Pressing Concerns: Oruã, Suzie True, Garden of Love, Six Flags Guy

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It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring new albums from Oruã, Suzie True, and Garden of Love, and a new EP from Six Flags Guy. Check them out below, and if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Sam Woodring, Cusp, E.R. Visit, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), dial that one up, 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.

Oruã – Slacker

Release date: October 24th
Record label: K
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Marejar

Half of the Rio De Janeiro psych rock quartet Oruã (guitarist/vocalist Lê Almeida and synth player João Casaes) were members of the ever-changing latter-day Built to Spill lineup for a few years, co-producing and playing on the Idaho indie rock institution’s latest album, 2022’s When the Wind Forgets Your Name. One imagines that this Pacific Northwest connection is how stalwart Olympia, Washington label K Records came to signing the Brazilians (Almeida, Caseas, bassist Bigu Medine, and drummer Ana Zumpano) for their latest album, Slacker, but that’s hardly Oruã’s only accomplishment: they’re important figures in their home city’s music scene, with Almeida running Transfusão Noise Records (Gueersh, Disco Doom, Retrato) for over twenty years. It’s not even the group’s first Washington State collaboration, as they put out a split LP with Seattle act Reverse Death earlier this year.

That split LP featured some songs that would go on to be reworked for (or cut from) Slacker, and if you enjoyed that record, Oruã’s version of psychedelia remains in familiar terrain on this more formal exploration of it. The rhythm section is still the bedrock of the quartet’s sound, with Zumpano and Medine providing the foundation on songs like “Deus Dará” and “De se Envolver” for Almeida and Caseas to intone and accent these tracks with their voices and instruments. They’re still an incredibly electric band, as the Big Riffs anchoring tracks like “Slave of the Golden Tooth” and “Marejar” make clear, but Oruã are remarkably even-keeled in their division of the spotlight–the album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Inaiê”, is an exercise in tension and subtlety, and the pensive “Soft” has languid guitar lines relying on the rest of the band to carry them. Oruã might be new to North Americans, but they’ve been at this thing for a while, and it shows with Slacker. (Bandcamp link)

Suzie True – How I Learned to Love What’s Gone

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Pop punk, indie pop, garage punk, twee, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Leeches (Play Dead)

After releasing a debut EP in 2018, Los Angeles pop punk group Suzie True has put out three records on indie punk veterans Get Better Records–How I Learned to Love What’s Gone follows in the footsteps of 2020’s Saddest Girl at the Party and 2023’s Sentimental Scum. The trio (bassist/lead vocalist Lexi McCoy, guitarist/vocalist G Leonardo, drummer Sarah Pineapple) are just as likely to mention The Powerpuff Girls or Sailor Moon as influences as they are “alt-rock” acts like Hole and The Breeders; as one might expect, How I Learned to Love What’s Gone is marked by a dogged pursuit of pop hooks and a boundless energy. Produced by Chris Farren, How I Learned to Love What’s Gone sounds at home evoking 60s girl groups (“Oh, Baby!!!”), interpolating “Cherry Bomb” (“Get Prettier Overnight!!!”), and doing a blistering Veruca Salt impression (“Love Like Cement”), and McCoy’s slick but very open writing hits as hard as fellow pop-ish punk-ish labelmates like Bacchae and Cowboy Boy. Suzie True are refreshingly unconstrained by their various influences’ orthodoxy–we wouldn’t get a song that verges towards post-hardcore (“So Blame Me”), a really good twee-punk number hidden towards the end of the record (“Love for Nihilists”), or cheerleader backing vocals proclaiming “Leeches!” (that’d be in “Leeches (Play Dead)”) otherwise. If you’re going to try to make this kind of pop music, it requires the kind of ambition Suzie True bring nonstop on How I Learned to Love What’s Gone. (Bandcamp link)

Garden of Love – Love Is Coming

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Lo-fi pop, garage rock, psychedelic pop, experimental pop, lo-fi punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Another Wall

Garden of Love are a new trio formed by a few Montreal indie rock/punk ringers, specifically vocalist/guitarist synth player Jane Harms (Donna Allen), drummer Cole Woods (Laughing, Faze), and bassist Sony (Cheap Wig, Ursula). Garden of Love’s debut album, Love Is Coming, is delivered to us via cult label Ever/Never Records (Workers Comp, Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, Kilynn Lunsford), who proclaim it to be (via a quote from WFMU DJ Erick Bradshaw) “miniature prog-pop suites condensed into radio-friendly runtimes”. At its most accessible, Love Is Coming sits comfortably amongst tinny, lo-fi guitar pop acts like Home Blitz, Silicone Prairie, and much of the Inscrutable Records catalog, although Garden of Love are just as apt to veer into noisy chaos as to deliver spindly, jangly guitar lines. There’s no denying the pop cores at the hearts of psych-prog-trash creations like “Another Wall” and “Garden Window”, and “Letter” ups the ante by coming out the other side into straight-up slapdash surf rock. The noise punk “T.V.B.” is the record’s first really off-the-rails moment, but it’s not the last, as Garden of Love continue embracing their wild side right up into the four-point-five-minute prog-blues-punk-pop suite “Carry On”, which puts a cap on the too-brief twenty-one minute cassette. Whether it’s the tossed-off collaboration between three busy musicians or the start of something larger, Love Is Coming holds its own. (Bandcamp link)

Six Flags Guy – In Texas, We Hang Horse Thieves and Let Murders Go

Release date: October 2nd
Record label: 329
Genre: Post-rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, math rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Yow Tools

Columbus, Ohio quartet Six Flags Guy are one of the strongest bands sitting at the corner of post-rock and post-hardcore in recent memory, and their sophomore album, You Look Terrible (which came out in June), only cemented the mantle they claimed with 2023’s And Nothing Did So What. After releasing a sprawling fifty-minute album of “eerie slowcore and guitar-based post-rock” (as I said at the time), it’s surprising to have Six Flags Guy back again so quickly, but here we are with a four-song EP called In Texas, We Hang Horse Thieves and Let Murders Go. You Look Terrible had some kinetic moments, but In Texas… is a lot punchier, landing just as many blows in fifteen minutes between the EP’s twin pillars of “Concrete Beach” and “Yow Tools”. The former starts off in Spiderland and builds to a tense, fiery art-punk conclusion, while the latter (after the requisite meandering introduction) is straight-up squealing in its fury. Bookending these songs are a noise-piece introduction called “I Bought a Dream Journal” and a surprising seventy-second retreat into Duster-esque slowcore called “Planning My Exit”; it’s nearly a photo-negative of their last album, the dominant elements reduced to the periphery and vice versa. Either seems to look good on Six Flags Guy. (Bandcamp link)

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