Pressing Concerns: Salem 66, Smug Brothers, Career Woman, Lùlù

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns is here, and it’s an instant classic! New albums from Smug Brothers, Career Woman, and Lùlù! A career-spanning retrospective compilation from Salem 66! And more! Well, I guess not really “more”, unless you count the also notable section. But, regardless, this is a great edition! Also, we had a Pressing Concerns go up (featuring John Galm, Now, Grant Pavol, and The Lilas) on Monday, and the May 2025 playlist arrived on Tuesday, so check those out if you missed them.

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.

Salem 66 – SALT

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Secret

Let me tell you some facts about a band from Boston called Salem 66. They were formed (by Judy Grunwald, Beth Kaplan, and Susan Merriam) in 1982. They released all four of their albums (and a few singles) on Homestead Records. They played shows with Butthole Surfers, Flipper, Big Black, Mission of Burma, and Dinosaur Jr., among others. A song of their was featured on 2020’s Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987, perhaps the greatest compilation of the decade so far, alongside bands like The Springfields, The Windbreakers, Great Plains, and 28th Day. The liner notes for SALT, a newly-issued career-spanning compilation of Salem 66’s work, were written by Franklin Bruno of The Human Hearts and Nothing Painted Blue. Judging by all that, I’d say they’re probably pretty good! Don Giovanni Records also thought so, as they went and made Salem 66’s entire discography available digitally earlier this year as well as putting together this physical LP/CD as a concise entrypoint. And SALT is, indeed, pretty good. It’s enough to make it clear that Grunwald and Kaplan (the band’s two songwriters and only consistent members) were two great lost college rock greats, and it’s much more than enough to make one wonder what took so long for something like this to come together in the first place.

Like I said, Salem 66 are perhaps most easily defined as “college rock”–hardly “power pop”, “jangly” enough to fit in with Strum & Thrum, early R.E.M., and their ilk, marked by a guitar-led psychedelic sound, that presumably coincidentally, fits alongside the Paisley Underground happening on the other coast of the United States. They’re a band that carried themselves like they were fluent in the heavier strains of indie rock practiced by the bands they associated with when they were active but weren’t interested in doing much more than refracting it as part of a larger, less categorizable form of music that I would call “doing their own thing”. The bands they remind me the most of are other underground rock iconoclasts like Scrawl and Tsunami (the latter of which also received the Franklin-Bruno-liner-notes-treatment recently); the fact that Salem 66 came earlier than both of those bands (as well as just about any I could think to name in the same vein) is impressive and not lost on me at all. I haven’t said a whole bunch about the individual songs on SALT yet, but rest assured they’re great–the compilation is (I believe) chronological, it starts off strong (see the jangle pop “Across the Sea” and the post-punk “Playground”) and it only gets better. The selections from their final two albums–1988’s Natural Disasters, Natural Treasures and 1990’s Down the Primrose Path–are my favorites, displaying a band who’d fully synthesized their parts into something confident, smooth, and heavy. I don’t think I’m done revisiting Salem 66, but SALT does exactly what it should to get us on board. (Bandcamp link)

Smug Brothers – Stuck on Beta

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Anyway
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, psych pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Prank Editions

You might’ve heard about this already, but Guided by Voices are not breaking up. They’re supposedly not going to play live any more, but rumors of a work stoppage at the Robert Pollard LP factory have proven to be unfounded. Even if this October’s Thick Rich and Delicious ends up being Guided by Voices’ final chapter, however, I’m not worried, as we’ve got plenty of other prolific Ohio lo-fi indie rock bands waiting in the wings. Well, I mean we have Smug Brothers at least. Vocalist/guitarist Kyle Melton and (ex-Guided by Voices) drummer Don Thrasher have been making Midwestern rock music that’s equal parts dark post-punk and bright, jangly college rock since 2004, and over the course of their past couple of albums, a new lineup featuring bassist Kyle Sowash and guitarist Ryan Shaffer has congealed. Stuck on Beta is Smug Brothers’ first album with Shaffer (who first appeared on last year’s Another Bar Behind the Night EP) on board, and while it seems like this ought to have led to a smooth continuity for Smug Brothers, the album actually became marked by “the death of an old friend”–the band’s twenty-year-old Tascam 424 MKIII 4-track, which had recorded “virtually every Smug Brothers track” up until that point (and a demise that led to Melton having to re-record many of his guitar parts).

As with Smug Brothers have done in the face of lineup changes and a move from Dayton to Columbus, however, they kept pressing forward, and Stuck on Beta is anything but a slowdown. Although the band have released a few brief, concise EPs in recent years, Stuck on Beta is (like 2023’s In the Book of Bad Ideas LP) for the true believers. Regardless of what the album was recorded on, the quartet still maintain their signature mix of lo-fi casualness and rock-and-roll exuberance, and Melton still certainly “has it”–“it” being the ability to make us really believe in the significance of phrases like “Paper Jane”, “Voltaire Basement”, “Ozone Bunker, and “Sidetrack Ghosts” (and I could go on–“Arcade Strange”, anyone?). So many songs on Stuck on Beta start with an undeniable guitar riff and go from there–the especially Guided by Voices-tinged “Prank Editions”, the chopping-starting of “Take It Out on Me”, the somersaulting solo of “Sidewalk Champagne”, the big, meaty power chords of “Flushing James”. Sowash plays saxophone on “Noble Harper”, which is pretty weird, but that’s a pretty weird and chilly song even without the saxophone, so the Smug Brothers were onto something with that choice. They procure an actual string section (well, violinist Sam Kim and Lung’s Kate Wakefield on cello) for “Cheers to Everything We Used to Do”, but they don’t dwell on the bite-sized balladry, as then it’s back to the grind for two more unflagging mid-tempo indie rockers. Up, up we go now. (Bandcamp link)

