Pressing Concerns: Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls, Humbug, Capsuna, Super Pattern

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This between-holiday week is actually shaping up to be a large one on Rosy Overdrive; I’m doing my best to clear out the 2025 coffers so we can start fresh next year. To that end, today we’re hitting up new albums from Humbug, Capsuna, and Super Pattern, plus a collaborative EP between The Bird Calls and Izzy Oram Brown. Check back tomorrow for more!

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.

Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls – Little Act

Release date: December 12th
Record label: Rock for Sale
Genre: Folk rock, folk-pop, alt-country, singer-songwriter, indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Little Act

Back in February, the New York singer-songwriters Nico Hedley and Léna Bartels co-launched a new label called Rock for Sale Records with It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, a split/collaborative EP between the two musicians. As it turns out, It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year was also the launch of a series called “Splits for Sale”, in which Rock for Sale “pair[s] artists who have previously never worked together and invite[s] them to collaborate”. The second Splits for Sale EP links together two more New York City folk acts: The Bird Calls, aka the solo project of Sam Sodomsky, and Izzy Oram Brown, a Brooklyn guitarist and songwriter who also played on Bartels’ most recent solo album.

Not only had Sodomsky and Brown never collaborated with each other previously, but, as Bartels writes on Little Act’s Bandcamp page, neither of them “had ever written music with another person” before this record. Little Act is enjoyable and impressive even without this context, to be clear: the title track, in which Brown and Sodomsky share lead vocals, is a late entry for the best pop song I’ve heard this year, for one. “Little Act”, the best of “lo-fi, drum machine indie pop” and “folk rock” in one, is a lot more immediately attention-grabbing than the rest of Little Act, but the duo continue to excel in the realms of (relatively) subtle folk-pop, too. The brisk melancholy of “Rose Petals in a Lava Pit” (great title) sounds like a Bird Calls song with extra lead vocal power, the quiet “I Know You Gotta Go (But I Want You to Stay)” is a lovely folk-country ballad, and “Rock Bottom (Is Just a Phone Call Away)” caps the EP with one last timeless-sounding composition. As I was already a fan of The Bird Calls, I’m not surprised that Little Act is a solid record, but Brown’s voice and writing undoubtedly add something to Sodomsky’s work–the best-case scenario for a collaboration like this. (Bandcamp link)

Humbug – Open Season

Release date: September 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, alt-rock, jangle pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Quit with Suzy (75K)

Pasadena’s Humbug bill themselves as a “new power pop band”, but they don’t really slot into the jangly, wistful version of the genre happening upstate in San Francisco, nor are they necessarily really loud Weezer-worshipping alt-rockers, either. On their debut album, the quartet (bassist Ryan Bouimad, vocalist/guitarist Aidan Cole, guitarist Alex Cubillos, and drummer Ardem Gourdikian) really sound like a band out of time, landing closer than anything to offbeat, catchy turn-of-the-century indie rock. I have to pull out obscure names like early Barsuk band MK Ultra and the underrated Fox Japan for soundalikes here–they were a departure from the dominant indie rock strains of the 1990s, they weren’t dogmatic enough for the 2000s “post-punk revival”, they’re aware of like, XTC and The Beach Boys, but they aren’t trying to sound like either of them overtly, either. These are fun little wrinkles that add some dimension to Open Season (how many other bands would write about middle-class angst so directly and melodically as “Quit with Suzy (75K)”?), but the most important thing about this album is that it’s full of strong pop music. Produced by Ryan Slegr (Ozma), there’s occasionally more recognizably West Coast power pop moments (“Can’t Read Velvet”, “Nina”), but Humbug are just as catchy and even more memorable when they embrace the dread at the heart of songs like the title track and “Quit with Suzy”. It seems unusual for a band to start where Humbug have with their debut album, so I’ll be interested to see where they go from here. (Bandcamp link)

Capsuna – Can’t Versus Can’t

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, lo-fi pop, power pop, jangle pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Stelissi

I first wrote about Capsuna at the beginning of last year–the Brussels-based indie pop quintet (formed by Cincinnati transplant David Enright on guitar and vocals and joined by lead vocalist Louise Crosby and bassist Pierre Meremans, among others) had just released their self-titled debut album of “charmingly fuzzy and lo-fi” indie pop rock. Over the course of 2024, Capsuna put out a two-song single and an EP called One Hit for Trainwreck, and 2025 saw the release of their sophomore LP, Can’t Versus Can’t. They’ve experienced some lineup changes (welcoming Petros Makris on drums and Ben Leclerc on guitars, while former member Damien Rixhon still appears on keyboards on a couple of songs), but Can’t Versus Can’t more or less picks up where Capsuna left off. It’s perhaps a bit more subdued, but the quintet’s mixture of Flying Nun-esque guitar pop, melancholic French indie pop, and Subsonic Eye-esque dream pop (aided in large part by Crosby’s strong vocals) is completely intact. Opening track “Headstand”, “Ventilator”, and “Red Flag” are a little more refined or “high-concept”, but Capsuna still pull out effortless-sounding jangly indie pop with stuff like “Stoker”, “Celluloid Saturday”, and “Stelissi”, all of which are as bright and sparkly as anything on their first LP. It’s nice to close out 2025 with the knowledge that Belgian indie pop is alive and well as long as Capsuna are still at it. (Bandcamp link)

Super Pattern – SPII

Release date: December 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, psychedelic pop, prog-pop, kraut-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Unusual Power

Who are Super Pattern? They’re a trio from Edinburgh and London, for one. They call themselves “nu-croon” on their Bandcamp page, and when they emailed me about their latest record, they labeled it “FFO Stereolab / The Who” (which is, I believe, a completely novel combination). That record is SPII, which–despite its name–appears to be Super Pattern’s first album. Quietly self-released by the band in early December, SPII nonetheless does a good job of introducing a new group with grand indie pop ambitions: organs, synths, and saxophones (provided partially by guest musician Euan Hinshelwood) feature prominently throughout this LP of at-times-motorik, at-times-gentle pop music. I guess if there really is a midpoint between The Who and Stereolab, it’s probably the punchy analog synth opening to “Unusual Power” (“Laundry Pops” isn’t a bad approximation of this either), and “Vigilante” deftly nails the motorik-pop side of their sound, but the more delicate synth-heavy soft rock of the album’s mid-section is more like Switched-On Belle and Sebastian (which I guess is sort of Peel Dream Magazine, but Super Pattern feels a little more…muscular, comparatively speaking). SPII doesn’t flag in the home stretch between the adventurous synth-rock landscapes “Forever” and “Winner”, unsurprisingly; it’s a smooth, blissful journey for the entirety of its ten songs and thirty-two minutes. (Bandcamp link)

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