under three. “No Way” is classic punk rock, marrying dark, gruff Wipers-style verses with a surprisingly catchy, Ramones-like garage punk chorus. “Flames” and “God Awful Place” continue TDA’s noise-punk attack; Pierce’s ear-piercing guitar and furious, frequently sardonic vocals are key to Fuck’s songs, but the rhythm section make themselves heard, too–particularly, Sosebee’s bass takes “God Awful Place” to another level. The bass is also a big part of Side A’s biggest black sheep, “Cross Me”, which introduces some dark, almost-gothic post-punk into the mix–it’s the one moment on Fuck where the band let up just a little bit, with the noisiness reduced to tightly-controlled blasts. Of course, then we’re on to one last punk punch with “GF from Hell”, and then the final seventeen minutes of the album (and the entire second side of the LP) is taken up by the eighteen-minute title track. This behemoth is an improvised psychedelic/jazz/noise piece that’s mostly instrumental (the official lyrics are “fuck! 2x”, but there’s some wordless vocal stuff going on, too). There’s some pounding, there’s some hammering, there’s a bunch of feedback, there’s no shortage of noise. It’s a world away from where we started with “No Way”, but it’s very thrilling to hear TDA blow open the capability at which those initial short bursts hinted. (Bandcamp link 1) (Bandcamp link 2)

zzzahara – Spiral Your Way Out

Release date: January 10th
Record label: Lex
Genre: Pop rock, indie pop, dream pop, synthpop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Bluebird

zzzahara is Zahara Jaime, a Los Angeles musician who’s new to me but plays in a couple of bands that are pretty popular–they’re the guitarist in Eyedress and one half of The Simps. As zzzahara, Jaime has done pretty well for themself, too–they’ve put out three albums on Lex Records (also the home of their other projects) in the past three years, with this week’s Spiral Your Way Out following 2023’s Tender and 2022’s Liminal Spaces. It seems like the first couple of zzzahara releases were more low-key, pulling from the 2010s style of Captured Tracks-esque dreamy indie rock and adding some California sunniness to the music; Spiral Your Way Out is the big, shiny, polished coming-out, enlisting a bunch of notable Los Angeles indie rock/pop musicians (prolific producer Jorge Elbrecht, illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzen, and Alex Craig of Big Troubles, among others) to bring the record to fruition. The jangly guitar pop of previous zzzahara releases is still present in Spiral Your Way Out, but there’s also…more, as Jaime and their collaborators hammer out an ambitious LP of huge-sounding but moody pop rock songs.

Oh, also Spiral Your Way Out is a break-up album, which may help explain that whole “moody” thing I mentioned earlier. Maybe song titles like “It Didn’t Mean Nothing, “If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Halfway”, and “Pressure Makes a Diamond” might’ve clued you in anyway, maybe not. That doesn’t mean that the first two of those tracks aren’t excellent, inspired-sounding pop songs, though–the former sets the tone with a jaunty full-band synthpop-rock beat and the latter sports a gorgeous melody in the verses and soaring power pop guitars. The songs on Spiral Your Way Out that hew closest to good old-fashioned guitar pop (the swirling psych-post-punk “Head in a Wheel”, the return of the jangle in “Bluebird”) are probably my favorites, but there’s plenty of charm to stuff like the 90s alt-pop vibes of “Wish You Would Notice (Know This)”, too. There’s certainly no hiding the heartbreak at the heart of these songs, though, and Spiral Your Way Out isn’t able to fully dance and sparkle its way out of it; the moments where zzzahara’s guard drops (like, say, the distortion that adds some appropriate ugliness to “Bruised”, and when Jaime’s voice finds a bitterness not present anywhere else to spit out the Title Fight-referencing, ruse-dispelling bridge to “Ghosts”) are some of the strongest ones. A lot of hands went into realizing Spiral Your Way Out, but nobody’s covering the record up when it doesn’t need to be. (Bandcamp link)

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3 thoughts on “Pressing Concerns: Cindy, Rotundos, TDA, zzzahara”

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