Pressing Concerns: GUV, OUT., Sotto Voce, Awful Din

Posted byrosyoverdrivePosted inPressing ConcernsTags:, , , , , , , ,

Hey there! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records coming out tomorrow, January 30th: the 30th anniversary reissue of OUT.‘s debut (and only) album, plus LPs from GUV, Sotto Voce, and Awful Din. Check them out, and also investigate Monday’s blog post (featuring R.E. Seraphin, Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled) if you haven’t yet.

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.

GUV – Warmer Than Gold

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Psychedelia, Madchester, alt-dance, power pop, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Thorns in My Heart

When we last heard from the Los Angeles-based musician Ben Cook AKA Young Guv, it was via a pair of LPs in 2022: the classic power pop-indebted GUV III and the “airier and more psychedelic” (as I said at the time) GUV IV. Desert vibes aside, GUV IV was still more or less a jangly guitar pop album of the kind Cook had been making since the mid-to-late 2010s, and thus worthy of the “Young Guv” moniker. After taking some time off from making new music, however, Cook is now back simply as “GUV”, and, with Warmer Than Gold, Cook has indeed pretty cleanly broken his own mold. During GUV’s four-year hiatus, we’ve seen similar power pop solo acts (like Dazy and Graham Hunt) increasingly incorporate 90s electronica, Madchester, and Screamadelica into their sounds, and, in simple terms, Warmer Than Gold (made as a collaboration with James Matthew Seven, AKA JMVII) is Cook’s entry into the fray. Inspired by Cook’s return to London (where he spent part of his childhood, splitting time with Toronto), Cook and Seven worked remotely and then together making a busy, overwhelming pop album featuring alt-dance, walls of sound, and just enough of Cook’s guitar pop past.

Warmer Than Gold is a forty-five minute “full-commitment” journey, much like most of its (generally substantially longer, given the CD era) direct influences. “Let Your Hands Go” comes out of the gate with a dance beat, and, if you give it a minute, GUV deploy a gigantic post-Britpop chorus to match the initial energy. “Blue Jade”, a propulsive dream pop/shoegaze-influenced rocker, is huge-sounding in a different way, and much of Warmer Than Gold leans towards one side of GUV’s sound or the other. The big beats of the title track, “Out of This Place”, and “Oscillating” form one towering end of Warmer Than Gold, and one the other end we’re greeted by the surging, euphoric power pop of “Thorns in My Heart” and the jangling, sun-drenched “Chasin Luv”. Somewhere in the midst of all this are subtler, more pensive moments–“Seaside Story” and “Never Should Have Said” evoke an earlier moment in British guitar music history, specifically proudly “indie” C86-esuqe indie pop. The sheer weight of Warmer Than Gold could come off as outshining these “hidden gem” moments, but it’s easy to follow along with a balancing act this passionate about what it’s juggling. (Bandcamp link)

OUT. – Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs (30th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Noise Pollution
Genre: Garage punk, rock and roll, hardcore punk, punk blues
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: You Destroy Me

OUT. came out of the mid-90s Louisville indie rock scene, co-founded by vocalist Chad Donnelly and guitarist Dave Bird (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sunburned Hand of the Man) and quickly joined by the rhythm section of bassist Tony Bailey (Aerial M, Crain) and drummer Russ Pollard (Sebadoh, Folk Implosion). Their ferocious garage rock sound is a bit of an outlier compared to the more math rock/post-hardcore/post-rock I typically associate with Louisville, but their early punk rock/hardcore punk-indebted fury wasn’t that far off from (relatively) nearby Midwestern garage-y groups like New Bomb Turks and Laughing Hyenas. The four of them recorded Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs with Kevin Brownstein on “Derby Day, 1996”; by the time it came out via CD on then-fledgling label Noise Pollution on Halloween 1997, Pollard and Bailey had already left the band, and OUT. disintegrated as a group entirely by the end of the century. 

