Pressing Concerns: Crooked Fingers, Landowner, Cootie Catcher, Voxtrot

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The Thursday Pressing Concerns features four albums coming out tomorrow, February 27th: new ones from Crooked Fingers, Landowner, Cootie Catcher, and Voxtrot. These are some heavy hitters! Check these out, and check out this week’s two previous blog posts (Monday’s featured Friends of Cesar Romero, Fran Carlyon, The Fruit Trees, and The Sylvia Platters, and Tuesday’s featured Keta Ester, Virgins, Would-Be-Goods, and Human Mascot) if you’ve yet to do so.

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.

Crooked Fingers – Swet Deth

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Merge
Genre: Folk rock, chamber rock, art rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: From All Ways

Crooked Fingers was Eric Bachmann’s second act–after the dissolution of the North Carolina’s tight, noisy, intense 90s indie rock quartet Archers of Loaf, he reinvented himself as a more folk rock/AM radio-esque frontperson with a loose and revolving cast of backing musicians. When Archers of Loaf released their first album in twenty-plus years in 2023 with Reason in Decline, it was a very intentional affair–the group spent a long time deciding whether or not they even wanted to make it, and then they had to figure out how to return to (and deviate from) a style initially abandoned partially due to its unsustainability. The first Crooked Fingers album since 2011, conversely, came about in a more organic fashion–while attempting to make another solo album (he’s put out two of those since Crooked Fingers’ last LP), Bachmann found himself with a bunch of songs that “belonged to a larger space than [his solo material]”. So, he pulled together a few collaborators and Swet Deth, a collection of songs about mortality inspired by the morbid but vibrant cover (drawn by Bachmann’s son in school), was born.

Bachmann’s musical collaborators here are a pair of musicians who’ve played on his solo albums (drummer Jeremy Wheatley and pedal steel player Jon Rauhouse), but this time there’s an impressive list of guest vocalists featuring longtime associates (Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan), surprising new faces (The National’s Matt Berninger and Sharon Van Etten), and current players in Bachmann’s live band (Avery Leigh Draut and Skylar Gudasz). Swet Deth feels like a Crooked Fingers album, a nebulous enough concept that’s more than large enough to contain the bright, bittersweet pop rock of opening track “Cold Waves” (featuring McCaughan on harmonies and sounding not unlike his own band’s recent material) and the gentle soft rock glide of “From All Ways” (in which Berninger sings the chorus).

As recognizable as Berninger’s voice is in general, I didn’t realize it was him on “From All Ways” at first; it’s a bit of an odd placement for him, his stoic baritone functioning as a balance to the brisk tempo Bachmann brings to the verses (and if the latter wins out, it’s still interesting to hear Berninger try to keep up in this situation). Dark undercurrents to “Insomnia” and “Empty Love and Cheap Thrills” aside, Swet Deth probably owes more to “swet” than “deth” as it’s been realized. It’s nice to hear Bachmann pursue Crooked Fingers-style pop music again–“Spray Tan Speed Queen (In a German Car)”, “Lena”, and “Hospital” deserve mentions in addition to the aforementioned opening duo. This side of Bachmann’s music, despite having been his dominant mode of artistic expression for almost all of this century, is probably underappreciated compared to the (understandable, justified) love Archers of Loaf still get to this day. We all ought to be as grateful for Crooked Fingers’ records as Bachmann sounds to be alive and creating them in 2026. (Bandcamp link)

Landowner – Assumption

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk, egg punk, post-hardcore, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Linear Age

What are Landowner? They’re a “abrasively-clean minimalist punk” band from western Massachusetts–not that this description clears anything up, really. They’re a very intense quintet, owing just as much to Dan Shaw’s frantic lyric-sputtering as to their furious rhythm section (bassist Josh Owsley and drummer Josh Daniel, the latter also of Editrix) and their squeaky-clean six-string spaghetti (provided by Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin). People like to compare them to The Fall and “egg punk”; I went with Minutemen and Pere Ubu when I wrote about their last album, 2023’s Escape the Compound (I’d throw Knowso on there now, too). They’ve always been very “New England” to me, and Assumption doesn’t change that. Maybe you’re game for a band hammering out an unrelenting, anti-punk opus littered with environmental destruction, fractured Americana, and bastardized religious iconography (no, I’m not sure if they’re the Puritans or the witches yet). We do live in a society, after all; the least we can do is join Landowner in properly maiming it.

