Pressing Concerns: Dazy, The Cat’s Miaow, A Country Western, Billiam

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got a new compilation from Dazy, plus new albums from The Cat’s Miaow, A Country Western, and Billiam. All of them are out tomorrow except for A Country Western, which came out yesterday. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Bliss?, Jacob T. Simons, The Knickerbocker5, and Sea Scouts), 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.

Dazy – MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol. 2: 24 Songs from 2023-2026

Release date: October 23rd
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Power pop, Madchester, alt-dance, fuzz pop, pop punk, Dazy
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: I Don’t Wanna Think About the Money

It’s time for the second Dazy compilation. The first MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD cassette tape came out back in 2021, and it marked the passing of an incredibly fruitful year for the Richmond, Virginia musician James Goodson’s solo project. I’ve been talking about Dazy and their recognizable mixture of power pop, pop punk, Madchester, and turn-of-the-century electronic-y alt-rock since before MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD even came out, and I’ve been happy to follow them over the next five years. MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol: 2 is pretty much every Dazy song since the first compilation came out except for the 2022 album OUTOFBODY (still their only “proper” LP), the 2023 companion EP OTHERBODY, and some collaborative singles. That means the twin I Get Lost (When I Try to Get Found) and It’s Only a Secret (If You Repeat It) EPs from 2024 are here, as well as the longer 2025 Bad Penny EP, plus a few miscellaneous singles and seven new songs. I’ve covered a little under half of these songs in Pressing Concerns, which means it’s totally fine to feature MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol: 2 despite some repeats.

Goodson makes the interesting choice to present MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol: 2 in reverse chronological order, which really helps underscore just how much the project has grown since its inception. The electronic parts to these songs have gotten more intricate and subversive-feeling; opening track “Beat Change” rules, but it’s very far from the “Dazy pop song” archetype that put the project on the map initially. Goodson still has a pop fastball though, which, oddly enough, he chooses to use on the quieter songs among the new tracks: “Ugly” and “Unreasonable Person” both immediately stick out as unusual and very welcome entries into the Dazy discography. I don’t need to talk too much about how great Bad Penny and the 2024 EPs are because I’ve already done that, but in this context these supercharged, twitching pop songs seem to serve as the bridge between the “early” Dazy era and where Goodson is right now. Goodson has talked about how his fairly unorthodox release schedule is what keeps Dazy interesting to him–revisiting OUTOFBODY, it’s even more obvious that he really had to go against his own personal grain to make even one “normal” album. I’ve no clue what to expect regarding the next Dazy release (on an even more basic level than any other band I write about here), but that’s fine–in fact, it’s more and more clear that that’s part of the draw. (Bandcamp link)

The Cat’s Miaow – When You Smiled and Turned Away

Release date: October 23rd
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: When You Smiled and Turned Away

Many indie pop fans (including myself) have had the pleasure of getting acquainted with the work of Australian quartet The Cat’s Miaow this decade due to a pair of World of Echo-released archival compilations covering the band’s initial six years of activity: Songs ‘94-’98 in 2022 and Skipping Stones: The Cassette Years ‘92-’93 in 2024. Vocalist Kerrie Bolton, bassist/guitarist Andrew Withycombe, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Bart Cummings, and drummer Cam Smith (the first three of which played together in Hydroplane after The Cat’s Miaow’s initial breakup) were inspired by the reception of the compilations to get back together, and, on the heels of Hydroplane’s first album in twenty-some years in 2025, The Cat’s Miaow have released their first-ever proper studio album thirty-four years after they initially debuted.

The minimal, refined, guitar pop band that I heard on Songs ‘94-’98 is very much alive on When You Smiled and Turned Away, a fourteen-song, thirty-one-minute LP that breezes through melancholic, simply-executed indie pop songs with the same paradoxically speedy slowness of The Cat’s Miaow’s past work. The artists that would eventually become the more atmospheric Hydroplane are present here, but The Cat’s Miaow are able to retrain their focus on short, self-contained pop songs like the title track and “Luminosity” like they hadn’t been away at all. Even as a young band, The Cat’s Miaow’s patient take on indie pop felt mature and timeless; unsurprisingly, the passing of time hasn’t shaken their ability to step right back into this world at all. When You Smiled and Turned Away is less an outwardly triumphant return and more a quiet reaffirming of The Cat’s Miaow’s music–as it should be. (Bandcamp link)

A Country Western – Audition Tape

Release date: October 21st
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, lo-fi indie rock, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: No Alcohol

Philadelphia shoegaze group A Country Western really impressed me back in 2024 when they put out Life on the Lawn, which shook off some of the odder experimental touches of their earlier releases to make “an incredibly confident and cool-sounding record” that “embrace[s] rock music with hardly a shred of self-consciousness”, as I said at the time (I also compared them to Swervedriver, notably). A Country Western’s fourth album, Audition Tape, is another change-up for the quartet (Derek Hengemihle, Garrett Miades, Erik Hilbert, and Paris Parker), albeit one that has plenty of links back to Life on the Lawn. The sometimes lo-fi, chilly, grayscale indie rock A Country Western embrace on Audition Tape is less singularly focused on pursuing loud, blaring, distorted rock and roll–it often does, but it’s just as indebted to slowcore and mid-tempo, slightly dreamy 90s-style indie rock. The opening of the LP, in which the five-minute doomy journey “45 Degrees” gives way to the rippers “Audition” and “Blood Eagle”, is a bit of a fake-out–the midsection of the record is made up of curious, relatively quiet little tracks like “Not Far Enough” and “I Found”. Aside from “45 Degrees”, the songs of Audition Tape are pretty quick, too; whether they’re a rocker like late-record detour “No Alcohol” or something more acoustic like “Baseball Game”, A Country Western do embrace brevity throughout the LP. Audition Tape displays a willingness to evolve like many good bands in their sphere, and A Country Western sounds like they’ll be making strong records for a while. (Bandcamp link)

Billiam – Fang the Sniper

Release date: October 22nd
Record label: Chain Smoking/BDK/Ubac
Genre: Garage rock, garage punk, synthpunk, egg punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Unemployable

The mononymous Australian musician Billiam has been making garage punk and self-described “Autismcore” at a frenetic pace across this decade, eventually graduating from the song-a-minute intensity of early releases to more “mature”, relatively normal albums like 2023’s Corner Tactics and 2024’s Animation Cel. Billiam’s official website, eggpunk.com, proclaims that his fourth album, Fang the Sniper, “is the first time Billiam has tried to make something good”. It’s a bold proclamation, but the result is inarguably a particularly strong effort from the Melbourne artist. All the hallmarks of recent Billiam are here on Fang the Sniper: the twenty-six-minute runtime, the chaotic cartoony vibe of both the artwork (done by Edan D) and the music itself, which is foot-on-grass Aussie garage rock with bits of post-punk, synthpunk, noise rock, and “egg” in the mixture. Billiam rips through plenty of quick punk keepers like “Human Body Units”, “Birdman Rally”, and “Unemployable”; some tracks, like “Asbestos and Me”, “Gossip Sesh [Feb 24]”, and “Another Brick in the Floor”, are a little more synth-heavy, but they’re right at home with the tougher tracks. The seething garage rock of “Skinning Dolphins Alive” is another sort-of outlier, but it ultimately contains the same amount of energy as the rest of Fang the Sniper, just redirected elsewhere. It’s pretty much all we could want from an Australian punk record in 2026. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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