Release date: July 25th
Record label: Asian Man
Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
The sophomore album from San Jose’s Pacing certainly qualifies as one of the most anticipated records of 2025 in Rosy Overdrive’s small corner of the music world. I would’ve said as much in the immediate aftermath of the project’s first album, 2023’s Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen, one of my favorite LPs of that year. Real Poetry… was a DIY affair whose visible seams did nothing but accentuate the brilliance of Pacing bandleader Katie McTigue, both in terms of her skill as a kitchen-sink indie pop/twee/“anti-folk” composer and as a writer with a truly staggering level of ambition strewn about her material. If that wasn’t enough, everything that Pacing’s done since Real Poetry… has upped the ante, from jumping to local stalwart Asian Man Records to creating an absurdly great stopgap “mini-album” called Songs to releasing a pair of singles that completely blew the entire idea of a “Pacing song” out of the water.
Aside from the core Pacing band of McTigue, bassist/guitarist Ben Krock, and drummer Joe Sherman, there’s a real brain trust behind PL*NET F*TNESS–it’s a veritable who’s who of Pacing collaborators and associates, with everyone from Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar, Copeland James, Star 99, Career Woman’s Melody Caudill and Jackson Felton, bassist Noah Sanchez de Tagle, and producer Ryan Perras lending their talents to these songs. Between the lineup and the advance singles, I fully expected PL*NET F*TNESS to be “Pacing as we’d never heard them before”; the first thing I noticed from “Pl*net F*tness” and “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” is the absolutely professional, full-band power pop polish to both of them, exploring genres like “pop punk” and “surf-y guitar pop” that I’d consider to be completely uncharted territory for Pacing before now (McTigue, in the lead-up to Songs, joked about the new album leading to her “[having] opinions about guitar tone”, certainly a strange place for an anti-folk musician to find themself).
Not to say that the music evolution of those singles was a red herring (PL*NET F*TNESS sounds great and contains many more surprising moments beyond the aforementioned tracks), but it was actually the second thing I noticed about those advance tracks that turned out to be the most key one to understanding the album as a whole. I’d rather go spelunking alone in Nutty Putty Cave than unironically describe an album as an artist’s “most personal to date”, but Pacing’s evolution on PL*NET F*TNESS goes beyond the instrumental bells and whistles. PL*NET F*TNESS is just as thematically ambitious as Real Poetry…’s dissection of reality and art was, but McTigue seems more comfortable (or, at the very least, open to) drawing from personal experiences to construct these giant overarching structures this time. When it came out, I wrote extensively (for me) on the title track’s examination of the banal aftermath of the death of a family member, and “Uno” (the sneaky, quick “B-side” to “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” is arguably an even rawer look at this extremely weird moment suspended in time.
For all of its might and bluster, PL*NET F*TNESS features some of McTigue’s most confused and awkward (emotionally, not structurally) writing yet. McTigue writes that the album contains “several love songs…with no clear target”; “Disclaimer”, a jerky, sweaty acoustic song that opens the album, finds McTigue singing “You say you need space / Well I hate space … / So I don’t know what to do / With all this love I have for you / I’d give it to the thrift store / But they don’t take anger / And it’s hard to separate the two”; this sincere floundering ought to be the clearest distillation of what I have to assume McTigue meant by that quote, but that would be ignoring the impossible-to-ignore “Mastering Positional Chess”, a brilliant folk-pop parasocial anthem about American Chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky. Oblivious and practically leaking with desire (of what kind? Pretty hard to unblur the lines here), “Mastering Positional Chess” is almost too much–it’s not, but it’s certainly much.
The emotional heart of PL*NET F*TNESS is an almost completely acoustic track called “True Crime / Birthday Song”; like another central song to the album, “Love Island”, “True Crime” isn’t really about its titular subject, but rather it’s a jaw-dropping, guard-dropping piece about laborious love (“All your crinkles and your soft spots and your prickly thorns / I run straight into them / And I’m surprised when I hit something sharp / And you’re surprised when I yell out”–I truly never expected Pacing to write something like this). Perhaps tacking the hushed “Birthday Song” at the end of “True Crime” is supposed to soften the blow a little bit, but it just reminds me of every time I try to wipe up a dye stain at my job and end up creating an even bigger blue smear (oh, and also there’s a sound collage called “The TV” in the middle of PL*NET F*TNESS; if we’re talking “unexpected moments”, I wasn’t really expecting something that reminds me of “Back to Saturn X Radio Report” on a Pacing album, but here we are).
Aside from the singles, my favorite song on PL*NET F*TNESS is called “Advertising”. Of all the album tracks, it’s the one that benefits the most from the expanded musical toolkit–it’s hard to imagine McTigue and company pulling something like this one off on Real Poetry…. The production forms itself around McTigue’s subdued but clear vocals, which deliver a desperately confused plea for some kind of meaning. “I guess I don’t mind / Being lied to / I don’t see what’s wrong with / Wanting everyone to like you,” McTigue confesses about the titular well-despised field, and then “I’m not so sure where / I’m supposed to get my cues / Now that I don’t believe in you”. There are no answers on PL*NET F*TNESS, only Things–charismatic professional chess players, bastardized Mr. Rogers quotes, reality television, true love, half-remembered advice from the dead, tickets for events you forgot to go to. And some pretty nice guitar tones, too. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 