Pressing Concerns: Red Xerox, Julianna Riolino, Swirls, Entrez Vous

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In an eclectic Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got a new album from Swirls, a new EP from Entrez Vous, a deluxe version of the Julianna Riolino album from last year, and a compilation of new Chicago indie rock bands including Friko, Sharp Pins, and Horsegirl. Check them out below!

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Various – Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025

Release date: March 18th
Record label: Desert Island Discs/New Now
Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz pop, dream pop, post-punk, noise rock, chamber pop, experimental rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: En Utero

Well, here we are, then. I’ve written quite a bit about what’s going on in Chicago via bands and acts like Sharp Pins, Friko, and Joe Glass, and I haven’t been the only one to take notice. A bunch of teenagers in the Windy City (sometimes connected to nearby Midwestern cities) making underground indie rock music inspired by varying combinations of early Guided by Voices, Flying Nun, Elephant 6, 1960s psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and their home city’s noise rock; some bands (like Horsegirl, Lifeguard, and the aforementioned Friko) have turned buzz into A-list indie record deals and Pitchfork hype, but everybody’s always been adamant that they’re part of a larger scene (sometimes referred to as “Hallogallo”, after Lifeguard/Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater’s cassette label and zine). Red Xerox, assembled by local chronicler and TV Buddha drummer Eli Schmitt, is a well-earned and useful five-year marker for this scene (though, as Slater says on Schmitt’s Bandcamp page: “This compilation is not a reminiscence of the good old days or a document of a time long gone, it is NOW!”).

If you’ve been reading this blog, I probably don’t need to tell you that the Sharp Pins and Friko selections are excellent guitar pop songs–if you like those, Red Xerox also offers up similarly-minded cuts from Dwaal Troupe (another Slater band, who let “En Utero” hiss its way to an excellent big finish), P. Noid (a new-to-me duo who K-Records their way through “Go Somewhere Else”), and Horsegirl (one of their earliest songs, “Sea Life Sandwich Boy”, shows up here). Plenty of other cuts from Red Xerox are “hits” in their own ways, even if they aren’t as upfront in their pop aspirations, from the bouncy post-punk of Uniflora’s “Two or More” to the minimalist indie pop of Post Office Winter’s “Mother, Sister, Nurse” to TV Buddha’s tinny psychedelic shit-wave “Baby, Woah!”. The earnest indie folk of Free Range has always felt drawn from a different era of Chicago music than the rest of these young acts, but Sofia Jensen’s project has been embraced by the mod-revivalists all the same, and “Lost and Found” is as good as anything else on this compilation. At this point, I’ve hit on almost every song on Red Xerox (and I didn’t even get to the most bizarre one–shout out Current Union ™ and their no wave fetishism), which is a good sign for a compilation. I look forward to several of these bands launching the next five years of Red Xerox very soon. (Bandcamp link)

Julianna Riolino – Echo in the Dust (Deluxe)

Release date: February 27th
Record label: MoonWhistle
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, country rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD (both original version only), digital
Pull Track: Like a Rembrandt

I first knew Julianna Riolino as a member of Daniel Romano’s Outfit, most recently seen contributing to their excellent 2024 album Too Hot to Sleep. Members of the Outfit releasing solo albums is hardly an uncommon occurrence; Carson McHone released one just last year, and Riolino herself already had one under her belt by that point with 2022’s All Blue. Nonetheless, a desire to more fully focus on her solo career led to Riolino leaving the Outfit shortly after Too Hot to Sleep, and she self-released a sophomore album called Echo in the Dust late last year. Though I missed Echo in the Dust on the first go-around, a “deluxe” re-release of it (featuring three additional songs) caught my ear, and I can say now that the Canadian musician has successfully carved out her own style honed from classic 60s folk rock, bits of 70s and even 80s singer-songwriter touches, and snatches of Romano-esque energetic power pop.