Career Woman – Lighthouse

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hit and Run

It’s strange to call the debut album from a twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter as “long-awaited”, but when you’ve been putting out music since you were fourteen, I guess it makes some sense. Melody Caudill started releasing songs on her own as Career Woman in Los Angeles in 2018, and has continued to do so as she’s moved to Santa Cruz for college, signed to Lauren Records (who put out the 2023 Grapevine EP and everything she’s done since), and put together a full Career Woman band (that’d be guitarist Allen Moreno, bassist Joey Chavez, and drummer Jackson Felton). I had previously only really been familiar with Caudill via her two collaborations with blog favorite Pacing–the excellent one-off single “Boyfriends” (which gets re-recorded for Lighthouse) and “New Song with Mel” from this year’s Songs mini-album. I suppose I was expecting Career Woman to sound more or less like Pacing’s anti-folk/bedroom pop sound, but that’s not what Career Woman LP1, Lighthouse, does at all. These songs are massive and polished, gigantic indie pop rock anthems that balance the clear might of the Career Woman Band with the just-as-obvious spotlight on Caudill herself (and it’s a truly collaborative enterprise that’s led to the songs ending up this way, as Felton is credited with arranging them and Moreno with recording them).

Lighthouse is world-conquering music. It’s the sound of a young songwriter and band excitedly reaching new heights together. Career Woman certainly aren’t the first band to put alt-country, Phoebe Bridgers-core indie pop, power pop, pop punk, and emo into a blender, but listening to Lighthouse is to be taken in by a powerful universality that can only really be achieved by saying “fuck it” and just putting everything “you” that you can fit into your music. “Piano Song” is “college rock” in a literal, messy sense, “Can You Tell Me?” really gains something from Chavez’s leading bassline, “Nosebleed” bounces along awkwardly but gracefully somehow nonetheless, “Hit and Run” is restless to the point of catastrophe (“This morning, we fucked up / And not Walgreens, Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart could pick us back up” might be my favorite lyric on this entire album). These are Lighthouse’s “anthems” (the re-recorded version of “Boyfriends”, which I’ve written about plenty before but sounds every bit as sharp and bittersweet as a power pop song, also qualifies)–but there’s more to Career Woman here between the power balladry of “Mel’s Drive In” and the sudden restraint of the record’s final three songs. I can confirm that Lighthouse sounds great in the car, but if you have somewhere to be you might not want to place yourself in the hands of a record that so confidently proclaims that it doesn’t know where it’s going to end up. (Bandcamp link)

Lùlù – Lùlù

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Howlin Banana/Taken by Surprise/Dangerhouse Skylab
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tous les Etes

Hey, we’ve got some French power pop on the blog today! I’ve written about my fair share of French bands in Pressing Concerns recently, and while groups like Cathedrale, EggS, and Pretty Inside can be described as some combination of “college rock”, “garage rock”, and “jangle pop”, the Lyon-Marseille-based Lùlù is something different. Led by vocalist Luc Simone and completed by bassist Sabrina Duval, guitarists Simon Perrin and Théo Serre, and drummer Fanny Bouland, the self-titled Lùlù debut album is power pop in its most freewheeling, energetically fun form. Simone and his collaborators gleefully roll around in the histories of garage rock and punk rock to make ten massively hooky rock and roll knockout punches. Far removed from the refined, cosmopolitan sound that I associated with French indie pop, Lùlù has more in common with Australian garage-power-poppers like The Unknowns and Romero, American retro-pop groups like Sheer Mag and Free Energy, and, honestly, even a little bit of the brighter side of melodic lifer punk rock groups (“orgcore”, as it’s called). The album artwork for Lùlù (a drawing by Simone) is perfect–it’s undeniably cartoony and it looks like it belongs in a different decade (though it’s hard to place which one, exactly), but there’s a clear edge to it nonetheless.

We might as well jump right in–it’s not like Lùlù are going to wait for us before kicking out some tunes. I should mention that Lùlù is entirely in sung in French, a language that I don’t speak but, as it turns out, actually sounds really good in power pop form. Lùlù kick off their first album with–what else?–a song called “Lùlù”, and they barrel through four minutes of rock-and-roll hooks that assure that their title-song lives up to their reputation (at least, the reputation that they’ll surely have after some more people hear Lùlù). “Lùlù” isn’t even the best part, though–I actually think that the two songs that follow it, the cowbell-heavy classic rock throwback “Ma Si Ma Io” and the earnest poppy punk rock of “Sonic, Lyon” are even better. If “Sogni d’Oro” is a little more subdued, Lùlù immediately come roaring back with “Tous les Etes” (the moment when the guitar riff suddenly kicks back in with about a minute left in the song might be my favorite moment on the entire record), and they never slow down again, as the entire second half of the album is made-up of quick-tempoed, guitar-showcase power pop rock and roll. You only need to sample a little bit of Lùlù to get what this band is capable of, but, if you’re like me, you certainly won’t want to stop there. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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