Pressing Concerns: Gosh Diggity, Space Jaguar, Ali Murray, Terror Management Band

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Despite the holiday week, I was still able to cobble together four solid records that are out today, tomorrow, or earlier this week: we’ve got new albums from Gosh Diggity, Space Jaguar, Ali Murray, and Terror Management Band for you below. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new albums from Abe Savas, Ella Hanshaw, City Planners, and The Whimbrels, and on Tuesday the June 2025 Playlist went up), 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.

Gosh Diggity – Good Luck! Have Fun!

Release date: July 3rd
Record label: Worry
Genre: Chiptune-punk, pop punk, power pop, emo
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!

Well, it seems like emo-chiptune-pop-punk-rock music is in good hands in 2025. I’m not talking about the similar but distinct “chiptune-slacker-rock” that’s practiced by blog favorite (T-T)b, but of a different strain of music that nonetheless seeks to combine big power pop hooks, rock band instrumentation, and video game-inspired synth bleating. It’s time for all of us to meet a trio from Chicago called Gosh Diggity, co-founded in 2018 by vocalist/guitarist/synth programmer Joe Marshall and vocalist/bassist CJ Hoglind and eventually (after a few different members cycled through) joined by drummer Kelson Zbichorski. From 2019 to 2023 Gosh Diggity put out three EPs and an album through labels like Rat Poison Recordings (a Lauren Records sublabel run by Avery Springer of Retirement Party) and Worry Records (Rust Ring, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Snow Ellet); the latter of the two is putting out cassettes of the trio’s long-awaited sophomore album, Good Luck! Have Fun!. As one should be able to surmise for the album’s, ah, memorable cover art, Good Luck! Have Fun! is absolutely loaded with bright colors, quick energy, and 8-bit/chiptune hooks strewn all over the place. Hoglind and Marshall are an excellent tag-team, both displaying the ability to emote like proper emo/pop-punk frontpeople and not sound absurd with the technicolor, digital symphony going on around them.

Every part of Gosh Diggity is doing the absolute most on Good Luck! Have Fun!–take lead single “The Season”, which features everything from a sprawling sing-song manifesto of a lyric and vocal performance that reminds me of the great Bad Moves, bouncing and bounding 8-bit touchstones, and nice, big, shiny guitars. I’m not even sure if it’s the biggest wrecking ball of a pop song on Good Luck! Have Fun!–there are at least two other main contenders in the mood-swinging, weather-dependent “10 Simple Tricks Your Doctor Does NOT Want You To Know About (#6 Will Shock You!!!)” and the synth-pop-punk sing-speaking extravaganza of “Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” (I think that that’s Hoglind on lead vocals; whoever it is, it might be my favorite vocal performance of the year thus far). Like a good emo-punk band, there are instrumental intros (“Good Luck!”), skits (“Gosh Diggity Dental”, I guess)…songs built around dog barking (“Dog Song”)? Mostly, though, it’s great chiptune-punk-pop, whether it’s done a little more laid-back (the slacker rock detour of “It’s Too Crowded in Here”) or zippier (the ninety-second “Mediocre”) than is typical for Gosh Diggity. Gosh Diggity doesn’t sound like a band who does anything half-assed, and Good Luck! Have Fun! sounds as great as it does because it’s one big swing after another. (Bandcamp link)

Space Jaguar – If You Play Expect to Pay

Release date: July 4th
Record label: Subjangle
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Please Come Around

The debut record from British jangle pop group Space Jaguar has been a while in the making–bandleader Mark Grassick first tipped me off to it at the beginning of last year over email. The album that would eventually become If You Play Expect to Pay went through a few iterations before Grassick settled on a core of jangle pop great Andrew Taylor (of The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness and Dropkick) and bassist Michael Wood (of Singing Adams and Whoa Melodic), who recorded the majority of this album in late 2024. The first Space Jaguar album is also marked by an impressive slate of guitar pop musicians making guest appearances–backing vocals from Hurry’s Matt Scottoline, extra guitars from Mike Connell (The Connells), Matt Ashton (Mirrored Daughters), and Josh Salter (Laughing). Taylor’s trademark euphoric jangly guitar melodies and sparkling production certainly put his stamp on If You Play Expect to Play, but these are Grassick’s songs, and that’s Grassick on lead vocals–all these embellishments wouldn’t amount to much without a capable bandleader. Thankfully, Grassick is a natural at this kind of thing, casually leading the rest of Space Jaguar through classic jangle pop and college rock hooks.

If You Play Expect to Pay does its business in ten songs and twenty-four minutes, with only one track crossing the three-minute barrier–Space Jaguar are acolytes of brevity, to be sure. The brief runtime isn’t because the band speeds things up too much–much like the aforementioned Scottoline’s band Hurry, Space Jaguar favor electric, mid-tempo performances that let the vocals and melodies hang in the air a bit. Despite the United Kingdom/Ireland origin of the band’s key personnel, there’s a surprising Americana streak to “Alone Now” (it reminds me a bit of Labrador), but Space Jaguar spend plenty of time on their bread and butter of jangly power pop with excellent material like “Please Come Around”, “Fall to Pieces”, and “Forward Momentum”. It’s becoming more apparent to me listening to this one closer and closer that If You Play Expect to Pay is a really sharply-honed album, even as it’s very unassuming in how it presents itself. “No Martyrs, No Victims”, “Nowhere Is My Home”, and “Standing in Your Way” all have a legitimate claim to the best chorus on the entire record (and, yes, the third of those three only has a one-line refrain, but it’s a really good line). The obligatory acoustic closing song “Untitled (23 February)” is the record’s only real departure, but stripping away (some of) the extra touches doesn’t change Space Jaguar’s timbre and only shows us just how much of Grassick is in the rest of the album anyway.

