Pressing Concerns: Vulture Feather, Billy Joel Jr., Shande (שאַנדע), Dorothy

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Welcome to a normal old Thursday Pressing Concerns. This is probably the last “upcoming records” one of the year, but there’ll be a few miscellaneous ones before we wrap 2025 up. Speaking of wrapping 2025 up, Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2025 went up earlier this week! If you missed it somehow, you’ll want to queue that up. Anyway, let’s look at new EPs from Vulture Feather and Dorothy, and new LPs from Billy Joel Jr. and Shande (שאַנדע). They’re all either out today or tomorrow (December 12th).

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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!

Vulture Feather – Craving and Aversion

Release date: December 12th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pleasant Obstacle

The vocals don’t kick in on Vulture Feather’s latest EP, Craving and Aversion, until nearly three minutes into the first track. Colin McCann, Brian Gossman, and Eric Fiscus take their time in setting up “Pleasant Obstacle”, giving the opening instrumental a lackadaisical undercurrent that nonetheless oddly retains a bit of the power trio’s trademark quiet intensity. At around the two-minute-thirty mark, though, Vulture Feather get serious, lock into a groove, and McCann’s intonation begins not long afterwards. They can’t keep getting away with it, right? Except they have, and the Hayfork, California-based group (made up of a couple of former members of 2000s buzzy Baltimore indie rock band Wilderness) have now released four records of this stuff since June 2023. 

Once again recorded by Tim Green (Nation of Ulysses), Craving and Aversion continues Vulture Feather’s strange, hypnotic remote northern California Dischord Records splinter group bid, pursuing slow, intense, Lungfish-esque post-hardcore music just as fervently as before. The EP was recorded “in the wake of” February’s It Will Be Like Now (timeline-wise, I think this would be somewhere in between the LP’s recording and release), and it’s a little smokier and jagged than that album. Everything on this EP is its own little world, from the aforementioned extended runway of “Pleasant Obstacle” to the five-minute post-punk monument “Coronation Veil” to the two-minute sweep of “The Secret” (I guess this is the “hit”) to the instrumental closing title track. “Craving and Aversion” fades into focus, and McCann’s snaking, coiling guitar is doing noticeably more work than it would be were he singing, too. If you’ve been paying close attention to Vulture Feather (which I recommend you do), it’s a palpable shift. (Bandcamp link)

Billy Joel Jr. – Ur a Star

Release date: December 11th
Record label: 11 AM
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bad Heart

The stunningly-named Billy Joel Jr. are actually a quartet from Chicago led by a singer-songwriter named Ari Levin. The band put out an EP last year called Rubberhouse, and now Levin, joined by drummer Karl El Sokhn, lead guitarist Nate Dorian, and Charlie Dykstal, has produced an entire Billy Joel Jr. LP called Ur a Star. The album was recorded by Blake Sokoloff at Abbey Cat Recordings, and it’s an exciting and promising Windy City indie rock debut. Moments on Ur a Star display at least a passing familiarity with Chicago punk and garage rock, but this is a decidedly inadequate umbrella for a band with just-as-sizeable penchants for earnest guitar pop and candle-waving balladry. “Girlfriend Twin Bed” is a genuinely amusing piss-take of garage rock and roll (if The Orwells aren’t dead yet, this will hopefully kill them), and “Bad Heart” shows that Billy Joel Jr. can make solid fuzz-rock music without the humor as a crutch. However, it’s songs like the alt-rock power ballad “She’s Always on My Mind”, the light-on-its-feet “About Me”, and the slow-burn “About Dying (Hannah)” that showcase a wider (and probably more accurate) picture of the band (I should say that, while some of the rock is indeed “soft”, and pianos do feature on the album, little if any of Ur a Star reminds me of Billy Joel the Senior). I have no idea how far Billy Joel Jr. can go (seriously, with a name like that…), but Ur a Star is a fine way to introduce one’s self. (Bandcamp link)

Shande (שאַנדע) – Hereness (דאָיִקייט)

Release date: December 12th
Record label: Peace Isn’t Luck/Como Tapes
Genre: Folk rock, lo-fi indie rock, slowcore, orchestral rock, jazz-folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Trust Yourself

It’s mid-December, but there’s still time in 2025 for a fifty-four minute debut album from a radical Jewish experimental folk rock twelve-piece band from Philadelphia. I am talking about Shande (שאַנדע), the project of a clarinetist and songwriter named Jack Braunstein, which began in 2018 in Vermont and has grown to include contributions from names like bassist And Keller (Snow Caps), drummer Dan Lynch (Loamer), and composer Melinda Rice. Hereness (דאָיִקייט) was recorded by Heather Jones (Ther) in Philly’s Beaumont Warehouse, and it’s an overwhelming listen to be sure. The tracks are folk songs at their core, guided by Braunstein’s measured, steady, almost slowcore style–but bits of woodwinds and brass, jazz, and “experimental” music take their turns chipping away at the foundation. The relatively tranquil foundation of Hereness (דאָיִקייט) (seriously, just listen to that tasteful jazz-pop instrumental in “Trust Yourself”!) might seem like an odd fit for a band that unambiguously stands for what it believes in–anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism, veganism, anti-police…ism–both in and outside of its music, but Shande (שאַנדע) make no apologies for challenging or pleading in “The News” (a series of pointed vignettes), “Every Land (Is the Holy Land)” (which is based on a Ursula K. Le Guin poem), and “The Adversary” (a nine-minute journey to pure darkness). Hereness (דאָיִקייט) is a classic “a lot to chew on” kind of album, and I mean that in a good way–how empty do you have to be to mean that as a criticism, anyway? (Bandcamp link)

Dorothy – Sea Songs

Release date: December 12th
Record label: Angel Tapes/Fire Talk
Genre: Dream pop, psychedelic pop, post-rock, chamber pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: 50s Song

Dorothy are a new trio from London whose members are all pretty accomplished artists on their own–Jude Woodhead makes music under the name Saint Jude, Marco Pini’s credits include Sorry, GG Skips, and RIP Magic, and Francesca Brierley has a project called Heka and also contributed to the most recent Naima Bock album. I’m not familiar with every one of those acts, but I believe they run the gamut from folk to ambient to slowcore to electronic music, and Dorothy does their best to make a coherent five-song pop EP out of that spectrum. I suppose you could loosely call Sea Songs “dream pop”, although it’s on the more scattershot side of Dreamland, if that. It reminds me a bit of sprawling, hypnotic British indie acts like Flotation Toy Warning, or whatever that mid-2000s movement people called “folktronica” was. Sea Songs contains “I Want to Be Out on the Sea”, which is content to be a lightly-floating, barely-there pop song for the majority of its runtime, as well as the glitzy, (relatively) maximalist retro-pop of “50s Song”, and British folk rock gets some time in the spotlight with “High Tide”. Sea Songs is large-feeling and wide-ranging for a five-track debut EP–the songs drift in and out of pop music structure, idling in strange waters before returning to shore. There’s nothing excessive about Sea Songs, though; Dorothy are right where they’re supposed to be here. (Bandcamp link)

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