Pressing Concerns: Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, Left Tracks

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During this eventful Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ll be looking at new albums from Sueño Púrpura and Goodbye Wudaokou, a career-spanning compilation from Generifus, and an EP or mini-LP or whatever from Left Tracks. Let’s go!

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.

Sueño Púrpura – Souvenir

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Buh
Genre: Shoegaze, art rock, dream pop, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: La Niebla

Lima, Peru-based Buh Records has done an impressive amount of excavating both new and historical experimental music from Latin America in its two decades of activity–with that in mind, providing a home for contemporary South American shoegaze bands like Thank You Lord for Satan and Sexores to put out new material is just one of the services they’ve provided us, but it’s probably the most relevant one for this blog. Buh’s latest signee is a five-piece from Lima called Sueño Púrpura, co-founded in 2022 by two guitarists who’d played together in the instrumental band Parahelio (Rodolfo Ontaneda and Christian Ortega) and quickly joined by vocalist Jandy Torres, bassist José Andrés Lezma, and drummer Juan Camba. The first Sueño Púrpura album, Souvenir, is a sprawling forty-four minute, six-song shoegaze LP (it’s bookended by a nine-minute opening track and a thirteen-minute closing one) with pieces of post-rock, dream pop, and fuzz pop baked into their sound.

Souvenir’s opening track, “Sueño Púrpura”, may indeed stretch to nearly ten minutes, but it’s a go-ahead dream-pop-infused shoegaze masterpiece for nearly its entire runtime–after this relatively friendly opening, Souvenir gets thornier once we get into the meat of songs like “Granate” and “Luz Inerte”. For the most part, these are meandering, lost-sounding psychedelic post-rock pieces with bits of noisy reprieves flaring up whenever Sueño Púrpura threaten to stray too far from shoegaze. “La Niebla” brings a little “pop” more directly back to the surface, and “El Tiempo Es Una Flor” tempers its atmospheric first half with a surging fuzz rock conclusion. The frenetic dozen-minute closing track “Mora” starts with a few minutes of setup that lead towards Sueño Púrpura upping the ante with nearly krautrock-level percussion and amplifiers on the brink. “Mora” doesn’t really sound like the rest of Souvenir, but Sueño Púrpura leave enough chaos strewn about their beauty-seeking music that it’s not unclear how we got here. (Bandcamp link)

Goodbye Wudaokou – Anything of Us

Release date: October 1st
Record label: Subjangle/YYZ
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, dream pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Glimmers

Last year’s Mirror Skies by Goodbye Wudaokou was a special thing–a lifelong musician finally makes a debut album, turning in an expansive record steeped in his influences (post-punk, new wave, college rock, C86) with a strong personal stamp on them. Manchester’s Mat Mills apparently decided not to wait long before continuing down this path, as the second Goodbye Wudakou album, Anything of Us, arrives scarcely a year after the first one did. If you liked Mirror Skies, you’ll probably like this one, though it’s clearly not a retread–it’s a more polished and propulsive listen, with Mills (still recording and performing all the instruments himself) pursuing a sound more clearly indebted to the jangly indie pop from his home city and country. In making a more recognizably “indie pop” record with a more traditional guitar-led sound, one might fret that Goodbye Wudaokou could lose the personal homespun touch of Mirror Skies, but that’s not the case here thanks to Mills’ vocals–still even-keeled, unassuming, and high in the mix. It’s not like the New Order synths and post-punk have disappeared from Anything of Us–Goodbye Wudaokou, impressively, is able to conjure up the same backwards-glancing melancholy with one of its strongest ingredients reduced a bit in the concoction. Presenting a winning formula is always welcome, and being able to tinker with it effectively just as much so. (Bandcamp link)

Generifus – Best Of

Release date: September 19th
Record label: Perpetual Doom
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Good Graces

I’ve written about Generifus on this blog before–specifically, the Olympia, Washington-based project’s 2023 album Rearrangel–but that doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of the discography that Spencer Sult has amassed under the name over the past twenty years. Thankfully, Perpetual Doom (Lee Baggett, Austin Leonard Jones, Bill Baird) has given us an easy way in via Best Of, an hourlong cassette tape featuring songs from across the folk rock act’s two-decade career. I believe it’s in roughly chronological order–at the very least, we get early cuts like “And I Tried” and “Good Graces” (from 2011’s I Don’t Have to Worry) at the beginning and songs from Rearrangel and 2024’s Summerberrys (“Didn’t Even Look at the Mountain”, “Rearrangel”, “Charm”) bring up the rear. Best Of starts as a lo-fi, acoustic, slow-crawling Pacific Northwest indie folk rock act and ends as a confident, polished alt-country group, but it’s not such a linear progression–highlights from both the first (early rocker “Back and Time” and country rock breezer “Favorite Thing”) and second (the quiet contemplation of “On God” and the boisterous retro-party vibes of “I Love Music”) halves defy easy placement on such a spectrum. That’s the mark of a successful survey, and of a wealth of work from which to draw it. (Bandcamp link)

Left Tracks – LT2

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop, synthpop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I’m Gone

I’ve written about Los Angeles-based musician Kabir Kumar thanks to their work as Sun Kin–their 2024 album Sunset World was one of my favorites of that year–so it’s nice to see them back again in some form with a record, this time as one-half of the duo Left Tracks. Left Tracks’ roots actually go back to around 2020, when Kumar and Phil Di Leo (DI LEO, Seemway) co-founded the group as a way to stay musically connected after the latter’s departure to SoCal from Oakland. The appropriately-titled LT2 is the second Left Tracks release, following a five-song EP in 2023 called End Times Hauling, and the record (it’s eight songs and sixteen minutes long, take your pick on “album” or “EP”) contains plenty of the vibrant, colorful indie pop that I’ve enjoyed via Sun Kin. LT2 is both more streamlined and weirder than Kumar’s solo project, somehow–I’m not sure how else to describe a record that opens with a minimal, sort of hip-hop spoken word experiment (“Conversation”) into a bright, sunny two-minute pop song (“I’m Gone”) into deconstructed dream folk (“Something from Last Night”). Perhaps Left Tracks could’ve elongated these songs and made a “proper” thirty-minute album, but I like the quick bursts of energy LT2 sprints towards instead. (Bandcamp link)

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