Pressing Concerns: Bliss?, Ali Murray, Rose of the World, Second Story Man

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It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It features a new EP from Bliss?, and new albums from Ali Murray, Rose of the World, and Second Story Man! Read on!

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.

Bliss? – Keep Your Joy to Yourself

Release date: November 21st
Record label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, college rock, punk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Fear & Trembling

I’ve only just started putting Rosy Overdrive’s year-end lists together, so I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% accurate, but my gut tells me that Bliss?’s Pass Yr Pain Along is the best debut album of 2025 (and if it’s not, it’s very close). Three Baton Rouge punk musicians (guitarist/vocalist Josh Higdon, bassist Hunter Kiser, and drummer Robert DeMouy) converged to make a record of Elvis Costello-inspired college rock, power pop, and rough-around-the-edges mod-revival. Not long after Pass Yr Pain Along’s release, Hunter Kiser moved to Houston and subsequently left the band, but Higdon and DeMouy have forged ahead as a duo, splitting bass duties on the three-song Keep Your Joy to Yourself EP. As one might guess from the thematically similar title, Keep Your Joy to Yourself’s songs were written as the same time as Pass Yr Pain Along’s, but they “weren’t ready to be recorded” until now.

DeMouy, upon sending this EP to me, wrote that Bliss? had to “take a new approach to recording” due to their new configuration and notes that the duo spent more time on overdubs than they had as a power trio. Keep Your Joy to Yourself isn’t any kind of major departure in its final form, though–it certainly does sound like three songs that could’ve been on Pass Yr Pain Along. “Fear & Trembling”, the EP’s hit, is as catchy as anything on that debut album, an awesome firecracker Lemonheads/Replacements-style power-punk wrecking ball. Sandwiching “Fear & Trembling” are two weirder pop songs–the opening track, “Antpile”, is a wobbly, dubby post-punk pastiche (full-time bassist or not, Bliss? haven’t forgotten the importance of the low-end in this kind of stuff), and “Clemency Program” marries the Costello new waviness of the EP’s first song with a bit more garage/alt-rock heft. The circular ending to “Clemency Program” may be where those “overdubs” start to become most obvious, but it’s a steady slide into just a tiny bit of maximalism. I fully trust the pilots of Bliss? to navigate this terrain at this point. (Bandcamp link)

Ali Murray – Spiritual Drift

Release date: November 19th
Record label: Dead Forest
Genre: Folk, slowcore, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Where Is Time Going?

Isle of Lewis, Scotland singer-songwriter Ali Murray has released a lot of music, much of it in the realms of dreamy, slowcore- and dream pop-indebted folk. Many of these records have shown up in Pressing Concerns before, but (if the musician himself is to be believed), Spiritual Drift will be the last Ali Murray album to appear on this blog. Murray isn’t retiring from music, apparently, just from putting it out under his own name (likely to be followed by albums released via “some other moniker/guise at some future point”), but Spiritual Drift is clearly the end of something. It’s a subdued finale, to be sure–the electric, distorted moments of past Murray records here are largely absent, and he instead zeroes in on a mostly acoustic sound that veers towards folk music, quiet dream pop, and even ambient at points. The mid-tempo electric folk rock of “Where Is Time Going?” is a rousing song in the record’s first half, but look towards tracks like the hushed opening “Blue Tree” and the straight-up acoustic ballad “Abuser” to get a better sense of what to expect on Spiritual Drift as a whole. The instrumental “The Natural World” separates the first side of the record from an even quieter second one, a collection of acoustic picking and ambient folk only sort of broken up by the light electronic touches (and guest vocals from Lyndsie Alguire) on the title track. The windswept “I Held You at the End of Time” is as good of an ending as Ali Murray could’ve conjured up–it’s dramatic and dynamic, but quite subtly so. (Bandcamp link)

Rose of the World – Heaven Is a Broken Heart

Release date: November 12th
Record label: Sad Cactus
Genre: Post-hardcore, emo, art-rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Vitamin

The members of Brooklyn quartet Rose of the World aren’t household names, exactly, but they’ve spent over a decade doing time in underground indie rock bands in New York and Boston–between the four of them, they’ve played with Quarrels, S.C.A.B., Superteen, Twen, Off Drugs, and Aural Burrows, among others. Many of those acts have put out music on Poughkeepsie, New York label Sad Cactus Records, and that’s who’s releasing Heaven Is a Broken Heart, Rose of the World’s debut LP (following a self-released EP in 2020). The band (vocalist/guitarist Cory Best, drummer Jeff Crenshaw, guitarist Jackson Martel, and bassist Drew Hardgrove) aren’t so easy to categorize on Heaven Is a Broken Heart, which makes sense for a bunch of veterans of different strains of indie rock–part of it is indebted to that New England/Northeastern Exploding in Sound-like post-hardcore/art rock sound, but it’s also more directly emo-influenced than a lot of that music, and there’s a subtle, subdued, almost “atmospheric” quality to this album, too. Heaven Is a Broken Heart is explosive basement rock (“Sucker”), catchy post-punk (“Vitamin”), and driving noisy garage punk (“SYS”) whenever Rose of the World deem these diversions to be the most interesting direction to take these songs–between the restlessness of the band and a passionate but not overly showy frontperson performance from Best, Heaven Is a Broken Heart has all the makings of a “grower” debut album. (Bandcamp link)

Second Story Man – Calico

Release date: October 24th
Record label: Noise Pollution
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzzy indie rock stuff
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Let It Out

Louisville, Kentucky has always punched above its weight a bit when it’s come to solid indie rock, and that goes beyond names like Slint, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Eleventh Dream Day that are famous (or at least recognizable) in certain corners of the indie music world. Noise Pollution Records has been cataloging Louisville acts since 1997, and their latest release is a new record from a similarly long-running band in Second Story Man. Second Story Man also emerged out of Louisville in the late 90s, and Calico is the fifth album by the quartet (guitarist/vocalists Evan Bailey and Carrie Neumayer, bassist Jeremy Irvin, and drummer Drew Osborn) and first since 2017. Calico is an enjoyably unclassifiable indie rock album–their bio mentions that Second Story Man has played shows with Versus, Sebadoh, and Rainer Maria, and that trio is a good start for what to expect. I’d also add Tsunami, Samuel S.C., and the aforementioned Eleventh Dream Day–parts of Calico are noisy, but it’s not “noise rock”, and parts of it are very poppy but it’s not really “indie pop”, either. This is a band that can crank out amplifier-drenched basement rock (the title track, “Let It Out”), retro pop-rock (“It’s in the Air”, “Big Seltzer”), and even a bit of emo (“Side of the Road”). It’s probably a “mature” record, but it’s a lively version of it. (Bandcamp link)

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One thought on “Pressing Concerns: Bliss?, Ali Murray, Rose of the World, Second Story Man”

  1. I’ve really been digging the Second Story Man record! They’re also really cool, down to Earth people which just makes a good thing even better!

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