Pressing Concerns: Psychic Flowers, Deady, The Catburgers, Homework

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have new albums from Psychic Flowers and Homework that come out tomorrow (September 25th), as well as an archival release from The Catburgers that also comes out tomorrow and a brand-new LP from Deady that came out earlier this week. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Shotmaker, The Van Pelt, My Pet Fossil, and Carry Ripple), 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.

Psychic Flowers – Columbarium Niches

Release date: September 25th
Record label: Living Lost
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Living Is Easy

After a five-year hiatus from releasing his own music, prolific Philadelphia musician (and 2nd Grade bassist) David Settle brought back one of his three projects at the beginning of this year with The Fragiles’ Sing the Heat of the Sun. The Fragiles is Settle’s outlet for relatively dreamy, psychedelic jangle pop, while Psychic Flowers, which Settle has also revived this year, hews towards blown-out, fuzzed-out garage-pop (the third Settle band, the post-punk/noise rock group Big Heet, hasn’t resurfaced yet–but, fingers crossed). Not only have the Psychic Flowers returned, but their first album since 2021’s For the Undertow is an oversized, twenty-song, forty-plus-minute CD and cassette. Settle wrote a dozen new songs for Columbarium Niches, but then decided to augment the record with a handful of outtakes from previous Psychic Flowers albums and a few alternate versions of previously-released tracks (inspired by compilations like Superchunk’s Cup of Sand, per Settle).

There’s no clear “band” on Columbarium Niches, but the majority of these songs have outside help on drums (between Nathan Walters, Ronnie Francisco, and Leo Suarez) and Zak Krone provides bass on a few of them. Unsurprisingly, Columbarium Niches is full-steam-ahead from the get-go between snotty garage-punk opening track “Diamonds in the Sky” and the speedy punk-pop of single “Go Man Go”. The relatively pastoral jangle pop of “Follow You Down” and the acoustic folk-pop “Summer Rose” are surprising turns, setting up an album that doesn’t always go the direction I’ve been expecting Psychic Flowers to go. The pin-drop quiet “Dust Cloud Descends” and the mini-epic “Atlas Wager” stand out in the first half, but this is still a record from a band that can toss off garage rockers (“Last Drive-In”) and sparkly, Guided by Voices-core guitar pop songs (“Living Is Easy”) with ease. One of the quieter moments on Columbarium Niches is actually an acoustic version of “For the Record” from For the Undertow, a nice call-back before the thirty-second Alien Lanes-style snippet “Astral Projector” and the ripping “Crushing the Microscope” lurch Psychic Flowers back into gear. Much like Sing the Heat of the Sun was in January, Columbarium Niches is a welcome return from a talented songwriter. (Bandcamp link)

Deady – Hunka Junk

Release date: September 21st
Record label: Romanus
Genre: Punk rock, noise punk, hardcore punk, noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Weight

Louisville quintet Deady came out of the gate swinging back in 2023 with their self-titled EP, six tracks of exciting, wild punk rock with bits of Brainiac and Midwestern egg punk in the mix. It’s the kind of debut EP that, as fun as it is, makes one wonder how they’re going to pull off a full-length album’s worth of this kind of thing. Three years later, we have our answer with Hunka Junk, the Kentucky post-hardcore/noise rock group’s first-ever LP. Over twenty-seven minutes and thirteen tracks, the group (vocalist Mandy Keathley, guitarists Sam Woodring FKA Mister Goblin and Chyppe Crosby, bassist Clayton Ray, and drummer KJ Bechtloff) offer up plenty of the self-aggrandizing, absurdist fury of their first EP and fully veer away from their signature sound on multiple occasions, too.

