Pressing Concerns: Sharp Pins, Antietam, Spread Joy, Soft Science

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Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have new albums from Antietam, Spread Joy, and Soft Science, plus a reissue from Sharp Pins. Check them out below, and if you missed the July and August playlist that went up on Monday, check that 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.

Sharp Pins – Mod Mayday 23 (Reissue)

Release date: September 4th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Mod revival, power pop, jangle pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: B-A-B-Y Baby Luv

Sharp Pins has ascended to the top of the modern power pop pantheon in short order–releasing three great albums of the best of mod revival, jangle pop, and classic-era Guided by Voices hooks in as many years will do that. On top of that, the Kai Slater project signed with K Records last year (who then proceeded to re-release 2024’s Radio DDR), and Sharp Pins live band member Joe Glass released an excellent solo album of his own (also being re-released by K later this year). With all this going on, you might’ve missed Mod Mayday 23 when it came out in late 2024, self-released on cassette by Slater on his own Hallogallo imprint. A covers album that (aside from the final song, a demo of an original Sharp Pins track that later appeared on Radio DDR) pulls entirely from the extended version of the Mods Mayday ‘79 compilation, Mod Mayday 23 stands as a tribute and key clue to understanding Slater’s specific style of pop music he’s chasing in his original music. 

Mods Mayday ‘79 is comprised of live recordings of long-forgotten second-wave mod bands, and these self-recorded covers tell us things about Sharp Pins in how they differ from the originals. The desperation you’ll hear in the 1979 recordings, nervy bands hopped up on pub rock and some form of “punk rock”, is replaced by something more confident and ethereal. Like someone to which Slater is compared a lot, Robert Pollard, he grabs a style of music wholesale and then effortlessly injects the other styles of music he likes into it–here, it’s the chasing-that-perfect-recording power pop, the earnest basement trappings of classic indie pop, and the shiny side of psychedelic pop. Mod Mayday 23 is a not not unfaithful album of mod songs as performed by someone who really likes “mod” music, and, sure, it’s easy enough to hear the seeds of Radio DDR and Balloon Balloon Balloon in hindsight. I don’t think I’m overthinking Mod Mayday 23, though–it merits some thought, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Antietam – The Counting Game

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Dromedary
Genre: 90s indie rock, folk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Way Too Well

Bassist Tim Harris and guitarist/vocalist Tara Key co-founded the indie rock group Antietam over forty years ago, and drummer Joshua Madell joined in 1990; the long-running band’s peers are acts like Yo La Tengo (who covered one of their songs back in 1989), Eleventh Dream Day (who also came out of the Louisville, Kentucky underground), and The Sonora Pine (whose Tara Jane O’Neil plays on The Counting Game). It’s been nearly a decade since the most recent original Antietam album, but the trio have remained busy in recent years; they released a collaborative covers album as a tribute to late Louisville guitarist Matthew “Wink” O’Bannon in 2021, and a four-song EP called Pitch & Yaw in 2024. 

The Counting Game is classic Antietam–it’ll appeal to real-deep-in-it “indie rock/alternative rock” fans in its evocation of the likes of the Paisley Underground (see the Dream Syndicate-like opening track “Way Too Well” and the hazy Western rock of “Good Advice” for a couple), Crazy Horse (“The Finest Line” and “Coney Island”, the latter of which is an unearthed recording from 1996), alt-country (“Dorado Gold”, featuring banjo from bluegrass musician Steve Cooley), and psychedelic pop rock (“Coco Bella”). Antietam are hardly the flashiest band out there, but The Counting Game is about as warm and inviting as this kind of music can be. (Bandcamp link)

Spread Joy – III

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, garage punk, egg punk, indie pop, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: (Why Can’t) I

Back in the early 2020s, the Chicago quartet Spread Joy showed up with two brief but tight collections of post-punk music that could be described as “egg punk”, “skronky”, “wiry”, “nervy”, and/or “no wave”. It’s been four years since II, which I compared to early Wire and Gang of Four at the time, so it’s about time we’ve gotten a third Spread Joy record (which you’d better believe is called III). Although it’s once again a quick one (ten songs in seventeen minutes, nearly identical to II), III is a worth-the-wait LP that plays to the strengths of the group (Raidy Hodges, Briana Hernandez, Nick Beaudoin, and Tyler Bixby). Although Spread Joy are still fairly batshit, I detect a little more pop music in their sound this time around–it’s not like their heroes like Pylon, Suburban Lawns, and Kleenex/Liliput didn’t know how to do the same. They may not be on the level of The B-52’s (another big influence on Spread Joy) or more “indie pop” labelmates like Artificial Go, but it feels natural for them to inject a bit more restrained pop rock into “(Why Can’t) I” and “Entrance” in the midst of post-punk workouts. Spread Joy has always been about fun rock music, and III is very much in that spirit. (Bandcamp link)

Soft Science – Sand

Release date: September 4th
Record label: Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, fuzz pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fade

Soft Science are a six-piece band from Sacramento, California that I first heard thanks to their fourth album, Lines, back in 2023. On that record, the sextet (vocalist Katie Haley, guitarists Ross and Matt Levine, drummer Tony Cale, bassist Becky Cale, and “atmospheric electronics” player Hans Munz) established themselves as a heavier, distorted indie pop group with a sound containing bits of dream pop, synthpop, jangle pop, and shoegaze. Soft Science’s fifth album, Sand, is even larger-feeling than their previous LP; it’s a full-on “dream-rock” album, with Haley’s vocals gliding over full-bodied, shoegaze-influenced, fuzzed-out pop music. Sand is very nearly a tour through several types of “big music”: “Go” has a nice, pounding, almost post-punk rhythm, the starry-eyed “Fade” shoots for power pop and new wave, “Thread” embraces a dramatic melancholy, and “Understand” zeroes in on dreamy, quasi-jangly guitar pop. There’s a surgical precision to how Soft Science approach Sand; there’s a lot of great pop music at the core of this album, and the soft scientists expertly mix and combine ingredients to best serve their creations. (Bandcamp link)

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