Pressing Concerns: Stay Inside, Mythical Motors, Prewn, Rainwater

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns is the first one of the week, featuring three albums coming out tomorrow (October 3rd) from Stay Inside, Prewn, and Rainwater, plus a Mythical Motors compilation from earlier this week. Earlier this week, we had the September 2025 playlist plus a rundown on the recent Silkworm reunion shows, so check those posts out if you haven’t yet.

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.

Stay Inside – Lunger

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo, art rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Ain’t That a Daisy?

Stay Inside became one of the best emo bands currently active so naturally and quietly that I didn’t even notice until now. The quartet (guitarist/vocalist Chris Johns, bassist Bryn Nieboer, guitarist Chris Lawless, and drummer Vishnu Anantha, with saxophonist Shelley Washington and trumpet player Matt Hull now billed as “sometimes” members) put out a very good post-hardcore album in 2020 called Viewing and then followed it up four years later with the more polished alt-rock of the independently-released Ferried Away. I enjoyed Ferried Away and I know I wasn’t alone in doing so, but it now feels like it was a warm-up for Lunger, their third and best LP (coming merely months after their last album). Lunger is fourteen songs of Stay Inside delivering a emo-rock blow informed by heavy-gravity groups like mewithouYou and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, only chiseled down to punchy, poppy emo-rock songs. Stay Inside do their best to outrun a sense of decay through sweeping rockers like “Wish It Away”, “Monsieur Hawkweed”, and “Ain’t That a Daisy?” (the latter of which is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard this year in any genre)–really, just about every song on Lunger feels like it’s in motion in some form. Stay Inside’s progress had largely flown under radar until now, but I’m at least listening after Lunger. (Bandcamp link)

Mythical Motors – The Painted Unseen: Selected Singles and EPs

Release date: October 1st
Record label: Subjangle
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Alive in Wildness

Yes, we do need more Mythical Motors records, thank you very much. Matt Addison’s Chattanooga, Tennessee-based lo-fi power pop project is one of the most prolific bands to regularly appear on Rosy Overdrive; typically, we get multiple Mythical Motors albums a year. In addition to a plethora of CD and cassettes, however, there’ve been a ton of digital-only Mythical Motors EPs and singles over the years, and that’s where The Painted Unseen comes in, collecting five such releases on one CD courtesy of Subjangle Records. A couple of these songs (“Omega Highway”, “Shadow That Comes from Nothing”) ended up on proper albums, but the vast majority of these twenty-seven songs are making their physical debut on The Painted Unseen. Addison’s proper albums find him more often than not laser-focused on punchy Guided by Voices hooks and guitars, and this applies to much of The Painted Unseen (hard to believe “Alive in Wildness” got “left off” anything), but we also get oddities like the garage-junk “Pinpoint Nosedives” and psychedelic debris “Someone Has Been Eating the Red Ribbon” (both of which are from 2018’s Negative Eleven EP, arguably the highlight of the whole collection). Mythical Motors’ music has a crate-digging appeal, and, with that in mind, The Painted Unseen is as an enjoyable a listen as their “normal” albums. At the very least, it’ll keep us busy for a few months until the next one. (Bandcamp link)

Prewn – System

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Art rock, experimental rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Dirty Dog

Exploding in Sound Records introduced us to Prewn in 2023 with Through the Window, the debut album from the Northampton, Massachusetts-based project of one Izzy Hagerup. On Through the Window, Hagerup’s intense and odd mixture of slow, electric indie and folk rock felt a bit hard to categorize, and she hasn’t made it any easier on me with the sophomore Prewn album, System. System feels nearly psychedelic in its construction, with a sound (played entirely by Hagerup once again) that feels both cavernous and uncomfortably up-close (a trick perfected by Prewn’s onetime labelmates Pile). Hagerup is pleading, nearly desperate in opening track “Easy”, a PJ Harvey-esque collision of strings, dread, and little else, but not even this scorcher prepares us for just how “widescreen” System is capable of getting. “Commotion” gets little more synthetic, “My Side” a little more string-heavy, “Dirty Dog” a little more deconstructed, but all of System is equally held together by Hagerup’s voice and her just-as-striking musical decisions. If a lot of System sounds like it’s being held together by little more than a thread, it should be pretty clear by now that that’s a feature of Prewn’s records. (Bandcamp link)

Rainwater – Yesturday & Tamarlow

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, 2000s indie rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

Seattle’s Blake Luley has been making music as Rainwater since the mid-2010s, and the impression I’ve gotten of the project via releases like 2021’s In-Between and 2023’s Wave EP is that of a sleepy Pacific Northwest dream-folk act. Rainwater’s latest record, Yesturday & Tamarlow, is largely inspired by Luley becoming a new father, so we should expect the extremely gentle vibes to continue, right? Well, yes and no. Earlier this year, Rainwater put out an EP called A Tired Light featuring re-recorded versions of a young Luley’s more post-punk/alt-rock-influenced writing, and Yesturday & Tamarlow, picking up the thread to a degree, isn’t afraid to get a little loud and “sweeping” itself. There’s still plenty of dream pop and indie folk throughout Yesturday & Tamarlow, but wide-eyed 2000s indie-style rockers like “Baby’s Alright”, “Shadow”, and “Bluebelly” are now a central–perhaps the central–part of Rainwater’s sound. Opening track “Cottonwood Snow” clings to its acoustic guitar foundation even as Luley and his collaborators turn it into something larger, and songs like “Visiting” and “Goosebump Skin” are intricate, soaring ballads that feel like they’d be entirely different (and more insular) experiences had they been recorded for an earlier Rainwater record. Instead, though, Rainwater made something just a bit different with Yesturday & Tamarlow. (Bandcamp link)

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