Pressing Concerns: True Green, Sluice, Helicopter Leaves, HEDGE

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

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a very good one, featuring an album from True Green that came out earlier this week and three records coming out tomorrow, March 27th: new LPs from Sluice and Helicopter Leaves, plus a new EP from HEDGE. If you missed the other blog post this week, Monday’s (featuring Julianna Riolino, Swirls, Entrez Vous, and a Chicago lo-fi indie rock compilation), check that one out here.

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.

True Green – Hail Disaster

Release date: March 24th
Record label: Spacecase
Genre: Lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Terry’s Parrot

One of my favorite albums of 2024 was My Lost Decade, the debut LP from a Minneapolis musician and novelist named Dan Hornsby who makes music under the name True Green. My Lost Decade was an inspired combination of Hornsby’s sharp storytelling with Beatles-esque kitchen-sink lo-fi pop cooked up by Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom. I’ve subsequently been hotly anticipating the sophomore True Green album, Hail Disaster, made once again by Hornsby and Ransom with a collection of Minneapolis- and Memphis-centric collaborators including Zach Mitchell (Missed Dunks at Summer League, Big Clown) and Dustin James (Green/Blue, Waveless). Hail Disaster was preceded a year ago by a two-song single; both “Consider the Priesthood” and “Falconry” ended up making the album, and the quieter, more pensive side of True Green displayed on those songs was, as it turns out, an apt preview of the band’s second album. Not everything on Hail Disaster is such a clear turn into sparse, spacey folk-rock, but there’s a subdued, adrift nature throughout the entire album spurred by both Hornsby’s delivery and True Green’s musical choices.

Three different songs on Hail Disaster reference birds in their title, and that’s not including “Bindi Sue”, a hymn-like tribute to the late conservationist Steve Irwin (James wrote the music for that one). Two different songs mention stingrays (including the Irwin song, of course). The hard-left detours into offbeat power pop and strange dance music of My Lost Decade are gone entirely, with True Green declining to go further than occasionally mustering up a “somewhat jaunty” for guitar pop highlights “Italian Lightning”, “Jonathan”, and “Beatlemania”. One of the songs is about how to draw hands; it’s called “How to Draw Hands”, and Hornsby sings “Go slow, it’s no race,” from the perspective of his mother giving him artistic advice in it. The more time I spend with Hail Disaster, the more I’m drawn in by its overwhelming calmness, a rejection of calamity drawn from what I must assume is Hornsby taking that aforementioned advice. My (current) two favorite songs on the album wouldn’t work without this perspective. 

“Terry’s Parrot” is, I think, the emotional core of Hail Disaster; the story isn’t entirely complete without extra context (according to Hornsby, it’s about his uncle who died of AIDS), but we just need to understand the idea of heavy loss to feel the full impact of that song’s final verse. “Bodysurfing” is probably the most beautiful song on Hail Disaster (and there’s a lot of competition for that title), Hornsby and Ransom giving the sparkling, polished, dreamy guitar pop treatment to the former’s tale of a family’s home getting robbed while they’re having “the time of [their] lives” at the beach. “The first half of your life is Tetris / And the second half is Jenga,” Hornsby sings, towards the end of “Bodysurfing”, suggesting a loss of innocence, but he just as immediately shrugs the conclusion off: “But maybe it’s all just / Bodysurfing”. Hail Disaster could’ve ended on that note, but Hornsby generously gives us a conclusion that elucidates the record’s points more finely with “Sparrows & Lilies”. “You worry yourself sick / You worry yourself silly / Think about the sparrows / Think about the lilies,” is how that one begins, and “Like an aquarium in a submarine / You kept yourself apart from everything,” is the refrain. I will admit that I was slightly disappointed that Hail Disaster didn’t have anything as catchy as “My Pecadilloes” on it when I first heard it, but I understand it now. It takes a lot of discipline to let as much go as True Green do on Hail Disaster. (Bandcamp link)

Sluice – Companion

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co.
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Vegas

For the past few years now, North Carolina’s Sluice have been known to me as “the band that’s not Fust”, despite sharing several touring bills, band membership, and one-syllable naming conventions with the Asheville alt-country group. Given that Fust made my favorite album of last year, that’s not a bad place to be, but Companion, Sluice’s third album and first since 2023, is enough for them to make a name for themselves beyond that in an increasingly crowded North Carolina indie-alt-country-rock scene. The main quartet of Sluice is singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, drummer Avery Sullivan, bassist Oliver Child-Lanning, and fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, all of whom are in Fust (and two other Fust members, bandleader Aaron Dowdy and Frank Meadows, also appear on Companion). Not to keep talking about Fust, but I can’t help but thinking about how their 2025 album, Big Ugly, seized the little “moment” that their scene is having by polishing Dowdy’s storytelling and songwriting into vibrant, immediately-grabbing country rock–Companion is, conversely, a different beast. It’s a more challenging, wide-ranging “folk rock” album, with plenty of accessible moments and just as many I would hardly describe as such.

