Pressing Concerns: Headphones, Florry, Forty Winks, Wipes

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Wake up, it’s the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Four records that are coming out tomorrow, May 19th! New albums from Florry and Wipes, a new EP from Forty Winks, and a deluxe reissue of a twenty-year old album from Headphones! And if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: Rodeo Boys, Beasts, Kilynn Lunsford, and a compilation from Worry Bead Records; Tuesday: Ryan Allen, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Son of Buzzi, and Pretty Rude), check those out 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.

Headphones – Headphones (Deluxe 20th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Suicide Squeeze
Genre: Synthpop, synth-rock, singer-songwriter, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pink and Brown

David Bazan has quite possibly the most fascinating discography in all of indie rock. I didn’t say “best discography” (though I wouldn’t argue with you if you said so), but specifically in the way that he’s been able to stay steady and recognizable across different project names, musical styles, and thematic journeys from the personal to literary (not to mention a change in his religious beliefs and relationship to the Christian Church, which is reflected in his music as well). The simply-titled Headphones and their sole self-titled album have been a particularly well-loved hidden release in Bazan’s career–recorded and released while his band Pedro the Lion was still together but after they’d already put out their final pre-reunion album, this new project found Bazan, frequent collaborator T.W. Walsh, and drummer Frank Lenz (Starflyer 59) making a unique synthesizer-and-live-drums style of music that nonetheless felt in line with the emo-y indie rock that Bazan had been pursuing with his “main” band. Remastered and re-released with two bonus tracks for its twentieth anniversary, Headphones is both wildly of its time and just too potent to be left there, the synths only sharpening and highlighting the darkness of this album. 

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the person who wrote the frequently-bleak dramas of Winners Never Quit and Control would continue writing uncomfortable tales of interpersonal and geopolitical strife in a new project, but–either due to the minimalist instrumental setup or just because that’s where Bazan was at at the time–Headphones really feels like a trip to somewhere one never wants to end up on purpose. A lot of that has to do with the ugly, humiliated, and murderous opening track “Gas and Matches”; I still don’t quite know what to make of it two decades later, but I still get a visceral reaction listening to it. The fairly rudimentary synths are part of the appeal of Headphones, I think–Bazan would make more layered and fully-developed synth-based music later in his solo career, but I’m not sure stuff like the dead-eyed, dead-hearted hatred of “I Never Wanted You” and the sociopathic shrug of “Shit Talker” would’ve been improved by any kind of refinement. 

The bonus material of Headphones also highlights the album’s mean streak–the acoustic version of “Gas and Matches” pulls no punches, and the bright, floating nature of “The Five Chord” only underscores how much it didn’t belong on Headphones. My favorite song on Headphones when I first became a fan of Bazan’s music was “Natural Disaster”, the appeal of which has as much to do with its blatant Bush-era concerns as the fact that it’s the most upbeat thing on the entire album (as obvious as what “Maybe a couple of airplanes could crash into buildings / And put the fear of God into you” is about, there’s still plenty of headscratching stuff in that one, too). Both because of the subject matter and because of a few fairly blunt lines, I wouldn’t expect something like “Natural Disaster” from Bazan in 2025 (and I think he’s gotten stuff like the creepy “Hello Operator” out of his system too), but it’s vivid picture of what 2005 looked like for a very talented writer. (Bandcamp link)

Florry – Sounds Like…

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Country rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pretty Eyes Lorraine

In 2023, I wrote about an album called The Holey Bible by a Philadelphia alt-country group called Florry (I also wrote about an EP from them; it was a busy year for Florry), and at the time I noted that the album reflected a shift from Florry as a Francie Medosch solo project to a raucous, powerful, and comfortable seven-piece band. Clearly, Medosch and company also viewed The Holey Bible as the start of something–when I wrote about it, I called it the third Florry album, but the press material for Sounds Like… calls their previous album their debut and the new album as their “sophomore” one. Medosch has recently moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, Vermont, but thankfully the band (whose members are already spread out between Pennsylvania and North Carolina) are still going strong and met up in Asheville to record Sounds Like… with Colin Miller. Sounds Like… features a similar but not exactly the same lineup as their last one–Medosch, guitarist John Murray, drummer Joey Sullivan, bassist Collin Dennen, pedal steel player Jon Cox, multi-instrumentalist Will Henriksen, vocalist Katya Malison, and a few guests. While (unlike The Holey Bible) Medosch sings lead vocals on all of Sounds Like…, it’s still a very collaborative and collective-feeling album, leaning on the many talents found within Florry to deliver another overstuffed country rock adventure.

Medosch is a smart songwriter and lyricist, but Florry separate themselves from the alt-country pack by emphasizing the group jamming around their wise and trusting bandleader. The yarn that Medosch spills on the awesome six-minute opening track “First It Was a Movie, Then It Was a Book” needs no help emphasizing its brilliance, leaving the guitars more time to devote to their true passions of rocking out. The first half of Sounds Like… is full of unintuitive but immediately-hitting classics like the opener, with the harmonica-aided “Waiting Around to Provide”, the country rock groove of “Hey Baby”, and the lumbering, dramatic “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” all qualifying. “Big Something” and “Say Your Prayers Rock” ensure that there’s plenty of liveliness in the record’s second half, too, but Sounds Like… isn’t entirely a big-tent-party version of that classic “Burlington-Asheville-Philly alt-country sound”. Medosch only gives herself a few real houselights-dimmed, spotlight-fully-trained-on-her moments, and she takes them to get surprisingly sweet and tender with “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone” and “Pretty Eyes Lorraine” (the 70s-style pop rock of the latter really goes well with her voice). The eight-minute closing track “You Don’t Know” counts too, I suppose, although I find myself impressed with how orderly and measured Florry are able to play over the length of the entire final odyssey. Even when the music of Sounds Like… veers away from showiness, it’s still key in its success.  (Bandcamp link)

