Pressing Concerns: Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, Rotundos / Vatos Tristes, Joe Glass

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The second Pressing Concerns of 2026 is a survey of good new music that came out around New Years’: we have new albums from Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, and Joe Glass, plus a split EP from Rotundos and Vatos Tristes. The blog is still on a two-posts-a-week schedule for now, but I think these will tide you over until Thursday.

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.

Celebrity Telethon – Celebrity Telethon

Release date: December 31st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, cowpunk, country rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Film Noir

We either ended 2025 or began 2026 with a major twist. I first heard Portland, Oregon group Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon back in 2021, when the alt-country band released “Gretchen Took a Ride”; I called the single a combination of “dreamy folk” and “West Coast cosmic psychedelia” at the time. 2023’s The Knockout Game leaned a bit more into outlaw country-punk, but even so, that was a small change compared to where the Celebrity Telethon ended up on their latest album. Released on New Year’s Eve 2025 (necessitating me treating it like a 2026 release for blog purposes), Celebrity Telethon finds Habegger dropping his name from the project; whether intentional or not, the spotlight is now equally shining on players like bassist Jack Moriarty, drummer Isaac Beach, guitarist Addison Clark, saxophonist Tax Coffey, and everyone else who drops by to lay something down throughout these eleven songs.

There’s nothing neat and tidy about Celebrity Telethon: this is a seedy, sleazy West Coast punk-garage-rock album. When Habegger croaks about “watching skin flick movies with [his] motherfucking mother-in-law” over a runaway rock-and-roll instrumental, it’s a disconcerting warning to buckle up, and, not long afterward, “Neighborhood Regulars” takes the Celebrity Telethon into terrain closer to Midwestern freaks like Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go Records than anywhere near the Laurel Canyon. When the Celebrity Telethon dial up a dark, noirish country-punk sound on “The Rumors Are True” and “(A Return to) Salem’s Lot”, it’s a thin enough link to their previous work, although real Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon throwbacks are here and there, too. There’s a mid-tempo slacker-pop song called “Film Noir” that finds Habegger embracing his inner Craig Finn, a nice cowpunk exercise called “How’d You Get Here from So Far?”, and then the closing track is a blistering version of the old country song “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water”. The grand finale gets pretty batshit and absurd as it nears the five minute mark, a compelling argument that there’s plenty of fun to be had on the wrong side of town. (Bandcamp link)

Dish Pit Violet – Dish Pit Violet

Release date: January 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, chamber pop, twee, orchestral pop, synthpop, dance-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: You Are My American Dream

Dish Pit Violet is a new indie pop project from Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Violent Fink, and her self-titled debut album is a bright and vibrant pop album borne from a tumultuous time in her life–coming out as transgender, the subsequent estrangement from her immediate family, leaving a “toxic” band she co-founded and played in for several years. Fink’s first statement of her new life is defiantly committed to “dance rock grooves” and “cutie-pie sentiments” (as she puts it); these are appropriate descriptors for Dish Pit Violet’s synth- and horn-laden, danceable indie pop, which reminds me of the pop-forward side of Elephant 6 (of Montreal, of course, being the biggest one) and the queer pop of Pelvis Wrestley. Fink’s background is in post-punk, and that assuredly helps with the strong grooves and 80s synthpop tones of “Nobody’s Better”, “I Hope I’m Ready for You”, and “I Hate It When I Do That”, but the embrace of twee-pop directness is where Dish Pit Violet asserts a new, distinct identity.

This works very well for Dish Pit Violet’s love songs (“You Are My American Dream”, “Tip-Top-Drop-Dead-Knock-Out”, “Sweetheart”…look, there are a lot of ‘em), but Fink wields the gaudy, sequined blunt-force hammer when dealing with the heaviness at the heart of Dish Pit Violet, too. “Rough String” and “You Picked Jesus Over Me” do in fact come right out and say it (“Just because somebody loved you then / Doesn’t mean you owe them anything” in the former and, ah, the title line of the latter), and “Hi I’m Violet” opens the album with an unapologetic personal introduction. It’s the “simplicity” of “twee-pop” that makes it possible to bound across an eternity like this; it’s why that label gets applied to some of the most powerful music in the world to me, and it’s a power that Dish Pit Violet harnesses for an entire debut album. (Bandcamp link)

Rotundos / Vatos Tristes – Para Siempre

Release date: January 1st
Record label: 7Songs
Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore, emo
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Upside Down

For the third January in a row, Chicago emo-punk group Rotundos have opened the year with new music: their Fragments EP got them on my radar in January 2024, their self-titled debut album followed almost exactly twelve months later, and this year they’ve invited another Windy City group, Vatos Tristes, to join in the fun via a split EP called Para Siempre. Featuring three songs from each band plus one collaborative finale, Para Siempre confirms that Rotundos (Jose Israel, Jacob Padilla-Caldero, Henry Speer, and new member Eric King) are one of the most explosive bands in Chicago post-hardcore/punk rock and introduces a band operating in similar terrain in Vatos Tristes (whose output up until now consisted of only a couple of singles and a live session). The former band continues to showcase their range, pulling out a blistering post-hardcore punk opener in “Upside Down”, turning to a skewed post-punk touch with “Late Nights”, and finishing with 90s emo atmospherics in “And You Know I…”. Vatos Tristes’ first two songs paint them as a classic Hum-esque “heavy shoegaze/alt-rock” group, but the trumpet, scatting, and overall Latin touches of “My Way” are a surprise and, as it turns out, help set up closing track “Pure Nieve”. The finale, described by the bands as a trip into Regional Mexican music, is a complete embrace of acoustic guitars and horns unlike anything else on Para Siempre. Given how in-sync Rotundos and Vatos Tristes sound out on this limb, however, the team-up feels automatic. (Bandcamp link)

Joe Glass – Snakewards

Release date: January 3rd
Record label: Hallogallo
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop, mod revival
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Man Who Lost His Diamond

The Rockford-originating, Chicago-based musician Joe Glass has been playing bass guitar in the live version of Kai Slater’s acclaimed mod revival/power pop project Sharp Pins as of late, but he’s a singer-songwriter in his own right as well, releasing a collection of lo-fi, psychedelic guitar pop called Slither in 2022. His second solo album, Snakewards (good thematic titling we’ve got here), is perhaps the result of playing in what is by all accounts a very tight live trio in Sharp Pins; Glass has landed himself directly in the world of brisk, mid-fi, early Guided by Voices-evoking power pop that Slater (who put out the album on his Hallogallo label) has also been pursuing. Snakewards is not precisely on the same level of otherworldly retro-pop-adhering discipline as Sharp Pins’ Balloon Balloon Balloon; it’s a little looser and garagier in places still, but it’s cut from the same cloth. Perfect jangle-power pop like “Dust on Your Halo”, “Man Who Lost His Diamond”, “All About You”, “Tied Tight”, and “New Pose” (what a rave-up in that one!) don’t grow on trees, and the songs in between them aren’t throwaways, either; when the stocking-stuffers are as well-thought-out and -performed as “Buck Wild” and “Candy Blowout 2”, we’re set up for a rewarding front-to-back listen of a pop album. Thirty-one minutes never went so fast. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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