Pressing Concerns: Bunnygrunt, No Joy, Wombo, Chris Staples

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This whirlwind week on Rosy Overdrive comes to a close with four records coming out tomorrow, August 8th: new LPs from No Joy, Wombo, and Chris Staples, and a reissue of Bunnygrunt‘s first album. Earlier this week, we had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Jacob Perez, Salty Greyhound, Lake Ruth, and FOND) and on Tuesday, the July 2025 playlist went live; 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.

Bunnygrunt – Action Pants (30th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: August 8th
Record label: HHBTM/Silly Moo/Jigsaw
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, twee, pop punk, 90s indie rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Superstar 666

Bunnygrunt are indie rock for the real indie rock fans. The group came out of St. Louis, Missouri in the early 1990s, co-led by guitarist Matt Harnish and drummer Karen Ried and with a relatively revolving door of third members. They’ve been intermittently active for three decades now, buoyed by multiple record labels associated with band members (The Bert Dax Cavalcade of Stars, Silly Moo) as well as regular support from cult indie pop imprint HHBTM. Bunnygrunt’s longevity and consistency would be enough reasons to look back at their debut album, 1995’s Action Pants, on their own, but this thirtieth anniversary of the first Bunnygrunt LP also restores the original intended tracklist for the album–bassist Renee Dullum abruptly left the band right before its release, and so the three songs she contributed to the album were just as quickly cut at the last minute. Presumably time has healed all wounds, and so now we’re finally able to take in Action Pants (recorded by Pulsars’ Dave Trumfio, who also contributes sitar and percussion) as it was initially intended. Like I said at the beginning, this is indie rock for people who like “indie rock” and all that entailed in 1995: there are bits of twee indie pop, scrappy indie punk, and even “motorik” moments here.

There are a lot of 90s indie rock bands that Action Pants reminds me of at different points–bands like Sleepyhead, Nothing Painted Blue, and Sebadoh, who could be “pop” and “noisy” at the drop of a hat and whose lack of an obvious gimmick perhaps has led to them not being as well-remembered as some of their more genre-devoted peers. It’s not too surprising that a band that got tagged as “cuddlecore” and recorded songs with names like “Eggy Greggy” would have plenty of moments that fit right in alongside the twee pop that K Records was chronicling further west. At the same time, though, there’s an oddly droning, humming quality to songs like “Superstar 666” and “I Am Curious Partridge”; I’m not saying that they were making Stereolab-level krautrock/indie pop (with one exception), but Action Pants is at the very least on the same level as the frantically-strummed clean electric chords of Unrest. The resting state of Bunnygrunt is somewhere between meditation and exuberant indie pop songs, but there’s plenty of deviation from the mean between the curious, two-part power pop experimentation of “Maude”, the sudden punk firebomb of “G.I.2.K.”, and the previously-alluded-to twelve-minute closing track “Open Up and Say Oblina”, which stretches Bunnygrunt’s sound out into a forever-seeming highway of indie pop patience. It does make me a little hopeful about the state of things that enough people remembered that Action Pants rocks for this re-release to happen; maybe we still deserve good indie rock music after all. (Bandcamp link)

No Joy – Bugland

Release date: August 8th
Record label: Hand Drawn Dracula/Sonic Cathedral
Genre: Shoegaze, experimental rock, dream pop, electronica
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: My Crud Princess

Montreal group No Joy showed up at the beginning of the 2010s, riding that particular wave of shoegaze-y, noise pop-ish indie rock bands that honestly still sounds pretty good and relevant today. No Joy weren’t exactly the buzziest or biggest of their cohort, but the group (which started out as a full band but has more or less morphed into a solo project led by Jasamine White-Gluz) has proven to be one of the more sturdy and forward-facing ones, expanding their sound to incorporate electronic elements and collaborating with the likes of Sonic Boom into the 2020s. For Bugland, the fifth No Joy album, White-Gluz continues to push the boundaries of “shoegaze” by enlisting the prolific experimental/electronic musician Angel Marcloid (aka Fire-Toolz) as her main collaborator. Combine that with the fact that it’s the first proper No Joy album in a half-decade, and it’s hard to predict just where Marcloid and White-Gluz are going to go with Bugland. The resulting album is just as notable for what it reaches towards (which is electronic, “dreamy” rock music) as for what it retains (that is, still being very much a rock record, whether it’s in a straight-up shoegaze direction or somewhere more odd).

