Pressing Concerns: Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, Wade Easy, Chorus Truly

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Hello, and welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, and Wade Easy, and a new EP from Chorus Truly. Check ’em 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.

Sun Kin – Bobby’s Voice

Release date: June 5th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, folk-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Of Some Use

I’ve been a fan of Kabir Kumar and their project Sun Kin ever since 2024’s Sunset World, an excellent art pop album that was one of my favorite LPs from that year. Kumar has been quite busy since then, playing in the band Guppy, co-founding the duo Left Tracks, guesting on the most recent Pacing album, and releasing a Sunset World remix album (Sunrise World, featuring Miracle Sweepstakes, Planet 81, and Pacing) and an ambient one (Painting Whales). Bobby’s Voice is Sun Kin’s return to “pop music”, although it’s a very different animal than the vibrant, apocalyptic Sunset World. This record is actually a “cross-generational collaboration” between Kabir’s father, Rajesh Prakash (“RP”) Kumar; the elder as lyricist and the younger Kumar writing the music and performing vocals. Kiran ‘Bobby’ Kumar was RP’s brother and Kabir’s uncle, who passed away in the Kumars’ native Delhi in 2018. Bobby was unable to speak for most of his life due to a stroke suffered in 1979, and his brother eventually left Bobby behind by moving to New York to raise his own family; Bobby’s Voice is RP’s attempt to tell his brother’s story from the deceased Kumar’s perspective.

The material with which Kabir has been given to work is undeniably difficult, in multiple ways–on the one hand, Bobby’s Voice tackles specific circumstances and situations that I imagine may never have been addressed in “indie pop” before, and, if the lyrics of Bobby’s Voice are a family member attempting to step into another’s shoes, Kabir’s setting them to music and singing them are effectively another level of interpretation. All things considered, the Kumars pull this off admirably–Kabir injects a more subtle, folky sound into these songs than what Sun Kin has been in the past, but it’s still within Kabir’s fairly vast wheelhouse. At the very least, “Of Some Use” (which soundtracks something of a rebirth) is one of Sun Kin’s best pop songs in its own right, and album bookends “Spinning” and “Pyre” pull off a more understated beauty. “Judas” and “ICU”, conversely, are the challenging, meaty centers of Bobby’s Voice that work best when experienced as part of RP and Bobby’s stories rather than on their own. That’s certainly not a knock on the quality of those songs, just an example of how Sun Kin was able to evolve into something new to fit this new, unique direction. It was not the Sun Kin album I would’ve expected after Sunset World, but I’m glad Bobby’s Voice came into existence nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

National Photo Committee – Red Hot Photo Committee

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Alt-country, fuzz rock, country rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Before the Feeling’s Gone

Oh boy, another fuzzy alt-country rock band from Chicago who’ve garnered David Berman comparisons? Well, let’s just see about that. To be fair, National Photo Committee didn’t come out of nowhere–their first EP, Songs About Sticks & Rocks, came out in May 2021, back when MJ Lenderman was still a hidden blog-rock gem. Their debut LP, Red Hot Photo Committee, has been a while in the making–you can hear some of these songs in their initial forms in the 2023 live tape Live Nude Photo Committee–but I’m happy to report that the first proper album from the group (led by vocalist/guitarist Maxwell Bottner and featuring some combination of pedal steel player Henry Moskal, bassist Will Carr, and drummer Jason Shapiro) was worth the gestation time.

I’m doing my best not to crib entirely from the bio Reed Jackson penned for Ever/Never, but it’s not my fault that his main thesis–basically, what if Ryan Davis’ old band State Champion was led by a Calvin Johnson type instead of a more explicit Berman acolyte from Kentucky–is pretty accurate to what Red Hot Photo Committee sounds like. Moskal is compelling and clever, of course, but the reason I enjoyed this album at first is because so much of it (particularly early highlights “If I Wait”, “Before the Feeling’s Gone”, and “It’s Hard”) genuinely country-rocks. National Photo Committee use the momentum they build in the record’s first half to hurdle headfirst into twin behemoths in the eleven-minute Crazy Horse tribute “Gizzard” and “Adelaide”, a seven-minute song begging to be labeled as a “barnburner”, “ripper”, and so forth. It’s not often that a debut album is willing and able to take us to such places, but Red Hot Photo Committee isn’t precisely an ordinary debut album. (Bandcamp link)

Wade Easy – Sea of Night

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, lo-fi folk, psychedelia, Appalachian Gothic
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Dead Moons

I don’t know much about Wade Easy beyond the singer-songwriter’s current whereabouts (Morgantown, West Virginia) and the few details he gives in this recent interview. Is “Wade Easy” even his real name? We can only hope so. Either way, Easy made his debut last year with an album called Sleeping with the Sun On, and the second Wade Easy album, Sea of Night, has arrived mere months after the first one. Everything on this eleven-song, thirty-eight minute album was recorded by Easy himself, and the entirety of Sea of Night is devoted to building a singular, striking ambience. Easy’s signature sound is a hushed, molasses-slow, Appalachian-shaded, “atmospheric” and “gothic” one. It’s electric, but I don’t know if I’d call it “rock” music. If early Songs: Ohia is “folk music” than I suppose that Sea of Night is too, but there’s a hazy, psychedelic side to Wade Easy that was never really the style of Jason Molina (Easy’s vocals, delivered in more or less a whisper, are another key difference). I don’t particularly feel like calling out specific tracks for this one, because it matters less here–from the moment the blurry “Where the River Sinks” starts to come into focus (but never fully doing so), Sea of Night is one, long, black piece. Sort of like the ocean at night. (Bandcamp link)

Chorus Truly – Is As Real As You Are

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Gentle Reminder/Home Late
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Your Name

Chorus Truly is a new project from Zo Talkin, a St. Louis-based musician who, in a different life, played in a bunch of underground Philadelphia bands like Mint, Dolly, Cabbage, Prob No, and Fire Roast. Resurfacing in the Midwest, Talkin assembled a supergroup of sorts with Martin Meyer (Lumpy and the Dumpers, Soup Activists, Rotten Apple Records) on drums, Pete Millar (BB Eye) and Mikey Crotty (Ratboys, Dowsing) on guitars, and TJ Pearson (Carte de Visite) on bass. On Chorus Truly’s first proper EP, Is As Real As You Are, Talkin and their collaborators make snappy, polished guitar pop with bits of college rock, jangle pop, and power pop in the mixture. Talkin’s confident, centered vocals separate Chorus Truly from a lot of modern college rock-influenced bands; there’s more than a bit of the classic Pretenders sound in these six songs. Everything on Is As Real As You Are is decidedly pop music, but the smooth-sailing jangly indie pop of opening track “Your Name” is the “hit” if I’ve ever heard one; the rest of the EP remains propulsive, but there’s a more melancholy streak to “Talk About It” and “Body” and more restraint is given to “Ways of a Child” and “Set Aside”. A very promising and likeable debut, all things considered. (Bandcamp link)

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