Pressing Concerns: Sacred Heart Academy, Market, Black Beach, Cashier

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We’ve got new EPs from Sacred Heart Academy and Cashier and new LPs from Market and Black Beach in the Monday Pressing Concerns! Check them out below!

We’ll be back on Thursday.

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.

Sacred Heart Academy – Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP

Release date: March 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, bedroom pop, folk rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Give It a Little More Time

Eilee and Evren Centeno are a sibling duo from North Carolina who’ve appeared on the blog before thanks to their record label, Trash Tape Records, which has released albums from Tombstone Poetry, Hill View #73, and Rain Recordings (the latter of which is also co-led by Evren). Lately, both of them have moved from Chapel Hill to Chicago, where they started making music together as Sacred Heart Academy sometime around late 2024 or early 2025, leading to shows in North Carolina and Chicago, a three-song Christmas EP, and Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP, the group’s first record (that isn’t just them singing Christmas classics, I mean). Sacred Heart Academy have added two new members in recent times, but Oh Good! is almost entirely the work of the Centenos; they both sing, play various instruments, and Evren engineered and mixed it (except for the drums on “Give It a Little More Time”, where the third co-founder of Trash Tape, Nathan McMurray, stepped in to engineer them).

Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP is an instantly likeable six-song introduction; these songs are all great, and the Centenos both establish themselves as compelling bandleaders. Evren is the “slacker”-adjacent alt-country/folk rocker, landing somewhere between their home state hero MJ Lenderman and Windy City pop tinkerer Noah Roth, and they’re countered nicely by a more openly expressive/heart-on-sleeve performance from Eilee (they both get three songs, and they both establish impressive range within them). They don’t come off as guitar pop-history nerds like some of their Chicago peers, but there’s a Hallogallo/New Now-like power pop undercurrent on some of the material, particularly “You Will Never Be That Free” and “Give It a Little More Time”, the EP’s two “hits”. I was lucky enough to catch one of those early Sacred Heart Academy shows, and I came away from it looking forward to hear the alt-country/power pop anthem of “Give It a Little More Time” on-record; it doesn’t disappoint, ending up one of the best pop songs I’ve heard this year. Despite Evren leading that one, they also helm the quietest moments on the album, “Piece of My Heart” and “Free Fallin’ II” (the former makes great use of Eilee’s clarinet and the latter, which reminds me of an old Okkervil River ballad, lives up to its title). The lo-fi pop of the Eilee-led “4,5 Seconds” and “Chicago” feels notably distinct from the Evren-led folk rock tracks, but there’s enough overlap to make Oh Good! work, and, more importantly, both members sound on the same page and in-sync no matter which “side” of their sound they’re exploring. (Bandcamp link)

Market – Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Western Vinyl
Genre: Art pop, art rock, synth-rock, sophisti-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Visitors

I wrote about Brooklyn musician Nate Mendelsohn and his project Market in late 2024, when he released his fourth album, Well I Asked You a Question. I called it a “relaxed but intricate art pop album”, built from soft rock, indie folk, chamber pop, and psychedelia. A year and change later, Mendelsohn released the fifth Market album, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies. A digital-only record released fairly quietly, it’d be easy to miss Cleanliness 2 even if it wasn’t seemingly committed to being a much more low-key album sonically than its predecessor. Although once again featuring many frequent Mendelsohn collaborators (Stephen Becker, Katie von Schleicher, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish, among others), Mendelsohn’s voice on Cleanliness 2 is often accompanied by little more than minimal synths and percussion. It feels like a “bedroom pop” album in how it pulls together pop, electronic, and even R&B into an assuming but transfixing package.

