Pressing Concerns: Mint Mile, Tulpa, The Melancholy Kings, Split Apex

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Happy Thanksgiving! We have a Thursday Pressing Concerns today, featuring new albums from Mint Mile, Tulpa, The Melancholy Kings, and Split Apex. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday was a Pressing Concerns featuring Bliss?, Ali Murray, Rose of the World, and Second Story Man), and Tuesday was the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Label Watch), 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.

Mint Mile – andwhichstray

Release date: November 28th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Alt-country-folk-rock, 90s indie rock, Crazy Horse
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Yamaha

Mint Mile recorded their third album, andwhichstray, a couple of months after last year’s Roughrider came out. It was a chance kind of thing–Steve Albini, longtime friend and engineer of Mint Mile bandleader Tim Midyett, was participating in a recording seminar at France’s Studios de la Fabrique, and the band he had initially intended to record had to drop. Mint Mile, with an album’s worth of songs ready to go, went over to Europe, recorded them with Albini from April 28 to May 1, and headed home. A lot has happened over the past year and a half–the sudden death of Albini less than a week later, which led to Midyett’s old band (and my favorite band) Silkworm to reconvene for his memorial and eventually playing an entire reunion tour (which I did get to see). I would say that the circumstances surrounding andwhichstray threaten to overshadow the album, except that it’s an album made for said circumstances.

andwhichstray is the best that Mint Mile have ever sounded. The Crazy Horse solidification of Roughrider is sharpened further here, the band even more roaring. There’s a rocker called “Little Chicken” that gets an insane amount of mileage out of basically one chord, and there’s a moody, percussion-heavy piece called “Black Road” that doesn’t sound like anything this band has ever done before. There’s “Yamaha”, a song I’d previously heard Midyett play solo on an acoustic guitar but appears here as a fuzzed-out, ear-splitting country rocker (it’s a bit of parallel thinking with the likes of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, I dare say). Midyett’s “Don’t wanna live a life about money,” in “Yamaha” and “I’m your friend, it just feels right,” in single “This ‘n’ That” cut to the quick, centering a clear-eyed directness that’s the “thread” on andwhichstray, from Midyett’s words to (of course) Albini’s engineering.

Then there is “Can’t Be the First One”. It was written by Jason Molina “for the surviving members of Silkworm, the day after [their drummer] Michael Dahlquist was killed in 2005”. As far as I know, this song has never been released or heard by the public before now, but here is Tim Midyett singing it twenty years later, and damned if it doesn’t sound like Tim from Silkworm singing a Jason Molina song (Mint Mile drummer Jeff Panall’s previous life as Molina’s drummer surely helped). The immediacy with which Molina originally wrote “Can’t Be the First One”, preserved admirably here by Mint Mile, is what allows it to make sense on andwhichstray. andwhichstray is “about” the death of Albini in the way that “Can’t Be the First One” is “about” Molina, who also died much too young. It makes strange sense to me, a bunch of departed musicians somehow paying tribute to each other in a non-linear fashion, arranged by Mint Mile over the course of decades and in a few short days in France. On andwhichstray’s final song, “Summer’s Mostly Wasted”, original Silkworm member Joel R.L. Phelps plays alto saxophone alongside Midyett’s voice. Thankfully the both of them are still around to do the channeling. (Bandcamp link)

Tulpa – Monster of the Week

Release date: November 28th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, krautpop, post-punk, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pyro

Josie Kirk (vocals, bass), Daniel Hyndman (guitar), Myles Kirk (guitar), and Mike Ainsley (drums) are Tulpa, an new indie pop band from Leeds who’ve recently partnered with the British indie pop label, Skep Wax, for their debut album. I first heard of this band last year thanks to a very good EP called Dismantler, which, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be available online anywhere now–they’ve had some lineup changes, and perhaps they’ve decided it doesn’t fit where they’ve ended up, but I still hope it resurfaces again someday. Regardless, their first full-length album, Monster of the Week, is every bit as strong a debut LP as I would’ve hoped from Tulpa, and it has a smoothness and confidence particularly impressive from a new band.

