Pressing Concerns: Moon Orchids, Midwestern Medicine, Publicity Department, Smalltalk

In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, Rosy Overdrive takes a look at new albums from Moon Orchids and Publicity Department, as well as new EPs from Midwestern Medicine and Smalltalk. You may not have heard of these bands before, but I think you’ll find something to enjoy below! Oh, and check out yesterday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Hooky & Winter, and Joshua Wayne Hensley) if you haven’t done so yet.

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.

Moon Orchids – Moon Orchids

Release date: February 3^rd
Record label: Positively 4th Street
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: November

Moon Orchids are a folk rock group from Kalamazoo, Michigan led by singer-songwriter and guitarist Jacob Simons, who co-founded the band with guitarist Bailey Miller and vocalist/trumpet player Morgan Keltie in 2021. The addition of a bassist (Jeremy Cronk) and drummer (Brendon Infante) soon followed, as well as a debut EP (2023’s Skin/Skein) and, now, a proper self-titled debut album. Simons caught my attention by referencing names like Magnolia Electric Co. and Silkworm as points of influence for Moon Orchids, but the one I’d lean the most on in describing the sound of Moon Orchids is the same act from which those bands took a good deal of inspiration–Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Moon Orchids (which also features contributions from multi-instrumentalist Mark Andrew Morris and saxophonist Isaac Bagley) is a “folk/rock” record like classic Young LPs, with mandolin and acoustic guitar-led folk songs sitting right next to blustery, meandering Crazy Horse-style rock explosions. Unlike a lot of modern Neil Young-influenced alt-country groups that hide their vocals under a layer of distortion, Simons stays up front–in the acoustic songs, sure, but in the rockers, too, a decision that helps Moon Orchids step out of time and put together an unplaceable and distinct journey of a full listen.

In a classic Neil Young move (or, if you prefer, something of an Andrew Cohen & Light Coma-esque one), Moon Orchids begins and ends with two versions of the same song–“The Gospel Tree II” (which opens the record with some acoustic guitar/mandolin folk) and “The Gospel Tree” (a swinging but unhurried country rock tune that finishes it). Simon’s matter-of-fact, leisurely vocals don’t sound like Neil (they kind of remind me of Jon Massey of Silo’s Choice/Upstairs/Coventry, actually), but I’ll admit that the sincere bizarreness of it all (“The angels playing upstairs just sound like castrati to these ears / They’ve got monkeys in their gospel tree; they’ve told me”) is an effective tribute. In between are six tracks neatly split down the middle genre-wise–if you’re looking for the Crazy Horse rockers, you’ll find them with the cavernous “Universe Blues”, the six-minute noir-rock of “Taciturn”, and the sweeping, Keltie-sung “November”. These are the songs on Moon Orchids that grabbed me immediately, but that’s not to say that the quieter half of the record is the weaker one–in particular, I should single out penultimate track “Shab Bekheir”, which features Simons alone on 12-string acoustic guitar and reminds me a bit of those early Mint Mile recordings. Apparently Simons has since moved to Colorado, which leaves the future of Moon Orchids in limbo, and while it’d certainly be a shame if this group of people weren’t able to make more music together at some point again, Moon Orchids is an ample legacy if it has to be. (Bandcamp link)

Midwestern Medicine – Ripped Headline

Release date: February 21^st
Record label: Website
Genre: Garage rock, garage punk, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Next Door Hell

Brock Ginther has been a consistent fixture in New England indie rock since the early 2010s, when he was in the Boston band King Pedestrian. As of late, Ginther’s been based out of Portland, Maine, but that hasn’t slowed his musical output down–in fact, during this decade he was a co-leader of Vacationland supergroup Lemon Pitch and continues to front the bands Divorce Cop and Midwestern Medicine. There are differences in the various acts (Divorce Cop is for no-fi, no-wave basement punk experiments, Midwestern Medicine is more melodic indie rock), but Ginther’s honed a distinct style over the years, marked by an ability to veer between polished, humble sounding poppy 90s indie rock evoking Jason Lytle, Mark Linkous, and Stephen Malkmus to off-the-wall careening rockabilly rave-ups at the drop of a pin (when I wrote about the final Lemon Pitch album, I called him “the most unhinged” of the three singer-songwriters). On the latest Midwestern Medicine record, a five-song EP called Ripped Headlines, Ginther and the rest of the band (bassist McCrae Hathway and Brian Saxton, plus keys on one track by engineer Bradford Krieger) hew toward the more slapdash side of the Ginther spectrum–it’s a noisy, garage-y indie rock EP, but one that unmistakably bears the mark of its frontperson.

