Rosy Overdrive

Pressing Concerns: Miserable chillers, Wendy Eisenberg, Robber Robber, Wax Head

The Thursday Pressing Concerns features three albums coming out tomorrow, April 3rd (LPs from Miserable chillers, Wendy Eisenberg, and Robber Robber), plus one album that came out yesterday, April 1st (from Wax Head). It’s been a busy week on Rosy Overdrive, so if you missed Monday’s (featuring Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, and Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac) or Tuesday’s (featuring The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, and Shop Talk) blog posts, check those 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.

Miserable chillers – Innocent Victims

Release date: April 3^rd
Record label: Baby Blue
Genre: Soft rock, indie pop, art pop, sophisti-pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Big Guitar

I wrote about Miguel Gallego and his long-running project Miserable chillers back in 2024; he’d just put out Great American Turn Off, an eclectic self-described “mixtape” of art pop with plenty of help from various guest vocalists and musicians. Two years later, Gallego is back with the first proper song-based Miserable chillers album since 2020, Innocent Victims, which offers a very different listening experience than Great American Turn Off. Musically speaking, we’re still in the same ballpark, do not get me wrong–Gallego continues to mine soft rock, art pop, and 60s/70s studio-auteur-type music for inspiration, and his referencing of Paul Simon, Judee Sill, and Burt Bacharach (among others) checks out. It’s a more muted, pensive version of it than Great American Turn Off was though, a feeling inseparable from the tragedy behind its creation–the unexpected death of Gallego’s partner and bandmate Sarah Goldfarb in late 2019. Innocent Victims took shape slowly over the next five years, with help from frequent Gallego collaborators like Kabir Kumar, Dylan Balliett, Megan Braaten, and Kate Ehrenberg, finally presented to us here as a forty-five minute, thirteen-track package that gives an ironic twinge to the term “easy listening”.

“Telling the Bees” and “Song for Ivy” are the contradiction manifest–beautiful, lush, Rundgren/Partridge-y songs with horns (provided by Rick Rein) and vibrant basslines nonetheless frozen in a skipping moment of time. Innocent Victims floats aimlessly along through these gorgeous dioramas, reaching out and grabbing us on a whim with the plainspoken doom of “The Crater” and its tale of a meteor strike (“We rebuilt the house on the lip of the crater / I see it through every window of our home”), the titular Thin Lizzy worship of “The Big Guitar”, the hopping bass of “Dumb Kingdom”, and the truly, truly devastating “Tybee”. Innocent Victims remains a lot to take in, and there are parts of it I’m still wrapping my head around for one reason or another–for an album that is undeniably heavy no matter how much light it’s dressed in, this makes sense to me. For instance, “Last Lights” and “Hoping for Snow” are lovely pop songs on their own whose tenors change when one is able to connect them together via the weather and the deer in both of them. At this point, I can never return to the times where I listened to Innocent Victims and primarily found myself appreciating the fretless bass, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Maybe that’s what the album is about. (Bandcamp link)

Wendy Eisenberg – Wendy Eisenberg

Release date: April 3^rd
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, art pop, jazz-pop, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Another Lifetime Floats Away

Rosy Overdrive has tons of respect for Wendy Eisenberg, as should anyone who enjoys good rock and/or experimental music. I’ve written about their solo output and their math rock trio Editrix on the blog before, and they’ve also been performing as part of Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet as of late. Needless to say, they’ve been quite busy in recent years (and I haven’t even gotten into Squanderers, Eisenberg’s newest experimental group with Gastr del Sol’s David Grubbs), but it’s still been a minute since we’d gotten a song-based Eisenberg solo album. Enter Wendy Eisenberg, an album of self-proclaimed “folk songs” made by someone whose definition of practitioners of the form includes Michael Hurley, John Prine, and Willie Nelson but also Van Dyke Parks, Richard Dawson, and the Mekons (although the LP’s biggest influence, hinted at by Joyful Noise Recordings’ bio, is the western Massachusetts-originating artist’s relocation to Brooklyn and subsequent desire to hang onto their more pastoral past in some way).

Wendy Eisenberg was co-produced by Eisenberg’s partner, Mari Rubio (aka More Eaze), who also provides string arrangements. Eisenberg, Rubio, bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle), and drummer Ryan Sawyer (Weak Signal) are the players here, and the four of them create a record that combines the conversational, wandering jazz-ish folk stylings of Eisenberg’s past solo work (and, in a more math rock way, Editrix) with ornate, string-laden country-folk backdrops. Do not worry, Wendy Eisenberg is still pretty weird–for varying reasons, I don’t really see “Old Myth Dying” and “Vanity Paradox” crossing over to the “Rumours on $50 vinyl” crowd, but Rubio and crew are able to guide Eisenberg into some polished, structured territory without sacrificing that side of their leader. Wendy Eisenberg feels like it waits until the right moment to fully take advantage of the tools at its disposal–like when opening track “Take a Number” lets the strings kick in after a friendly acoustic-folk opening, or how they indulge in some “lush jazz” in “The Ultraworld”, or how they wait until the penultimate song, “Will You Dare”, to play their “full-on embrace of classic country” card (the payoff is worth it). It’s impressive how Wendy Eisenberg, despite existing in completely different genres from Editrix and Eisenberg’s more experimental work, bears its namesake’s unmistakable mark just as clearly. They’ve done it yet again! (Bandcamp link)

Robber Robber – Two Wheels Move the Soul

Release date: April 3^rd
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, no wave, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Talkback

The Burlington, Vermont quartet Robber Robber debuted in 2024 with an album called Wild Guess, although the group’s founding duo of vocalist/guitarist Nina Cates and drummer Zack James have been making music together since 2017. Wild Guess set the band (Cates, James, guitarist Will Krulak, and bassist Carney Hemler) apart in a folk/alt-country-inspired Vermont music scene by instead taking inspiration from more New York-y post-punk and experimental (“arty”) indie rock. They signed to Fire Talk (Wombo, Cola, PACKS) and re-released their debut album the following year, and they’re back with a sophomore album still less than two years removed from Wild Guess. Despite (or perhaps because of) the quick turnaround, Two Wheels Move the Soul was made during a tumultuous time for Robber Robber–Cates and James were evicted from their longtime home and had to rely on that aforementioned Burlington community (like associates Lily Seabird and Greg Freeman) for stability.

Nonetheless, Two Wheels Move the Soul is every bit Wild Guess’ equal, both more ambitious and smoother than its predecessor but still cut from the same cloth. The first half of the album is teetering noise-punk; “The Sound It Made”, “Avalanche Sound Effect”, and “Watch for Infection” are all warped post-punk scorchers (imagine a more garage-y Water from Your Eyes, perhaps). Cates’ vocals work well as a unifying force as things get more or less wonky, which is important because the LP ends on a different note than how it begins. Amusingly, the final four songs on Two Wheels Move the Soul are arguably the most “pop” ones; sticking the motorik charms of “Talkback” on Side Two is a self-sabotaging sequencing decision, but I do see the vision in sticking the (relatively) mellow trio of “Enough”, “Again”, and “Bullseye” at the end of the LP. The “vision” is key to Two Wheels Move the Soul, as controlled chaos is looking more and more like Robber Robber’s specialty. (Bandcamp link)

Wax Head – GNAT

Release date: April 1^st
Record label: Sour Grapes
Genre: Garage punk, noise punk, psych-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Clatter Coats

Wax Head are a punk quartet from Manchester that nonetheless have clearly spent time with American and Australian garage rock. GNAT is their first album following an EP in 2023 and a handful of singles, and with it, the band (drummer/vocalist Lewis Fletcher, guitarist Harry Bunker, keyboardist Archie Jones, and bassist Evan Chase) have given us a nine-track, twenty-seven-minute foot-on-gas debut LP. Wax Head do a great job of evoking the witchy, sometimes psychedelic garage punk of Thee Oh Sees and the faster side of Ty Segall as they plow through a whirlwind of punk music with images of body horror, violence, blood and the like (or so I’ve been told; it’s not like I can make out what Fletcher’s actually saying most of the time). Take a minute to steel yourself before putting on GNAT, because you won’t get a break once it starts–before you know it, Wax Head have raced through the 90-second metallic punk title track, the wild synth-hardcore-punk of “Bug Doctor” and “Clatter Coats”, and the classic punk throwback “Terminal Sinker”. Things might get a little more unpredictable with the Sabbath-like second half of “Takeover”, the Crampsian garage rock of “Rusty Cutter”, and the five-minute synth-punk-prog odyssey of “Resin214”, but it’s not like GNAT settles down at all. You’re going to have to wait until closing track “Clamp” gets its final blows in before you can start to recover. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, Shop Talk

It’s the return of the Tuesday blog post! In this edition of Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from The Pretty Flowers, Fake Canadian, Eggs on Mars, and Shop Talk. It’s a great set; check them out below, and, if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, and Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac), check that one out too.

