Pressing Concerns: Hüsker Dü, Buddie, Strange Passage, Sweet Nobody

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns, as per usual, features four records coming out tomorrow (that’s November 7th): we have new albums from Buddie and Sweet Nobody, an album that I think is an EP from Strange Passage, and an archival live collection from Hüsker Dü (yes, that Hüsker Dü). If you Missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Dazy, Orillia, Weird Magazines, and Glo-worm) or the October 2025 Playlist/Round-Up (which went up on Tuesday), 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.

Hüsker Dü – 1985: The Miracle Year

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Numero Group
Genre: Punk rock, hardcore punk, alternative rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Everything Falls Apart

An acquaintance of mine who enjoys plenty of punk and noise rock told me that he listened to Hüsker Dü for the first time recently, and he was decidedly unimpressed. “‘‘I-I-I Apologize’…” he mimicked in an exaggerated whiny voice. “…what the hell is that?” As somebody who takes all this stuff way too seriously, it’s funny to take a step back from a canonized Alternative Rock band and think “you know, maybe the speed freak punks with a flowery pop streak aren’t for everyone”. For those of us who aren’t hung up on asking “what was their deal?”, said deal was in full swing in 1985. That’s where we join the Minneapolis trio for The Miracle Year, an archival 4-LP/2-CD live collection from Numero Group capturing an entire January 1985 Hüsker Dü concert as well as twenty other live recordings from the same year. For a band whose “official” recordings often come with an asterisk due to fidelity and availability issues, 1985: The Miracle Year could be seen as the definitive single document of Hüsker Dü at their best–and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it supplants Zen Arcade or New Day Rising, it’s a pretty solid recording of something not exactly captured by those LPs either.

Zen Arcade less than a year old, New Day Rising a couple of weeks young, Flip Your Wig coming later that year, and a major label debut on the horizon. This is the backdrop for the first half of 1985: The Miracle Year, a twenty-three song set from January 30, 1985 at First Avenue in Minneapolis. I’m not going to spend too much time talking about how great these songs are (if you don’t know them, there’s no better time to learn ‘em than right now), except to say that hearing Hüsker Dü sprint from the hardcore-punk “Everything Falls Apart” to the power pop cuts from Flip Your Wig in a single stride rules. The second half of 1985: The Miracle Year may not be from a single concert, but it’s structured like one, starting with a bunch of new songs (from the upcoming Candy Apple Grey) before the rest of the album fills in the gaps of classic Hüsker songs missing from the Minneapolis set (“Celebrated Summer”, “In a Free Land”, “Chartered Trips”). Candy Apple Grey has, for me, always been a perfectly fine album diminished by coming right after three classic ones, but hearing “Hardly Getting Over It” and “Eiffel Tower High” right next to those aforementioned giants (and played with just as much fervor) helps bridge the gap. “Bridging the gap” is exactly 1985: The Miracle Year’s purpose. Or, maybe it’s just a good live album featuring a good band playing a bunch of good songs in a very good manner. Both, I guess. (Bandcamp link)

Buddie – Glass

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Crafted Sounds/Placeholder
Genre: Power pop, fuzz pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: In the Glass Shell

Buddie’s second album, 2023’s Agitator, was one of my favorite LPs of that year and cemented the project (led by Daniel Forrest, then a new transplant to Vancouver from Philadelphia) as one of the best “indie rock” acts currently active. A frequently loud pop record that encompassed “Built to Spill-esque 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, and power pop” (as I wrote at the time), Agitator nonetheless centered Forrest’s charismatic, intimate, and impactful songwriting. Two years later, we’ve gotten Glass, the third Buddie album and the first recorded with the band’s new Canadian lineup (lead guitarist Patrick Farrugia, drummer Natalie Glubb, and bassist Lindsay Partin). The eight-song, twenty-five minute LP sounds almost exactly like the Philadelphia version of Buddie (and that’s a good thing); if there’s a difference, it’s a slightly more “rocking” record, probably due to the consistent lineup (only the four Buddie members, no guest musicians this time around) and the all-too-brief runtime. 

