Pressing Concerns: Cheekface, Mopar Stars, Grass Jaw, Bondo

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Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have two albums coming out tomorrow, July 31st (from Mopar Stars and Bondo), plus two albums that came out earlier this week (from Cheekface and Grass Jaw). Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Josaleigh Pollett, Nocturnal Prose, Picastro, and Jake King), check that one 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.

Cheekface – Podium

Release date: July 28th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, power pop, new wave, dance-punk, pop rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Peanut Butter Prawns

I’ve said it before, but I really do appreciate bands who put out an album every year (it used to be quite common, believe it or not, kids). It’s a very unpretentious way to go about making art (and I do recognize the irony as using that descriptor with respect to Cheekface of all bands, but I’ll get to that). Technically, it makes my (unpaid) job as a music writer harder: there’s more music to cover, and there’s less of an obvious “narrative” or “journey” when you just have a band putting out a “here’s what we’ve created lately” document every few months. You could listen to Podium, shrug and say, “well, it sounds like a Cheekface album”, and move on–and indeed, it does sound about midway between the two most recent Cheekface albums, 2025’s Middle Spoon and 2024’s It’s Sorted. You could cut the most “power pop” songs from those albums or the most “dance-punk” ones and stick them together and create totally different records–and I imagine that’s what most bands would do. But that’s not Cheekface, a band who are dedicated to giving us the entire “Cheekface experience” on each one of their records and everything that that entails.

That’s partially to say that, if you haven’t been charmed by Cheekface in the past, Podium isn’t going to be the one to break that streak. One clear artistic choice that the trio have made on this album is opening the LP with their most confrontational side: “Hostile Street” and “There Is a God” are the deadpan post-ironic, rhythm-driven, late-90s-alt-pop trash heap Cheekface at their most uncut. If you’re the “scissors in hand for the best-of playlist” time, you’ll perk up at the massive new wave pop rock success “Peanut Butter Prawns” (that’s the best song They Might Be Giants never wrote right there), and you’re also going to be particularly interested in “Black Site” (“When they lock me in a black site, here’s the music to put on,” is the band at their self-aware best), “No Fly Zone” (this is the patented Cheekface “should not work anywhere near as well as it does” one), and “U Can’t Do It” (what is this one about? I’m not sure but it rules). What else do we get with Podium? Bassist Amanda Tannen takes the lead vocals for a verse on “The Weather” (they should let her sing more, but her voice has a much different tone than Greg Katz’s does which I’m sure makes it tricky), we get The Ballad(TM) with “Rent Is Down”, and there’s also this dadaist industrial anti-fascist thing called “Discrete” (I respect the ambition even if it doesn’t end up being one of my favorite Cheekface songs here). Prolific or no, I can’t imagine anyone running out of things to say about Cheekface anytime soon. (Bandcamp link)

Mopar Stars – Official Researchers of the NJ Devil

Release date: July 31st
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Power pop, punk rock, fuzz rock, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Drinkallnite

The Philadelphia project Mopar Stars has been one of the best-kept secrets in power pop ever since their 2023 debut EP Shoot the Moon. Led by guitarist/vocalist Nao Demand of post-punk/goth-rock group Poison Ruïn and metal band Zorn, Mopar Stars have particularly been heroes at the “power” end of the power pop spectrum, adding classic rock and roll, punk rock, and 90s alt-rock energy to their Lemonheads/Replacements-influenced pop rock in a way that evokes everyone from Sugar to Liquid Mike. After two strong (and Rosy Overdrive-praised) EPs, K and Perennial Records made Mopar Stars the latest very smart buzz-band signing (adding them to a list of new acquisitions also including Sharp Pins, Now, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, and Paper Jam) for their debut album, Official Researchers of the NJ Devil. 

