Pressing Concerns: Mythical Motors, Prism Shores, Paul Bergmann, Lay Llamas

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Only one Pressing Concerns this week, but it’s no slouch, looking at a bunch of new albums coming out tomorrow, April 10th. We’ve got blog regulars Mythical Motors, as well as Prism Shores and Paul Bergmann making their second Pressing Concerns appearances and the debut of Lay Llamas below. Earlier this week, we put up the March 2026 playlist; check it out if you haven’t yet.

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.

Mythical Motors – Tremolo on the Punchline

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Best Brother/Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mass Attraction

Tremolo on the Punchline is the eighth Mythical Motors album I’ve written about in Pressing Concerns (Hello Whirled, currently at nine, is the only one I’m aware of that’s higher). There’s another dozen or so Mythical Motors albums that either predate this blog or I didn’t get around to covering, as they’ve been averaging more than one a year for a minute now. Along the way, Matt Addison’s one-man lo-fi power pop project has become a cult favorite for a certain kind of music fan, the kind that believes that the best pop music in the world came from basements in Dayton, Ohio and Dunedin (a school of thought welcomed at Rosy Overdrive). Despite all this, Mythical Motors have never put any of their music out on vinyl before now–but a couple of Rosy Overdrive mainstays in Repeating Cloud (who’ve put out two Mythical Motors records, Travelogues and Movie Stills and Upside Down World, on cassette) and Best Brother Records have teamed up to press Tremolo on the Punchline, the first Mythical Motors album of 2026 (and their first record of any kind since last October’s The Painted Unseen compilation) on LP.

If Addison felt like he had to approach Tremolo on the Punchline differently than previous digital or cassette-only Mythical Motors releases, it doesn’t sound that way–it’s seventeen songs of exuberant, unflappable guitar pop music combining the angelic vocals of Tobin Sprout with the mysticism of Robert Pollard and a bit of college rock (even occasionally new wave) sheen. Addison sings “The queen of fleeting moments / Will shine for you in time,” in “The Queen of Fleeting Moments” like it’s a life or death situation, which, for all we know, could very well be in Mythical Motors’ native dialect. “The Queen of Fleeting Moments” kicks off my favorite stretch of Tremolo on the Punchline, also featuring the automatic power pop of “Mass Attraction” and jumpy, jangly single “Dismantled Man Tell You”, but I could see just about anything off of this album being the one that resonates with any given listener in particular. Mythical Motors are built to do that, regardless of the format. (Bandcamp link)

Prism Shores – Softest Attack

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Meritorio/Having Fun
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind

At the beginning of last year, the Montreal quintet Prism Shores released Out from Underneath, their second LP and first for Meritorio Records. Guitarist Jack MacKenzie, bassist Ben Goss, drummer Luke Pound, and guitarist Finn Dalbeth revealed themselves as strong practitioners of fuzz-drenched indie pop and college rock, claiming a spot for themselves at a Montreal guitar pop table that’s been impressively crowded as of late. The four of them got back to work almost immediately after Out from Underneath, recording Softest Attack with prolific producer Scott “Monty” Munro (Laughing, Chad VanGaalen, Preoccupations) at Studio St. Zo. It’s a classic leveling-up moment, taking the spirited energy of Out from Underneath and marrying it with larger, more confident hooks and a studio polish designed to accentuate them.

If you’re familiar with Out from Underneath (or with any number of Prism Shores’ Meritorio labelmates), you won’t be surprised to learn that Softest Attack is stuffed with C86 and Flying Nun-influenced power pop and “fuzz pop”; even with that in mind, I was still surprised by how many of these tracks immediately jumped out at me as top-notch examples of the form. We get “Idle Again”, “Gossamer”, and “Resigned to the Fact” in the “foot-on-gas punky indie pop” department, two note-perfect jangle pop/college rock tributes in “Magical Thinking” and “Precarity”, a timeless-sounding rollout of an opening track in “Kid Gloves”, and “I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind”, a massive-sounding, achingly earnest, top-of-the-mountain guitar pop anthem that sounds like a larger version of the most recent (Meritorio-released) Fazed on a Pony album, itself one of the best “power pop” albums of the year so far. Despite the quick turnaround, Softest Attack is an incredibly generous and stacked pop album that sounds anything but rushed (though it is indeed a sugar rush to listen to). (Bandcamp link)

Paul Bergmann – Connecticut Cowboy

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, dreamy-indie-rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Smaller

Towards the beginning of last year, the New Haven singer-songwriter Paul Bergmann released an EP called Long Island Sounds; recorded live with Justin Pizzoferrato at his Sonelab Studio, the six-song EP served as a nice showcase for Bergmann’s current band (bassist Scott Lawrence and drummer Cameron Brown) as well as establishing Bergmann himself as an intriguing artist in the realms of indie, folk rock, and even a bit of post-punk (I compared Long Island Sounds to mid-period The National at the time). Bergmann’s latest record is a seven-song, thirty-four minute album called Connecticut Cowboy, once again recorded with Brown and Lawrence (with extra lead guitar provided by Stephen Heath and organ by Scott Amore, who also engineered the album).

Connecticut Cowboy begins in similar terrain to Long Island Sounds, with “Smaller”, “Vacant Green Eyes” (an alternate version of a song from Bergmann’s 2023 album No Masters in Paradise), and “It” all floating in the ether of gothic-folk-tinged, somewhat fuzzy indie rock. Connecticut Cowboy gets odder from that point forward; I wouldn’t say that Bergmann embraces alt-country to the degree one might expect from the album title, but the angsty gothic country of “West Rock” is new, and “Appalachian Mountains” incorporates a little more obvious folk influence (although it’s still a Paul Bergmann song). Bergmann and his band close out Connecticut Cowboy with back-to-back six minute tracks; “Desert Man” is, like its title evokes, a vast Western psychedelic expanse, while “Blue Light Cowboy” returns to the buttoned-up vibes of the beginning of the LP only to strain and push against them as the song comes to a close. Although it starts to have an “odds and ends” vibe in the second half, Connecticut Cowboy ultimately comes full circle. (Bandcamp link)

Lay Llamas – Time, Islands and Thresholds

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Zel Zele
Genre: Psychedelia, experimental rock, post-rock, dub
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Mystical Journey

Good news, everyone! I’ve got some weird psychedelic stuff for you today. Lay Llamas is Nicola Giunta, an Italian musician who has some pretty impressive bona fides in the realms of experimental and art rock, having collaborated with Can’s Damo Suzuki, The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, and Swedish psych rock group Goat in the past. The latest Lay Llamas record comes to us via the cosmic record label and NTS radio show Zel Zele–Time, Islands and Thresholds is for those who like their “psychedelic rock” to be vast, meandering, full of empty space, and fluent in dub and post-rock. The LP starts with a minimal, transfixing groove in “Up Your Hands in Front the Sun”, and the deconstructed “Surfers’ Black Mass” continues Time, Islands and Thresholds’ path down odd trails. The dusty “Mystical Journey”, with its propulsion, floating keyboards, and vague melodies, feels like a warped lot piece of 60s psychedelia, a trait that describes Time, Islands and Thresholds at its most accessible, relatively speaking (see also “Night Time History” and “Disguise You by Animal” in the album’s second half). These tracks are still fairly odd, but, conversely, there’s something of their friendliness in the strange sections of the album (like the dubby “Island” or the molasses-slow beat of “Bees in the Holy Box”). Everything flows together correctly and seamlessly, which is exactly what you want in a record like Time, Islands and Thresholds. (Bandcamp link)

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