Pressing Concerns: Fire Man, NAYAN, Lovewell, The Hobknobs

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In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got new albums from Fire Man, Lovewell, and The Hobknobs, and a new EP from NAYAN. Check them out below!

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Fire Man – How to Erase Everything

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: How to Erase Everything

I’ve written about Fire Man, the New York-based punk project of Caio Brentar (vocals/guitar/bass) and Kiyoshi Chinzei (drums), a few times now. 2023’s Yerself Is Fire was a weird and exciting noise rock record in the vein of early oddball SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Touch & Go Records bands, while the warfare-inspired Territorial Conquest 2024 EP took things in a notably heavier direction. The newest Fire Man album, How to Erase Everything, represents yet another sonic shift for Fire Man, this time into something more restrained and less overtly “hardcore/noise rock”-inspired. Brentar and Chinzei are still punks by trade, to be sure, but they temper their sound with everything from folk punk to college rock to dance punk to even ska-punk (on “Newspaper”).

“I Still Believe” is an energetic opening track, but Fire Man choose to kick off How to Erase Everything with something a little closer to skate punk or early/proto-“pop punk” than their more typical noise rock fare. The dynamic “Marry You” explores 90s Dischord post-hardcore structures for an appropriately nervous song, and by the time we get to the acoustic “Kosciuszko Bridge” and the fist-pumping, emo-influenced anthem “Dylan the Swimmer”, How to Erase Everything has wandered pretty far from what I think of when I think about the “Fire Man sound”. An impressively consistent album, I may actually prefer the second side of How to Erase Everything, and the surprises keep coming with the aforementioned “Newspaper”, the dance-punk “Move to Queens” (which takes a stand against the titular activity), and the emo/post-punk grand finale of the title track. Whether or not How to Erase Everything is Fire Man’s best LP yet is an open question, but the duo have accomplished something new and impressive for them here nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

NAYAN – In the Dirt

Release date: May 22nd
Record label: Red Stapler
Genre: Power pop, heartland rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Blind Horse

It was two years ago that I heard the debut album from NAYAN, the latest project from Washington, D.C. indie rock veteran Nayan Bhula. I called Rock N Roll Ruined My Life “bombastic, wide-scale indie rock” that displayed its Bruce Springsteen influence openly; it may not be what one thinks of when they hear “D.C. indie rock”, but NAYAN proved to be quite deft at it. Two years later, NAYAN have pared down to a quartet (Bhula, Mike Nilsson, Eddie Fuentes, and Andrew Gabor) and have returned with a six-song EP called In the Dirt, recorded by J. Robbins at his Magpie Cage Recording Studio. In the Dirt is nothing less than an extremely vigorous, open-hearted rock and roll record bearing the mark of longtime musicians doing it purely for the love of the genre. Opening track “Blind Horse” and “Hit the Pavement” are brilliant, surging anthems, foot-on-gas moments buoyed by the horn-aided “Right Thing to Do” and tempered by surprising left turns like the art rock journey of “End of the Daydream Nation” and the aptly-titled closing track “Dark Times”, in which NAYAN let just a little bit of Dischord-style post-punk creep into their sound. NAYAN have once again displayed the full range of their sound, but they impressively do it in a more compact package with In the Dirt. (Bandcamp link)

Lovewell – Everything You Ever Wanted

Release date: June 12th
Record label: Financial/Another Year
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, dream pop, emo
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Make Me Whole

Towards the end of 2022 I first heard Lovewell, a New England (Massachusetts and New Hampshire)-based duo of former hardcore/metal musicians who’d “graduated” into the world of “shoegaze-y, dream-y, emo-ish indie rock” (as I called Around the Flowers at the time). Aside from a couple of non-album singles, Everything You Wanted is Lovewell’s first new music since Around the Flowers, and it finds the founding duo of Mark Palladino and Joe Bradshaw welcoming new members Bobby Pettigrew and Jake Watkins into the band. Rather than shaking up their sound, these new recruits seem to have fallen right into lockstep with the sublime, hook-driven emo-dream-gaze sound that Palladino and Bradshaw do so well. Few bands are doing the “delicate, crystal-clear vocal melodies mixed with fuzzed-out, gas-pedal-driven punk/alt-rock instrumentals” thing better than Lovewell right now; just in the first half, they churn out guitar pop anthems like “Gloaming”, “Make Me Whole”, and “Want to Bloom” like it’s second-nature for them. Everything You Wanted is an unflagging collection–“Overflow”, the record’s “ballad”, is probably the closest thing to a deviation from Lovewell’s bread and butter, and even that one swoons into a satisfying finale. Four years and two new band members later, Lovewell are as fixated as ever on their own personal platonic ideal of pop music. (Bandcamp link)

The Hobknobs – Helmets Off

Release date: June 26th
Record label: 12XU/Cargo
Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Are You Looking for Something?

It appears that the cult Dutch indie rock quartet Lewsberg are no longer active, but a couple of its members have started new projects recently: Lewsberg guitarist/keyboardist Michiel Klein debuted a new group called Magasin in March, and June sees the debut LP from The Hobknobs, the duo of Lewsberg vocalist/guitarist/violinist Arie van Vliet and fellow Dutch group The Klittens’ Yaël Dekker. Even compared to the relatively stripped-down indie rock of Lewsberg and the streamlined post-punk/indie pop of The Klittens, Helmets Off is a quiet affair. Those who appreciate “minimalism” in indie pop will find a lot to love in Helmets Off, in which van Vliet and Dekker sing together twee-ly over guitars, percussion, and keys all used sparingly. At their “jauntiest”, The Hobknobs can sound like Jonathan Richman (“Easier Listening”) or a C86 band confidently making their way through a Peel Session (“Are You Looking for Something?”), while they also have their moments of meticulously-rhythmic Young Marble Giants stuff (“Around the Bend”) or lo-fi Pollardesque melodies (“Enamoured”). The construction may be light, but the material and execution are anything but–this sixteen-song, forty-minute debut LP is a forceful argument to pay attention to The Hobknobs. (Bandcamp link)

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