Ali Murray – The Summer Laden

Release date: July 1st
Record label: Dead Forest
Genre: Folk rock, dream pop, slowcore, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Heaven All the Way

The best-kept secret of the northern reaches of Scotland is Ali Murray, a singer-songwriter who calls the Isle of Lewis home. I’ve written about a couple of Murray’s records over the years, but I’ve really only scratched the surface of the prolific musician–under a variety of projects, he’s made music encompassing the worlds of slowcore, folk (both “traditional” and “indie rock”-focused), dream pop, ambient, shoegaze, fuzz rock, and more. Murray hasn’t gone anywhere in recent years–last year, he put out a four-song solo EP called Highway to the End, and earlier this year he debuted a project called Felines of the Night (whose music is self-described as “dark, eerie, mournful death ballads sung entirely by cats”), but the first Murray record I’ve written about in a couple of years is a strong return to form to the music that first got him on my radar. The Summer Laden has its own detours, but it’s primarily an album fully re-embracing folky, slowcore-inspired indie rock of both the acoustic and electric varieties. Sometimes The Summer Laden is pin-drop quiet, sometimes it’s relatively amped-up, but it pretty much always feels like a delicate, thoughtful thirty-minute journey through the world of a talented and somewhat iconoclastic singer-songwriter. 

The range of Murray is on full, constant display in The Summer Laden’s first half–he begins the record with the title track, a carefully-arranged chamber pop exercise that folds unexpectedly into the fuzzed-out indie rock of “Heaven All the Way” (the record’s loudest song and the one with the most divergent vocal performance from Murray) and then once again veers into a different world, this time via the acoustic folk of “Toby”. The verses of “Heaven All the Way” may feel pretty dark and obscure for Murray, but the singer surfaces for a beautiful shoegaze-pop chorus, and he’s able to unite some of The Summer Laden’s more disparate moments in this way, too, like the mid-record duo of “Don’t Fade on Me” and “July the Spiral”, which jump a little further into the realms of electronic-touched, rhythmic dream pop. The one song that rivals “Heaven All the Way” in terms of pure electricity is the album’s penultimate track, “Last to Leave”–this one is based on chugging power chords, typically held in some restraint but every now and then offering up minor explosions to go alongside Murray’s star-reaching vocals (see also the acoustic track “Starlit Beaches”, in which Murray gives so much to the barebones recording that it feels much “fuller” than it is on paper). It’s a good a time as any to get in on this particular secret. (Bandcamp link)

Terror Management Band – Austerity Gospel

Release date: July 1st
Record label: Belladonna/Ashtray Monument
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Chamber Music

And now we have a noise rock group from Florida called “Terror Management Band”. The quartet of Kevin Kelley (drums), Jeremy Rogers (bass), Alan Mills (“weird guitar”), and Mike Taylor (“regular guitar”) came together incrementally beginning in 2018 in the St. Augustine area, eventually releasing an album called Big Box Apocalypse in 2023 and a two-song single called “Landlord/WW1099” last year. Terror Management Band are clearly on a hot streak, as they’ve already returned to spread the Austerity Gospel via their second full-length record. The AmRep and “Side 2 of My War” references the group claimed for their first album largely still apply on Austerity Gospel; Terror Management Band say that their newest record “documents the psychic spiral between the Trump administrations”, but it just sounds like classic dark, angry, chaotic noise rock to me (which, I suppose, is as appropriate a soundtrack for this era as anything). Terror Management Band are somewhere on a spectrum between Lungfish and Pissed Jeans–sometimes they can be almost psychedelic in their slow-moving, low-end-worshipping post-punk sound, sometimes they’re more into straight-up pummeling, and they move between poles effortlessly.

Terror Management Band arrive with a buzz and a thud with “Deincarnation” (a classic noise rock song title if I’ve ever heard one), a blunt-force object of rock and roll featuring shouted-out vocals (“everyone sings on this record”, notes the Bandcamp page; good thing, as this would be an exhausting task for just one person). The group then impart a little bit of local history to us with a song called “Minorcan”, and one of Terror Management Band’s key dynamics–that of Mills’ “weird guitar” chiming and drilling alongside the more cavemen-like crunch of the rest of the band–begins to reveal itself. Through the Pile-like atmospherics of “Chamber Music” and the Devo-core banal paranoia of “Exit Interview”, Austerity Gospel remains hot to the touch; side two of the album kicks off with yet another noise rock classic title in “The Chisel”, which lives up to its name with a bit of Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes-esque screeching. Terror Management Band don’t lose their fire in the closing stretch of Austerity Gospel so much as employ it more strategically–the tricky dynamics of stuff like “Neon Pond” and “Hornets” sound like deep cuts from an unsung 90s-era Dischord record, and it also has a bit of that slow-dawning terror that I loved in last year’s American Motors album. Well, they did call themselves the “Terror Management Band”. (Bandcamp link)

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