Pressing Concerns: Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entrez Vous, hairpin

It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring a delightfully wide-ranging lineup! We’ve got a new LP from Entrez Vous, a split/collaborative EP between Léna Bartels and Nico Hedley, a remastered version of Impulsive Hearts‘ debut album, and an EP from hairpin. If you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray, check it out here.

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.

Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley – It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Rock for Sale
Genre: Experimental folk, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: New Year Song

Nico Hedley has been hovering around the periphery of Rosy Overdrive for a while now. He’s involved with the “artist-run collective/label” Whatever’s Clever (Flat Mary Road, Dave Scanlon, Keen Dreams) and, either as a producer or instrumentalist, has contributed to albums from Ben Seretan, The Bird Calls, and Charlie Kaplan (as well as playing with many more acts that have appeared on this blog before at some point). Despite all this, I’d yet to write about Hedley’s solo work in Pressing Concerns until now–well, sort of. It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is a split/collaborative EP between Hedley and another New York-based singer-songwriter, Léna Bartels, who may not have quite as many Rosy Overdrive-adjacent credits as Hedley but has still been busy in her own right between guesting on Izzy Oram Brown’s latest record, playing shows with acts like Will Stratton, Trace Mountains, and Field Guides, and releasing a solo album. Hedley gets two songs on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, Bartels gets another two, and they take on the final song on the EP together. As one might expect from Hedley’s associates, the EP is more or less “folk” music, shaded by both delicate, piano-heavy pop music and an experimental streak–the two co-leaders have different takes on this kind of music, but they’re operating in similar areas and are able to share space quite effortlessly. 

Bartel’s songs are a bit more outwardly “intimate” than the rest of It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year–the biography for the record, written by Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson, references early Cat Power, and I think this is an accurate comparison. “January Is the Loneliest Month” is a bedroom folk song with a bit of woodwind accompaniment and “Nothing Can Stop You” is an uncertain but quite capable piano ballad, but both kind of feel like a peek into somebody working on their art alone. Hedley’s “New Year Song” is, instrumentally speaking, even simpler than either of Bartel’s songs, but it has a bright, acoustic friendliness that makes it the warmest and most intentional-feeling thing on the EP. Most of the experimentation on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is bundled up in “Equations of Motion”, a droning post-rock track from Hedley aided by the only outside contributor on the EP, Carmen Quill on double bass. The closing title track does float off into ambient nothingness, but that’s after five minutes of a very charming lo-fi drum machine-led pop song song by the both of them together. “Don’t be afraid of the future when / What we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working out,” sing Hedley and Bartels as one–while the lyrics to “It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year” aren’t as rosy as the music suggests, the forward glance of the title (and final) line sounds like a mantra with legs.  (Bandcamp link)

Impulsive Hearts – Sorry in the Summer (Remastered)

Release date: March 28^th
Record label: Cavity Search
Genre: Power pop, dream pop, fuzz rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sve Yrself

Chicago indie rock quartet Impulsive Hearts have been around for a decade now, although they’ve largely flown under the radar–since 2014, they’ve released three albums (averaging about one every four years) and a handful of EPs, most recently linking up with Portland, Oregon label Cavity Search Records for their third album, last year’s Fit 4 the Apocalypse. Cavity Search is also helping out the band (led by singer-songwriter Danielle Sines and also featuring Max Cohen, Rachael Farinella, and Adele Nicholas) with their latest release, a remastered version of their 2016 debut album, Sorry in the Summer. Over the past ten years, the Windy City has seen Beach Bunny blow up to unthinkable levels, Ratboys and Dehd become reliable critical darlings, and Friko recently ascend from the underground circuit to notoriety. This shined-up revisitation of older material from a lesser-known Chicago artist seems to ask the question: why not Impulsive Hearts? Sorry in the Summer is certainly compelling enough in 2025–nine years later, it comes off as the missing link between the early 2010s buzzy, fuzzy indie-surf-pop wave and the earnest, “confessional/bedroom pop” era of indie rock that would dominate the latter half of the decade. Even more importantly, though, the songs are there–Impulsive Hearts don’t beat you over the head with them, but this is an excellent pop record upon a closer look.

Sines and her backing band are probably too Midwestern to make a straight-ahead surf-rock-and-roll record–it seems like Chicago bands always are. Sines’ vocals are frequently buried in this remastered version of Sorry in the Summer, but they don’t fade into the background so much as take their place as an equal partner with the fuzzy guitar-led instrumentation. It’s actually quite impressive how big Impulsive Hearts are able to make themselves sound on “I Wannabe Gone” and “MDB”, both of which are maximal pop songs with what sounds like everything from horns to woodwinds mixed into the walls of sound (and despite this, the bass guitar–of all the possibilities–is the most prominent instrument a fair amount of the time). I know I already mentioned Friko, but Sorry in the Summer really does have this sort of “guitar pop via controlled-intensity” attitude that reminds me of the Friko album from last year; “Sve Yrself” might start off with Beach Boys-esque “woo-ooh”ing, but it’s way too desperate to see the pastiche through without going off the deep end. As Impulsive Hearts move into the second half of Sorry in the Summer, some of the obvious hooks fade (some of them; “Wasp” and “DWM” are still on this side of the record, mind you) but the intensity remains, right up to the five-minute frantic dream pop finale of “YKILY”. One last subtle epic for anyone who’s still hanging with Impulsive Hearts. (Bandcamp link)

Entrez Vous – Antenna Legs Hear Everything

Release date: March 21^st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Too Vague