Demand and the rest of Mopar Stars (guitarist Bill Magerr, drummer Evan Campbell, and bassist Alex Karraba, the latter of which has since been replaced by Nneka Anyaoku) recorded Official Researchers of the NJ Devil with Philly punk producer Trish Quigley, and the result is a fiery, lean eleven-song/twenty-eight-minute LP with all the energy and hooks of the band’s tantalizing earlier releases. It’s hard to come up with a better opening duo than “Wreck the Bike” (what a riff-based hook on this one!) and “Drinkallnite” (ah, you can just feel the desperation here), and the hits keep coming with the lightly jangly college rock car song “Suped Up Coupe” and the very nearly bouncy “Everyone Wants What I Got”. Official Researchers of the NJ Devil careens wildly into its second half and is over before you know it, but not before “American Fast Thing” gives us one last high-gear guitar pop finale. I don’t think I could ask for a better way for Mopar Stars to introduce themselves to a wider audience. (Bandcamp link)

Grass Jaw – Fix Your Heart

Release date: July 27th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, slowcore, post-rock, doom-folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Loser Bus

Grass Jaw is Brendan Kuntz, an Ithaca, New York-based musician who put out seven albums under this project’s name from 2019 to 2024 (four of which have been covered in Pressing Concerns over the years). Kuntz’s recognizable blend of doom-ish folk/alt-country, slowcore, and noisy Northeastern-U.S.-style indie rock has been missed during the uncharacteristic two-year gap between 2024’s I Don’t Want to Believe and Fix Your Heart, Grass Jaw’s triumphant return, but it’s not like Kuntz hasn’t been busy in the meantime–I imagine the short break might have something to do with the reunion of Kuntz’s old noise rock group Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, who’ve put out two new LPs of their own since 2024. Perhaps playing in a new old band again inspired Kuntz to adopt a similar strategy for Grass Jaw, whose latest album was largely recorded with the rhythm section of bassist Christine Klunk and drummer Clayton Dow.

Time away and new lineup aside, Fix Your Heart sounds like the Grass Jaw I remember from those earlier albums, probing the darker depths of slow, Crazy Horse-inspired indie rock with occasional help from saxophone (provided by Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death bandmate Tom Yagielski and Gary Gahan) and trombone (Jack Kuntz). The opening title track is especially dour-feeling, and “Time War” and “Cleveland” similarly circle the low-end drain, and these electric workouts are separated by more folk/country-inspired but no more “upbeat” songs like “Blood Swimming” and “Block Universe”. The supernatural bent to I Don’t Want to Believe isn’t as explicit here, but there is something otherworldly about Fix Your Heart’s concluding stretch: the droning electric guitars of “Loser Bus” and the saxophone-laden abyss of “Purgatory Chasm” ensure a memorable final journey. Grass Jaw have jumped right back into the black hole with their return. (Bandcamp link)

Bondo – Bondo

Release date: July 31st
Record label: Solid Brass
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-rock, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Listen Back

The Los Angeles group Bondo turned up on my radar back in 2023 with their debut album, Print Selections, an incredibly low-key take on 90s post-rock, slowcore, and underground indie rock that spilled into 2024’s Harmonica. The quartet (guitarist/vocalists Nikolas Escudero and Brian Bartus, bassist Gerry Dykes, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian) are now on Solid Brass Records (Franklin, The Pines of Rome, Convinced Friend) for their third album in four years, a self-titled LP that continues Bondo’s patient, time-unmoored journey through music still conjuring up names like “Slint”, “Bedhead”, and “Duster”. As always, vocals are intermittent occurrences, and “On the Cross” introduces us to Bondo in a quiet and sleepy fashion. “Listen Back” and “Strummer” only marginally perk things up; it’s the fuzzed-out outlier “Brian Screams” (accurate title, I assume) that reminds us that Bondo can explode every once in a while when they want to. Things never boil over again like “Brian Screams”, but there’s a lot to enjoy in the slow-moving side of Bondo’s sound (see the relaxed “Spin Cycle” or the slightly unwound “While My Guitar Gently Peaks”). I can’t imagine it’s easy to make music like this that actually sounds gripping and vibrant, but the needle has been threaded once again on Bondo. (Bandcamp link)

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