Pressing Concerns: Keta Ester, Virgins, Would-Be-Goods, Human Mascot

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In this here Tuesday Pressing Concerns, we have new albums from Keta Ester and Would-Be-Goods, an new album-ish from Human Mascot, and the final release from Virgins. Check ’em out below, and if you missed yesterday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Friends of Cesar Romero, Fran Carlyon, The Fruit Trees, and The Sylvia Platters), check that 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.

Keta Ester – Love Apple

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, psychedelic folk, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Saved the World, Left Us All

I’ve been familiar with the music of Keegan Graziane thanks to his work with Bruiser & Bicycle, the Albany-originating psychedelic folk band he co-founded with Nicholas R. Whittemore. Bruiser & Bicycle have released three great albums from 2019 to 2025, and they’re still going strong (you can catch them playing shows in upstate New York with Cootie Catcher and Blue Ranger, among others), but Graziane decided he needed to make a solo album on top of that, apparently. Taking the name Keta Ester, Graziane enlisted Bruiser & Bicycle’s current rhythm section (bassist Zahra “Z” Houacine and drummer Joe Taurone) as well as flautist Stone Filipczak (of @ and E.R. Visit, acts that feel akin to Bruiser & Bicycle) to record Love Apple with the prolific Scoops Dardaris (Laveda, Cusp, Buddie).

The sprawling, fifty-minute Love Apple sure does sound like a solo album from one of the guys from Bruiser & Bicycle (which, to be clear, is a very good thing). The convoluted, surprising, and progressive pop sensibilities of Graziane’s other band are left entirely intact here, with the main difference being a more stripped-down, folk-influenced take on this kind of music that provides something of a breather from Bruiser & Bicycle’s “sensory overload” vibes (the most recent Bruiser & Bicycle album, last year’s Deep Country, had glanced in this direction, but Love Apple is a full-on embrace of it). “Big Stomp, Big Stomp” and “Teacher of the Earth” are effectively streamlined Bruiser & Bicycle songs, but other moments on the album, such as the soft 80s pop “Truth Is a Land Mine”, the quiet flute-aided folk of “Who Bares This Life?”, and the beautiful morning folk rock of “Saved the World, Left Us All” find Keta Ester exploring relatively new terrain. Bruiser & Bicycle fans will undoubtedly enjoy Love Apple, but I see it having some reach beyond that band’s niche, as well. (Bandcamp link)

Virgins – Light the Space Left Behind / Transmit a Little Heaven

Release date: February 19th
Record label: Blowtorch/Old Crows
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, alt-rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Reveries

I wrote about the somewhat questionably-named Belfast shoegaze group Virgins back in 2024, when they released their debut album Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful. As it turned out, Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful was also fated to be the final Virgins LP, as the quintet broke up less than two years after its release. The quintet (vocalist Rebecca Dow, guitarists Dave Sloan and Michael Smythe, bassist Mo O’Kane, drummer Matt McMullan) had recorded three final songs last September, however, and these represent the final Virgins release, Light the Space Left Behind. The physical edition of Light the Space Left Behind also takes the opportunity to press some miscellaneous Virgins material to vinyl, including the non-album single from last year “b l o o m s” and their debut EP, 2022’s Transmit a Little Heaven (meaning that the first and last Virgins recordings are now on the same physical record).

The five Transmit a Little Heaven songs are some solid modern shoegaze, but “b l o o m s” and Light the Space Left Behind are the ones that highlight how much Virgins grew over the course of a half-decade. The non-album single sounds cavernous, really exemplifying why they once called themselves a “deafening dream pop” group, and the fourteen minutes of Light the Space Left Behind close the book on Virgins on an undoubtedly high note. The quintet once again collide wall-of-sound shoegaze with the ethereal on “Crucible”, while the acoustic guitars and swooning feedback of “Passing” is a lovely reminder that Virgins were hardly one-trick ponies. I can’t say that Virgins left anything on the table by closing the EP with “Reveries”, which is a massive five-minute grand finale of giant drums, soaring vocals, and transcendent guitars. It’s exactly how Virgins should wrap it up, if they must. (Bandcamp link)

Would-Be-Goods – Tears Before Bedtime

Release date: February 13th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: The Gallopers

British indie pop group Would-Be-Goods have been around since the late 1980s: they put out a handful of singles and albums in their first few years of existence, and then they released three LPs on Matinee Recordings in the 2000s. A lengthy gap was broken at the beginning of this decade with four digital EPs in 2021 (compiled on a CD called The Night Life two years later), and the band linked up with fellow indie pop veterans Skep Wax to release their sixth proper album, Tears Before Bedtime. Although frontperson Jessica Griffin was the group’s sole founder, Would-Be-Goods’ current lineup–guitarist Peter Momtchiloff (Heavenly, Railcard), drummer Debbie Greensmith (The Headcoatees), and bassist Andy Warren (The Monochrome Set)–has been in place for twenty years now, and that’s who’ve come together to realize this latest collection of Griffin’s vintage indie pop songwriting.

The Would-Be-Goods’ style is a recognizable one, one that arose during the indie pop heyday in which they participated and hardly out of fashion today–gentle, plain-spoken, quite British, and 60s-indebted. Opening track “The Gallopers” puts it all together quite nicely, and “The Back of Your Bike” is a classic youthful tragedy song that makes it clear that the 1960s influence on Griffin’s songwriting is much more than mere dabbling. Tears Before Bedtime covers a lot of ground in its fourteen songs and thirty-six minutes–with “The Rose Tattoo”, we get the sparse, doomed ballad, “Don’t Come Crying to Me” is a horn-laden kiss-off, “Carmilla” brings organ to the forefront, and “The Moon Doesn’t Mind” skips away to the tune of dream pop and woodwinds. I write about plenty of indie pop records in the vein of Tears Before Bedtime on this blog, but I certainly welcome Would-Be-Goods dropping in to remind us how it’s done any time. (Bandcamp link)

Human Mascot – Ketchup Mill

Release date: February 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Math rock, art rock, garage rock, experimental pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Mail Pouch Chew

I get it. It’s been a long day. You’re tired. You look at the sensory-overload, ketchup-infused, fever dream-esque cover art to Ketchup Mill (credit Andy Soda) and think “I can’t deal with this bullshit right now”. Maybe you see that they refer to themselves as “Americhaotica”, “countrygaze”, and “art punk”, which probably doesn’t help. I am here to report about good music, though, and Human Mascot have pretty easily made the cut with Ketchup Mill. They appear to be a trio from Boston, and this appears to be their second record (after an EP called This! Is Your Human Mascot in 2024). On this record (seven songs, twenty minutes, call it an EP or LP based on your preference I suppose), Human Mascot continue in the grand tradition of New England math rock bands that know how to write a pop hook, from Pet Fox to Rick Rude to Lane. Blown-out noisy guitars veer into golden melodies (of both the instrumental and vocal variety), exemplified when the claustrophobic opening track “Hollow Log” gives way to the weird but undeniably catchy alt-math-country-pop-rock thing “Mail Pouch Chew”. “Pee/Spit” and the title track are frantic garage rockers that pound and chime their way into “hit” status, respectively, and even something as unhinged as “Debuild” has its pop moments. This is what “indie rock” should sound like, in my opinion. It’s cool that there are still bands out there like Human Mascot, and it’s cool that Rosy Overdrive exists so I can direct the rest of you to them. (Bandcamp link)

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