Pressing Concerns: Earwig, Sting Pain Index, Dietz, Addicus

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December or not, there’s still plenty of new music to cover in Pressing Concerns. Today, we’ve got new albums from Dietz and Addicus, as well as new EPs from Earwig and Sting Pain Index. Check them out below! We did have a Pressing Concerns go up on Thanksgiving (featuring Mint Mile, Tulpa, The Melancholy Kings, and Split Apex); if you were busy with family matters or other holiday business and missed it, check it out here.

Also: The Rosy Overdrive 2025 Reader’s Poll is now open for voting! Head over here to learn more about it and submit a ballot by December 26th.

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.

Earwig – Secret Studio Sessions

Release date: October 19th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, heartland rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Late September Song

The Columbus, Ohio quartet Earwig has been around since the early 1990s, and the only consistent member throughout has been guitarist and vocalist Lizard McGee (who himself is something of a Columbus indie rock institution). It’s been almost a decade since the last Earwig album (2016’s Pause For The Jets), but the group are still active: the current lineup is McGee, Costa Hondroulis on bass, Jeremy Skeen on drums, and McGee’s daughter, James McGee-Moore, on lead vocals. The four of them are working on a new album called Rattle OK, and in the meantime they’ve released Secret Studio Sessions, featuring live-in-studio versions of four songs slated to be on their new LP. I didn’t know it was a “live” EP when I first listened to it; it just sounds like four good indie rock songs done power trio (plus power trio’s guitarist’s daughter) style.

I would dare call the “Late September Song”, the opening track, “anthemic”; this doesn’t sound like a band still stuck in the 90s underground, but one that’s let itself grow into something different with time. “Late September Song” is the “hit”, but that doesn’t mean the rest of Secret Studio Sessions is a letdown–the slightly jangly power pop bounce of “Coyote Cry” and the mid-tempo power ballad “Fucked Up & Perfect” are a fine middle section, and “The World Is Coming 2 an End” (featuring vocal trade-offs between McGee and McGee-Moore) is nearly the mirror image of the EP’s opening. Looking forward to hearing that Rattle OK album now, certainly. (Bandcamp link)

Sting Pain Index – The Revolution Somewhere Else

Release date: September 29th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, post-hardcore, garage punk, new wave, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: John Brown’s Knife

I don’t know much about Sting Pain Index. They call themselves a “punk rock supergroup”. They put out an album in 2022 called Songs About Fracking. They are likely spread out across the United States, and appear to have connections to Texas, Tennessee, and Maryland; their first album was recorded by Ross Ingram (EEP) in El Paso, and their new EP The Revolution Somewhere Else was recorded in Knoxville and co-produced by Ingram and Scotty Loewen (THEMM!). So what does this four-song EP sound like? Well, like punk rock, I suppose, albeit of a noisy, abrasive, and “post-” variety. The first half of The Revolution Somewhere Else is the more aggressive one, with the furious shouting at the beginning of opening track “Flight Risk” kicking off a garage-y noise punk introduction and the prowling post-punk “John Brown’s Knife” living up to the high expectations set by the title.

Things get a bit…stranger on the digital B-side, as we then take a trip to a seven-minute 80s-style power ballad called “I Could Have Been Queen”. And then, of course, The Revolution Somewhere Else ends with a shockingly faithful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Break It Down Again” (if the title of the EP sounded familiar but unplaceable to you–it’s a paraphrased lyric from this one). Sting Pain Index clearly saw something in this also-ran pop song that speaks to their agitated underground Americana, and The Revolution Somewhere Else is, ironically, successful at building this connection up. (Bandcamp link)

Dietz – Watch Your Step Slick

Release date: October 24th
Record label: One Frog
Genre: Folk rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Grass

John Dietz hails from Richmond, Virginia, and they’ve been making music under their last name since at least the late 2010s. The “Dietz” project, while always led by its namesake, typically includes other contributors, and the latest Dietz record, Watch Your Step Slick, features Soph Asenso and Nick Gada on drums and Abby Mendez and Logan Wolf on additional vocals. Dietz listed a bizarre set of influences when they sent me this album: R.E.M., John Darnielle, George Clanton, and Greg Freeman. I’m not sure what an even split of those acts would even sound like, but Watch Your Step Slick succeeds in being an unhurried, wandering, “southern gothic”-style folk rock record. Dietz calls the album “psychedelic”, and while I don’t know if I would’ve called it that on my own, I don’t disagree with that–there’s a disorienting aspect to both slow-burners like “Genesee” and rockers like “Grass”. Some stuff like “Dog & Kit” feels genuinely folk-adjacent, but a lot of these songs (like, say, “Tennis”) are just really odd singer-songwriter material that happens to be acoustic. By the time we get to the nine-minute penultimate track, “Tropical Storm Ophelia We Will Rebuild”, we’ve been fully baptized in the intense, offbeat way of Dietz. (Bandcamp link)

Addicus – A Story About…

Release date: September 24th
Record label: Acid Punk
Genre: Pop punk, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Mario Party Crashout!

The Marquette, Michigan power pop band Addicus first came to my attention last summer, when they released their self-titled debut album. Over ten scrappy indie-pop-punk songs, vocalist/guitarist Alexis Armstrong, drummer/guitarist/synth player Joshua Copeman, and bassist Eric Gladwell made their case as a notable name in the Upper Peninsula music scene (which is surprisingly strong thanks to Liquid Mike, Deep-Fried Butterfly, and Kitschy Spirit Records). The trio didn’t wait long to return, as we’ve been given a sophomore Addicus album, A Story About…, a year and change later. It’s a shorter record than Addicus, but it’s their strongest one yet; they come out the gate swinging with a couple of Remember Sports/Chumped-esque punk-pop classics in “Self Satisfaction” and “Stupid Luck”, and the momentum carries through for a clean twenty-one minutes. The synthetic touches on “Call Me (When It’s Over)” are a new and interesting development for Addicus, but their bread and butter is still three-to-four-chord wreckers of pop songs (see “Mario Party Crashout!”, a shining example of the form). I already thought Addicus were a good band, but it’s even more promising to hear A Story About… make it clear that they’re on the upswing. (Bandcamp link)

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