If you’re looking for the motormouth-featuring, galloping-percussion-led side of Midwestern Medicine, you’ll get it throughout Ripped Headline, most prominently in the sprint of “Foolstuff” and the warbly rock and roll of “Credit Line”. However, the entirety of this EP is made up of two-to-three minute “rockers”, so don’t expect stuff like the opening title track (which, for most of its length, drowns out Ginther’s vocals with a noisy post-punk attack) and “Next Door Hell” (which Ginther says would be the single “if [he] was doing that kind of thing”) to be breathers. The stitched-together garage rock pop journey of “Next Door Hell” does deserve a special mention in this regard–there’s a bunch of really cool sections mashed together here, from the post-punk-garage verses to the lurching-upwards pre-chorus to the sneering refrain that gives the song its title to the…post-chorus? (Whatever you call the part that goes “They’ve got a draft of my unauthorized biography / It’s big enough that I’ll get crushed if it gets dropped on me”) which is actually probably the best part. The only thing on Ripped Headline that could be described as “subtle” is the first half of closing track “Down by the Drain”–Ginther surprisingly mumbles along to the mid-tempo, downcast instrumental before Midwestern Medicine switch gears and remember how to sound loud and a little unnerving to finish things off. Krieger’s keys and a bit of restraint can hold Midwestern Medicine together for a minute, but it’s a temporary adhesive. (Bandcamp link)

Publicity Department – Old Master

Release date: February 7^th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, slacker pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: (There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again

A lo-fi guitar pop solo project from a London indie rocker released via Safe Suburban Home Records, eh? I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Sean Brook is Publicity Department–he’s also the vocalist and guitarist in a difficult-to-Google quartet called Brunch, and the first few Publicity Department releases (an EP in 2015, an album in 2018) were intermittent and reflected the work of somebody who has other irons in the fire. Brunch are still kicking (after a COVID-induced hiatus, they returned with a three-song EP last year), but Publicity Department has taken a few steps forward recently, releasing a full-band-recorded sophomore album in 2023 and returning quickly (albeit back to mostly Brook on his own again) with a third LP, Old Master, early this year. Joshua Belcher (who drummed on the last Publicity Department album) plays drums on one track, and Brunch bandmate Adrian McCusker receives a co-writing credit on one song, but otherwise Old Master is all Brook, recorded in a “shed” in the singer-songwriter’s garden. There are some upbeat rockers here, but Old Master generally follows a winding, meandering slacker rock path, British pessimism and irony fighting against the melodies and hooks to come to a convincing draw.

Brook writes that Old Master is partially written from the “perspective of old men raging at a world they have all but destroyed but no longer understand”, and it follows from there to imagine the glaring elderly gentlemen peeking out of his safe suburban home on the album cover muttering refrains like “You want some advice from someone? / Don’t try, don’t try, don’t try,” in the spirited anti-anthem “Don’t Try”, “I have lived a sheltered life / Nothing too much just out of sight,” in the almost self-reflective “Sheltered Life”, and, of course, “Get a Haircut, Hippie”. The latter two of those songs help shape the core sound of Old Master, an unhurried gait of one way too long in the tooth to worry about overly impressing anyone (an attitude helped out by the synth accents in more anchor-tracks like “Two Little Birds” and “No Clown”), although when Publicity Department up the tempo a little bit, there’s a nice fuzz-pop variety added to the LP. There’s a yet-to-be extinguished defiance in songs like “(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again” and the brief sprint of “It’s a Pain”, and the toe-tapping “Prime” is less clear but bursts out of its haze for the refrain, at least. Whether Brook’s narrators actually do have any hope of breaking out of Old Master’s fog (or whether they even ought to seek to) isn’t really answered, but it makes for a nice trip to the garden shed. (Bandcamp link)