The wobbly, steady country rock of opening track “Beadie” is as warm an opening to Companion as one could hope for, and “Rachet Strap” isn’t far behind. On the other end of the album, “Zillow” is a gorgeous penultimate track that interpolates an old Fust song and “Vegas” pulls the trick of saving the catchiest song on the LP for last (it’s an exhilarating, whirlwind country-rock flashback to Morris’ time touring with Angel Olsen as her merch guy in the 2010s, an up-close experience with “indie stardom” that nearly made him quit music and that really wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in the album’s sequencing). In between these four songs is what we call “the fun stuff”–some good old-fashioned Bill Callahan worship (damn, “Torpor” is really good), twin sprawling nine-minute songs (the disintegrating folk-drone of “Unknowing” in particular rules), an empty-space experimental piece, and the fun vocalizing going on at the beginning of “WTF”. After sitting with Companion for a minute, I’ve come to the conclusion that Sluice have also seized their moment. (Bandcamp link)

Helicopter Leaves – Sabrina Nickels

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Noyes
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: It Really Never Did

Chicago musician Anthony Vaccaro has been widely heard this decade as part of the Beach Bunny phenomenon; he plays guitar and has contributed songwriting to the very popular Windy City indie pop trio. Vaccaro first stepped out on his own in 2023 with Get Stuck In, the home-recorded debut album from his solo project Helicopter Leaves, but it’s the second LP under the name that has fully realized the guitar pop potential that Vaccaro clearly possesses. Sabrina Nickels (named for a recently-deceased family friend who was integral in Vaccaro’s development as a songwriter) is once again entirely written and performed by Vaccaro, but this time he enlisted Sean O’Keefe as a producer and recorded the LP between Electrical Audio and O’Keefe’s Rosebud Studios, a decision that seems to serve the record’s material. For its smooth, eleven-track/thirty-five-minute runtime, Helicopter Leaves hew towards vibrant, immaculately-executed Teenage Fanclub-inspired power pop in the vein of modern crafters like Hurry, Bory, The Sylvia Platters, and Dan Darrah. Vaccaro’s relatively delicate vocals keep Sabrina Nickels with one foot in the worlds of twee and indie pop, but the big guitars and even bigger refrains are hardly bashful.

Sabrina Nickels is a whirlwind; this feeling is greatly enhanced by “It Really Never Did”, a starry-eyed power pop opening track that’s as good as any guitar pop I’ve heard this year. Helicopter Leaves bash out similarly-minded hits in a professional but inspired manner–“Falling Water (Before You)”, “Number Girl”, and “Show Me All Your Landscape Paintings” are all simply sublime. The “deviations” from Vaccaro’s preferred mode are pretty small and still very “power pop”; the blaring synth in “Moreoff More Off Than On” and the slow start to “Sorry from Now On” both give way to big hooks, and the surprisingly electric conclusion to Sabrina Nickels (the garage-tinged “What’s One More Place?” and the fuzz-fest closing track “Self-Reliance”) doesn’t abandon them either. I don’t know if I’d call Sabrina Nickels the “best” power pop album of the year so far, but it’s perhaps the purest distillation of the form of 2026 yet. (Bandcamp link)

HEDGE – Freeze Frame High Five

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Best Brother
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, punk rock, fuzz rock, orgcore, Bob Mould
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hey Dude

The only band I can think of in recent memory to list Weston as an influence, HEDGE are a pop punk trio from Worcester, Massachusetts who caught my attention with their 2024 debut album, Better Days. I called it an “all-in Bob Mould-style aggressive power-pop-punk record”, and the Sugar/Superchunk sap continues to flow on the group’s brand new EP Freeze Frame High Five. Sprinting through a half-dozen songs in under ten minutes, guitarist “Christopher”, bassist “Pillowman Pete”, and drummer “Rainy Maple Stanford-Cordaro” take us on a foot-on-gas journey through post-Jawbreaker 90s “indie punk” energy and intensity with a power pop sensibility. “Hey Dude” and “Snapple Cap” are just monster trucks of pop songs, and Christopher’s deep, almost conversational voice and vocal melodies make him feel like a pop punk version of The Bevis Frond’s Nick Salomon. Nothing on Freeze Frame High Five is over two minutes long, but ninety-or-so seconds is enough time to give “Ice Rink” a college rock undercurrent and “Hit the Road” a sense of melancholy. The EP closes with a cover of Guided by Voices’ “My Valuable Hunting Knife” that only sort of tries to keep the original melody intact (and not even that with the tempo); it’s impressive in its own weird way how HEDGE’s pop punk steamroller flattens it into something that sounds almost exactly like the rest of Freeze Frame High Five. This quick EP is all the time HEDGE needs to reaffirm themselves as one of the best currently out there at what they do. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Leave a comment