Pressing Concerns: Smug Brothers, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Tall Friend, U.S. Highball

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Welcome to the Thursday blog post! It features new albums from Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Tall Friend, and U.S. Highball, and a new compilation from Smug Brothers. Also, the April 2026 playlist went up on Monday, so check that out too 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.

Smug Brothers – Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall

Release date: May 15th
Record label: Best Brother/Anyway
Genre: Power pop, 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hang Up

I’ve enjoyed writing about the long-running Dayton, Ohio indie rock group Smug Brothers for the majority of this blog’s existence–I’ve featured one of their records on this blog every year since 2022, and I expect them to have another new one out before this year is over. However, the band (led by vocalist/guitarist Kyle Melton and currently featuring drummer Don Thrasher, bassist Kyle Sowash, and guitarist Ryan Shaffer) has been around for much longer than Rosy Overdrive has, initially emerging in the mid-2000s with their sometimes lo-fi, sometimes post-punk take on Guided by Voices-esque guitar pop. They’ve amassed quite the discography in two decades, and a new compilation called Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall does an admirable job of taking us through the world of Smug Brothers.

The vinyl version of Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall is a clean thirteen-song survey of the band’s oeuvre, from recent highlights I’ve written about previously (“Javelina Nowhere” from 2024’s Another Bar Behind the Night EP, “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” from 2023’s In the Book of Bad Ideas) to songs from the earliest days of Smug Brothers like “Interior Magnets” (from the 2011 album Fortune Rumors) and “It Was Hard to Be a Team Last Night” (from 2014’s On the Way to the Punchline). It’s hardly surprising that Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall is uniformly comprised of very strong power pop-adjacent indie rock, given that Smug Brothers’ non-“best of” LPs can also be described that way, but that doesn’t make the digging up of mid-to-late 2010s hits like “It Was Hard to Be a Team Last Night” and “Hang Up” (from Disco Maroon, the first Smug Brothers album I ever heard) any less worthwhile. I haven’t even really delved into the thirty-one song CD edition of Gravity Is Just a Way to Fall (using every bit of those eighty minutes), but I recognize several more great ones from the tracklist. For any new bands out there looking for inspiration: here’s a band who methodically and humbly built something massive, to the point where their retrospective has to leave out plenty of worthy material. Something to strive for! (Bandcamp link)

Touch Girl Apple Blossom – Graceful

Release date: May 15th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Heart-Go

A couple of years ago, a quartet from Austin called Touch Girl Apple Blossom started gaining some buzz on the strength of their debut record; it made my list of favorite EPs from 2023, where I called it “vintage C86-inspired jangly guitar pop through and through”. Plenty of others took notice–perhaps it was due to the Beat Happening reference in their name, but K Records (alongside their sibling label Perennial) signed the band to put out their debut LP, Graceful. Combine that with a recent tour alongside fellow jangly buzz band Good Flying Birds and there are plenty of reasons for the wider indie rock world to start paying attention to Olivia Garner, John Morales, Dustin Pilkington, and Daniel Charles Powell. I’ve long since given up on trying to guess whether or not any given act will get that level of notoriety, but those who do check them out will find a confident, infectious, and more-than-ready-for-primetime collection of indie pop songs.

As opening track “Tell” chimes along, I’m already prepared to declare Graceful heavenly–by that, I mean that the combination of jangly guitars and twee, centered vocals from Garner reminds me of indie pop legends and K Records alumni Heavenly. Like a lot of the best of these kinds of records, Graceful is a whirlwind that only kind of slows down in the midsection (with the pastoral/lightly psychedelic “You Made Me Do It” and the Pilkington-sung “Moon Was Gone”) before revving its engines once again as the B-side begins (hit it, “Heart-Go”!). The whole thing is rock solid, but I feel the need to applaud the closing stretch of Graceful; penultimate track “I’m Lucky I Found You”, with its Beatlesy melody and lackadaisical attitude, will appeal to those who enjoy the stylings of Sharp Pins (another K band!), while closing track “Big Star” takes its jangle on a fast and propulsive journey at which the rest of the LP didn’t really hint. And they’re off into the sunset with pedal firmly pressed down. (Bandcamp link)

Tall Friend – Fossil

Release date: May 15th
Record label: Window Sill
Genre: Folk rock, bedroom rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Laughing Gull

The Bandcamp page for their new album, Fossil, says that the Boston group Tall Friend “has never been driven by industry momentum or ambition”. I’m sure plenty of bands say that, but the nine year gap in between the first and second Tall Friend albums is pretty undeniable proof that they’re moving on their own time. To be sure, though, Tall Friend frontperson River Pfaff had his reasons for disappearing for a bit–namely, he began medically transitioning shortly after 2017’s Exploding in Sound-released Safely Nobody’s, an undertaking he decided to undergo “privately”. Fossil was actually recorded mostly in 2018 before Pfaff’s transition, but the complexity of such a huge personal shift led him to shelve the album for nearly a decade. After testosterone began to affect his voice, Pfaff added some backing vocals to these songs, an interesting wrinkle for an album that feels drawn from a different time in more ways than one.

Fossil sounds very much like 2018, feeling at home in that era’s folky, lo-fi, twee indie rock movement led by the likes of Frankie Cosmos, Free Cake for Every Creature, and Gabby’s World. Like Safely Nobody’s, it’s a short listen, wrapping up eleven songs in under a half-hour. It’s a rock album in which Pfaff, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Paller, bassist Cale Cuellar, and guitarist Jeremy Ray do indeed get loud on occasion, but never to the point of taking away the intimacy of Pfaff’s writing. “83” and “Rock Collection” are clear enough to let the key lines sink in (I do want to see your rock collection, thank you for asking). “Going to Hell” and the sixty-second lead single “Laughing Gall” could both genuinely be called “jaunty”, and the title track is a math/emo-y (mostly) instrumental. Tall Friend’s decision to preserve and eventually display Fossil out of time is one that’s paid off; it might be even stronger today. (Bandcamp link)

U.S. Highball – God Save the Kelvin Wheelies

Release date: May 15th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Peter’s Parade

I believe that God Save the Kelvin Wheelies is the fifth album from Glasgow indie pop duo U.S. Highball. James Hindle and Calvin Halliday have been a reliable source for the stuff since 2019, always zipping through quick-tempoed but bittersweet, drum machine-led guitar pop. Lame-O Records pointed out that it’s their first LP in three years–that surprised me, I didn’t realize that No Thievery, Just Cool came out back in 2023–but the uncharacteristic time away hasn’t dampened U.S. Highball’s pop songwriting. Featuring vocal harmonies from members of The Ladybug Transistor, Slaughter Beach, Dog, Sassyhiya, and Hurry (whose Matt Scottoline also contributes some bass), God Save the Kelvin Wheelies nonetheless keeps the focus on Hindle and Halliday’s simple melodies. Titular phrases like “Copenhagen Chemistry” and “A Parkhead Cross of the Mind” (no, I’m not sure why it shares a title with a 2022 U.S. Highball album that doesn’t feature that particular song) become unavoidable earworms, and little details like the harpsichord in “Topsy-Turvey”, the synth-leaning “Falling Out of Favor”, and whatever that cartoonish sound effect is in the opening track stick out among the relatively barebones indie pop backgrounds. It’s always nice to hear new U.S. Highball music, and God Save the Kelvin Wheelies keeps their standard high.

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