Pressing Concerns: Cub, Peaer, Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One, Wormy

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The second Pressing Concerns of the week (and third of 2026) features four records coming out tomorrow, January 16th: new albums from Peaer and Wormy, a reissue from Cub, and the wider release of an album by Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One. Earlier this week, we looked at new records from Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, Rotundos / Vatos Tristes, and Joe Glass; check that post out, too.

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.

Cub – Come Out Come Out (30th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Mint
Genre: Twee, indie pop, cuddlecore, power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ticket to Spain

The Vancouver, British Columbia indie pop group Cub are probably most well-known for their 1993 debut album Betti-Cola, a classic in twee (and self-described “cuddlecore”) that put Mint Records (now a Canadian institution) on the map. Come Out Come Out was the sophomore record (out of three; they broke up in 1997), originally released in 1995 as a triple 7” (of course) and reissued on CD in 2007. This vinyl edition is the first time that Come Out Come Out has been released on a boring-old 12-inch record, and it also marks the first time I’ve heard this record in full. Here, original members Lisa Marr (vocals/bass) and Robynn Iwata (guitar/backing vocals) are joined by new drummer Lisa G, and the three of them pick up the irresistible twee-pop thread that Cub began with Betti-Cola two years previously.

Come Out Come Out is probably a more polished and “professional”-sounding album than Betti-Cola (if nothing else, it features a stable core trio, with guest musicians like organist Lorraine Finch and percussionist Marc L’Esperance only used as additions to the main three). Cub aren’t a “punk band” and wouldn’t be called “power pop” by that genre’s gatekeepers, but opening track “Ticket to Spain” is great, loud, “rocking” pop music no matter what we call it. “My Flaming Red Bobsled”, “Voracious”, and “Life of Crime” are the work of a genuine garage rock band (imagine the intermittent “prowling” vibes of one of Cub’s biggest influences, Beat Happening, but with better musicianship), “Everything’s Geometry”, “Your Bed”, and “So Far Apart” are Cub at their fluffiest, and “New York City” (famously covered by Cub tourmates They Might Be Giants) ought to be an indie pop standard. Speaking of covers, there’s a Yoko Ono one and a Go-Go’s one (I’m partial to the latter, “Vacation”, but they both work as “Cub songs”), and there’s a bonus live version of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” (which they also did on Betti-Cola; it’s one of my favorite ones from that album) featuring an “Italian harmonica man”. In between wild harmonica solos and cringeworthy banter (Cub did their best with what the Italian harmonica man gave them, I admit), an all-time great indie pop song is performed. Marr sings “Cast a Shadow” with an audible big grin on her face, which sums up all of Come Out Come Out very well. (Bandcamp link)

Peaer – Doppelgänger

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Math rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Just Because

The SUNY Purchase-originating trio Peaer were one of the great indie rock bands to emerge from the American Northeast in the mid-2010s, going from a Peter Katz solo project to a full-fledged band who put out two albums on Tiny Engines (their 2016 self-titled album and 2019’s A Healthy Earth). Although Katz, bassist Thom Lombardi, and drummer Jeremy Kinney spent the first half of this decade in relative silence, they continued work on a third proper Peaer album, finally arriving at the beginning of 2026 as Doppelgänger. The first song from Doppelgänger we heard, “Just Because” (released last year as a standalone single), was a sparkling missive right out of the more melodic end of the “Exploding in Sound math rock” heyday; it’s a bit perkier than Doppelgänger as a whole, but it’s the kind of well-crafted, sleek, friendly-but-not-overly-so indie rock that populates the record. 

For a band who hadn’t been afraid to get pretty noisy in the past, Doppelgänger represents a clear shift into more “refined”, “restrained”, “reserved” and other such “re”-word-territory. The “rocking” side of Peaer is largely confined to wonky guitar solos in “Part of the Problem” and “Bad News”, as well as the trash-compactor-ending to “Rose in My Teeth”; they’re exciting moments, to be sure, but the less-explosive bridges in between them are what make up Doppelgänger’s foundation. “End of the World” opens the album with Peaer’s clearest foray yet into “guitar pop” (it’s damn-near toe-tapping!); if they don’t quite do anything like that again, “Part of the Problem” and “Just Because” at the very least form an undeniably catchy opening trio. “No More Today” is catchy too, I suppose, but it has a dour streak that’s apparently Doppelgänger’s final missing piece: from there, Peaer make songs like “Button” and “Bad News” sound like the most natural things in the world. Nonetheless, it took six years and (one imagines) a great deal of tinkering to get to Doppelgänger, and I don’t take this “effortless”-seeming final product for granted. (Bandcamp link)

Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One – Antenna

Release date: January 16th
Record label: The Forever Exploding Dynamo
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, experimental rock, noise rock, ambient
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Touché

The intriguingly-named Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One are a new band from Columbus made up of three longtime central Ohio indie rock musicians in drummer/keyboardist Keith Hanlon (The Black Swans, Orchestraville), guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki (Closet Mix), and bassist Joel Walter (who’s put out a few solo albums). The trio’s first album, Antenna, appeared on Bandcamp last October, but Novicki has given it a wider release this month via his new record label, The Forever Exploding Dynamo. Antenna, a thirty-five-minute LP made up of only five songs, is “indie rock” for those of us who enjoy music that veers between the accessible and the challenging. Long-running groups like Oneida and the similarly-named Eleventh Dream Day come to mind–opening and closing your album with twin eleven-minute pillars of Sonic Youth-style art rock is a pretty inarguable “statement”, as is sticking a nice, dirty garage punk song right in the middle of your LP (“Touché”, which holds the center in between a meandering five-minute dream-rock song called “Keyhole” and the ambient piece “Defeated Lions”). It’s those opening and closing tracks that really cement Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One as true professionals in this arena (and, given that they together make up the majority of the album, that’s a good thing). “Dissolve Me Now” condenses from noise into something melodic, while “Dilly Dally” closes the album by effectively doing the reverse. There’s an art to making this kind of thing, and Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One have hit the ground sculpting with Antenna. (Bandcamp link)

Wormy – Shark River

Release date: January 16th
Record label: Rose Garden
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, indie folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Cocaine Bear

Brooklyn musician Noah Rauchwerk has been quite active over the past decade, whether he’s been playing alongside his brother in the folk duo The Lords of Liechtenstein, drumming for Samia (among other acts) on tour, or guesting on the most recent Little Hag album. He’s nonetheless found time for his solo project Wormy in recent years, releasing an album called I’m Sweating All the Time in 2022 (with a companion version featuring Another Michael, Dogwood Tales, and Medium Build following not long afterwards). The sophomore Wormy album, Shark River, is another chance for Rauchwerk to call in a bunch of musicians he’s crossed paths with in his line of work–it features contributions from members of Remo Drive, Another Michael, Little Hag, and Samia, among others. With the kind of comfy indie folk Rauchwerk makes as Wormy, having too many cooks in the kitchen is a real concern, but Shark River walks the line very well, balancing Rauchwerk’s delicate, intimate obvious influences (Bright Eyes, mid-period Mountain Goats) with the polish some of his collaborators have pursued in their own music. Rauchwerk’s emotive singer-songwriter style is at the core of Shark River both in its most gigantic heartland-pop moments (“I Hate You”, “Old Dog”) and its simplest, quietest ones (“Cocaine Bear”, effectively a minimal-electric version of the best Slaughter Beach, Dog songs, and “Give Up”, featuring a great Hovvdy name-drop). Sometimes, it’s just as simple as this: the songwriting on Shark River is better than that of most of its peers, so it stands out. (Bandcamp link)

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