Pressing Concerns: Christina’s Trip / Mox / Natasha Sandworms, Chevreuil, Casual Technicians, Jack Shields & The Mojave Rush

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Welcome to a “Monday” Pressing Concerns, this time actually on a Tuesday due to the U.S. holiday weekend (hope everyone in the States had a nice Memorial Day, and a nice Monday to the rest of us). Today we have new albums from Chevreuil, Casual Technicians, and Jack Shields & The Mojave Rush, plus a split EP between Christina’s Trip, Mox, and Natasha Sandworms. Check them out below!

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.

Christina’s Trip / Mox / Natasha Sandworms – Lucky Three

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Fuzz pop, dream pop, lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, indie pop, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bird of My Life

One of my favorite debut albums of 2024 was Forever After, the first LP from the Oakland fuzzy indie pop group Christina’s Trip; it was one of the more pop-forward albums I’d heard from San Francisco experimental shoegaze label Cherub Dream Records, and I mentioned The Spinanes, Velocity Girl, and K Records as influences. Two years after Forever After, Christina’s Trip has teamed up with two like-minded north/central California groups in Mox (a Merced-based project led by Mox Hamright) and Natasha Sandworms (led by San Jose’s Natasha Sandborn) to release a six-song split EP called Lucky Three. The three acts share a fair bit of overlap in their sounds–all of them can be described as distorted pop music inspired by 90s indie rock, more or less–but these six tracks are more than enough to get a picture of three distinct emerging artists. 

For their part, Christina’s Trip offers up a sugary fuzz-pop song that could’ve fit right on Forever After (“F.B.A.T.”) and one song that looks beyond their debut (“Sweep Me”, a clearer embrace of shoegaze walls of sound without dropping the pop hooks). If you’re a fan of the greyscale, slowcore/shoegaze-indebted “bedroom lo-fi indie rock” records that populated the 2010s, then you’ll appreciate Mox’s first contribution, “Scared”, but “Leaving” (which closes the EP) shows a softer, acoustic-based lo-fi pop side to the project, as well. Natasha Sandworms might be the hardest of the three to get a handle on, but that’s a compliment in this case–“Bird of My Life”, with its propulsive drumbeat, Liz Phair frontperson performance, and shimmering guitars, might be the most brilliant pop song on Lucky Three, but “Perfect Feeling” is a more restrained version of their sound, putting the vocals a little further back in the mix. In both songs, though, Sandborn’s vocals are the star of the show no matter where they’re placed in comparison to the instruments. I feel fairly confident that all three of these acts are worth watching after Lucky Three. (Bandcamp link)

Chevreuil – Stadium

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Computer Students
Genre: Math rock, post-rock, experimental rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mortalis

The French duo Chevreuil is guitarist Tony Chauvin and drummer Julien Fernandez, who came together in 1998 and went on to release several records’ worth of instrumental math and noise rock over the next decade (three of which were recorded by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio). After 2006’s Capoëira, though, Chevreuil stopped putting out new music, and when Chauvin and Fernandez reconvened in early 2025 to plan reissuing their older material on the latter’s Computer Students record label, they hadn’t played together in fifteen years. Quickly, however, the duo fell back into their old chemistry and instead made a brand new hour-long double album called Stadium. Recorded live in January of last year at Chauvin’s Nantes-based Retroengineering studio, Stadium is a towering instrumental rock record that introduces Chauvin’s new “reconfigured guitar” with a “hybrid electro-acoustic engine capable of generating electronic timbres”.

At its heaviest, Stadium is in line with math rock/noise rock groups that Computer Students has reissued in recent years like Cheval de Frise, Big’n, and Lynx (not to mention Shellac, clearly an influence on Chevreuil both as musicians and engineers). Chevreuil work hard to fill in all the empty space as a duo; Fernandez’s drumming is frenetic, erratic, and vying with the guitar for the centerpiece of the record more often than not. The two make so much noise that introducing the electronic capabilities of Chauvin’s guitar almost seems unfair–leading to moments where Stadium is about as far away from “rock duo” as Chevreuil can get with their tools. “Plexus” and “Magnus” are more or less “math rock songs” with electronic elements, while it’s hard to imagine what “Theorus Macrocosmus” or “Atoll II” would’ve even sounded like in a more traditional arrangement. Chauvin and Fernandez may have been able to plug back into Chevreuil after a decade and a half away, but Stadium is not so much a straight-up continuation of their previous work as something more expansive and entirely new. (Computer Students link)

Casual Technicians – Well Once There Was a King

Release date: May 15th
Record label: Historic New Jersey
Genre: Psychedelic pop, folk pop, psychedelic folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: A Higher Power

Back in 2024, a strange psychedelic folk-pop trio named the Casual Technicians released two albums on blog favorite Repeating Cloud Records–a self-titled one in March, and Deeply Unworthy in November. Those albums had more than their fair share of Elephant 6-style “warped Beach Boys” pop music, but it was delivered in the casual package of three geographically far-flung friends meeting up to create something together. Nathan Baumgartner, Boone Howard and Tyler Keene (aka Log Across the Washer) have returned after a year and a half with a third Casual Technicians LP called Well Once There Was a King, recorded between the band members’ stations of southwest Oregon and Essex County, New Jersey and released on their new label home of Historic New Jersey (Star Moles, Thank You Thank You, Rubber Band Gun).

Well Once There Was a King continues the strong streak that Casual Technicians began with their first two albums; all three members take their turns in the spotlight as they practice a folky, homespun, laid-back version of indie pop. If anything, Well Once There Was a King is the Casual Technicians at their most “chill” yet; not that new age and soft rock haven’t been part of their sound before, but it’s a bit closer to the forefront in these tracks. At twenty-four songs and nearly an hour in length, it’s easy to get lost in Well Once There Was a King, especially as one conjures up a remote Pacific Northwestern outpost like the one suggested by the album artwork. Casual Technicians have been greater than the sum of their parts for a while now, but it’s still very heartening to hear how committed Howard, Keene, and Baumgartner remain to building their weird little world several albums into it. (Bandcamp link)

Jack Shields & The Mojave Rush – Avalanche Hour

Release date: May 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Country rock, alt-country, fuzz rock, Americana
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: In the Alpine

Jack Shields is a ringer–the Los Angeles-based musician plays guitar in the Montana-originating folk rock group Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners, and he’s spent time in Nashville doing the “aspiring country music singer-songwriter” thing. Shields also had a collection of songs lying around for a while that didn’t quite fit with his other pursuits, the origins of which go back to his time working in central California as a ski lift operator during the pandemic. Recorded “quickly in the gaps between tours”, Avalanche Hour is an intriguing album that was clearly made by a country musician, but one who’s channeled his songwriting into distorted guitars and a gritty, electric sound (it’s almost like an…“alternative” kind of country?). Avalanche Hour’s opening trio of rockers lean heavily on fuzzed-out instrumentation and ragged performances–my favorite moment on the album, “In the Alpine”, is an atmospheric, dark alt-country song with a massive hook nonetheless. There’s a desperation as Avalanche Hour advances into fumbling, distorted country-rock songs like “Eat the Blame” and “Cull the Fleet”, and even the relatively bright music of “My Poor Mind” is clouded by despair. I hear a lot of music that could be described as “distorted indie rock band messing around with country”; I think part of why I like Avalanche Hour is because it’s effectively the other way around, and this leads to some unique moments. (Bandcamp link)

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