Smalltalk – As If

Release date: January 18^th
Record label: Candlepin/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Fuzz pop, jangle pop, dream pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sweet Want

As always, Boston cassette label Candlepin Records has continued to be the premier home for modern shoegaze, slowcore, lo-fi “Numero Group”-inspired indie rock groups in 2025. Worthwhile releases from Marathon Runner, Lacing, and Ian Huschle have already surfaced this year, but I’m still stuck on the label’s first release of 2025, an EP from a dreamy, shoegaze-y fuzz pop group from Savannah, Georgia called Smalltalk. There’s not too much information about this band out there–at one point, it was the solo project of Andrew Keith, but they’re clearly a quartet now, and although there’s a trail of Bandcamp releases going all the way back to 2017, it seems like As If (co-released with similarly-minded Portland, Oregon imprint Pleasure Tapes) is Smalltalk’s first release as a full band. Although Smalltalk do have that “from a basement somewhere in America” attitude, As If eschews the more experimental and abrasive sides of this kind of music and instead portrays the band as polished, hook-chasing devotees of the jangly, new wave/college rock version of 80s post-punk and dream pop. Although it’s only a six-song EP, As If is more than enough in its twenty-four minutes for us to get a full sense of how locked-in Smalltalk is in its pursuit of this noble goal.

Not only are Smalltalk a sneakily excellent pop band, they also want you to know about it–they load up As If with a pair of no-holds-barred guitar pop anthems to kick things off. Fans of wistful but still very electric modern dream pop groups like Subsonic Eye will find themselves well-taken-care-of in opening track “Sweet Want”–the guitars shimmer, the vocals are way more melodic and dramatic than they seem on the surface, and even the bass gets in on the melodic action, too. “Talk Is Cheap” follows it, its predecessor’s equal in every way (but, by adding a bit more distortion to the colorful tapestry, avoids repeating itself too much). As If kind of follows the trajectory of a big, sweeping wave–the middle of the EP is the loudest, heaviest, most directly shoegaze-indebted section, between the wall-of-guitars mid-tempo lumbering of “Snaggletooth” and “Remembrance”, which balances spindly, hooky guitar parts with bouts of noise. The latter song ushers back in Smaltalk’s unvarnished “pop” side, as “Wrapped in Blues” and “Falling Down” close out As If with a pair of tracks that rival the EP’s opening duo. There’s a bit of a punchiness to them, though, like Smalltalk picked up something new in the sea of “Snaggletooth” and its distortion. All in the service of giving us a smooth ride through their world. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Jutland Songs – Autumn Trash EP
• Donna Allen – Atom-ic Citizen of the Dying Empire
• Vemberlain – First Demos
• Swimming – Old
• Cigarettes for Breakfast – Slow Motion
• Abdomen – Yes, I Don’t Know
• Billy Changer – Untitled / Early Naked Fun
• Les Rallizes Dénudés – 屋​根​裏 YaneUra Sept. ’80 
• Sheepish – Goodbye Lemon EP
• Youth Lagoon – Rarely Do I Dream
• Wetnap – /// EP
• Dick Hick – Triple Cat Death Barrage
• Jim Ghedi – Wasteland
• Radio Anorak – Rememberer
• Horsefight – Volunteer
• EMPEREUR – Eau Rouge
• Cages – Better Mistakes
• Chalk – Conditions III EP
• Punchcard – Soap Box Hero
• CULTBABY – Cut the Arm, Preserve the Body: Songs from 2019-2023
• Jesse Daniel Edwards – Jesse Daniel Edwards
• AVI – Passes
• The Deadnotes – Rock ‘n’ Roll Saviour
• Garaventa – Casual Drama
• Yellow Belly – Ghostwriter