The Pretty Flowers – Never Felt Bitter

Release date: March 27^th
Record label: Forge Again
Genre: Power pop, college rock, heartland rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Came Back Kicking

Longtime blog readers may recognize Los Angeles-based quartet The Pretty Flowers from their 2023 sophomore album A Company Sleeve (or, perhaps, the 2024 non-album single “Police Me”). I called that LP a “very strong collection of earnest guitar rock that incorporates bits of slacker rock, jangle pop, college rock, power pop, pop punk, and heartland rock all led charismatically by [frontperson Noah] Green’s clear, everyman vocals”; I enjoyed it at the time and, frankly, it sounded even better than I remembered when I put together my year-end list six months later. Never Felt Bitter, their third full-length and first for Forge Again Records, finds the group (Green on vocals and guitar, bassist Sam Tiger, guitarist Jake Gideon, and drummer Sean Christopher Johnson) back in their Paul Westberg- and Lemonheads-influenced element; Green writes that he was inspired by moving out of Los Angeles to the more spacious and quiet town of Sierra Madre, but Never Felt Bitter doesn’t abandon what The Pretty Flowers started in the city–it’s just more.

The sprawling, fifty-minute Never Felt Bitter is “larger” for The Pretty Flowers in a strictly literal sense (that’s a dangerous runtime for a power pop band), but the rockers really do feel like they are able to take up more space and stretch out more than the band had done so previously. Gideon, who produced and engineered the album, probably deserves a fair amount of credit for that, but everyone aboard The Pretty Flowers sounds game to fill in this extra space from the overwhelming big-sky opening track “Thief of Time” to the ripping garage-power-pop-rock “To Be So Cool”. I count at least four power pop could’ve-been-hits in “Convent Walls”, “Came Back Kicking”, “Ocean Swimming”, and “Tough Love”; they could’ve bashed out another four almost-as-good-but-not-quite cuts and called it a day, but The Pretty Flowers instead spend their time loitering in the realms of darker (but still poppy) rock and roll with “Never Felt Bitter (We Burn)” and “Big Dummy”, rolling around the six-minute Western punk landscape of “Ring True”, and fading away with the somewhat-ironically titled “Not Dissolve”. Maybe this is just what moving out of the city in California does to you; The Pretty Flowers wear it well, regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Fake Canadian – Fellow Traveler

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Daylight Headlight Section
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, post-punk, new wave, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Please Stop Moving to Philadelphia

Fake Canadian began in San Jose late last decade as the solo project of one Christopher Casuga, who released a single, EP, and album under the name before relocating to Sacramento in 2021 and recruiting bassist Howard Ingerman and drummer Jordan Solomon to turn Fake Canadian into a power trio. The full-band era of Fake Canadian began in 2022 with an EP called Fleeting Moments; when I heard it belatedly in 2024, I called it “one of the more unique-sounding things I’ve heard in recent memory” and put them somewhere on a three-dimensional axis of “clean, Steve Albini/Silkworm-influenced ‘PRF-core’ indie rock”, bratty, nasally power-pop-punk, and “Devo-y nerve-y post-punk/new wave”. The second Fake Canadian album and first as a full-on band is called Fellow Traveler, recorded by Cameron Karren at Sacramento’s renowned Pus Cavern studio, and it’s large enough to contain several more hits from the self-described “angular power pop” band as well as push some of their (already fairly loose) boundaries.

Whip-smart, wordy (read: “nerdy”), punched-up by the rhythm section, and quite catchy: if opening track “What Will Rational Actors Do?” doesn’t grab you, then Fake Canadian is hopelessly out of your reach. The nervous pop-punk cautionary tale of “Timothy Is in Danger” and the surging power pop “Please Stop Moving to Philadelphia” (ah, somebody’s listened to Silkworm’s Lifestyle a fair amount judging by that guitar-lead spatter) are every bit as strong pop tracks; it’s not until the groggy, hungover six-minute alt-country-tinged “Wednesday” that Fake Canadian tap the brakes just a little bit. “Wednesday” and the instrumental surf-punk “The Ballad of Justin Queso” serve to separate the opening pop trio from another pop-punk undercard threesome (“Comet, Come Back to Me” is positively jangly!); oh, and Fake Canadian end Fellow Traveler with one last curveball in the eight-minute, slouching-towards-heaviness finale of “Midnight Giants”. “Midnight Giants” and “Wednesday” don’t end up derailing any of the runaway-train momentum of the rest of Fellow Traveler; the bite that Casuga, Ingerman, and Solomon give even the record’s weirdest moments ensures that Fake Canadian remain on the more ornery side of whatever they’re doing. (Bandcamp link)

Eggs on Mars – Good Morning, I Love You

Release date: March 3^rd
Record label: Enigmatic Brunch
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Takes Time

I first heard the Kansas City indie pop quartet Eggs on Mars back in 2023 when they released Warm Breakfast, but the band (currently vocalist/guitarist Brad Smith, bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Doug Bybee, guitarist/keyboardist Joel Stratton, and drummer Mason Potter) have been putting out albums since at least 2014. Three years (and one Stratton solo album) later, western Missouri’s preeminent guitar pop group are back again with a ten-song, twenty-seven minute collection called Good Morning (I Love You), which is by my count their seventh album. The group’s self-described “Midwestern soft psych” is intact here, as Eggs on Mars have once again pulled together a bunch of confident-yet-delicate, straightforward-but-full-sounding pop rock.

As I’m beginning to understand, Eggs on Mars albums are unhurried, relaxed affairs–there’s a lot to like in the jangly indie pop of opening track “Inconsistent Cowpoke” and the slightly psychedelic soft rock of the title track, but Eggs on Mars don’t sound anxious to land a memorable, collar-grabbing first impression with them. Bybee sings lead on two songs, but only one of them–the Apples in Stereo-lite power pop diversion of “Takes Time” (featuring lyrics written by Justin Longmeyer, the band’s founding bassist who now lives in Japan)–even suggests that the undercard vocalist isn’t on the same page as Smith (of course, it’s good enough that this mid-record wake-up call is a welcome one). Good Morning (I Love You) remains a gentle, deliberate ride; the songs generally hover a little over the two-minute mark, but they (and, subsequently, the sub-thirty-minute LP) feel complete nonetheless. The exception to the rule is the five-minute closing track “I Came Home 2 Find Nothing Had Changed Except Me”, which pushes the lackadaisical, plodding tendencies of Eggs on Mars to extremes (the title line is, in fact, the only one). As different as it is on the surface, though, “I Came Home 2 Find Nothing Had Changed Except Me” is right in line with the rest of Good Morning (I Love You). (Bandcamp link)

Shop Talk – Shop Talk

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: One Track Mind/Revolver USA
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: SOS

After a couple of singles and an EP, we now join Brooklyn punk trio Shop Talk (vocalist/guitarist Jon Garcia, bassist Tristan Griffin, and drummer Alexander Perrelli) as they release their self-titled debut album. Recorded in Nashville with The Sleeveens’ James Mechan and released via a new New York label called One Track Mind, Shop Talk is fiery, muscular, yet slapdash garage-punk-rock-and-roll at its finest. Garcia’s glammy one-man-show Ty Segall-esque vocals collide with a well-oiled power trio sound that owes plenty to the realms of first-wave punk rock and decades of garage rock underground that followed it. These ten songs wrap up in under thirty minutes, so Shop Talk waste no time in tossing out quick-moving punk rockers (“Ramona”, “Peddlers of Hope”) and dark-undercurrent garage rock tunes (“Black Friar”, “SOS”). The second of Shop Talk brings the gothic undertones of “Saltillo”, the three-minute punk workout “Golden Afternoon” (that’s long for Shop Talk!), and the absolutely frenetic “Mirage of Life”. For a modern garage punk album featuring little to no overlap with modern power pop, Shop Talk has an impressive number of quite memorable moments. Shop Talk can hang their proverbial hats on that accomplishment. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac

Hey there! It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, and The Disassociation, and a new EP from Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac! Check them out below!

We will have a Tuesday post this week (it’s been a minute, I know!).

Stuck – Optimizer

Release date: March 27^th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sicko

Stuck has been a fixture in Chicago indie rock since their formation in the late 2010s. Guitarist/vocalist Greg Obis’ history making noisy post-punk goes back even further, to his time in the underrated trio Yeesh alongside Babe Report drummer Peter Reale and Alex Doyle. After that group’s demise, Obis linked up with drummer Tim Green, guitarist Donny Walsh, and bassist David Algrim; albums Change Is Bad (2020) and Freak Frequency (2023) followed, as well as an EP called Content That Makes You Feel Good in 2021. Optimizer, Stuck’s third album, is their first as a trio (Walsh left the group in 2022), and the three of them tapped Andrew Oswald (Marbled Eye, Public Interest, Blue Zero) to record the album at Electrical Audio. Obis is a mastering engineer himself, taking over Chicago Mastering Service from Shellac’s Bob Weston and working on a bunch of albums I’ve written about (just in the past year: Wishy, Ducks Ltd., Maneka, Will Stratton, Winter, and Shallowater), but it doesn’t take a studio professional to guess that Oswald’s finely-honed, sharp-edged, greyscale post-punk background is an inspired pairing with Stuck’s blunt-force noisy Windy City punk rock.

