Pressing Concerns: The Fragiles, Winged Wheel, Six Going on Seven, Clémentine March

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Are you ready? Well, whether you are or not, we’re starting off 2026 in Pressing Concerns today. We’ve got four albums coming out tomorrow, January 9th: new LPs from The Fragiles, Winged Wheel, Six Going on Seven, and Clémentine March. “With a bang”, indeed. The actual first blog post of 2026 was the December 2025 playlist, which went up on Monday, so check that one out too if you missed it.

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.

The Fragiles – Sing the Heat of the Sun

Release date: January 9th
Record label: Living Lost
Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, psychedelic pop, dream pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Broken Pendulum

Philadelphia musician David Settle ruled the realms of lo-fi indie rock in 2020 and 2021, putting out a slew of albums via his aliases The Fragiles, Big Heet, and Psychic Flowers (on his own Living Lost label) before they all went silent for the past couple of years. It’s not like Settle hasn’t been busy in the meantime–he’s playing bass for the great 2nd Grade, and I believe he’s been raising a kid–but his bands have been missed as of late, so it’s nice to start off 2026 with the first album from The Fragiles in five years. While Big Heet deals in noisy post-punk and Psychic Flowers in shit-fi fuzz pop, The Fragiles has always been where Settle explores dreamier, almost psychedelic indie-gaze, and Sing the Heat of the Sun offers a strong collection of such material.

With a capable band behind him (Remember Sports/Spring Onion’s Catherine Dwyer on bass, Gavin Perez-Canto of DRILL on drums, and Ylayali’s Francis Lyons on occasional synth), Settle is able to give the songs of Sing the Heat of the Sun delicate but forceful readings. There are a handful of instant-classic guitar pop songs on here (the jangly, Flying Nun-ish opening track “Broken Pendulum” and the bouncy, scuzzy lo-fi pop of “Dig for Now” both fit), and The Fragiles hold together in the greyer, more challenging material that’s the heart of the record, too. On the one hand, you’ve got the quiet ballads of “River’s Roll” and “Drugstore Winner”, and on the other, a wall-of-sound shoegaze influence on the likes of “Unglued”–but songs like the thrilling fuzz-noise-pop “Hell Or” and the slowcore crescendo of “Fall into Gray” demonstrate that it isn’t an “either/or” proposition. Whether Sing the Heat of the Sun marks the return of David Settle to his trio of projects or if it’s just a one-off for now, it’s a strong reminder how good this guy is in this particular sandbox. (Bandcamp link)

Winged Wheel – Desert So Green

Release date: January 9th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Post-rock, psychedelia, post-punk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Speed Table

The “creatively and geographically scattered” indie rock supergroup Winged Wheel emerged in 2022 as a quartet with their remote-created first album and 12XU debut, No Island, and the album’s success led to an expanded lineup, in-person live shows and recording sessions, and a sophomore album called Big Hotel in 2024. After touring in support of that album last year, the now-sextet, which consists of Matchess and Circuit des Yeux’s Whitney Johnson, Spray Paint’s Cory Plump, Powers/Rolin Duo’s Matthew J. Rolin, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, Water Damage’s Lonnie Slack, and Idle Ray/Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Fred Thomas, began recording Desert So Green in Chicago. The resultant record is an overwhelming, beautiful, “collective” art rock album, checking the “post-rock”, “post-punk”, and “psychedelia” boxes at different intervals.

Desert So Green opens with what I’d call a “vibe”; specifically, a six-minute shimmering post-rock instrumental deemed “Canvas 11”. Winged Wheel flex their “far-reaching” muscles soon after that, though, as the empty-space and violin-aided “Canvas 2” imagines a deconstructed post-rock Mekons, and the pummeling, ethereal “Speed Table” kind of feels like their take on mid-period Swans. An album that can regularly veer into out-there moments like the collage of “Canvas 8” can’t really “settle in” to anything, but there’s a comfort to Winged Wheel’s dream-psych rhythm-forward moments like “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” and “Bird Spells” (and “I See Poseurs Every Day” is damn near a pop song made out of the stuff). Desert So Green may be Winged Wheel’s best work yet (time will tell and whatnot), but I can already confidently say that it sounds like a band with infinite possibilities between their members continuing the work of pursuing new ones. (Bandcamp link)

Six Going on Seven – Human Tears

Release date: January 9th
Record label: Spartan
Genre: Art rock, new wave, synthpop, sophisti-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Jack Jones

Six Going on Seven emerged in the mid-1990s from Boston’s post-hardcore/emo underground, playing shows with bands like Braid, The Promise Ring, and Elliott and putting out music on Hydra Head and Doghouse Records. When they reunited in 2024 after being split up for over twenty years, they signed with Spartan Records, who’ve recently worked with notable 90s emo bands like Boys Life, Knapsack, and The Van Veldt. So, when I pressed play on their fourth LP and first since 2021, Human Tears, I was of course expecting it to sound like Peter Gabriel. Kidding! But that’s indeed what comes to mind listening to “Jack Jones”, the first non-intro song on Human Tears.

The trio may not be the first emo-originating band to draw inspiration from 80s art rock (it is, in effect, trading in one “emotional” genre of music for another), but, to be clear, we’re talking about a full-on immersion in the decade and its array of new wave, synthpop, prog-pop, sophisti-pop, and so on and so forth. One thing that Six Going on Seven do leave behind in the 1980s is excess; this is a more streamlined take on this kind of music, with a few songs wrapping things up in around two minutes and even the longer ones feeling like they go on for only as long as they need to. That doesn’t stop Human Tears from being just as fun and awe-inspiring as the music Six Going on Seven have chosen to evoke, however. (Bandcamp link)

Clémentine March – Powder Keg

Release date: January 9th
Record label: PRAH
Genre: Art pop, chamber pop, indie pop, post-punk, psychedelic pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Upheaval

The French-British (currently London-based) musician Clémentine March began putting out records of Brazil-influenced orchestral art pop in the late 2010s, releasing two EPs and two LPs from 2017 to 2023. Powder Keg is March’s third solo album, and it features contributions from an impressive array of musicians she’s connected with touring and recording across Europe (Naima Bock, Sophie Jamieson, Katy J Pearson, Alabaster DePlume, Dana Gavanski, and members of Tapir!). Nonetheless, Powder Keg lands on the more laid-back side of French (or, I guess, part-French) indie pop; the album’s core trio of March, bassist Ollie Chapman, and drummer Sophie Lowe leisurely wander through a collection of pop songs where strings and horns jump in and out as the feeling strikes. Of course, they cover quite a bit of ground through their meandering; the sprawling, six-minute dream pop of opening track “After the Solstice” switches gears into the perfunctory horn-tinged indie pop of “Lixo Sentimental”, and then “Upheaval” surprisingly moves into electric alt-rock. “Fireworks”, “Symtomatique”, and “Lucie” all prove that March can make groovy post-punk pop gems, but Powder Keg is too ambitious to be content to ride the rhythms for all too long. Regardless of where Powder Keg ends up on any of its dozen tracks, though, deft pop touches are never too far away. (Bandcamp link)

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