The vibrant, bizarre art pop of opening track “The Visitors” is classic Market, although Cleanliness 2 mostly declines to make itself as busy as it is in that one. A good portion of Cleanliness 2 is actually percusionless, giving songs like “Tripping Wire”, “Neighbor”, and “Fuck Famous People” trippy suspended-in-amber feelings. The pop rock second half of “Yenylpines” and the piano ballad “40 Years” change things up a bit in on the album’s B-side, as does Mendelsohn’s ceding of the lead vocals to Rose Droll in “Church”. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of Cleanliness 2, but I do keep returning to it. Part of that has to do with some memorable train-of-thought lines from Mendelsohn (“I’m a hetero man, but I’ve got feelings though / What a novel idea like forty years ago” from “40 Years”, “You ate the sticker right off of the apple / I mean who does that when you’re upset?” from “Tripping Wire”), but the non-lyrical choices are just as baffling and intriguing. (Bandcamp link)

Black Beach – Mail Thief

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Best Brother
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Something Sinister

The Boston noise rock trio Black Beach have been around for a decade now–they put out LPs in 2016 and 2019, along with a handful of EPs, most recently Giallo in 2021. Mail Thief is the long-awaited third LP from the group (bassist Steve Instasi, guitarist/vocalist Ben Semeta, and drummer Ryan Nicholson) and their first for the (relatively) new high-batting-average New England label Best Brother (Rick Rude, Hallelujah the Hills, Be Safe). Continuing to take their cues from classic early noise rock, Mail Thief is a bleak, dark-sounding post-punk record; it’s like Meat Wave minus the garage rock side, or if Pissed Jeans tried to make a record of “dirges”. These eight songs and thirty-two minutes aren’t all that linked to the modern “post-punk” revival, though I’m sure they can be enjoyed by fans of Protomartyr and whichever British band is currently getting accolades for cribbing from the Touch & Go catalog.

“Something Sinister” and “Broken Glass” start Mail Thief with competing definitions of “dour”; the former is a circling-the-drain post-hardcore song somewhere along the Unwound-FACS axis, while the latter continues the Birthday Party-Cramps-Swans tradition of dark gothic-country in their post-punk. If you’re starting to get depressed, fear not, because there’s some fun stuff in Mail Thief’s mid-section–“Dream Shake” has a nice Stuck-ish garage-post-punk bent to it, “Secret World”, quite nearly an anthem, sounds like U2 from hell, and “Psychic War” is a surprisingly straightforward trip into dance-punk. I’m not even really sure what to categorize “Parking Garage” as, but that’s one for the art punk weirdos, for sure. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, making greyscale music with a vibrant streak, but Mail Thief is a very good example of how to make it work. (Bandcamp link)

Cashier – The Weight

Release date: March 13th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, alt-rock, fuzz rock, noise punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Same Mistakes

Cashier are a new grunge-gaze quartet out of Lafayette, Louisiana, led by vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Kylie Gaspard and rounded out by guitarist Joseph Perillo, bassist Austyn Wood, and drummer Zachary Derouen. A handful of singles in 2023 and 2024 led to the group signing with Philadelphia label Julia’s War and recording their debut EP, The Weight, in Lafayette with engineer Chad Viator (who co-produced the record with the band). Julia’s War has, in recent years, established themselves as the vanguard of the abrasive, confrontational, and experimental extremes of what can still be called “shoegaze” (aided by their founding band, They Are Gutting a Body of Water), so it’s nice to see that they can still appreciate a good shoegaze-pop group when they hear them.

Cashier have more in common with mainstream 90s alt-rock like The Smashing Pumpkins or even punky indie rock like Dinosaur Jr. than the do with the “ethereal”. “A Curse I Know So Well” kicks off The Weight with a polished mess, lumbering and tumbling through killer riffs and jerky tempos; in “Like I Do” and “Part from Me”, Cashier embrace full-on heavy, distorted pop rock hooks. After a screeching interlude called “For I Never Knew You” (there’s the Julia’s War we all know and love), Cashier fit in one more grunge-pop anthem (“Same Mistakes”) before the eighteen-minute EP closes with the title track, the closest thing to “pure” shoegaze on the record. Cashier slow the tempo down just a little bit on “The Weight”; if anything, this shines an even greater spotlight on their pop writing. It’s a warmly familiar debut from a band that sounds greater than the sum of their parts. (Bandcamp link)

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