Ninety-second bloodlettings remain an essential part of Landowner’s sound–the primordial “Rival Males”, the sardonic “Pray for the Environment”, and “Enemy Attack” (which lives up to its title) all make sure of that. If Landowner let one of their unforgiving grooves go on for more than three minutes though, watch out–those are the ones that’ll leave a mark. We’ve got the opening title track, in which we are kindly informed that “your time has come / your assumption has become”. We have the vat-of-acid-drenched “Unboxing”, in which Shaw bellows “I am the Daniel Boone of the New Contamination Wilderness” over top of deteriorating rock music. We have “Linear Age”, a three-point-five-minute history of humanity as a video game speedrun (“Develop bronze! / You have successfully developed bronze”), complete with rockets and landfills and all the hits. The last song is six minutes long; it’s called “Normal Returns to Normal”, and Shaw repeats that title like a mantra. I don’t know if “Normal Returns to Normal” is an observation or a prediction (or what even “normal returning to normal” even means, necessarily); I’m not the one making assumptions here. (Bandcamp link)

Cootie Catcher – Something We All Got

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Carpark
Genre: Indie pop, twee, experimental pop, electronica, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Loiter for the Love of It

Montreal quartet Cootie Catcher won me over early last year with their sophomore album, Shy at First, an electronic-twee pop balancing act that ended up being an unlikely breakout record for vocalist/bassist Anita Fowl, vocalist/guitarist Nolan Jakupovski, vocalist/synth player Sophia Chavez, and drummer Joseph Shemoun. Later that year, they (along with their tourmates, fellow rising indie pop group Good Flying Birds) were picked up by Carpark Records (Cloud Nothings, The Beths, Ducks Ltd.), and a new Cootie Catcher LP has arrived less than a year after Shy at First. On Something We All Got, Cootie Catcher has clearly “gone for it”; armed with a label with a larger reach and (presumably) more resources than before, the quartet have polished the stranger, “out-there” side of their sound away and honed in on making big-hook, excitable indie pop songs.

Was the wonky, oftentimes headscratching synth-trails of Shy at First part of Cootie Catcher’s initial appeal to me? Sure, but any worry that the band may have inadvertently sanded off their strong suits is laid to rest by the gorgeous, twinkling opening ballad “Loiter for the Love of It” (You think you know slacker-twee? Cootie Catcher will show you slacker-twee). There’s no getting around the fact that “Straight Drop”, “From Here to Halifax”, and “Quarter Note Rock” are straight-up monsters of guitar pop songs, and every one of Something We All Got’s fourteen tracks contains at least some elements of that side of them. The weird is still here–burbling synths and skittering beats are scattered here and there, less central but still integral to “Rhymes with Rest” and “Lyfestyle”, the most “offbeat” moments on the album. “Pirouette” is effectively a straightforward twee-jangle-pop song with some incessant synths refusing to be cowed, while “Stick Figure” suggests a different path for Cootie Catcher, flirting with noise-pop kitchen-sink vibes in its refrain. If another band made Something We All Got, I might call it a “transitional” album, but everything I know about Cootie Catcher suggests they’re right at home here. (Bandcamp link)

Voxtrot – Dreamers in Exile

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Cult Hero
Genre: Indie pop, folk-pop, dream pop, power pop, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Rock & Roll Jesus

The Austin, Texas quintet Voxtrot were a mid-2000s “blog rock” band, building buzz off of a pair of EPs and then releasing one album before breaking up at the end of that decade. They’d been a name I sort of recognized for a long time, but it wasn’t until they reunited and began reissuing their older material that I discovered that the group (vocalist/guitarist Ramesh Srivastava, guitarist Mitch Calvert, bassist Jason Chronis, keyboardist Jared van Fleet and drummer Matt Simon) were an impressive indie pop band that holds up well today. Even so, Dreamers in Exile is Voxtrot’s first new album in almost twenty years (and only their second overall); it’s a reintroduction to a music landscape that looks completely different than it did when Voxtrot put out Raised by Wolves in 2005. Srivastava, Chronis and Simon are described as the band’s current “nucleus”, but all five original members contribute to Dreamers in Exile, and the quintet have made an incredibly polished, vibrant, multi-layered, “mature” pop album together.

“Another Fire” is both grand-sounding and approachable, a string-swept orchestral/chamber pop opening statement that also serves to introduce Srivastava as a compelling pop frontperson, too. As strong as the opening track is, it doesn’t fully prepare us for what Voxtrot have done in Dreamers in Exile–from there, the propulsive, synthpop/new wave-esque power pop of “Fighting Back” and the title track are nice surprises. If this kind of thoughtful, AM-fluent post-chamber indie pop is in any way relevant to you, Dreamers in Exile plays like a lost greatest hits collection; there isn’t a dull moment whether Voxtrot are letting the strings lead us into starry-eyed territory with “The Times” and “Esprit de Coeur” or getting a little more electric with “Change” and “Rock & Roll Jesus” (the latter of which genuinely does rock, although it “works” for much the same reasons other Voxtrot songs do). Now we know what a Voxtrot album in 2026 sounds like–a band making the absolute most of its second act. (Bandcamp link)

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