Pressing Concerns: Perennial, The Drin, Scarves, Mr. Husband

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It’s the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from Perennial, The Drin, Scarves, and Mr. Husband down below. Check them out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Dagwood, Soda Gumball, Blimps, and Plum), 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.

Perennial – Modernism

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Ernest Jenning/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Art punk, garage rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Modernism

When this whole “Perennial” thing winds down, we’re sure gonna miss these guys. That’s a thought I had while listening to the fourth album from the New England-based “modernist punk” trio, Modernism, specifically when listening to “Me and the Magpie”, one of the most “Perennial” songs that Perennial have ever made. Chelsey Hahn stabs at her electric organ, Ceej Wolf pounds out a drum beat, and Hahn and vocalist/guitarist Chad Jewett trade lines with bits of Perennial’s favorite imagery in them (“Me and the magpie in our haunted house” / Me and the magpie going underground” / “Me and the magpie in the dead of night” / “Me and the magpie on the harpsichord”, etc., all punctuated by “Yeah, yeah, yeah”s and “Alright”s, of course). And then, of course, the guitars kick in right on time for a furious garage punk/post-hardcore rave-up of a refrain. It is, like I said, extremely “Perennial”–like I said when I wrote about 2024’s Art History, it’s a near-AC/DC level of knowing exactly what they’re about and performing it perfectly. It’s easy to take this for granted after four LPs’ worth of it, but when the faucet stops–that’s it. This is the Perennial Sound, and they’re the only band that does it.

So, Modernism gives us the hits yet again, rolling through blaring, deafening songs that are equally indebted to 60s garage rock and turn-of-the-century noise rock (the title track, “Perennial ‘65”, “Emma Peel”, “Me and the Magpie”), as well as marginally more fractured rock and rollers like “Baby, Are You Abstract?”, “What’s New on the Beat Scene”, and “Cloak & Dagger”. As opposed to Art History, which let its edges get frayed and scorched with some genuine ambient and electronic moments, the twenty-one minute Modernism is an assault for all but the two-minute “Granny Smith Apple”. You can tell that “Granny Smith Apple” wants to explode, but it doesn’t, instead living its entire brief life as a warm, mid-tempo, organ-led indie pop song–it’s Perennial by way of Sparklehorse or Flotation Toy Warning (or maybe the gentler moments of one of Perennial’s biggest influences to my ears, Lunchbox). It doesn’t sound like any other song on Modernism, although, like I said, you can hear the Perennial Sound beating on the walls of “Granny Smith Apple” trying to get out. Which it does one song later, of course, with “The Shadow”, and it doesn’t stop from there. Thankfully, it’s still going right now. (Bandcamp link)

The Drin – I Lost My Way for Centuries

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic rock, folk rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Prophets of Doom

2025 was the first year in quite some time that we didn’t get a new album from Cincinnati underground group The Drin (even though bandleader Dylan McCartney did put out a solo EP called For Those Not Here). In hindsight, I should’ve recognized this meant that The Drin were cooking up something big, and indeed they’ve returned this year with the massive double album I Lost My Way for Centuries (seventy-four minutes long on CD and digital, a bit shorter on vinyl). The Drin have picked a good time in their career to shoot for the moon like this–2024’s Elude the Torch was a high-water mark and a reinvention for the group, embracing the full-band sextet lineup (McCartney, Eric Dietrich, Ryan Sennett, Luke Cornett, Cole Gilfilen, and Dakota Carlyle) to make “dark, rhythmic rock music that finds power in steadiness”, as I said at the time. 

