Pressing Concerns: Teen Suicide, Bullseye, Frog, Gawshock

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Hey folks! Brand new Pressing Concerns! New albums from Teen Suicide, Frog, and Gawshock, and an EP from Bullseye. Check’ em out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Sacred Heart Academy, Market, Black Beach, and Cashier), 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.

Teen Suicide – Nude descending staircase headless

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Fuzzy indie rock, art rock, alt-rock, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Suffering (Mike’s Way)

The narrative’s there for the taking when it comes to Nude descending staircase headless, the latest from Sam and Kitty Ray’s Teen Suicide project. After Sam spent the 2010s making his band nearly synonymous with that decade’s strain of “lo-fi indie rock”, this is the first studio-recorded Teen Suicide album (Mike Sapone, who’s been at the controls for many successful post-hardcore and pop punk albums, recorded it). It’s “accessible” in its willingness to embrace bowling ball alt-rock and, occasionally, big pop hooks. It’s a full-fledged comeback after Sam and Kitty both dealt with physical illnesses at the beginning of this decade, returning to an audience that has only grown thanks to the eternal appeal of lo-fi, opaque, challenging indie rock music with “the youths”. With Nude descending staircase headless, Teen Suicide make a bid to join their more polished peers, the ones against which Sam Ray had been content to position himself as a scrappy underdog in the past. 

The effort that Sam and Kitty Ray put into sharpening up Nude descending staircase headless (title comes from a David Berman poem, of course) is quite impressive, and it’ll probably be one of my most listened-to Ray-related records for this reason. It’s when we get to track three, “Suffering (Mike’s Way)”, when it becomes apparent just how successful Teen Suicide can be at making straight-up power pop, and, with “Spider”, Nude descending staircase headless establishes a more sustainable way for an “accessible Teen Suicide album” to sound. To be clear, though, we are still talking about a band called Teen Suicide here, one founded and co-led by one of the most divisive and chaotic figures in the last decade of indie rock. I have to thank “Everything in My Life Is Perfect” for not letting me totally lose track of who I’m dealing with, here (that song begins with “The day Luca Magnota got arrested / I was getting head outside of Denny’s / A new folk hero for the nihilists”, sung like the most wounded Will Sheff performance). Even after a few grunge-gaze instrumentals in the middle of the record, Nude descending staircase headless ends with some classically odd Teen Suicide recordings (“Hypnotic Poison” and its noise pop overload, the acoustic psychedelia of “Kindnesses”, and the epilogue “Come and See the Clown”). It all just happens to be a lot more clear this time around. (Bandcamp link)

Bullseye – Bullseye

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Angel’s Share

We’re getting some good old-fashioned guitar pop from the eclectic New York label Ever/Never Records (Workers Comp, Split Apex, Garden of Love). Their latest signee is Bullseye, a Brooklyn band with roots in Minnesota and Texas who’ve followed up four-song EPs in 2024 and 2025 with a self-titled six-song EP (the CD edition comes with six more bonus tracks, apparently). Beginning in 2020 as the solo project of guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Jake Barczak, Bullseye are now a solid quartet featuring guitarist Oliver Ohaver, drummer Humberto, and bassist Clara, and their Ever/Never debut is a compelling mix of power pop, garage rock, roots rock, college rock, and 90s indie rock that sounds like a band still in touch with Texas and Minnesota alt-rock/punk history. 

Jangly guitars, “slacker rock” vocals, and a winning power pop chorus greet us in opening track “Angel’s Share”, a declaration that Bullseye isn’t beating around the bush when it comes to crafting guitar pop hooks. “Blue Eyes Blue” features just a touch of Dinosaur Jr./Meat Puppets-y rootsiness without taking too hard of a left turn away from the opener (we’re in Late Bloomer territory here), and “Dangers of the Heart” bravely tries to find middle ground between Elvis Costello and Pavement (it also sounds a little alt-country). “Papillyou Papillons” and “Kid” close out the “proper” part of Bullseye with a pair of vintage power pop throwbacks, both making great use of power chords and meandering vocals that nonetheless get it together for the hook. I haven’t heard all the bonus tracks, but “Tell Tale Signs” is jangly college rock at its finest and “Everything Is True” has a Guided by Voices-style melancholy to it, both indicating that Bullseye have an excess of worthy material with which to work. With this record, Ever/Never have really hit the…jackpot. (Bandcamp link)

Frog – Frog for Sale

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Tapewormies
Genre: Indie pop, piano pop, folk-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Max von Side-Eye

Breaking news: Frog are back with their fourth album in under three years, and their eighth overall. Ever since the New Rochelle, New York duo of Daniel Bateman (vocals and most instruments) and Steve Bateman (drums) returned from a hiatus in 2023 with Grog, they’ve been hard at work pumping out their distinctive mixture of prominent pianos, falsetto vocals, and bedroom pop hooks evoking everything from Alex G to hip hop to classic country to 70s singer-songwriter LPs. After getting progressively wonkier and weirder with their twin 2025 albums, Frog for Sale is probably their most immediate album since the hit parade of Grog; the highs hit in these dozen songs are ample assurance that Frog aren’t running out of steam in the middle of their stride. The toe-tapping, nearly twee “Bad Time to Fall in Love Again” and the R&B organs of “Best Buy” ease us into Frog for Sale by leaning on what the Batemans do best, and the exuberant “Dark Out” and the surprising acoustic yarn of “Yonder This Way Comes” knock it right out of the park from that tee-up. It really can’t be emphasized enough how excitable, bouncy, and upbeat Frog come off on “Max von Side-Eye”, “All the Things You Get”, and “Je Ne Sai Pas”. Their most recent album, The Count, was confident in its oddness and eccentricities; Frog for Sale is confident too, cocky but friendly enough that it’s hard not to be taken with it anyway. Frog continue to feel themselves on Frog for Sale, and it’s pretty contagious. (Bandcamp link)

Gawshock – Leaves to the Sun

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Patchwork
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Heat Lightning

Gawshock began in 2021 as the bedroom pop/lo-fi indie rock project of Huntsville, Alabama musician and aerospace engineer David Broome, quickly releasing three albums of chilly, greyscale indie rock in four years (2021’s Friendship 7, 2023’s Gawshock, and 2024’s Unless If). Broome cites classic 90s folk/slowcore acts like Idaho and Acetone as well as the delicate underground pop music of Sparklehorse as influences, and the fourth Gawshock LP, Leaves to the Sun, bears this out. It’s a brief record, around twenty-five minutes long, but Gawshock don’t hurry through these eleven songs. “Brighter Hue” sets the tone with a slow-moving, deliberate, and intricate piece of Mark Linkous-inspired indie rock, and the lilting, warm title track is Broome’s version of a “rocker”. “Heat Lightning” is Gawshock’s turn at electric, crawling, empty-space slowcore a la Bedhead, while “Everything I Want” and “What Do You Dream About” lean a bit more on acoustic instruments and subsequently explore the folkier side of slowcore. Like a lot of this kind of music, Leaves to the Sun enters and exits the picture quietly, but there’s plenty to appreciate upon returning to it (in the second half, the dreamy “Great Outdoors” and the sharp “Still Shining” currently stick out to me). There is, in its own way, a lot of beauty in Leaves to the Sun.

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