Kelly Reidy is a physics professor, podcast host, and singer-songwriter currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Clark Blomquist is a Tobacco State musical gun-for-hire, having lent his talents to everyone from Spider Bags to the Dan Melcior Band to The Kingsbury Manx over the years. Together, they are Entrez Vous, a guitar pop duo who debuted with a self-titled album in 2023. The collaboration has remained fruitful, as Entrez Vous are back a little under two years later with Antenna Legs Hear Everything, fourteen tracks of garage rock-mussed-up power pop (or, if you prefer, garage rock with power pop hidden in the center) in twenty-seven minutes. Reidy sings and plays guitar, Blomquist handles the other instrumentation, and they’re both credited as writing these songs–like I said, this is a strong partnership already, as Reidy is more than capable of stepping into the garage-y underground indie rock world that Blomquist has been inhabiting for two decades and helming an entire collection of this material. Antenna Legs Hear Everything kind of reminds me of Shredded Sun, another newish band from longtime rockers who put garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop in a blender to make something equally confusing and friendly (but always exciting).

Most of the songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are quite short, and it’s a credit to Entrez Vous that they rarely feel this way since there’s so much going on in each of them. That’s Blomquist’s touch, I suppose, but Reidy is just as impressive in how she cuts through the (occasionally) noisy bluster and keeps these songs’ eyes on the pop prizes. The kind-of-fuzzy opening “Too Vague” is just a little psychedelic, just a little Southern, just a little Elephant 6, and much more than just a little compelling–all in under two minutes. A lot of the most immediate songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are right up front, like the exuberant power pop of “Dream City, 1963”, the alt-country shuffle of “Troublesome Love”, and the mid-tempo slacker pop of “I Had This Vision”. There’s still a lot of fun to be had later on in the album, though–the post-punk/garage rock sprint of “Palm Springs”, the glam-jangle-stomp of “Art of Canova”, and the muddled noir-pop of “Lbs. of Roses” are under ninety seconds apiece and together make one of the most enjoyable stretches of the entire record. Buried among the rubble that Entrez Vous knock down is stuff like the waltzing ballad “Trap Door”, the gothic, synth-touched “Silky”, and the psychedelic folk closing track “Get Out of the Sauna”. It’s probably unnecessary for them to put so much into these songs, but it’s all very generous, too–everybody say “thank you, Entrez Vous”. (Bandcamp link)

hairpin – Modern Day Living

Release date: April 3^rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, power pop, pop punk, fuzz rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Okay Thru There

Hairpin are a band from the South Coast of England, started by frontperson Adam Edwards and eventually growing to a four-piece encompassing Perry Sears, Sam Marsh and Callan Milward. The first hairpin release is a five-song EP called Modern Day Living that offers the first glimpse of what the band mean when they call their music “post-hardcore through a power pop lens”; as it turns out, it means loud, noisy, and catchy rock and roll music for the most part. Modern Day Living (which was recorded at Community Noise Recording Co. and features guest musicians Jack Kenny on drums and Roberto Cappellina on backing vocals) has moments that feel in line with the American-centered wave of “hardcore guys making power pop” like Militarie Gun and Public Opinion, although there’s also a British garage-y punk side to it that recalls both the Mclusky expanded universe and the ever-present threat of the Kingdom’s “post-punk revival”. Hairpin sound great here, their instrumentals dynamic and with plenty of low-end, and Edwards’ vocals are just emotional enough to sit atop the grey walls of noise and sound like they belong there.

Opening track “Okay Thru There” kicks down the door with the most overtly “punk” moment on the EP–hairpin really do find the midpoint between antisocial basement indie rock and power pop here, as there’s an incredibly huge chorus with “woo-ooh” backing vocals and giant guitar chords, but it’s also just a bit of distortion removed from being a Pardoner fuzz-punk anthem. There’s no rest for the hairpin, though–“Curtain Call” starts with a prowling, bass-led instrumental that reminds me a bit of Meat Wave and launches into a garage-y post-punk workout of a track, and “Wiped” is the atmospheric guitar-splatter mid-record exploration. Punk rock returns for “Shake It”, the song that gets the closest to really earning that “RIYL Hot Snakes” tag–it’s the quick-out-of-the-gate beginning combined with a nice, big riff in the chorus that does it. Edwards is always hovering on the edge as a vocalist, but “Shake It” features the most “unleashed” singing on the album; at the same time, though, hairpin are able to rein both the vocals and music in for a carefully-orchestrated finale in “Self Portrait”. It’s the one song that rivals “Okay Thru There” in pure catchiness, but it’s a lot less straightforward of a journey to get there–there’s some big wall-of-fuzz guitars at the beginning, and a restraint-heavy first half leads to guitar heroics and one last fiery Edwards performance before the EP comes to a close. So, you’re in, right?  (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Mekons – Horror
• Bad Bloom – Pepper EP
• Painting – Snapshot of Pure Attention
• Fugue State – In the Lurch
• Sweet Williams – Four Five
• Juanita & Juan – Jungle Cruise
• Mamalarky – Hex Key
• Jimmie Kilpatrick – Jimmie
• Shae Tull – Statues of Teeth on Every Street Corner
• The Lookout Honeys – Aguacatero
• Dave Desmelik – Among Friends
• Research Vessel – Next Weekend EP
• Casper Skulls – Kit-Cat
• Brown Horse – All the Right Weaknesses
• Valerie June – Owls, Omens, and Oracles
• Florist – Jellywish
• Beer – III EP
• BlackWristband – My Escape
• Sleigh Bells – Bunky Becky Birthday Boy
• Buck Gooter – King Kong Lives: Thereminsanity
• Lily of the Sea – Slow Violence
• Duendita – A Strong Desire to Survive
• Rude Films – Rude Films
• The Mars Volta – Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacio
• Tom Dunphy – Everything Was New