Pressing Concerns: Gladie, Otoliths, This House, Filth Is Eternal

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In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 20th: new ones from Gladie, Otoliths, This House, and Filth Is Eternal. If you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, and Corespondents), 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.

Gladie – No Need to Be Lonely

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Indie punk, pop punk, grunge-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Push Me Down

This Philly indie punk rock musician still does it the old-fashioned way. At a time when many of her peers from the 2010s indie underground have moved on to making more “mature”, tasteful alt-country and/or indie folk, the former frontperson of the now-defunct first-run Tiny Engines band Cayetana has kept the slightly-emo, slightly pop-punk flame alive with Gladie. They’re on their third album now, and No Need to Be Lonely sees Koch joined by bassist Evan Demianczyk, multi-instrumentalist Matt Schimelfenig, drummer Miles Ziskind, and backing vocalist Liz Parsons, not to mention Jeff Rosenstock in the producer’s (and organist’s) chair. Everything about No Need to Be Lonely’s release–from Rosenstock’s involvement, to its release on DIY staple Get Better Records (Remember Sports, Teenage Halloween, Worriers), to a chorus of backing vocalists on “Talk Past Each Other” featuring members of The Sidekicks, Chumped, and Koch’s former Cayetana bandmates–is a callback to a bygone era of indie rock, but No Need to Be Lonely doesn’t come off as sentimental or stuck in the past. 

No Need to Be Lonely is immediate, hard-hitting, and raw because that’s what it should be–that’s how Koch writes, plays, and sings. The revved-up, huge guitars make themselves known before anything else on the album, but Koch’s frayed, cracking voice isn’t far behind (both feature heavily on “Push Me Down”, a wrecking ball of an opening track). Koch’s writing is just as blunt–she pulls no punches in singing about humiliation, people pleasing, screaming in open fields, and the like. When Koch repeats “I won’t hold back a compliment / I’ll be careful with how my time is spent,” in the chorus of “Brace Yourself”, it’s the kind of lyric that loses some of its impact when written out without context–in the song, it’s a liferaft clung to in a tsunami. The primary mode of No Need to Be Lonely is nice and grungy; many of the mid-tempo numbers, like “Talk Past Each Other” and “Lucky for Another”, still have a bite to them, and the true detours (“Fix Her”, “I Will If You Will”, “Blurry”) don’t overstay their welcome. In the closing track, “Unfolding”, Koch mutter “Nostalgia’s just fool’s gold,” over a steady, weary indie rock instrumental–if it sounds familiar to us, it’s not because Gladie is looking backwards. (Bandcamp link)

Otoliths – Lithos

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, college rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bi-Weekly Lady

The Chicago-originating, Oakland-based musician Tom Smith has been in a bunch of different bands: Smokin’ Ziggurats, Office, Mazes, Social Studies, Silverware, and Abracadabra, to name a few. His latest project is called Otoliths; they debuted in 2024 with a song on a compilation, and their next release is a full-fledged debut album called Lithos. The majority of Lithos was recorded by Jason Kick and Marta Alvarez at Santo Recording with the lineup of Smith on vocals and guitar, Daniel Pearce on drums, Ben McClintock on bass and guitar, Akhil Bhatt on keyboard and vocals, and Ainsley Wagoner on additional vocals (one song, “Minna”, was recorded by Trans Am/Terry Gross’ Phil Manley with a slightly different lineup). Otoliths’ debut album fits right in with the jangly indie pop/college rock revival happening across the San Francisco Bay Area, although they only acknowledge this in a roundabout way by calling themselves a “post-punk band” influenced by Emmett Kelly and Martin Newell (the latter of which is so popular in the modern guitar pop movement that Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records were able to put together an album-length tribute record to him in 2024, mind you).