I Lost My Way for Centuries feels like a “double album” in a classic rock sense. The Drin take the meditative aspects of their last album and allow it to stretch and sprawl to previously-unthinkable proportions. This album’s twenty-three songs give The Drin the chance to fully embrace the music that’s led them to this point: you’ll hear clear bits of progressive rock, psychedelia, folk, dub, and krautrock throughout I Lost My Way for Centuries. “Moths to the Light” is Neil Young circa Harvest with a warped saxophone in play, while the thundering blues-rock of “Prophets of Doom” is closer to Led Zeppelin. I Lost My Way for Centuries has this “intensity at a distance” quality to it that The Drin are really good at evoking, and it helps this double LP trip feel like an unearthed, dust-covered album from some forgotten band from the 1970s. I’ve been told music in this vein has been having something of a moment recently, which does make me wonder what would happen if I Lost My Way for Centuries came from a somewhat-mysterious art-pop auteur from a cultural capital and not a somewhat-mysterious garage rock band from Ohio on a garage rock label from Ohio. As far as Rosy Overdrive is concerned, though, I Lost My Way for Centuries came from exactly where it should’ve come from. (Bandcamp link)

Scarves – Strays Forever

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Tender Loving Empire
Genre: Indie folk, 90s indie rock, indie pop, twee, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: We Should Get a Dog

I wrote about the Seattle group Scarves back in 2022, when the Niko Stathakopoulos-led act put out their fourth album, Delicate Creatures. That aptly-titled record won me over with its mixture of tender, almost-twee indie pop with 90s-style meandering and occasionally distorted indie rock, all led by a frontperson whose earnest and, yes, gentle vocals and lyrics take cues from John K. Samson of The Weakerthans and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. On their fifth LP, Strays Forever, Scarves are a quintet–guitarist/vocalist Nessa Grasing and multi-instrumentalist Elijah Sokolow return from Delicate Creatures, and bassist Jesse Cohen and drummer Jacob Whinihan join the trio alongside producer Chris Walla, a natural choice to record a Scarves album. 

The affable pop rock of “Self Soothing” introduces Strays Forever in the most welcoming fashion, before “Marionettes” and “Hey!” inject a bit more of a rainy Pacific Northwest indie rock fog to Scarves’ sound and the title track distinguishes itself as “the one with the synths and electronics” (just a touch of them, to be clear). Stathakopoulos is most impactful when he seems to fully give in to his deeply-felt, eccentric writing, and the back-to-back triumphs of “Chainsaw” and “We Should Get a Dog” in the second half of Strays Forever reflect this. The dreamy former track is a love song apparently inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and features Stathakopoulos proclaiming “I love you like a cat loves cardboard / I want to tear you to shreds / Out of pure joy” in the refrain, while the latter is a swirling, anthemic kicking against ennui that all leads up to the title line. Closing track “Skeletons and Swords” is just as memorable, but here Scarves allow Stathakopoulos to dissolve in a sea of strings and haziness. That’s undoubtedly Walla’s touch, but Strays Forever is unmistakably a “Scarves album” first and foremost. (Bandcamp link)

Mr. Husband – Song for the Old World

Release date: September 18th
Record label: Good Soil
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Is It Real

From his outpost in the Maryland panhandle, the West Virginia-originating Kenny Tompkins has been a stalwart advancer of American indie pop, from involvement in record labels Yellow K and Good Soil (Japanese Breakfast, Gabby’s World, Human People) to his power pop group The Trend to, more than anything else, his long-running Mr. Husband solo project. As Mr. Husband, Tompkins has straddled the line between Appalachian-inspired folky Americana and jangly indie pop (with plenty of excursions as well), and Song for the Old World (dubbed the ninth Mr. Husband album by Tompkins, though I think it depends on how one counts) plays to the troubadour’s strengths.

The eight-track, thirty-minute LP begins and ends with the title track, an instrumental piece Tompkins claims to have tinkered with for twenty years before finally “let[ting] go of it” here. It’s a delicate and careful framing for the rest of Song for the Old World, which finds Tompkins and the same lineup from 2024’s Wildflower (drummer Chris Morris, lap steel guitarist Adam Laye, and bassist Curt Tompkins) thoughtfully moving through timeless-sounding pop music with bits of folk and rock music history contained therein. The country-folk belter “White Hot Embers”, the rollicking folk-rocking “Is It Real”, the sparse acoustic “So Goodbye”, and the heart-on-sleeve penultimate bow-out of “Haunted Head” all feel like they ought to be Song for the Old World’s centerpiece; the neat trick of this album is they’re all presented that way thanks to how Tompkins constructed this strong little collection. Mr. Husband remains one of the best at what they do here, simple as that. (Bandcamp link)

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