Believe it or not, Optimizer is about as adventurous as this kind of music gets (without transforming into something else entirely). Opening track “Totally Vexed” ought to be Stuck at their noise-punk pummeling best, but swirling keys and strings are surprising touches–and then the absurd Devo-y synths of “Instakill” throw something completely different at us, as does the surging, blaring garage-punk anthem “Sicko”. Combine the skewed perspective of labelmates Landowner with the bleakness of Meat Wave and just a bit of the experimentation of FACS, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Optimizer, one of the most “Chicago underground rock” albums I’ve heard in recent memory (and I’ve heard a lot of them!). The trio sound kinetic and volatile on tracks like “Net Negative”, “It Isn’t”, and “Punchline”, post-punk songs that provide some limber acrobatics in between tough, chewy noise rockers like “Fire, Man” and “GG”. “It’s hard to see it now, but looking back somehow / You’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed,” Obis sings in the latter, over a mixture of post-punk and swelling, symphonic indie rock that’s somehow become “classic Stuck”. (Bandcamp link)

Miscellaneous Owl – The Wanting Chemical

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, bedroom pop, twee, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Walling Up the Train

This is the third year in a row that I’m writing about a Miscellaneous Owl album that came out in March after the project’s mastermind, Huan-Hua Chye, spent February participating in the February Album Writing Month exercise. This time, however, it’s not even the first Chye album album of the year: the Wisconsin singer-songwriter’s five-piece indie pop band Gentle Brontosaurus broke an eight-year gap between LPs in February with Three Hares. The Gentle Brontosaurus LP had plenty of great Chye-penned material on it, but if you missed the Midwestern bedroom pop auteur in solo mode, playing with acoustic indie folk and Magnetic Fields synths and all other manners of tinkering, The Wanting Chemical has us covered.

The Wanting Chemical isn’t Gentle Brontosaurus levels of full-band power pop, but perhaps the return of Chye’s band has trickled into Miscellaneous Owl’s latest album–there’s a bit more electric guitar, some of which I’d even describe as “chugging”. Still, an album that starts with a glittering indie pop song about “American Death” and a power pop stomp about how “You Can’t Save Everything” (beginning with “three dead shrews in a line beside the walking trail”) is classic Miscellaneous Owl. Elsewhere, Chye uses the rockers to serenade the apocalypse (“Em-Dash Shibboleth”, which is indeed the “AI lament”), reminisce on more turbulent times (the Paisley-ish “Camel Crush”), and to get a bit literary (with “Walling Up the Train”).

It wouldn’t be a Miscellaneous Owlbum without some garish synthpop, a role filled by “Counting the Breaths of a Ticking Clock”, and the gaps between these attention-grabbers are filled with the quiet stuff (I’m partial to the lo-fi, fuzzy murmur of “Metaphorical Snow” myself). The twinkling folk-pop of “Centering” closes The Wanting Chemical on a curious note, a pretty pottery and seasonal metaphor which nonetheless has some gore in it, too (roadkill, of course). Chye has a few different recognizable musical hallmarks as Miscellaneous Owl, but a just-as-defining aspect of her albums is her surprising and oftentimes challenging writing, veering from opaque to diaristic (simultaneously, sometimes, I might even say). (Bandcamp link)

The Disassociation – Losing Is a Luxury

Release date: March 21^st
Record label: Shrimper
Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Five Miles to Mexico

Thirty-something years after their initial formation in 1990, right now is a fruitful time for fans of the cult Inland Empire, California indie rock group Refrigerator. The quintet (Chris Jones, Daniel Brodo, Mark Givens, Allen Callaci, and Dennis Callaci) put out their fifteenth album in late 2024, and the past couple years have also seen two collaborative releases by Dennis Callaci (one with Heimito Kunst and one with L. Eugene Methe). The latest Refrigerator-related project is called The Disassociation, an eight-piece “collective” featuring all five band members as well as Amy Maloof (of the Pomona band Falcon Eddy), the novelist (and bassist) Jonathan Lethem, and Sam Sousa (a radio host who supposedly once played in a hardcore band called Bring Your Brain).

Callaci’s side projects hew towards the experimental, but The Disassociation’s first LP, Losing Is a Luxury, largely retains the warm, casual, folky lo-fi indie pop of Refrigerator’s proper records. It also just happens to contain a bit…more than that, too. The winding, delicate lo-fi pop of opening track “Five Miles to Mexico” is vintage Refrigerator, but Maloof’s vocals and the showy bass guitar parts on “Breaking Glass” take the song into new terrain. I would categorize some of the material on Losing Is a Luxury as more Refrigerator-like (“The Map Ain’t the Territory”, even with Maloof’s vocals, and “One Willful Act”) and some a little further afield (like the rootsy tinges to “Merle” and–especially–“Beer Commercial”, or the piano ballad “The Rat in My Kitchen”), but it’s not like there’s a huge gap between these different “sides” to The Disassociation. If I wasn’t so well-versed in Refrigerator (a great investment for one to make, by the way), I’d likely just think of The Disassociation as one big, weird, in-sync family. Maybe that’s what Losing Is a Luxury is, regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac – Two Heavy Hearts

Release date: January 30^th
Record label: Hidden Bay
Genre: Indie folk, lo-fi folk, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Brighton’s Hills

Toulouse-based label Hidden Bay Records has put out a fair amount of French indie pop in recent years, and the imprint kicked off 2026 with another entry in their ongoing project. Louisa Bénâtre is a musician who may be known to some as the drummer of Toulouse “crunch pop” quartet Vemberlain, and she’s also the sister of Camille Bénâtre, who’s put out some solo records on Hidden Bay. Her latest release is a four-song cassette called Two Heavy Hearts that she made with “longtime friend” Barbara Bessac, stemming from a period of time in late 2021 where Bessac, in Britain for an extended period of time, sent Bénâtre three poems as a way of keeping in touch. Bénâtre set these poems to music, the duo wrote a fourth song together after Bessac returned to France, and they then recorded what would become Two Heavy Hearts (with help from Camille).

Bénâtre’s lo-fi pop influences (Broadcast, Au Revoir Simone, Sibylle Baier) range from “dreamy” to “actively sound like they’re fading away”, and this is reflected in this low-key EP. Two Heavy Hearts opens with a simple folk-ish song called “Brighton’s Hills”, leaning heavily on an acoustic guitar and a meandering vocal performance; Bénâtre & Bessac don’t set out to grab us, but we’re welcome to witness what they’re creating. “A Choir” is much in the same manner, although the minimal Casio and harmonies are small but difference-making additions. The drum machine/Casio-organ dream pop of “Fine” is probably the EP’s black sheep, although the barebones bossa nova pop isn’t all that far removed from the stark bedroom folk of the rest of Two Heavy Hearts. “Fluffy” wraps the dozen-minute EP up much like how it begins–spare but beautiful to anyone paying attention. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: True Green, Sluice, Helicopter Leaves, HEDGE

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a very good one, featuring an album from True Green that came out earlier this week and three records coming out tomorrow, March 27th: new LPs from Sluice and Helicopter Leaves, plus a new EP from HEDGE. If you missed the other blog post this week, Monday’s (featuring Julianna Riolino, Swirls, Entrez Vous, and a Chicago lo-fi indie rock compilation), check that one out here.

True Green – Hail Disaster

Release date: March 24^th
Record label: Spacecase
Genre: Lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Terry’s Parrot

One of my favorite albums of 2024 was My Lost Decade, the debut LP from a Minneapolis musician and novelist named Dan Hornsby who makes music under the name True Green. My Lost Decade was an inspired combination of Hornsby’s sharp storytelling with Beatles-esque kitchen-sink lo-fi pop cooked up by Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom. I’ve subsequently been hotly anticipating the sophomore True Green album, Hail Disaster, made once again by Hornsby and Ransom with a collection of Minneapolis- and Memphis-centric collaborators including Zach Mitchell (Missed Dunks at Summer League, Big Clown) and Dustin James (Green/Blue, Waveless). Hail Disaster was preceded a year ago by a two-song single; both “Consider the Priesthood” and “Falconry” ended up making the album, and the quieter, more pensive side of True Green displayed on those songs was, as it turns out, an apt preview of the band’s second album. Not everything on Hail Disaster is such a clear turn into sparse, spacey folk-rock, but there’s a subdued, adrift nature throughout the entire album spurred by both Hornsby’s delivery and True Green’s musical choices.

Three different songs on Hail Disaster reference birds in their title, and that’s not including “Bindi Sue”, a hymn-like tribute to the late conservationist Steve Irwin (James wrote the music for that one). Two different songs mention stingrays (including the Irwin song, of course). The hard-left detours into offbeat power pop and strange dance music of My Lost Decade are gone entirely, with True Green declining to go further than occasionally mustering up a “somewhat jaunty” for guitar pop highlights “Italian Lightning”, “Jonathan”, and “Beatlemania”. One of the songs is about how to draw hands; it’s called “How to Draw Hands”, and Hornsby sings “Go slow, it’s no race,” from the perspective of his mother giving him artistic advice in it. The more time I spend with Hail Disaster, the more I’m drawn in by its overwhelming calmness, a rejection of calamity drawn from what I must assume is Hornsby taking that aforementioned advice. My (current) two favorite songs on the album wouldn’t work without this perspective.

“Terry’s Parrot” is, I think, the emotional core of Hail Disaster; the story isn’t entirely complete without extra context (according to Hornsby, it’s about his uncle who died of AIDS), but we just need to understand the idea of heavy loss to feel the full impact of that song’s final verse. “Bodysurfing” is probably the most beautiful song on Hail Disaster (and there’s a lot of competition for that title), Hornsby and Ransom giving the sparkling, polished, dreamy guitar pop treatment to the former’s tale of a family’s home getting robbed while they’re having “the time of [their] lives” at the beach. “The first half of your life is Tetris / And the second half is Jenga,” Hornsby sings, towards the end of “Bodysurfing”, suggesting a loss of innocence, but he just as immediately shrugs the conclusion off: “But maybe it’s all just / Bodysurfing”. Hail Disaster could’ve ended on that note, but Hornsby generously gives us a conclusion that elucidates the record’s points more finely with “Sparrows & Lilies”. “You worry yourself sick / You worry yourself silly / Think about the sparrows / Think about the lilies,” is how that one begins, and “Like an aquarium in a submarine / You kept yourself apart from everything,” is the refrain. I will admit that I was slightly disappointed that Hail Disaster didn’t have anything as catchy as “My Pecadilloes” on it when I first heard it, but I understand it now. It takes a lot of discipline to let as much go as True Green do on Hail Disaster. (Bandcamp link)

Sluice – Companion

Release date: March 27^th
Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co.
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Vegas

For the past few years now, North Carolina’s Sluice have been known to me as “the band that’s not Fust”, despite sharing several touring bills, band membership, and one-syllable naming conventions with the Asheville alt-country group. Given that Fust made my favorite album of last year, that’s not a bad place to be, but Companion, Sluice’s third album and first since 2023, is enough for them to make a name for themselves beyond that in an increasingly crowded North Carolina indie-alt-country-rock scene. The main quartet of Sluice is singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, drummer Avery Sullivan, bassist Oliver Child-Lanning, and fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, all of whom are in Fust (and two other Fust members, bandleader Aaron Dowdy and Frank Meadows, also appear on Companion). Not to keep talking about Fust, but I can’t help but thinking about how their 2025 album, Big Ugly, seized the little “moment” that their scene is having by polishing Dowdy’s storytelling and songwriting into vibrant, immediately-grabbing country rock–Companion is, conversely, a different beast. It’s a more challenging, wide-ranging “folk rock” album, with plenty of accessible moments and just as many I would hardly describe as such.

The wobbly, steady country rock of opening track “Beadie” is as warm an opening to Companion as one could hope for, and “Rachet Strap” isn’t far behind. On the other end of the album, “Zillow” is a gorgeous penultimate track that interpolates an old Fust song and “Vegas” pulls the trick of saving the catchiest song on the LP for last (it’s an exhilarating, whirlwind country-rock flashback to Morris’ time touring with Angel Olsen as her merch guy in the 2010s, an up-close experience with “indie stardom” that nearly made him quit music and that really wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in the album’s sequencing). In between these four songs is what we call “the fun stuff”–some good old-fashioned Bill Callahan worship (damn, “Torpor” is really good), twin sprawling nine-minute songs (the disintegrating folk-drone of “Unknowing” in particular rules), an empty-space experimental piece, and the fun vocalizing going on at the beginning of “WTF”. After sitting with Companion for a minute, I’ve come to the conclusion that Sluice have also seized their moment. (Bandcamp link)

Helicopter Leaves – Sabrina Nickels

Release date: March 27^th
Record label: Noyes
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: It Really Never Did

Chicago musician Anthony Vaccaro has been widely heard this decade as part of the Beach Bunny phenomenon; he plays guitar and has contributed songwriting to the very popular Windy City indie pop trio. Vaccaro first stepped out on his own in 2023 with Get Stuck In, the home-recorded debut album from his solo project Helicopter Leaves, but it’s the second LP under the name that has fully realized the guitar pop potential that Vaccaro clearly possesses. Sabrina Nickels (named for a recently-deceased family friend who was integral in Vaccaro’s development as a songwriter) is once again entirely written and performed by Vaccaro, but this time he enlisted Sean O’Keefe as a producer and recorded the LP between Electrical Audio and O’Keefe’s Rosebud Studios, a decision that seems to serve the record’s material. For its smooth, eleven-track/thirty-five-minute runtime, Helicopter Leaves hew towards vibrant, immaculately-executed Teenage Fanclub-inspired power pop in the vein of modern crafters like Hurry, Bory, The Sylvia Platters, and Dan Darrah. Vaccaro’s relatively delicate vocals keep Sabrina Nickels with one foot in the worlds of twee and indie pop, but the big guitars and even bigger refrains are hardly bashful.

Sabrina Nickels is a whirlwind; this feeling is greatly enhanced by “It Really Never Did”, a starry-eyed power pop opening track that’s as good as any guitar pop I’ve heard this year. Helicopter Leaves bash out similarly-minded hits in a professional but inspired manner–“Falling Water (Before You)”, “Number Girl”, and “Show Me All Your Landscape Paintings” are all simply sublime. The “deviations” from Vaccaro’s preferred mode are pretty small and still very “power pop”; the blaring synth in “Moreoff More Off Than On” and the slow start to “Sorry from Now On” both give way to big hooks, and the surprisingly electric conclusion to Sabrina Nickels (the garage-tinged “What’s One More Place?” and the fuzz-fest closing track “Self-Reliance”) doesn’t abandon them either. I don’t know if I’d call Sabrina Nickels the “best” power pop album of the year so far, but it’s perhaps the purest distillation of the form of 2026 yet. (Bandcamp link)

HEDGE – Freeze Frame High Five

Release date: March 27^th
Record label: Best Brother
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, punk rock, fuzz rock, orgcore, Bob Mould
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hey Dude

The only band I can think of in recent memory to list Weston as an influence, HEDGE are a pop punk trio from Worcester, Massachusetts who caught my attention with their 2024 debut album, Better Days. I called it an “all-in Bob Mould-style aggressive power-pop-punk record”, and the Sugar/Superchunk sap continues to flow on the group’s brand new EP Freeze Frame High Five. Sprinting through a half-dozen songs in under ten minutes, guitarist “Christopher”, bassist “Pillowman Pete”, and drummer “Rainy Maple Stanford-Cordaro” take us on a foot-on-gas journey through post-Jawbreaker 90s “indie punk” energy and intensity with a power pop sensibility. “Hey Dude” and “Snapple Cap” are just monster trucks of pop songs, and Christopher’s deep, almost conversational voice and vocal melodies make him feel like a pop punk version of The Bevis Frond’s Nick Salomon. Nothing on Freeze Frame High Five is over two minutes long, but ninety-or-so seconds is enough time to give “Ice Rink” a college rock undercurrent and “Hit the Road” a sense of melancholy. The EP closes with a cover of Guided by Voices’ “My Valuable Hunting Knife” that only sort of tries to keep the original melody intact (and not even that with the tempo); it’s impressive in its own weird way how HEDGE’s pop punk steamroller flattens it into something that sounds almost exactly like the rest of Freeze Frame High Five. This quick EP is all the time HEDGE needs to reaffirm themselves as one of the best currently out there at what they do. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Red Xerox, Julianna Riolino, Swirls, Entrez Vous

In an eclectic Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got a new album from Swirls, a new EP from Entrez Vous, a deluxe version of the Julianna Riolino album from last year, and a compilation of new Chicago indie rock bands including Friko, Sharp Pins, and Horsegirl. Check them out below!

We’ll be back on Thursday!

Various – Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025

Release date: March 18^th
Record label: Desert Island Discs/New Now
Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz pop, dream pop, post-punk, noise rock, chamber pop, experimental rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: En Utero

Well, here we are, then. I’ve written quite a bit about what’s going on in Chicago via bands and acts like Sharp Pins, Friko, and Joe Glass, and I haven’t been the only one to take notice. A bunch of teenagers in the Windy City (sometimes connected to nearby Midwestern cities) making underground indie rock music inspired by varying combinations of early Guided by Voices, Flying Nun, Elephant 6, 1960s psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and their home city’s noise rock; some bands (like Horsegirl, Lifeguard, and the aforementioned Friko) have turned buzz into A-list indie record deals and Pitchfork hype, but everybody’s always been adamant that they’re part of a larger scene (sometimes referred to as “Hallogallo”, after Lifeguard/Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater’s cassette label and zine). Red Xerox, assembled by local chronicler and TV Buddha drummer Eli Schmitt, is a well-earned and useful five-year marker for this scene (though, as Slater says on Schmitt’s Bandcamp page: “This compilation is not a reminiscence of the good old days or a document of a time long gone, it is NOW!”).

If you’ve been reading this blog, I probably don’t need to tell you that the Sharp Pins and Friko selections are excellent guitar pop songs–if you like those, Red Xerox also offers up similarly-minded cuts from Dwaal Troupe (another Slater band, who let “En Utero” hiss its way to an excellent big finish), P. Noid (a new-to-me duo who K-Records their way through “Go Somewhere Else”), and Horsegirl (one of their earliest songs, “Sea Life Sandwich Boy”, shows up here). Plenty of other cuts from Red Xerox are “hits” in their own ways, even if they aren’t as upfront in their pop aspirations, from the bouncy post-punk of Uniflora’s “Two or More” to the minimalist indie pop of Post Office Winter’s “Mother, Sister, Nurse” to TV Buddha’s tinny psychedelic shit-wave “Baby, Woah!”. The earnest indie folk of Free Range has always felt drawn from a different era of Chicago music than the rest of these young acts, but Sofia Jensen’s project has been embraced by the mod-revivalists all the same, and “Lost and Found” is as good as anything else on this compilation. At this point, I’ve hit on almost every song on Red Xerox (and I didn’t even get to the most bizarre one–shout out Current Union ™ and their no wave fetishism), which is a good sign for a compilation. I look forward to several of these bands launching the next five years of Red Xerox very soon. (Bandcamp link)

Julianna Riolino – Echo in the Dust (Deluxe)

Release date: February 27^th
Record label: MoonWhistle
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, country rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD (both original version only), digital
Pull Track: Like a Rembrandt

I first knew Julianna Riolino as a member of Daniel Romano’s Outfit, most recently seen contributing to their excellent 2024 album Too Hot to Sleep. Members of the Outfit releasing solo albums is hardly an uncommon occurrence; Carson McHone released one just last year, and Riolino herself already had one under her belt by that point with 2022’s All Blue. Nonetheless, a desire to more fully focus on her solo career led to Riolino leaving the Outfit shortly after Too Hot to Sleep, and she self-released a sophomore album called Echo in the Dust late last year. Though I missed Echo in the Dust on the first go-around, a “deluxe” re-release of it (featuring three additional songs) caught my ear, and I can say now that the Canadian musician has successfully carved out her own style honed from classic 60s folk rock, bits of 70s and even 80s singer-songwriter touches, and snatches of Romano-esque energetic power pop.

Opening track “Like a Rembrandt” is the kind of polished, exuberant, poppy country rock I’d expect from a “Daniel Romano-associate solo album”, and Riolino generously gives us several more songs in a similar vein throughout Echo in the Dust between the glammy alt-country of “It’s a Shakedown”, the breezy guitar pop of “On a Bluebird’s Wing”, and the original LP’s bittersweet closing track “The Less I Know”. I’m sure I’d be happy with an entire album of this kind of material, but Riolino isn’t just interested in that, and so we get songs like the synth-rock glider “Full Moon” (a collaboration with Weird Nightmare), the horn-laden throwback pop of “Seed”, the cavernous, gently-rocking “Let Me Dream”, and the somewhat angsty studio-experiment rock of “I Wonder”. The “bonus tracks” land somewhere in between, all largely pop songs of a relatively thoughtful variety; that Riolino chose the extremes in the “final” tracklist of Echo in the Dust is probably a reflection of the range she’s seeking to explore in her solo work. She’s off to a strong start with this one. (Bandcamp link)

Swirls – Surge

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Howlin Banana/A Tant Rêver Du Roi
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, mod
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Short Fuse

Another French garage rock band, eh? Alright, let’s see what Swirls have to offer. They’re a quartet from Nantes–Guillaume Cibard, Hugo Allard, Samuel Sprent, and Théo Radière are their names, and they all used to play together in a band called The Von Pariahs. Surge is their second album as Swirls, following 2024’s Top of the Line; both LPs have come via stalwart French indie labels Howlin Banana and A Tant Rêver Du Roi. Swirls specifically reference Australian garage punk and The Hives as influences, and you’d probably have a rough guess as to how Surge sounds based off of those references. You wouldn’t be wrong, but there’s this 60s proto-garage rock charm to it, too; it doesn’t sound like the British Invasion and Nuggets per se, but it has the same simple, almost childlike relationship to rock and roll as bands who came about in its relative infancy did.

Swirls sing about whatever happens to be on their mind, whether it’s the concept of needing to sleep every day in “Sleep” (“Now I’m 30 and I’m practically dead/ ‘cause I’ve got back pain wired through my body”) or daydreaming about questionable financial decisions in “A Car or a Guitar”. “Short Fuse” feels right out of 1964 (“(He’s got a short fuse) And it’s yesterday’s news / (He’s got a short fuse) And I’ve got no excuse”); we’re into early The Who territory here. If there’s a theme to Surge, it has something to do with youth and growing up; in addition to the back-crack in “Sleep”, “Neverland” and “Powerstation” deal with it to some degree, too. The members of Swirls have been making this kind of music for over a decade now; they’re different people than in their Von Pariahs days. Thankfully, it sounds like they’re taking fun garage rock with them into their ~~old age~~ thirties. (Bandcamp link)

Entrez Vous – Tell Her a Joke

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, dream pop, experimental pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: (Crying in the) Sportsbook

I first heard the Chapel Hill indie pop duo Entrez Vous last year via their sophomore album, Antenna Legs Hear Everything; just a little under a year since that LP’s “garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop” blend (as I said at the time), Kelly Reidy and Clark Blomquist have returned with their third record since 2023. This time it’s a five-song, eleven-minute EP called Tell Her a Joke, made with help from Chris Girard (bass/bass VI/guitar), Sean Armbruster (organ), Shareen El Naga (organ/electric piano), Danny Grewen (trombone), Justin Blatt (violin), and Paul Finn (who recorded it). Girard, Armbruster, and El Naga now seem to be proper members of Entrez Vous, but the expanded lineup hasn’t lessened the group’s tossed-off, garage-y indie pop rock charms.

“(Crying in the) Sportsbook” is an instant classic from the North Carolina group–golden vintage pop harmonies, country rock shuffling, and a winking vocal performance from Reidy all see to that. It’s over in ninety seconds, and the organ-tinged folk-pop of “Willy” and the drum-machine dreaminess of “Oh, Raquel!” also wrap things up in under two minutes. The digital Side Two is the classic weird flipside, led off by the four-minute psychedelic trip of “Her Favorite Horse” and ending with an orchestral instrumental called “Bootsy’s Place”; Entrez Vous are more than equipped to make the former work as a pop song, and the latter is a perfectly reasonable comedown finale. It’s pretty much all you could want in a stopgap EP, and I look forward to Entrez Vous continuing to stockpile fun and interesting pop music via their current hot hand. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Gladie, Otoliths, This House, Filth Is Eternal

In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 20th: new ones from Gladie, Otoliths, This House, and Filth Is Eternal. If you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, and Corespondents), check that out too.

Gladie – No Need to Be Lonely

Release date: March 20^th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Indie punk, pop punk, grunge-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Push Me Down

This Philly indie punk rock musician still does it the old-fashioned way. At a time when many of August Koch’s peers from the 2010s indie underground have moved on to making more “mature”, tasteful alt-country and/or indie folk, the former frontperson of the now-defunct first-run Tiny Engines band Cayetana has kept the slightly-emo, slightly pop-punk flame alive with Gladie. They’re on their third album now, and No Need to Be Lonely sees Koch joined by bassist Evan Demianczyk, multi-instrumentalist Matt Schimelfenig, drummer Miles Ziskind, and backing vocalist Liz Parsons, not to mention Jeff Rosenstock in the producer’s (and organist’s) chair. Everything about No Need to Be Lonely’s release–from Rosenstock’s involvement, to its release on DIY staple Get Better Records (Remember Sports, Teenage Halloween, Worriers), to a chorus of backing vocalists on “Talk Past Each Other” featuring members of The Sidekicks, Chumped, and Koch’s former Cayetana bandmates–is a callback to a bygone era of indie rock, but No Need to Be Lonely doesn’t come off as sentimental or stuck in the past.

No Need to Be Lonely is immediate, hard-hitting, and raw because that’s what it should be–that’s how Koch writes, plays, and sings. The revved-up, huge guitars make themselves known before anything else on the album, but Koch’s frayed, cracking voice isn’t far behind (both feature heavily on “Push Me Down”, a wrecking ball of an opening track). Koch’s writing is just as blunt–she pulls no punches in singing about humiliation, people pleasing, screaming in open fields, and the like. When Koch repeats “I won’t hold back a compliment / I’ll be careful with how my time is spent,” in the chorus of “Brace Yourself”, it’s the kind of lyric that loses some of its impact when written out without context–in the song, it’s a liferaft clung to in a tsunami. The primary mode of No Need to Be Lonely is nice and grungy; many of the mid-tempo numbers, like “Talk Past Each Other” and “Lucky for Another”, still have a bite to them, and the true detours (“Fix Her”, “I Will If You Will”, “Blurry”) don’t overstay their welcome. In the closing track, “Unfolding”, Koch mutter “Nostalgia’s just fool’s gold,” over a steady, weary indie rock instrumental–if it sounds familiar to us, it’s not because Gladie is looking backwards. (Bandcamp link)

Otoliths – Lithos

Release date: March 20^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, college rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bi-Weekly Lady

The Chicago-originating, Oakland-based musician Tom Smith has been in a bunch of different bands: Smokin’ Ziggurats, Office, Mazes, Social Studies, Silverware, and Abracadabra, to name a few. His latest project is called Otoliths; they debuted in 2024 with a song on a compilation, and their next release is a full-fledged debut album called Lithos. The majority of Lithos was recorded by Jason Kick and Marta Alvarez at Santo Recording with the lineup of Smith on vocals and guitar, Daniel Pearce on drums, Ben McClintock on bass and guitar, Akhil Bhatt on keyboard and vocals, and Ainsley Wagoner on additional vocals (one song, “Minna”, was recorded by Trans Am/Terry Gross’ Phil Manley with a slightly different lineup). Otoliths’ debut album fits right in with the jangly indie pop/college rock revival happening across the San Francisco Bay Area, although they only acknowledge this in a roundabout way by calling themselves a “post-punk band” influenced by Emmett Kelly and Martin Newell (the latter of which is so popular in the modern guitar pop movement that Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records were able to put together an album-length tribute record to him in 2024, mind you).

I hear plenty of Flying Nun, The Soft Boys, and even Elvis Costello in the casual power pop of opening track “Maeve’s Melody”, and Lithos really does come out swinging between the Kiwi Jr.-like stop-start college rock of “Sense in Asking”, the massive fuzz-pop hooks of “Bi-Weekly Lady”, and the jangly psychedelia of “Limb from Limb”. The cruise control vibes of “Bar Pilots” at the beginning of Side Two turn out to actually be last call of a sort–Otoliths spend the final four songs getting comfortable in the spacier realms of dream pop/post-punk. “Go to Sleep” and “Minna” have nice undergirding rhythms, while “Projectionist” ends Lithos with a slow-building that simply comes to a stop in lieu of releasing anything. Lithos loads plenty of melodic guitars and catchy choruses up front, but Otoliths show their mettle by weaving it into less obvious material, too–it all results in a very promising first LP. (Bandcamp link)

This House – Soft Rains Will Come

Release date: March 20^th
Record label: Pink Cotton Candy/Red Wig/Ramble
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Burned House

From 1979 to 2008, G.W. Sok was the unmistakable barking lead vocalist of Dutch noise rock group The Ex, leading the band from anarcho-punks to globe-trotting experimentalists on dozens of albums before departing. Sok has led a Mike Watt-esque career since then, blazing a trail littered with countless collaborations spanning everything from jazz to punk to spoken word. One of these many records was Is This a House?, a 2024 album Sok made with the Spain-originating, Copenhagen-based “noise, jazz and electronic” producer/musician Ignacio Córdoba; the two of them made an “experimental collage album” combining Córdoba’s electronic with occasional rhythms and Sok’s spoken word, and the duo must’ve hit on something, because they started a project called This House not long afterwards.

Unlike Is This a House?, Soft Rains Will Come feels like the work of a real rock band–Córdoba plays most of the instruments on the album, but drummer Søren Høj and synth player P.J. Fossum also help with this feeling. Sok gets to growl and prowl over top of unforgiving rhythmic post-punk again, just like he did with The Ex. It basically sounds like an Ex album with more synths in some parts, which is certainly fine by me; “Oh My, Butterfly” is probably the most Ex-like song on here, but pretty much all of these eight songs hit the same “grinding noise rock” sweet spot at some point in their (frequently stretching-past-five-minute) runtime. Almost every song is lyrically inspired by a different poem, apparently (from Atwood, Bukowski, and Prévert, among others); while Sok’s exact words may not always be important to the structure of these noisy, blaring soundscapes, it’s essential that he sound like he always means it–and I come away from Soft Rains Will Come believing he’s got just as much of a fire under him now as he did forty years ago. This House continues one of the most important threads of Sok’s music career: no matter how twisted and convoluted things get, the passion always makes it through. (Bandcamp link)

Filth Is Eternal – Impossible World

Release date: March 17^th
Record label: MNRK Heavy
Genre: Punk rock, alt-rock, melodic hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Long Way

The Seattle quintet Filth Is Eternal have shared the stage with Baroness and Botch, and they currently share a record label with the likes of Underoath, High on Fire, and Judas Priest. This is, admittedly, further into the realm of “heavy music” than Rosy Overdrive typically ventures (if the name “Filth Is Eternal” didn’t give it away). Nonetheless, the blog is always happy to spotlight good punk rock, and Filth Is Eternal’s fourth album, Impossible World, is most certainly that. On this record, the group (vocalist Lis DiAngelo, guitarists Brian McClelland and Colin Jenkins, bassist Logan Miller, and drummer Emily Salisbury) have thrown themselves headfirst into the realm of meaty, muscular, punk-heavy alt-rock (and, good news: it’s the kind with giant hooks, too). Impossible World hits like a tractor-trailer: a dozen short, serious, grey, loud bursts of heavy metal/hardcore-tinged grunge-pop songs in just under a half-hour. DiAngelo is clear and unwavering over top of guitars set to “rumbling down the highway” and rhythms doing their requisite pounding. It’s hard to pick highlights because Impossible World is an incredibly even listening experience, but you can’t go wrong with the first four songs, which introduce us to where Filth Is Eternal is at perfectly and breathlessly. Once Impossible World turns the faucet on, it just keeps pouring out until “Skorpio” comes to a close. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, Corespondents

We’ve got four new albums for you in this Monday Pressing Concerns, all of which came out last week: new LPs from Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, and Corespondents. Check ’em out!

No Tuesday post this week. Due to personal life business and whatnot, we may be down to two posts a week for the foreseeable future. But we’ll be back on Thursday!

Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman – The Great Degradation

Release date: March 11^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Country punk, cowpunk, alt-country, singer-songwriter, Americana
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Bongos

Two Cow Garage co-leader and central Ohio cowpunk poet laureate Micah Schnabel is about two years removed from The Clown Watches the Clock, a smart, catchy, and funny opus of Midwestern desperation, poverty, and general ambience (I mean, what’s the difference?) that stands as one of the long-running musician’s best works. The cult alt-country lifer is back with a record called The Great Degradation, made with his partner, poet and musician Vanessa Jean Speckman, and partially spurred on by the two of them getting priced out of their Columbus apartment. The duo assembled a group of collaborators with substantial overlap from The Clown Watches the Clock‘s personnel (engineer Alex Douglas, drummer Jason Winner, organist/guitarist Jay Gasper, bassist Todd May, and pianist Frank Turner) and bashed out The Great Degradation over “2.5 days in two separate basements in Columbus”, and the result is an ornery, more laser-focused sequel to Schnabel’s last LP.

Compared to the bittersweet character sketches that opened The Clown Watches the Clock, Schnabel and Speckman barely even bother with these useful middlemen in The Great Degradation’s opening salvo: the duo’s seething landscape-view look at “MAHA” carnage and transphobia resolves to simply “Hands up! Who’s had enough?”. There’s still plenty of wit on this record–“Enemy of the State”, for one (“We’re enemies of the state! / Mental, emotional wellbeing? Not great!”), and “C.I.Hey!” also has plenty of memorable lines before the climax, where Schnabel asks if he, too, can receive the Jackson Pollock treatment for his art. The dark folk rock of “Diamond Dave” and “Omaha (Villain)”, conversely, sound like the work of somebody whose relationship with “wit” is nearing its end. Like most Schnabel-helmed records, The Great Degradation is a rollercoaster, and we’re again rewarded with moments of country rock catharsis–the best ones on this album are the transcendent hackeysack/drum circle anthem “Bongos” and the singalong “2P4P” (repeat after me: “We live in a death cult called the USA / Gets a little more expensive every day”). You won’t find Schnabel and Speckman’s art in The Atlantic, exactly, but the inland stories land a lot closer to home (and I don’t mean that in a strictly geographic sense). (Bandcamp link)

The Notwist – News from Planet Zombie

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Morr Music
Genre: Art rock, 90s indie rock, psychedelia, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: X-Ray

I admit that I’m not the most familiar with the oeuvre of The Notwist. I certainly know of them, the long-running German group acclaimed for merging indie rock and electronica around the turn of the century (they’ve actually been around since the 1980s, initially as a punk band). Currently, the “main trio” of the band is comprised of founding members Markus Acher and Micha Acher plus newer recruit Cico Beck, but the “expanded live formation” of the band more than doubles its numbers (specifically, Theresa Loibl, Max Punktezahl, Karl Ivar Refseth, and Andi Haberl). News from Planet Zombie, The Notwist’s tenth album and first in five years, was recorded by the seven of them in their “home base” of Munich; the resulting album subsequently has a strong foundation in solid indie rock music, even if I’d characterize it as largely “unclassifiable” beyond that. Sometimes quick and straightforward, sometimes symphonic and patient, News from Planet Zombie sounds like a veteran band confidently going wherever their ideas happen to take them.

