Pressing Concerns: Léna Bartels, Bones Shredder, Baltimore at an Angle, Big Cry Country

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First Pressing Concerns of the week! New albums from Léna Bartels, Bones Shredder, and Baltimore at an Angle! New EP from Big Cry Country! Let’s go!

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Léna Bartels – The Brightest Silver Fish

Release date: September 12th
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Fuzz rock, alt-country, bedroom rock, art rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Why Won’t You Let Me Keep It

Léna Bartels put out her first album, Preservation, in 2022, but she first got onto my radar earlier this year thanks to a split EP with Nico Hedley called It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year. I enjoyed Bartels’ intimate bedroom folk-style contributions to that EP, but as it turns out, they were hardly sufficient to prepare me for the full range of her sophomore LP, The Brightest Silver Fish. Featuring Izzy Oram Brown and members of Youbet and The Big Net and coming out via Glamour Gowns (Charlie Kaplan, Peaceful Faces, Josh Halper), The Brightest Silver Fish is (loosely speaking) a “folk rock” album that explores either end of that spectrum as well as other avenues entirely across its thirty-four minutes. On the one hand we have fuzzed-out, soaring alt-rock stuff like “Amber” and “Why Won’t You Let Me Keep It” that will appeal to fans of Lily Seabird’s Alas, or even Wednesday, while we also get the rootsy alt-country breathers of “Bad Sugar” and “Give Myself A Way”, pin-drop quiet lo-fi bedroom pop recordings “Lead Me On” and “Nothing Makes Me Feel Touched”, and a kind of freaky synthpop song called “I Knew” that reminds me of Laurie Anderson (with the vocal manipulations and all, I suppose). The Brightest Silver Fish won’t bore you, but it’ll do just about everything else. (Bandcamp link)

Bones Shredder – Morbid Little Thing

Release date: September 19th
Record label: Sunken Teeth
Genre: Pop punk, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pulling Teeth

Oh, great, here comes Mr. Bones Shredder. A pop punk artist with a dark cabaret aesthetic, eh? A horror-themed musical vampire-mad-scientist whose Frankenstein’s monster is a Morrissey that only knows how to write Ramones/Misfits songs? Yes, he has played in multiple Alkaline Trio side projects, good on you for asking. No, it’s not 2007–it’s 2025, and I’m writing about the debut album from a San Jose musician named Randy Moore called Morbid Little Thing that happens to be everything I described above and one of the best power pop albums I’ve heard this year, too. You’ll hear a bit of that darker Chicago pop punk sound–Smoking Popes and, yes, Alkaline Trio–in Morbid Little Thing’s ten songs, but no amount of blonde-streaked dark hair can cover up the other source material: suburban Fountains of Wayne-esque power pop and big old Blue Album power chords. Kicking the thing off with lean pop punk attention-grabbers “There You Are” and “Daylight” works, and Bones Shredder is streaking through stuff like the ascendent power pop “Pulling Teeth”, the refreshingly-simple belter “Stay Away”, and the earthquaking fuzz-grunge-pop of “Who Cares” in no time. Stick around to the end for the chugging power chords that construct an otherwise pretty faithful Beatles cover (“Baby’s in Black”) and the five-minute closing track, too–both are black sheep, true, but that’s Morbid Little Thing’s thing. (Bandcamp link)

Baltimore at an Angle – I Thought

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sky Blue Sky

Last year, I wrote about an album called Once Upon a Time in Battersea by Grr Ant, which is the new solo project of a London musician named Grant Gillingham. Once Upon a Time in Battersea, an excellent collection of confident jangly guitar pop, was the debut Grr Ant release, but it turns out that Gillingham has been putting out music under a different project called Baltimore at an Angle since 2020. I Thought is actually the fourth Baltimore at an Angle LP, and appears to have been recorded entirely by Gillingham himself–what precisely differentiates it from Grr Ant isn’t entirely clear, but more music from the apparently fairly prolific musician is welcome. I Thought retains the jangle pop and classic C86-inspired indie pop side of Once Upon a Time in Battersea, although it’s perhaps more laid-back, meditative, and a little more openly “British” in its execution. “Starting Again” is a practically pastoral opener, and the slightly-post-punk-influenced “KIA” has the most polite “I hate you / You stupid cunt” I’ve ever heard. It’s an economical ten songs in thirty minutes, but its unassuming packaging doesn’t make highlights like “Sky Blue Sky” any less impressive. Grant Gillingham, under whatever name he chooses, knows how to make songs like that click. (Bandcamp link)

Big Cry Country – Something Blue

Release date: September 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie punk, power-pop-punk, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: To Voicemail

A power pop/pop punk/emo-indie band from Washington, D.C. called Big Cry County? Seems like they should fit right in here in Pressing Concerns. This quartet (Roxanne Bublitz, Jill Miller, JP Salussolia, and Jarrod Brennet) have been around since the beginning of the 2020s but, after a few one-off singles, they got my attention via their debut EP, 2023’s Living Conditions. If you’ve enjoyed what fellow D.C. bands like Pretty Bitter and Flowerbomb have been doing (not to mention the 2010s Midwestern indie rock bands that inspired them like Remember Sports and Ratboys), the sophomore Big Cry Country EP will be a satisfying and promising listen. Something Blue is admittedly more barebones than many of the names mentioned above, but that doesn’t stop Big Cry Country from putting on a memorable show nonetheless–both the pop punk bass and (relatively) subtle keyboard hook of opening track “To Voicemail” feel as grand as the most polished arena “indie” rock could be. They may not be a straight-ahead “punk” group, but all six of these pop songs have foot-on-gas energy, even (perhaps especially) when Bublitz’s lyricism is a bit of a bummer. I respect the ethos. (Bandcamp link)

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