Pressing Concerns: Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, Wenches

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Hey, all! Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week, a strong collection featuring new albums from Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches. Check ’em out below!

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.

Aunt Katrina – This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Dream pop, psych pop, art pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Just a Game

Ryan Walchonski recorded the first EP from his Aunt Katrina project more or less on his own; at the time of Hot’s release (December 2023), Walchonski was still a part of the acclaimed noise pop group he co-founded, Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse, even as he’d recently moved to Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, however, Walchonski officially stepped away from Feeble Little Horse, and Aunt Katrina has started to look more and more like a “real” band in the meantime. They’re at least a six-piece now; Walchonski (now based in Baltimore) has welcomed multi-instrumentalist Alex Bass, drummer Ray Brown, guitarist Eric Zidar, lyricist/guitarist Laney Ackley, bassist Nick Miller, and lyricist/keyboardist Emma Banks into the group–the majority of them appear on the first Aunt Katrina full-length, as well as former member Connor Peters. The hotness of the band’s debut EP continues with This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me (a title apparently inspired by listening to the band This Heat in a car with no air conditioning in the midst of a Baltimore summer), but otherwise it’s a pretty big leap from the first Aunt Katrina release to this one.

Hot felt like a very low-stakes release, the work of somebody with a larger project just messing around and making experimental pop music–This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me is still a little bit “offbeat”, sure, but the psychedelic guitar pop of this album is much more fully-developed and labored-over. It’s not the Feeble Little Horse “wall of sound”–in fact, the first two songs on the album, “How Are You?” and “Peace of Mind”, are relatively streamlined pieces of dreamy indie pop that are open to the idea of minimalism and leaving a little space between the instruments. It’s a more thoughtful kind of obsessive pop music, but even so, I was still totally unprepared for the skipping, almost twee jangly indie pop of “Just a Game” that follows this opening duo. After nailing a few pop songs of varying levels of “pep”, the second half of This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me is admittedly a little weirder, but none of the final three songs (as disparate as they are) allow for any flagging to creep into the album’s home stretch. “Locked Me Up” is the dramatic one, a pretty harrowing lo-fi folk song that turns into a fuzzed-out mid-tempo grunge rocker, “Rhythm” is a flighty, electronic-tinged indie pop song, and “I Don’t Want to be Your Friend” closes This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me right about where it began, with a simple pop core visited by intermittent synths and orchestration. I liked what Walchonski did with Hot, but now it’s apparent that he’s built something larger. (Bandcamp link)

The Fruit Trees – An Opening

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Flower Sounds
Genre: Lo-fi folk, folk rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Right Back to That Place

I last wrote about The Fruit Trees around two years ago, on the occasion of their debut album, Weather. At the time, the “group” was effectively the solo project of southern California musician Johnny Rafter, who (with the help of plenty of guest musicians) made music in the realms of both sparse, lo-fi slowcore and fuzzy folk rock. The Fruit Trees have remained busy since Rosy Overdrive last checked in on them–they put out an EP called Leaving later in 2023, and 2024 brought a sprawling, hourlong sophomore album called We Could Lie Down in the Grass, but we rejoin them for an album that’s a little different than their past work. An Opening is a pure collaboration between Rafter and Hannah Ford-Monroe, a visual artist who, apparently, had never sang publicly before the making of this album. The core of An Opening was improvised over a single three-hour period with Ford-Monroe as the vocalist and lyricist and Rafter playing guitar (and some overdubs were added after the fact). I didn’t know any of this context until I decided that I wanted to write about An Opening–I just thought it was a normal folk rock album, as the partnership between Rafter and Ford-Monroe just sounds so natural.

Ford-Monroe rises to the challenge of being the focal point of these songs–because they’re relatively stripped down, her voice is even more centralized than Rafter’s was previously in the Fruit Trees albums that he’s fronted. There’s a delicate strength to Ford-Monroe’s singing, one that fits right in with the fractured but very human Microphones/Mount Eerie-inspired musicianship of Rafter. Ford-Monroe deals in a lot of bittersweet, talk-sung reminiscing from the past in her lyrics, pulling from the haze of childhood and the more clear and regrettable worlds of adulthood. An Opening is on the longer side (around fifty minutes), and a lot of the album’s strongest moments come in the first half (the pin-drop quiet opener “Marionette”, the wobbly folk of “Right Back to That Place”, and the rootsy “Hand Me Down” are quite the formidable trio to start the record). Stick with The Fruit Trees, though, and you’ll see why Ford-Monroe and Rafter decided to let the partnership continue to curious second half highlights like “A Thousand Dreams”, “A Door”, and the eight-minute penultimate track “Far Away”. The Fruit Trees have been a lot more things than your favorite lo-fi folk quasi-solo project has been over the past few years, and this record of a fruitful creative session between two friends is one of their best offerings. (Bandcamp link)

Autocamper – What Do You Do All Day?