When Hunka Junk rocks, it’s an unstoppable force–the goal of any punk band in 2026 should be blowing the door off its hinges as well as Deady do with “Systematic Slaughter”, “Outlaw”, and “Hot Damn” before we’ve got a chance to catch our breath. The first curveball is track number five, “Louisville”, nestled right in between the metallic “Spinning Rooms” and the noise punk single “Bad As It Sounds”; it’s a straight-up acoustic folk song, believe it or not. The gorgeous guitar line has Woodring’s solo work written all over it with its hushed, resigned, but somewhat wonky beauty; Keathley adds a twang to it that I never knew I needed in a Sam Woodring ballad. It’s a different side of Keathley from the one who’s shouting “suck my dick in hell!” in the more-or-less nu metal “Hunka” (when Deady get like this, they remind me of Jobber if they were inspired by barfights instead of professional wrestling). The acoustic moments return in “Goodnight” and “Lie to the Police”, and the relatively mid-tempo “The Weight” demonstrates that Deady can evolve their sound a bit while still remaining pretty heavy (in multiple senses). Hunka Junk is a predictably unpredictable wild ride worth taking. (Bandcamp link)

The Catburgers – Galashiels

Release date: September 25th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, C86, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: I’ve Got a Friend

The Catburgers formed in 1985 in Edinburgh, Scotland, right in time to be part of a golden age of indie pop, post-punk, and combinations thereof in the United Kingdom. Guitarist/vocalist Robert Jones, bassist Stuart Macgregor, drummer Jeff Duffy, and guitarist Keith Burns played shows and recorded demos over their five-year run, even rubbing elbows with Dan Treacy of their biggest musical influence, the Television Personalities; however, they broke up in 1990 without ever formally releasing anything. Nine songs that The Catburgers recorded in 1989 sat unreleased and mixed for more than thirty years, but after a few earlier Catburgers recordings saw release through FELT Records in 2022, it was time for their shelved album to see the light of day. Unsurprisingly, major indie pop player Slumberland Records is at the scene of the crime, as they’ve put out these songs–mixed by Archie Moore and christened Galashiels–on vinyl and CD.

Listening to Galashiels is to suddenly be swept back to the key time and place from which The Catburgers emerged–an exciting time where bands made records with bubbly, jangly indie pop songs like “I’ve Got a Friend” and “Children’s TV” right next to moodier, post-punk-ish tracks like “Holiday House” and “Nothing to Live For”. “Holiday House”, featuring melodica from Jowe Head of Television Personalities and Swell Maps, is a neat early curveball, one that doesn’t derail the nearly pop-punk giddiness of “The First Day of Spring” or the low-end-heavy proto-gaze of “Summer of Love”. The dreaminess of “I’m Leaving on the 7:52” leads us into a more subdued closing stretch marked by the dread-filled quiet of “Darkness Before Dawn” and the rumbling post-punk of finale “Nothing to Live For”. Even here, though, The Catburgers sneak in one last jangle pop song in penultimate track “The Frightened Girl”, and one of Galashiels’ strongest qualities as a whole is an LP-long ability to live in the darkness and the light. (Bandcamp link)

Homework – Bang Here If Stuck

Release date: September 25th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, 90s indie rock, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Heroes Welcome

Homework are a new-ish band out of Glasgow who make a warmly familiar kind of pop music–it’s either classic 1980s British indie pop filtered through 1990s American indie rock, or vice versa. After a couple of three-song EPs in 2023 and 2024, Bang Here If Stuck is Homework’s first LP, and it finds the quartet (Michael Newton, Santiago Taberna, Lizzie Quirke, and Andrew Gordon) putting together a set of sharply-written tunes that justifies their label Meritorio Records’ invocation of Pavement, Teenage Fanclub, and Urusei Yatsura (it also reminds me a lot of modern power pop/90s revivalists Kiwi Jr.). The album’s dozen songs take us on a catchy, somewhat warped odyssey; we get gold-soundz guitar pop like “Made” right next to sloppy rockers like “Hedge Your Bets” (finally, somebody rips of that side of Pavement) and stuff like “Trivial” that embraces Homework’s absurd and pop sides. Homework keep their eyes on the indie pop prize and don’t let any of their excursions go too far off the beaten path; by the time they’re closing out Bang Here If Stuck with the appropriately-titled “Ending Song”, it feels like their first LP has been wrapped up as neatly as possible. If actual homework was this fun and rewarding, I probably would’ve ended up a physicist instead of a music blogger. (Bandcamp link)

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