I hear plenty of Flying Nun, The Soft Boys, and even Elvis Costello in the casual power pop of opening track “Maeve’s Melody”, and Lithos really does come out swinging between the Kiwi Jr.-like stop-start college rock of “Sense in Asking”, the massive fuzz-pop hooks of “Bi-Weekly Lady”, and the jangly psychedelia of “Limb from Limb”. The cruise control vibes of “Bar Pilots” at the beginning of Side Two turn out to actually be last call of a sort–Otoliths spend the final four songs getting comfortable in the spacier realms of dream pop/post-punk. “Go to Sleep” and “Minna” have nice undergirding rhythms, while “Projectionist” ends Lithos with a slow-building that simply comes to a stop in lieu of releasing anything. Lithos loads plenty of melodic guitars and catchy choruses up front, but Otoliths show their mettle by weaving it into less obvious material, too–it all results in a very promising first LP. (Bandcamp link)

This House – Soft Rains Will Come

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Pink Cotton Candy/Red Wig/Ramble
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Burned House

From 1979 to 2008, G.W. Sok was the unmistakable barking lead vocalist of Dutch noise rock group The Ex, leading the band from anarcho-punks to globe-trotting experimentalists on dozens of albums before departing. Sok has led a Mike Watt-esque career since then, blazing a trail littered with countless collaborations spanning everything from jazz to punk to spoken word. One of these many records was Is This a House?, a 2024 album Sok made with the Spain-originating, Copenhagen-based “noise, jazz and electronic” producer/musician Ignacio Córdoba; the two of them made an “experimental collage album” combining Córdoba’s electronic with occasional rhythms and Sok’s spoken word, and the duo must’ve hit on something, because they started a project called This House not long afterwards.

Unlike Is This a House?, Soft Rains Will Come feels like the work of a real rock band–Córdoba plays most of the instruments on the album, but drummer Søren Høj and synth player P.J. Fossum also help with this feeling. Sok gets to growl and prowl over top of unforgiving rhythmic post-punk again, just like he did with The Ex. It basically sounds like an Ex album with more synths in some parts, which is certainly fine by me; “Oh My, Butterfly” is probably the most Ex-like song on here, but pretty much all of these eight songs hit the same “grinding noise rock” sweet spot at some point in their (frequently stretching-past-five-minute) runtime. Almost every song is lyrically inspired by a different poem, apparently (from Atwood, Bukowski, and Prévert, among others); while Sok’s exact words may not always be important to the structure of these noisy, blaring soundscapes, it’s essential that he sound like he always means it–and I come away from Soft Rains Will Come believing he’s got just as much of a fire under him now as he did forty years ago. This House continues one of the most important threads of Sok’s music career: no matter how twisted and convoluted things get, the passion always makes it through. (Bandcamp link)

Filth Is Eternal – Impossible World

Release date: March 17th
Record label: MNRK Heavy
Genre: Punk rock, alt-rock, melodic hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Long Way

The Seattle quintet Filth Is Eternal have shared the stage with Baroness and Botch, and they currently share a record label with the likes of Underoath, High on Fire, and Judas Priest. This is, admittedly, further into the realm of “heavy music” than Rosy Overdrive typically ventures (if the name “Filth Is Eternal” didn’t give it away). Nonetheless, the blog is always happy to spotlight good punk rock, and Filth Is Eternal’s fourth album, Impossible World, is most certainly that. On this record, the group (vocalist Lis DiAngelo, guitarists Brian McClelland and Colin Jenkins, bassist Logan Miller, and drummer Emily Salisbury) have thrown themselves headfirst into the realm of meaty, muscular, punk-heavy alt-rock (and, good news: it’s the kind with giant hooks, too). Impossible World hits like a tractor-trailer: a dozen short, serious, grey, loud bursts of heavy metal/hardcore-tinged grunge-pop songs in just under a half-hour. DiAngelo is clear and unwavering over top of guitars set to “rumbling down the highway” and rhythms doing their requisite pounding. It’s hard to pick highlights because Impossible World is an incredibly even listening experience, but you can’t go wrong with the first four songs, which introduce us to where Filth Is Eternal is at perfectly and breathlessly. Once Impossible World turns the faucet on, it just keeps pouring out until “Skorpio” comes to a close. (Bandcamp link)

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