Buddie start Glass by literally cowering: opening track “In the Glass Shell” is a monster truck of a fuzz pop song about hiding in the midst of creature comforts (“I can forget that / Out there in the world / I’m a fish / And there’s grizzlies”). Glass is Buddie’s first vinyl release, and they’ve responded to this development by making an old-school album where every track seems built to stand on its own. The first four songs all could be the record’s biggest “Buddie-style anthem”–the heavier alt-rock of “Impatient”, the breezy reality-check of “Stressed in Paradise”, and “Golden” (which is kind of the best parts of the three songs before it mashed together). Buddie push things to (for them) extremes on the second side, with two of their loudest songs yet (the punchy “Antarctica, 2005” and the near-shoegaze wall of sound “No Fun”) bookending Glass’ clearest forays into subtlety (the two-minute indie pop zipper “Crow” and “Blackout”, which breathes in a way the rest of the album doesn’t, really). Like I said, it all sounds like the same Buddie I’ve been enjoying these past few years, but Glass feels like a distinct version of this band and, I suspect, will continue to assert itself in Buddie’s discography regardless of what the group do next. (Bandcamp link)

Strange Passage – A Folded Sky

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Post-punk, jangle pop, college rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Palace Behind the Shade

The Somerville, Massachusetts trio Strange Passage formed in 2016, and released an EP (2016’s Shine and Scatter) and LP (2019’s Shouldn’t Be Too Long) before seemingly disappearing at the beginning of this decade. Thankfully, guitarist/vocalist Renato Montenegro, guitarist Greg Witz, drummer Ricky Hartman, and bassist Andrew Jackmauh (who’ve played in bands like The Spatulas, Invisible Rays, and Magic Circle, among others, between the four of them) never stopped making music together, leading to their Meritorio Records debut, A Folded Sky. Now split between Boston and New York, Strange Passage have nonetheless convened to make a six-song, nineteen-minute record (which to me is an EP, but some of the members’ hardcore punk backgrounds may explain why they’ve christened it an “album”) of classic garage-y jangle pop and college rock. 

A guitar pop band who mentions names like The Church, The Feelies, and Neu! as influences, it’s probably not surprising to learn that A Folded Sky is both incredibly catchy and built with a noticeably tough post-punk backbone (for newer bands, maybe try “janglier Parquet Courts” or “more motorik Kiwi Jr.”). Strange Passage tackle “Palace Behind the Shade” and “Hunter’s Fancy” with a freewheeling garage punk energy, even if the songs themselves are nervy post-punk/college rock chimers, and even the most unvarnished “jangle pop” moment on A Folded Sky (“Daylight Savings”) has a bit of a darker streak hidden somewhere in there. I like a lot of bands whose primary purpose seems to be chasing power pop hooks for their own sake, but Strange Passage is something else: listening to the dense but ramshackle closing track “Golden Rule” and its frayed but passionate narrative diatribe, the winning melodies feel like a pleasant coincidence. (Bandcamp link)

Sweet Nobody – Driving Off to Nowhere

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, synthpop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Revenge

I wrote about Los Angeles indie pop group Sweet Nobody in 2021, when they released their sophomore album, We’re Trying Our Best. That LP came four years after the quartet’s 2017 debut album, and, another four years later, here we are with the third Sweet Nobody album (and their first for Repeating Cloud), Driving Off to Nowhere. Vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Joy Deyo, drummer Brian Dishon, guitarist Casey Snyder, and bassist Adam Nolan haven’t completely abandoned the straightforward jangly guitar pop of We’re Trying Our Best, but Driving Off to Nowhere represents something markedly different for Sweet Nobody. Opening track “I Don’t Know When I’ll See You Again” is a bold first statement, a four-minute glitzy indie pop track cobbled together from bits of dream pop, synthpop, and new wave. Not everything is as stark as “I Don’t Know When I’ll See You Again” (hell, “Revenge” in the track two slot takes us right back to “jangle”), but there’s a hazy, reverb-touched quality to just about everything on Driving Off to Nowhere, from electric power pop (“Making It Right”) to 60s girl-group-influenced dream pop (“The Lasting Kind”). It feels like Sweet Nobody really labored over these songs, possibly tweaking them here and there until, say, “Finally Free” began riding an electronic groove and “Could You Be the One” gained a heartland rock grandiosity. They were just fine where they were before, yes, but expansion sounds good on Sweet Nobody. (Bandcamp link)

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