I like that whoever wrote the bio for Bugland was bold enough to reference Zooropa as a sonic touchpoint (although they do pull their punches a bit by distancing it from U2’s “ego”). It’s not as far off as one might initially think, as opening track “Garbage Dream House” demonstrates. It’s maximalist “dream pop” music made without any proper dream pop lineage, just happening to shake out that way between the distorted guitars, insistent but somewhat obscured vocals, and high-flying noises of all kinds strewn about. Highlight “Bits” is perhaps the best “pop song” on Bugland–it’s hard to pinpoint what about it makes it so catchy, other than it somehow uses both shoegaze (in the first half of the song) and synth-y dream pop (parts of the second half) to make its mad-scientist creation. The fuzz revs up again for a couple excellent rock songs in the record’s second half–the quick-tempoed, speedy dream-gaze-pop of “My Crud Princess” and the curious “Bather in the Bloodcells”, which combines huge guitars with an almost funk-like groove hidden in the sprawl. “Jelly Meadow Bright” closes out Bugland with an eight-minute trip, and it’s the closest that No Joy come to leaving their past fully behind. However, even in the psychedelic electronic new age-y reaches of the track’s final push, Marcloid and White-Gluz fit some nice rock guitars into the tapestry, too. (Bandcamp link)

Wombo – Danger in Fives

Release date: August 8th
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Danger in Fives

Who wants to listen to some post-punk music from Kentucky? I am specifically talking about Louisville trio Wombo, a band who’ve exemplified the American rock underground since they initially came together in 2016. Ever since linking up with Fire Talk (a Brooklyn label that, to its credit, knows to look inland from time to time), bassist/vocalist Sydney Chadwick, guitarist Cameron Lowe, and drummer Joel Taylor have set to work building a sturdy, rewarding, and inviting (as far as these things go) discography; albums Blossomlooksdownuponus and Fairy Rust came out in 2020 and 2022, while EPs Keesh Mountain and Slab filled gaps in 2021 and 2023. Last year was the first one this decade not to feature any kind of new Wombo record, but the trio taking their time (comparatively, at least) has paid off with Danger in Fives, the third (or fourth, depending on how you count) Wombo LP. Compared to other great Fire Talk post-punk bands, Danger in Fives is more tranquil than the nervousness of Patio, but hardly the same type of suaveness practiced by Cola; there’s a tension between Chadwick’s grounded basslines and her dreamy, ascendant vocals, and the rest of the band–which alternate between trying to make a brief but searing mark and fading into the vibe–match this intriguing dichotomy, as well.

Danger in Fives isn’t exactly a “minimalist” album so much as an album carefully built and executed to avoid any excess. Pretty much everybody in Wombo is doing something interesting and non-intuitive in the opening title track, but the band still manage to wrap the song up in two-and-a-half minutes with little more than Chadwick’s ghostly melody seemingly designed to stick with us. Wombo don’t sound like Pile, per se, but there’s a similar commitment to making music that consistently sounds surprising and engaging with little care for jamming obvious “hooks” into the mix–this lack of an obvious central point becomes the bait to return to the songs over and over again, at least for me. What’s up with the Lonesome Crowded West-esque turntable scratches in “A Dog Says”, for instance? What about the strict, plodding rhythm-keeping of “Neon Bog”? How did Wombo get “Reveal Dusty” to sound so…rubbery? And is the penultimate track “Common Things” really as much of a “beautiful ballad” as I remember it sounding, coming at the end of a bunch of less tangible recordings? Well, it’s all worth looking into. (Bandcamp link)

Chris Staples – Don’t Worry

Release date: August 5th
Record label: Hot Tub Recordings
Genre: Indie folk, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: A Cold New York Morning

It’s been a long and fruitful road for Chris Staples. He hails from Pensacola, Florida, where he played in the Tooth & Nail emo band Twothirtyeight in the 1990s and early 2000s, after which he moved to Seattle where he pursued a solo career, recorded for Barsuk Records, and associated with fellow fringes-of-Christian-music figures like David Bazan and Jeremy Enigk. Recently, Staples moved to Richmond, Virginia, and that’s where he recorded his seventh solo album, Don’t Worry. Staples invited a couple of well-traveled session musicians to Richmond in pedal steel/lead guitarist Alan Parker and drummer Kyle Crane to help put this album together, and finished it off with remote piano and vocal contributions from Daniel Walker and Kylie Dailey, respectively. Don’t Worry is a very deliberately-paced, peaceful folk album that seeks to live up to its title without taking any cheap shortcuts to get there, and Staples’ decades of experience surely came in handy while making something that remains compelling while pursuing subtlety. Don’t Worry may sound sleepy at times between Staples’ subdued vocals, Crane’s slow beat-keeping, and hazy moments of piano and pedal steel, but the mind writing these songs and words is very much an active one.

“I have so much on my mind / And so much underneath,” Staples quietly sings in “Doesn’t Matter”, Don’t Worry’s opening statement. Staples’ muted manifesto is easy to miss if one isn’t listening closely, as the album opener is much too absorbed in thought to welcome us into the fold (memorable Lemonheads name-checking aside). “A Cold New York Morning” is appropriately chilly, raising the tempo and the stakes slightly but palpably to soundtrack a momentous occasion of some kind (“I know what I’m about to do is wrong / But so is standing by and looking on / As you play God”). As I’m writing this, I still feel like there’s a lot more to Don’t Worry than what I’ve gotten from it so far, but what’s most connected with me so far is more than enough to recommend it–between the country-ish, breezy contentment story of “Good Enough for Now”, the curious, woozy, piano-and-percussion-built “Open Mind”, and the economical, self-contained, cheerfully dreary folk-pop closer “Two Carat Diamond”, Staples sounds like someone with a lot still in the tank in his third decade of making music. (Bandcamp link)

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