Thirty years since recording Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs, unfortunately only half of OUT.’s first LP lineup are still with us; Donnelly died in 1999, and Bailey passed in 2009. Noise Pollution is nonetheless still going strong, and they’ve marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s sole album with its first-ever vinyl release and by unearthing two previously-unreleased recordings (“Missed Connection” and “Building a Better Monster”). Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs remains an incredible document, perhaps the purest distillation of Kentucky punk rock and roll ever put to tape. The opening three or four songs are a sprint, a clusterfuck of Bad Brains and 70s punk and Motörhead that’s virtually indistinguishable from something that’d come out on Goner or Feel It Records today. With “Sing While the World Sinks”, you get a clearer glimpse of the “Jesus Lizard/Birthday Party” side of OUT.’s influences, and the likes of “Seven” lean harder on good old “hard rock”, but OUT. never stop kicking out garage rippers (“Love Can Break Your Back”, “Where the River Runs”). Even though OUT.’s story feels a little too short in 2026, it’s still fortunate that everything aligned for long enough for Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs to happen at all. (Bandcamp link)

Sotto Voce – The Sound of Trying

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Makeout Artist
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, math rock, post-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Threesome (Asking for a Friend)

Sotto Voce is Ryan Gabos, a Pittsburgh-originating, Brooklyn-based musician who’s been putting out home-recorded albums at a clip of about one a year since 2013. The most recent Sotto Voce album before this year was actually 2023’s Murgatroyd (with the archival Fool Ass EP coming the following year), so this is an atypically long gap between LPs by Gabos’ standards. The Sound of Trying, my first exposure to Sotto Voce, is a curious-sounding return to the world of solo home-recording by Gabos; it’s almost like it’s trying to be an explosive, 90s-style indie rock album, a sensitive, sensual singer-songwriter album, and a sprawling, folk-y slowcore album all at once. The majority of The Sound of Trying’s seven songs cross the five-minute mark, and two of them are over seven–more often than not, the different sides of Sotto Voce are explored within the same track.

The Sound of Trying begins with two songs that start off relatively softly and build into something noisy; the transition in “Sitting in a Tree” is more abrupt than the more typical math-y indie rock of “Kickball”, but it happens in both. At this point, I’d be ready to slot Sotto Voce into a (quite capable) “quiet-loud” indie rock group, but, aside from “It’s a Dull Pain”, Gabos effectively never returns to this formula again on The Sound of Trying. The eight-minute harmonics-aided “Miami from the Window Seat” disappears in a gentle, soft-rock breeze, and “Days Without Incident” similarly takes a leisurely route across its six minutes. I’m weirdly drawn to the last song on The Sound of Trying–it’s another long one, called “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” (sure, sure), and it’s a confusing but endearing mixture of coffeeshop folk, noodly (but still largely acoustic) math-y guitars, and melodies that appear and disappear as Gabos shifts around tempos and times and whatnot. Beyond the fact that it sounds quite good, I like “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” because, I think, I can’t quite figure it out. All of The Sound of Trying has a bit of that to it. (Bandcamp link)

Awful Din – ANTI BODY

Release date: January 30th
Record label: We’re Trying
Genre: Emo, pop punk, orgcore, power pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Goodbye Delaware

Brooklyn quartet Awful Din formed back in 2014, but they only put out their debut album in 2022, and I myself only heard about them thanks to their 2024 EP Sunday Gentlemen (featuring a really good song about Anton Lavey called “Anton Lavey”). Founding members Aaron Groom (vocals/guitar) and Kat Doniger (guitar) reference 90s emo and punk as what brought them together in a band (Saves the Day and Texas Is The Reason, specifically), and on their sophomore album ANTI BODY, the group (now joined by new members Jay Rodriguez and Don Lavis on bass and drums) take those influences and make a fresh, catchy-sounding emo-pop-punk album out of them. Somewhere between post-Lemonheads earnest jangle-power pop, John K. Samson storytelling, Taking Meds-style indie rock/punk, and big PUP choruses, the opening stretch of ANTI BODY is a whirlwind between the three golden pop rock songs “GFTO My Basement”, “Goodbye Delaware”, and “I Will Break You”. 

If you’ve forgotten that Awful Din are an emo band, the brake-tapping, string-laden hospital ballad “Foot Punk” will remind you, although the quartet throw themselves into that one so fully that it just adds another layer to ANTI BODY rather than arresting any momentum (and if that one doesn’t slow Awful Din down, the sparse, slow-building “Chaparral” certainly won’t either). The bass-led belter “15 Minutes of Shame” and a perfect jangly pop song called “Big’s In Paris Now” (of course) are B-side highlights, as is closing track “We Have We Are We Will”, in which Awful Din do the “cathartic big finish” thing as well as I’d expect them to do. It’s been a minute since I’ve heard an emo (or “emo-adjacent”, even) album that hits these notes as well as Awful Din do on ANTI BODY; it’s a welcome reminder of the power of this kind of thing. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment