Pressing Concerns: Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, Groceries!, Sudden Voices, Coral Grief

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four albums that are coming out tomorrow, July 18th: new LPs from Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, Groceries!, Sudden Voices, and Coral Grief. Read on, and if you missed either of the earlier blog posts from this week (on Monday, we looked at new ones from Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches, and Tuesday’s post featured Rip Van Winkle, Uniflora, West Coast Music Club, and Pat Hatt), 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.

Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra – Yikes Almighty

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Lauren/Making New Enemies
Genre: Folk pop, singer-songwriter, indie pop, twee, slacker pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: My Diving Board Game

There was a band from California called Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, and then there was one called Walter Etc. led by the same person (Dustin Hayes) and featuring, from what I understand, more or less the same people. Maybe they’re two different bands, or maybe they’re the same one “split into two identities” (as their bio puts it)–either way, after about a decade of Walter Etc., Hayes revived the project’s original name for the first time since 2014 for his latest album, Yikes Almighty. Hayes’ project(s) have always been “the band with the silly name(s)” in the periphery of my mind until I gave Yikes Almighty a shot; they get referred to as a “folk punk” act, and I can hear how they might’ve initially been one, but Yikes Almighty is in the realm of underground iconoclasts falling somewhere between “lo-fi pop” and anti-folk/folk punk (names like Diners, Fishboy, Emperor X, Okkervil River, and Mike Adams at His Honest Weight–several of which share a label with Walter Mitty–come to mind). Dubbed “a calming existential crisis set to children’s toy instruments”, Yikes Almighty is low-key folk-pop music that’s about as “relaxed” and “chill” as its creator could reasonably allow it to be. 

Like a lot of “cult”-ish-type bands, it’s hard to say what, exactly, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra is. Are they a vehicle for a uniquely talented singer-songwriter? A bunch of quirky, lo-fi, underground outcast punks (in attitude, if not in genre)? Classic pop music nerds tinkering away at their own personal Pet Sounds? The unassuming, unfamiliar mixture of all these sides of them make Yikes Almighty a one-of-a-kind album in 2025, the kind of album that’ll give you statuesque, studious pop queries like “Econoline” and “The Way She Said It”, folk-pop hand-clappers like “Naked Self Portrait #2” and “My Scratched CD of a Brain”, and the oddities anchoring stuff like “Fireworks on the Moon” (some kind of clinking bells), “Homesick Hour” (that sounds like a Speak & Spell), and “Triplet Daughters” (in which it is, finally, ukulele time). I’m not sure what the single greatest moment on Yikes Almighty is–at first I thought it was the striking, somewhat alarming slacker pop of “Omfg”, then I started gravitating towards the post-“adult alternative” party-acoustic-rock of “My Diving Board Game” (side note: this has been one of the most difficult albums for me to describe in the history of this blog, for some reason). After a brilliant aw-shucks chorus in the latter, Hayes declares “I don’t know what it is I’m trying to find / But I’m diving in, without a deep breath”–and then a kazoo rises up to meet him. (Bandcamp link)

Groceries! – Human Extinctions

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock, experimental rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Causing Time

The Los Angeles quartet Groceries! was co-founded last year by vocalist/guitarist Gabby Fiszman and drummer Ed Graveline, who were shortly joined by bassist Nate Ramer and guitarist Grant Gonzalez and then set to work recording their debut album. That would be Human Extinctions, which is anything but a soft launch for the young band. Groceries! call themselves “post-sleaze”, and while I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that, the points of influence for Human Extinctions are all over the underground rock music map–90s emo and lo-fi indie rock to be sure, collided with the psychedelic ambition of 2000s indie and the experimental kitchen-sink attitude of recent noise pop groups on labels like Julia’s War, Candlepin, and Trash Tape. I specifically mention Trash Tape as it’s one of their bands, Rain Recordings, that sounds the closest to Human Extinctions to me–it’s a wide array of indie rock warped, compacted, and reinterpreted by a generation that didn’t experience much of it in person, which perhaps helps Groceries! draw connections from Rainer Maria to Modest Mouse to Animal Collective to The Wrens to Neutral Milk Hotel that might be hard to have developed in real time. 

While there are certainly noisy and feedback-drenched moments on Human Extinctions, it almost feels revelatory that Groceries! aren’t a shoegaze band. They aren’t “emo-gaze” so much as a distorted emo-ish rock band whose interests beyond these key tentpoles rear up on a regular basis. Human Extinctions feels longer than its thirty-five minutes, presumably because every song on the album packs several tracks’ worth of ideas together–“Finding San Pedro” introduces Groceries! with a flat-out impressive five-minute multi-part emo odyssey, and neither the more “rock band”-forward “Causing Time” nor the dream pop-indebted “Angel Numbers” slow down Groceries!’s momentum. Because Human Extinctions doesn’t instinctively resort to walls of sound to kick things up a notch, one might call it a “lighter” version of this current wave of basement indie rock, but the flipside of that is that the mostly discernible instruments and Fiszman’s clean vocals make something like the seven-minute “Lullaby” even headier than a noisy freak-out would be. Stuff like “Alegria” and “Decompose” might be a little weirder than some of the other tracks, but there’s no single “out-there” moment on Human Extinctions; how Groceries! are able to make an album that bounces off some of the more well-worn aspects of their peers and constantly sounds fresh comes down to more subtle decision-making. Not that “subtle” is the first word that’ll come to mind listening to Human Extinctions, but you’ll want to listen to it enough to where it’ll start to apply. (Bandcamp link)