Opening track “Like a Rembrandt” is the kind of polished, exuberant, poppy country rock I’d expect from a “Daniel Romano-associate solo album”, and Riolino generously gives us several more songs in a similar vein throughout Echo in the Dust between the glammy alt-country of “It’s a Shakedown”, the breezy guitar pop of “On a Bluebird’s Wing”, and the original LP’s bittersweet closing track “The Less I Know”. I’m sure I’d be happy with an entire album of this kind of material, but Riolino isn’t just interested in that, and so we get songs like the synth-rock glider “Full Moon” (a collaboration with Weird Nightmare), the horn-laden throwback pop of “Seed”, the cavernous, gently-rocking “Let Me Dream”, and the somewhat angsty studio-experiment rock of “I Wonder”. The “bonus tracks” land somewhere in between, all largely pop songs of a relatively thoughtful variety; that Riolino chose the extremes in the “final” tracklist of Echo in the Dust is probably a reflection of the range she’s seeking to explore in her solo work. She’s off to a strong start with this one. (Bandcamp link)

Swirls – Surge

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Howlin Banana/A Tant Rêver Du Roi
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, mod
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Short Fuse

Another French garage rock band, eh? Alright, let’s see what Swirls have to offer. They’re a quartet from Nantes–Guillaume Cibard, Hugo Allard, Samuel Sprent, and Théo Radière are their names, and they all used to play together in a band called The Von Pariahs. Surge is their second album as Swirls, following 2024’s Top of the Line; both LPs have come via stalwart French indie labels Howlin Banana and A Tant Rêver Du Roi. Swirls specifically reference Australian garage punk and The Hives as influences, and you’d probably have a rough guess as to how Surge sounds based off of those references. You wouldn’t be wrong, but there’s this 60s proto-garage rock charm to it, too; it doesn’t sound like the British Invasion and Nuggets per se, but it has the same simple, almost childlike relationship to rock and roll as bands who came about in its relative infancy did.

Swirls sing about whatever happens to be on their mind, whether it’s the concept of needing to sleep every day in “Sleep” (“Now I’m 30 and I’m practically dead/ ‘cause I’ve got back pain wired through my body”) or daydreaming about questionable financial decisions in “A Car or a Guitar”. “Short Fuse” feels right out of 1964 (“(He’s got a short fuse) And it’s yesterday’s news / (He’s got a short fuse) And I’ve got no excuse”); we’re into early The Who territory here. If there’s a theme to Surge, it has something to do with youth and growing up; in addition to the back-crack in “Sleep”, “Neverland” and “Powerstation” deal with it to some degree, too. The members of Swirls have been making this kind of music for over a decade now; they’re different people than in their Von Pariahs days. Thankfully, it sounds like they’re taking fun garage rock with them into their old age thirties. (Bandcamp link)

Entrez Vous – Tell Her a Joke

Release date: March 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, dream pop, experimental pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: (Crying in the) Sportsbook

I first heard the Chapel Hill indie pop duo Entrez Vous last year via their sophomore album, Antenna Legs Hear Everything; just a little under a year since that LP’s “garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop” blend (as I said at the time), Kelly Reidy and Clark Blomquist have returned with their third record since 2023. This time it’s a five-song, eleven-minute EP called Tell Her a Joke, made with help from Chris Girard (bass/bass VI/guitar), Sean Armbruster (organ), Shareen El Naga (organ/electric piano), Danny Grewen (trombone), Justin Blatt (violin), and Paul Finn (who recorded it). Girard, Armbruster, and El Naga now seem to be proper members of Entrez Vous, but the expanded lineup hasn’t lessened the group’s tossed-off, garage-y indie pop rock charms.

“(Crying in the) Sportsbook” is an instant classic from the North Carolina group–golden vintage pop harmonies, country rock shuffling, and a winking vocal performance from Reidy all see to that. It’s over in ninety seconds, and the organ-tinged folk-pop of “Willy” and the drum-machine dreaminess of “Oh, Raquel!” also wrap things up in under two minutes. The digital Side Two is the classic weird flipside, led off by the four-minute psychedelic trip of “Her Favorite Horse” and ending with an orchestral instrumental called “Bootsy’s Place”; Entrez Vous are more than equipped to make the former work as a pop song, and the latter is a perfectly reasonable comedown finale. It’s pretty much all you could want in a stopgap EP, and I look forward to Entrez Vous continuing to stockpile fun and interesting pop music via their current hot hand. (Bandcamp link)

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