Chilly indie rock collides with woodwinds in the six-minute opening track “Teeth”, a winding journey that remains engrossing right until single “X-Ray” kicks in with garage rock structure, post-punk rhythms, and a melancholic vocal melody from Markus Acher. The rocking side of The Notwist returns in “The Turning” and parts of “Silver Lines”, but News from Planet Zombie also encompasses the psychedelic pop of “Propeller”, a beautiful chamber-folk cover of “Red Sun” (an underappreciated Neil Young cut from 2000’s Silver & Gold), and the country ballad of “Projectors”. The compact, smooth-moving Notwist found in “The Turning” and “X-Ray” is what drew me into News from Planet Zombie at first, and it’s the layers of “Teeth” and the quiet “Snow” that kept the record on my mind. It’s a very good way to construct a sturdy, long-haul kind of album–it’s like they’re experts at this or something. (Bandcamp link)

Land Whales – How to Make a Breakfast

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Buh
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, punk rock, fuzz rock, shoegaze
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Little Glow

Land Whales were started by vocalist/guitarist Martín Schellekens in Havana, Cuba in 2021; initially, they were called Hey Joni, but the name had changed by the time they released an EP (Libélula) and LP (Null Days) in 2023 on local label Death Heaven Flowers. Schellekens recently relocated from Havana to The Netherlands, but not before recording How to Make a Breakfast, the second Land Whales album, with regular collaborator Martín Espinosa. Released via Buh Records, the Lima, Peru-based label that has been chronicling experimental and underground Latin American music for over twenty years, How to Make a Breakfast is an abrasive, maxed-out noise rock record; more accessible influences like Sonic Youth and shoegaze are present, but Schellekens and Espinosa are truly committed to making challenging pillars of noise music as well.

The first two tracks on How to Make a Breakfast make Land Whales’ seriousness abundantly clear: they start the LP with “Pierce”, which is two minutes of droning feedback and then two more of sludgy noise punk, and then “The Trial” is blistering, frenetic, self-destructive post-hardcore. The reprieve (relatively speaking, I mean) comes in the form of “Eyes Out” and “Little Glow”, both of which are distorted but are more or less straightforward indie rock sounds in a Sonic Youth vein, and “Slit Your Guts” is the closest that Land Whales get to straight-up shoegaze on the album. Brace yourself, though, because Schellekens and Espinosa then take us on an eight-minute feedback-laden odyssey called “No Privacy” and follow it up with an appropriately-titled sludgy number called “The Torment”. Land Whales are the real deal, and, though Schellekens may not live there anymore, it’s certainly worth highlighting that How to Make a Breakfast is entirely the product of a Cuban rock scene clearly meriting a spotlight beyond its country of origin. (Bandcamp link)

Corespondents – Exploding House

Release date: March 12^th
Record label: Antiquated Future
Genre: Post-rock, jazz-rock, surf rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Strawberry Ashtray

The confusingly-named Seattle quartet Corespondents have been doing their thing for over twenty years now–said “thing” being instrumental, “surf-inspired” post-rock. The four of them (currently Doug Arney, Todd Arney, Olie Eshleman, and Kieran Harrison) are on their tenth album now, Exploding House, out via Pacific Northwest indie rock stalwart label Antiquated Future (Rose Melberg, Guidon Bear, Fred Thomas). Compared to the other long-running, (sometimes) instrumental Seattle post-rock group I know, the noise rock-adjacent Kinski, Corespondents have a wildly different set of influences: psychedelia, jazz, Tropicália, and, indeed, surf rock. Exploding House is a concise one, fitting six compositions into twenty-seven quick minutes. Opening track “Rubbin My Dirt Ball” introduces Corespondents with spindly guitars, strong but casual rhythms, and synths set to “whooshing”; the brighter songs on the album, like “Strawberry Ashtray” and “Queen Nut”, follow in its footsteps. On the more challenging end of the spectrum, the seven-minute “Furtive Lurker” chronicles Corespondents’ full descent into jazz rock, while closing track “Vegan Meditation Part 2: K-hole at the AI Weiwei Jawa Rave: Sisyphus Mix” (sure, sure) is a little closer to ambient-rock. It’s nothing that those of you willingly signing yourselves up for “surf-inspired post-rock” can’t handle, though. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Bill Orcutt, Missed Dunks at Summer League, Dialup Ghost, The Foot & Leg Clinic

In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we look at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 13th, from Bill Orcutt, Missed Dunks at Summer League, Dialup Ghost, and The Foot & Leg Clinic. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Railcard, Star Moles, Timeout Room, and The Early), check that out too.

Bill Orcutt – Music in Continuous Motion

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Palilalia
Genre: Experimental rock, post-rock, jazz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Giving Unknown Origin

What’s Bill Orcutt up to now? Indie rock fans may remember his 90s noise rock/experimental band Harry Pussy, but the Miami-originating, San Francisco-based musician has reinvented himself as a prolific solo artist over the past decade and a half. Though Orcutt is known for free improvisation, his hit 2022 album Music for Four Guitars (I mean, as much of a “hit” as this kind of thing can be) spotlit a strong compositional element (and it also birthed the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish). Once again released via his own label Palilalia, Orcutt’s latest solo album, Music in Continuous Motion, finds the guitarist returning to the realm of four-guitar compositions (all played by himself, of course). I only have a passing familiarity with Orcutt’s work (for instance, I haven’t heard any of the five solo albums that came in between this one and Music for Four Guitars), but the fluid spirit of Music in Continuous Motion drew me in pretty quickly.

I mean, it’s called Music in Continuous Motion, and that’s exactly what it sounds like. The four guitars intertwine and play off of each other, but they’re always moving towards something–and moving quickly, as Orcutt wraps up every one of these songs in under three minutes (and the LP itself in under thirty). Even the titles flow into each other; I’m not sure if all twelve of them combined make a coherent statement per se, but the ones adjacent to each other all seem to be in communication, at least (“Because sharp also smooth”, “And warm to the touch”, “Now nearly gone”, “Unfinished not fragile”, “Yet always moving”, et cetera). The songs are somewhat chaotic but outwardly melodic; “Giving unknown origin”, the opening track, positively chimes along, and the next few songs are all markedly tuneful (even “Now nearly gone”, the most abrasive song up until that point on the record, has some tasteful and understandable guitar solos baked into it). I don’t regret peeking into the world of Bill Orcutt; if Music in Continuous Motion is at all representative, it’s a quite vibrant one. (Bandcamp link)

Missed Dunks at Summer League – Fared Well

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Machine Duplication
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Missed Dunks at Summer League

I have my pre-conceived notions on what “Memphis rock music” sounds like. It’s the land of the Oblivians, Jay Reatard, and Goner Records (not to mention “rock and roll”); I would come to an album released on an underground “always documenting, always DIY” cassette label (Machine Duplication Recordings, run by True Green and Big Clown’s Zach Mitchell) expecting some relatively unhinged mixture of “garage rock” and “punk rock”. If you’re in the same boat as me, I’d encourage you to shelve your expectations when it comes to Missed Dunks at Summer League, a new indie rock band from Jordan Petersen-Kamp. Petersen-Kamp began this project not long after landing in Memphis from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his debut album under the name, Fared Well, is largely a solo effort (Mitchell and Elijah Poston provide additional percussion, and Spence Bailey is credited with production and additional bass).

Compared to the bands around them in their adopted hometown, Missed Dunks at Summer League’s influences are a bit more…esoteric? The dominant sound of Fared Well is greyscale, chilly, introverted 90s indie rock–Machine Duplication mentions Built to Spill and the Mountain Goats as ingredients, though they don’t particularly sound like either one of those acts. Fared Well does rock in its own way–the opening title track features a nice bass groove and a hypnotic guitar riff, “Miller’s Thumb” trudges forward in an Electrical Audio kind of way, and “Don’t Slip” could very nearly be called “garage rock”. They aren’t the only relatively upbeat moments on Fared Well, but the plodding, introspective side of Missed Dunks at Summer League is already apparent there, and Petersen-Kamp dives fully into it with “Pinaceae” and “Big Lake”. There are more apt choices if you’re looking for a quick hit of Memphis rock and roll music, but if you’re down for a band with a little more deliberation in their stride that can still get it up for rockers like “It Feels Good to Be Bored”, Missed Dunks at Summer League are here to help. (Bandcamp link)

Dialup Ghost – Donkey Howdy

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, indie pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Sunny Boy

The Nashville alt-country quartet Dialup Ghost have been making music since 2018, when they released their debut album, I’m Fine, I’m Fine. At the time, their lineup was solidifying into vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Russ Finn, bassist/guitarists Jade McPeak and Jordan Smith, and drummer Jack Holway; eight years later, the four of them have just made their fifth album together, Donkey Howdy. The album’s goofy title is “an attempt to free the band from over-seriousness and over-thinking”, and these eleven songs (recorded last year with Truck Roley at Bunker Noise) also represent an attempt by Dialup Ghost to incorporate musical ideas beyond their alt-country roots (Roley’s synthesizer and McPeak’s trumpet feature prominently in a few songs). Both Finn’s writing and Nashville drawl help Dialup Ghost stay squarely in the big-tent version of “alt-country”, but Donkey Howdy is a subsequently adventurous and weird album reflecting a band still restless after several records together.