Sudden Voices – Scruples

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-rock, experimental rock, jazz-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I Knew You at Once (Slight Return)

After a fifteen-year hiatus from making records, the London musician Ben Morris (who previously led the band Union Wireless in the late 1990s and early 2000s) returned to the worlds of post-rock and experimental music in 2023 with a new project called Sudden Voices and a self-titled debut album. Sudden Voices was an adventurous, confusing mixture of post-punk, electronica, and chamber music, the latter of which Morris explored even further with the second Sudden Voices LP, last year’s Days and Nights. The resurgent musician has really made up for lost time at this point with the third Sudden Voices album in as many years, Scruples. Rather than continuing down the path at which Days and Nights had hinted, Scruples represents something of a left turn for Sudden Voices–the choral, chanting sections of the previous LP are gone entirely, and a synthetic, jazzy instrumental minimalism has taken its place. The project’s previously-named influences–CAN, Bitches Brew, Talk Talk–all still apply here, but the still-wide musical palette is applied more sparingly and carefully, finding more in common with post-rock groups like Tortoise or even The Necks than the post-punk/art rock that was (at least somewhat) part of Sudden Voices.

The future jazz of the title track greets us in a well-orchestrated but subdued manner, setting the stage for the understated instrumental explorations set to come in Scruples. The bass pushes “Ends and Means” forward, and while Sudden Voices take detours into sustained orchestral drone (“Coming Up for Air”) and minimal keyboard pieces (“There Will Be Two of Us”) after that, the light krautrock/TNT vibes eventually return again in “A Stand Against the Dark” (an excellent piece that divvies up horns, mallets, and keys in equal measure), “Small Myths” (featuring some of the best rhythmic moments on the entire record), and “They Do Not Speak”. The latter of those three songs is Scruples’ penultimate track, a relatively brief two-minute kaleidoscopic crescendo that paves the way for the eight minute finale, “I Knew You at Once (Slight Return)”. It’s perhaps Sudden Voices’ best single composition yet–the way it builds and builds stoically and intently, without ever offering up something that could cleanly be labeled a “payoff”, feels like exactly what Morris has been working up towards with Scruples. It is, more than ever before in Sudden Voices’ existence, about the journeys these songs take. (Bandcamp link)

Coral Grief – Air Between Us

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Suicide Squeeze/Den Tapes/Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Dream pop, fuzz pop, psychedelia, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Starboard

Even though they’re a fairly new band with a fairly small discography, Seattle dream pop trio Coral Grief already have the makings of a cult-favorite group to me. Vocalist/bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey and guitarist Sam Fason co-founded the group and released a self-titled debut EP in 2021, and drummer Cam Hancock came on board for the group’s second EP, 2023’s Daydrops. Daydrops didn’t shatter the world or anything, but it got a little bit of attention, and it seemed to me like the people who enjoyed it really seemed to enjoy it. I heard Daydrops when it came out–Seattle label Den Tapes put out a cassette featuring both EPs around this time–and while it kind of got lost in the shuffle for me, it made enough of an impression on a few record labels (specifically Anxiety Blanket and Suicide Squeeze) who’ve teamed up with Den Tapes to release Coral Grief’s debut LP, Air Between Us. Coral Grief’s latest record is clearly their best work yet, but, like their earlier EPs, Air Between Us (recorded by New Issue’s Nicholas Wilbur at Anacortes’ The Unknown) isn’t going to reach out and grab you. Coral Grief’s journey of psychedelic, droney indie rock and dream pop ambience requires some patience to start to congeal.

That’s not to say that Air Between Us isn’t a pop album–that much is pretty obvious between the lightly sweeping, lightly jangly opening statement “Starboard” and the dreamy, Stereolab-inspired propulsion of second song and advance single “Rockhounds”. Between Farr-Morrissey’s somewhat cold vocals and the perfunctory, greyscale guitar work, there’s something of a distant quality to Air Between Us, even when the trio are working their way through electric, alive-feeling rockers like “Avenue You”. Songs like this one and the whirring “Paint by Number” are in the same “shoegaze-inspired art rock” territory as groups like Aluminum and (early) Dummy, but Coral Grief do more traditionally pop-sounding dream pop between cuts like the title track and “Latitude”. Much of this I hadn’t really observed until I sat down to write about Air Between Us; unless one focuses very intently, this album is built to present itself as a single, hazy, all-encompassing cloud that doesn’t lift until the echoing indie pop of final song “Almost Everyday” comes to a close. It certainly works the way Coral Grief sculpt it, but Air Between Us holds up to advanced scrutiny, too. (Bandcamp link)

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