Forty Winks – Love Is a Dog from Hell

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Noise pop, fuzz rock, shoegaze
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Noise

In the time I’ve been doing this blog, Crafted Sounds has established itself as the go-to record label for Pittsburgh’s burgeoning shoegaze, fuzz rock, and noise pop movements (see Gaadge and Feeble Little Horse and Flower Crown, among others). The imprint’s latest signee is a quartet that fits right alongside Crafted Sounds’ lineage–Forty Winks, who are made up of bassist/vocalist Cilia Catello, guitarist/vocalist Conner McGee, drummer Colin Klink, and guitarist Kyuhwan “Q” Hwang and who have just released their debut EP, Love Is a Dog from Hell. Via these five songs, I certainly can see why Crafted Sounds referred to Forty Winks as “riff evangelists” and “zoomer rock”–they fall somewhere in between the textured experimentation of shoegaze-originating acts like They Are Gutting a Body of Water and fuzzed-out rock and roll groups like Ex Pilots and A Country Western, eagerly mixing chaotic noise, roaring guitars, and pop hooks together in a brief but memorable package. A more rock-devoted version of early Feeble Little Horse might the most succinct comparison for Love Is a Dog from Hell that I can offer, but the quartet pack so much personality in a dozen minutes here that they deserve to be considered on their own already.

“Noise”, an advance single and quite possibly the best pop song on the EP, is saved for last, but Love Is a Dog from Hell isn’t just a delayed gratification-fest. It’s true that the opening track, “liadfh”, is a textural piece featuring dreamy shoegaze guitar tones gliding smoothly over minimal percussion and unobtrusively melodic vocals, but it’s catchy in its own right, plus it leads right into the other possible catchiest song on the EP, “Commie BF”. The skewed, oddly dramatic gaze-pop song is like a more mall-punk version of the Gaadge/Ex Pilots side of fuzz rock; it alone presents an exciting future for this young band. Lead single “Spurs” is a bit more standoffish than these aforementioned tracks, but I can still see why it was an advance track–it’s perhaps the most complete “shoegaze” moment on the EP, the quartet really letting the guitars run wild in this odd but certainly fully-realized track. After getting a bit tricky with “Spurs” (and the interlude of sorts “Faith”, into which the previous song bleeds), “Noise” comes to save the day with a huge noise-pop (no pun intended) conclusion. Punchy and fuzzed-out and delivering the goods in a straightforward way that Forty Winks hadn’t quite hinted at up until now, “Noise” is another reason to keep this band on our collective radar–not that we needed another one by this point in Love Is a Dog from Hell. (Bandcamp link)

Wipes – Don’t Tell My Parents

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Hex
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, sludge
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Milk Dreams

The hottest new noise rock band is a trio simply called Wipes. No, not “Wipers” (you imbecile), they’re from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (although their label, Hex Records, is from the same Portland that the legendary, similarly-named proto-grunge band hailed). Two-thirds of Wipes (bassist/vocalist Ray Gurz and guitarist Daryl Fogel) previously played together in Allentown group Tile, which I can only imagine was also a noise rock band, and they reconvened with new drummer Garrett Groller as Wipes at the beginning of this decade. Wipes debuted in a big way in 2022 with a debut album called Making Friends and a split cassette with the band Day Job, both via Hex; they strayed from their label of origin by releasing an EP called Vacuum on Avarice in 2024, but they’re back with Hex for their sophomore album, Don’t Tell My Parents. I don’t know what to say about Don’t Tell My Parents other than the fact that it’s just plain-old good noise rock music. It’s not particularly wedded to any specific part of the genre–some of it is sludgy and metallic, some of it’s punky and furious, but all of it is music that’ll please fans of all rock music that’s heavy and pummeling. 

“Pummeling” is how Don’t Tell My Parents feels from a structural level, too–it’s thirteen songs long, always with its gaze set on maximum noisiness, and thus has a bit of an “endurance test” factor to it. Big, downtuned, grungy riffs begin to drill their way into our skulls with the mission statement opening track “Good Luck in the Future”, and they don’t stop: “Stone Eater” and “Bleeding Gums” are just as mean as their titles suggest. “Inhuman Highway” sounds a little more post-punk in its guitars and almost Devo in its vocals, but it’s hardly a respite, and even if it were, there’s nothing here that could slow down the march of tracks like “Machine” and “Taste the Chain” soon afterwards. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I do see new shapes emerging in Wipes’ constant assault towards the end of the album, the trio trying on new tricks with the Dischord-reminiscent post-hardcore of “Speedway”, the dramatic, creepy drone-rock of “Condition”, and the kind-of-catchy garage punk “Milk Dreams”. Don’t Tell My Parents ends in much the same way it begins, though–the four-minute noise rock hurricane of “Ezra”, heavy and slowly inflicting as much damage as possible before things come to a close. (Bandcamp link)

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