This is undoubtedly “British indie pop” at its finest; Tulpa love Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth-style noisy guitars, but these bouncy, twee, sugary songs would never be mistaken for either of those bands. There’s a simplicity and breeziness to early hits “Transfixed Gaze”, “Psyops”, and “Pyro”, in which Tulpa make it sound much easier than it must be. The quasi-theme song “Let’s Make a Tulpa!” is another dizzying high, as is the similarly quick power pop “You’re Living in a Reverie” in Monster of the Week’s second half. You want curveballs? Well, Tulpa switch lead vocalists in the title track, they lumber through a five-minute fuzz-rumbler in “Stick Figure Boy”, and then there’s a couple black sheep towards the end of the album in the subdued, moody “Amateur Hour” and the choppy post-punk of “Raw Nerve”. That’s the sound of us getting one more great pop album in before 2025 is up. (Bandcamp link)

The Melancholy Kings – Her Favorite Disguise

Release date: November 28th
Record label: Magic Door
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, college rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Steady As She Goes

The members of New Jersey quartet The Melancholy Kings have histories in Garden State and New York indie rock dating back to the 1980s: vocalist/guitarist Mike Potenza, bassist Scott Selig, guitarist/vocalist Peter Horvath, and drummer Paul Andrew have played in The Anderson Council, The Make Three, Phantom Tollbooth, Fluffer, The Deni Bonet Band, and more between them. Her Favorite Disguise is the second Melancholy Kings album, following a self-titled one in 2019, and I admit I’m quite impressed with what these veterans have to offer in 2025. It’s one thing to “end up” making power pop after years of working in edgier underground indie rock, but The Melancholy Kings attack these songs like they’re just as cool as the New York post-punk of their youths.

The two biggest hits on Her Favorite Disguise, “Victoria” and “Steady As She Goes”, pull out all the stops–“whoa oh oh”s, “radio”/“stereo”, jangly guitar hooks, winking lyrics. Rolling mid-tempo Lemonheads-y pop rock like “Astor Place” and “Bitcoin Elegy” gives a little more space for narratives without dropping the catchiness, and there’s also opening track “Six Feet Down”, perhaps the best The Who pastiche I’ve heard this decade. Speaking of Who pastiche, The Melancholy Kings make the inspired decision to cover a late period Guided by Voices song– “Alex Bell” from 2022’s Tremblers and Goggles by Rank, which any hardcore Robert Pollard fan knows contains some of the best melodies you’ll hear in this current run of GBV albums. It’s arguably a better recording than the original–The Melancholy Kings keep the helicopter arena-rock guitars in the front, and Horvath (who sings lead vocals on this cover, the only non-Potenza-led one) injects a gigantic desperation into the song’s massive first half. Her Favorite Disguise takes this kind of music very seriously, but it’s not self-serious–mainly, though, it rocks. (Bandcamp link)

Split Apex – Thoughts in 3D

Release date: November 28th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Post-rock, experimental, sound collage, industrial, spoken word
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Peninsula

Peter Blundell is a longtime experimental musician, known for his work in acts like Mosquitoes, Komare, and Temperatures. Finnish-originating artist Jussi Palmusaari has previously played in Preesens, a progressive rock group from his home country. Together, they are Split Apex, a London-based duo who formed in late 2024 and released a self-titled cassette EP not long afterwards. They’ve linked up with Ever/Never Records for their first full-length album, a strange and eerie five-song collection called Thoughts in 3D. The only actual musical reference that WFMU’s Erick Bradshaw makes in the bio for this record is to cult British experimental act The Shadow Ring, but it’s the non-musical ones–to the “oceanic abyss” and “unchartered waters”–that explain what it’s like to listen to Thoughts in 3D. Palmusaari handles “guitar, electronics, percussion”, and Blundell (on voice and bass) interjects with occasional spoken-word snippets. On “Peninsula”, the propulsive opening track, Split Apex are able to turn all of this into a facsimile of industrial post-punk, but the rest of Thoughts in 3D declines even this meager relief. “Crux Machine” and the title track are vast, desolate wastelands, occasional stabs of guitars or bass walking appearing and disappearing like specters. It’s all unsettlingly quiet and simple, making the remote vistas conjured up by Split Apex here all the more impressive. (Bandcamp link)

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