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Slumberland/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Proper

I’d been hearing about an indie pop group from Manchester called Autocamper for nearly two years, even though the quartet’s discography up until now had only consisted of a trio of two-song singles. After releasing their debut single with Discontinuous Innovation in 2023, they contributed a song to a Prefect Records compilation the following year and linked up with their current homes of Safe Suburban Home and Slumberland for two more two-song singles, all the while playing local gigs with groups like Swansea Sound, Chime School, and The Umbrellas when they came to town. This all led to a decent amount of hype for a quartet (guitarist Jack Harkins and keyboardist Niamh Purtill, who share lead vocals, plus drummer Arthur Robinson and bassist Harry Williams) who’d yet to put out a full-length album (or even an EP!) until What Do You Do All Day?. “Not twee, not anorak, not lucky, just pop,” reads Autocamper’s Bandcamp bio, and I like this description–this is best described as “indie pop” music, to be sure, but it’s indie pop music made with the extra kick of a four-piece band with a strong rhythm section to boot.

Autocamper are classic indie pop acolytes, and a real who’s who of influences have been mentioned in the run-up to this album–Calvin Johnson! The Pastels! Felt! The Vaselines! The one reference that caught my attention is one that doesn’t necessarily reflect their sound so much as their attitude–The Feelies, specifically with regard to Robinson and Williams’ playing. At its best and most transcendent, What Do You Do All Day? effectively takes the crazy rhythms of motorik indie rock and collides them with C86-style indie pop, power pop, and the like. “Again”, “Map Like a Life”, “Foxes”–these are exciting, energetic pop songs made by a real-deal rock band (or, if you will, excellent rock and roll songs made by a pop group). Autocamper’s vocalists make their presence felt on What Do You Do All Day?, too, both as singers and musicians–take maybe my favorite song on the album, “Dogsitting”, an offbeat power pop shuffle whose strongest weapons are the bemused, conversational vocals (which are actually from Robinson, I learned post-publication) and Purtill’s worlds of keyboard hooks. The quick-paced thirty-four minute record feels like a proof of concept, the immediately-hitting Side A complimented by still-very-pop-forward but reaching-a-little-deeper B-side material like “Linnean” and “Somehow”. After building up to it for quite a while, What Do You Do All Day? is finally Autocamper’s moment, and they certainly know how to seize it. (Bandcamp link)

Wenches – Stupid Sick

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Master Kontrol Audio/Small Hand Factory/Sunken Temple/Tokyo Fist/The Ghost Is Clear/Already Dead
Genre: Noise rock, garage punk, hard rock, punk blues
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Buzzkiller

Well, here’s some good news: there’s a new album from a very loud hard rock/heavy metal/proto-punk revival group called Wenches. I couldn’t tell you too much about this band–there appear to be four of them (guitarist Jarod, bassist Mike, drummer Brad, and vocalist James; “feat. ex-members of other bands”, their Bandcamp page boasts), they seem to be originally from Bloomington, Indiana (not sure if they’re still there), and they put out an album called Effin’ Gnarly in 2021. Wenches’ second album is called Stupid Sick, and it comes to us via a half-dozen record labels and was largely recorded by Carl Byers at Clandestine Arts. Stupid Sick is a half-hour of rock and roll adrenaline, pure and simple–Wenches keep their foot firmly planted on the gas pedal for all eight of the album’s songs, following in a torrid lineage including Motorhead, the MC5, and Hot Snakes, among others. They do welcome a couple of guests into the fold (ALL’s Chad Price on “Kick It Down”, Brazil’s Jonathon Newby on “Like Lightnin’”), but Wenches’ mission is to rock out as dirtily and furiously as possible, and they seem to have only allowed people on board who also understand the assignment.

We meet our heroes just as they’ve begun their journey with a song called “Haulin’ Ass Fault” that more or less sounds how one would expect a song called that to sound (if you’ve kept up with modern Detroit garage punk groups like The Stools, that’s the kind of thing you’ll be hearing here). Blistering guitar riffs, chunky power chords, screamed-out vocals, and in-the-red distortion all come thundering down the line as Stupid Sick progresses through workouts such as “Buzzkiller” and “Boneless”, and there’s a little bit more metal-adjacent wizardry going on in the otherwise-fairly-recognizable “When I Died”. “Kick It Down” is another “sounds just like you’d expect based on the title” ones, and “Throw Me to the Wolves” flirts with something that I’m going to call “goblin punk”. It all leads up to the final two knockout punches of “Dearly Departed” (“We didn’t bury the bodies deep enough,” Wenches yell–uh oh) and “Like Lightnin’” (a five-minute blues-punk torpedo of a set-wrecker). Eventually, Stupid Sick stops pounding and bludgeoning, but only after Wenches seem to be satisfied with the extent of their destruction. (Bandcamp link)

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