If you can hang with the first two songs of Donkey Howdy, you’ll enjoy the rest. There are some genuinely fun country rock moments on this album, so Dialup Ghost’s decision to open their album with an acoustic guitar-led folk-y ballad in “Seafoam Ceiling” and the depressing synth-Americana number “Shallow Ends” is pretty bold. The duality of Dialup Ghost is on full display with the goofy, endearing, power pop/country synthesis in the most accessible songs on Donkey Howdy, “Bigger Households”, “Yer the Only One on My Mind”, “Soot Sprite”, and “Sunny Boy”. Those are the ones I’d direct any skeptics to at first, but there’s plenty to like in Dialup Ghost’s weirder areas; the seven-minute trumpet-folk meditation on a lost stand of pines of “The Giving and Taking of Shade” is slowly becoming one of my favorite tracks on the record. It’s a good sign that Dialup Ghost find success at both ends of Donkey Howdy. (Bandcamp link)

The Foot & Leg Clinic – Sit Down for Rock and Roll

Release date: March 13^th
Record label: Bingo
Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, art rock, psych/prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Where Did All the Fruit Go?

Sometime around the beginning of this decade, four musicians from Glasgow made the good decision to begin playing music together, and the not-so-good decision to call their band “The Wife Guys of Reddit”. After a smattering of EPs and singles across the last few years, the quartet (co-led by vocalists/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Arion Xenos and Niamh R MacPhail, joined by pianist Angus Fernie and drummer Elise Atkinson) have linked up with Bingo Records (The Bug Club, U.S. Highball, Tulpa) to release their debut LP. They’ve rechristened themselves The Foot & Leg Clinic (a marginally better name, I suppose) and asked us to Sit Down for Rock and Roll with an offbeat, catchy, and surprising collection of British indie-art-rock (“wonk rock”, they call it).

Sit Down for Rock and Roll is a bit hard to get a read on at the outset: listening to “Intro – Showtime”, it sounds like we’re in for a bunch of low-key twee indie folk-pop, while the inchworm rhythms, quote unquote angular guitar riffs, and sing-muttering of “The Early Bird” suggests that The Foot & Leg Clinic are one of those new-fangled “British post-punk bands”. The truth is that neither description comes all that close to capturing Sit Down for Rock and Roll, an album stocked with catchy, pop-forward garage rock like “Dear Bongo” and “Where Did All the Fruit Go?” that imagine a more polite version of their labelmates in The Bug Club, as well as the psychedelic, folk, and even prog undertones to pieces like “Music for Baby Fairy”, “…Halcyon”, and “The Mariposal Antidote” (the latter of which is actually nearly as catchy as the previously-mentioned cohort). The Foot & Leg Clinic seem to contain multitudes, and their first album is an oddly compelling listen thanks to it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Railcard, Star Moles, Timeout Room, The Early

It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It’s got a new compilation from Railcard, plus new albums from Star Moles, Timeout Room, and The Early! These are good!

No blog post this Tuesday, unfortunately. Need to catch up on some things; Pressing Concerns will be back on Thursday.

Railcard – Railcard

Release date: February 6^th
Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk-pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Born in ‘62

Peter Momtchiloff has probably been most heard as the founding guitarist of archetypal twee-pop quintet Heavenly, who have just returned with their first new album since 1996 in February. He’s also backed Jessica Griffin in her band Would-Be-Goods since 1999, and that band also returned with a new album in February. And if you’ve been paying attention to the indie pop world, you’d also know that there’s a third Momtchiloff-associated record that came out in February. Meet Railcard, a new indie pop supergroup co-founded last year by Momtchiloff (bass), Rachel Love of Dolly Mixture (vocals/guitar/keys), and Ian Button of Thrashing Doves, The Catenary Wires and the recently-reunited lineup of Heavenly (vocals/drums/guitar). After adding trumpeter Allison Thomson (Trash Can Sinatras, Heist) to complete the quartet, Railcard quickly released two digital EPs last October and December; this CD compilation from Skep Wax and Slumberland collects the seven songs from them as well as three new ones.

Although Button and Love (who also trade off lead vocals) are Railcard’s songwriting duo, Railcard is also very much in line with Momtchiloff’s other bands in its pursuit of timeless-sounding indie pop. Loosely speaking, the group have two different modes: a triumphant, confident, often horn-aided 60s-style pop rock side, and a softer, more pensive take on indie-soft-folk-rock-pop. Although Railcard is presented in chronological order (four songs from the Railcard EP, three from E.P. 2, and then the three new ones), it all feels of a piece; the original EP showcases both the direct (“Narcissus” and “Born in ‘62”, the year in which Momtchiloff, Love, and Button indeed all originated) and indirect (“Cherry Plum” and “Revolutionary Calendar”) sides of Railcard, and the rest of the record elaborates upon these poles. The trumpet showcase “Northern Soul Dancing”, the string-aided retro finale “Think About That”, and the propulsive “Disco Loadout” are all immediate highlights from the rest of Railcard, though don’t sleep on cuts like the sub-two-minute, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dream pop of “Day Dream”, either. Railcard plan to follow this compilation with a “proper” album soon enough, but Railcard is an adequate first statement on its own. (Bandcamp link)

Star Moles – Highway to Hell

Release date: February 26^th
Record label: Historic New Jersey
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, piano pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Halo

Star Moles is Emily Moales, a prolific Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music under the name since 2017 and as of late has been averaging at least one Star Moles record per year, sometimes on Earth Libraries (The Juniper Berries, The Medium, Pelvis Wrestley) and sometimes on Historic New Jersey Recordings. The latter, who’ve released Highway to Hell, is the label of Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko; Basko (who also plays with Moales in the band Hot Machine) produced this album and played most of the instruments that Moales didn’t on it (Sam Sullivan of Sam & Louise plays some guitar, and Jem Seidel adds percussion on one song). Moales has described Star Moles’ music as “medieval-via-1960s folk-troubadour” before, and that’s not far off from the offbeat, transcendent, marching-to-the-beat-of-her-own-drum singer-songwriter I hear on Highway to Hell (it is an album for people who wish Mary Timony made more records that sound like Mountains, perhaps).

You can squint at Highway to Hell’s opening track, “The End”, and see both a boozy dive-bar ballad and a traditional folk song (as far as album-length theses go, exploring the space, or lack thereof, between the two seems like a fairly promising one). Highway to Hell doesn’t necessarily feel like a reaction to anything, per se, but it does serve as a nice antidote to the polished, glossy, “SSRI-core” side of modern “indie folk”; stuff like “Real Magic” and “Factory Train” are very well-executed and disciplined, do not get me wrong, but the vision that Moales and Basko have in mind with these songs is something beautiful in a more challenging way. That’s all well and good, but Highway to Hell also works because it’s quite fun; stuff like the tinkering pop rock of “Time”, the meandering piano ballad “Overdog”, and ever-so-slightly “Philly alt-country”-curious closing track “Halo” are all going to stick with me. If not immediately rewarding, Highway to Hell is instantly intriguing, and there’s a clear road to the full charms of the album from there. (Bandcamp link)

Timeout Room – Celebration Station

Release date: February 20^th
Record label: Tough Gum
Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Night Eye

Timeout Room crash-landed into view back in 2023 with an album called Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, a brilliant, skewed, and bizarre collection of guitar pop that was like The Cleaners from Venus as interpreted by a lo-fi punk from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (S.T. McCrary, responsible for everything on that LP). A follow-up LP took three years to materialize, but Celebration Station is a fantastically frayed collection of jangle pop, power pop, and garage punk that meets the high bar set by Timeout Room’s debut. McCrary gets some more help this time around (Kallie Tiffault on bass and backing vocals for a few songs, Atticus Lopez drums on half the album, Stevie Spring plays a guitar solo on “Don’t You Feel Better Off?”), and some of the more overtly silly aspects of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures are absent (there are no fake rock radio interlude tracks, for instance), leading to a tighter, more rocking collection of tracks that is nonetheless still very fun.

“Don’t You Feel Better Off?”, “Night Eye”, and “Keep Me Up” are an incredibly strong opening trio (discounting the intro track “STMS”, with which I have no beef); the first of those three, with its blistering guitar solo, is some nice, gritty, post-Wipers rock-and-roll, “Night Eye” continues McCrary’s mission to shove pop punk-level hooks and attitude into lo-fi guitar pop, and “Keep Me Up” is sloppy, tinny college rock in the vein of acts like Silicone Prairie. Some of the best power pop on Celebration Station comes afterwards, though–“All Away” slips more of an overt British Invasion interpretation over top of McCrary’s melody, and the tick-ticking drum machine pop of “Domino” and “I Hope It Don’t Take Long” (the latter of which feels right out of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures) are true Side-Two gems. After the excitement of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, Celebration Station feels like Timeout Room settling down just a little bit and confirming that they’ve got more up their sleeves yet. (Bandcamp link)

The Early – I Want to Be Ready

Release date: February 27^th
Record label: Island House
Genre: Post-rock, experimental, jazz, electronica
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Hill Forms

The Early is the instrumental, experimental post-rock duo of drummer/percussionist Jake Nussbaum (who’s also played with Ben Seretan) and guitarist/korg player Alex Lewis (also of Flat Mary Road), currently based in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively. The Early’s roots go all the way back to Lewis and Nussbaum’s time as high schoolers in New Jersey in the early 2000s, but they really took off again after reuniting in Philadelphia at the beginning of this decade, releasing records like On Juniper, Impatient, and Squashed Dragons from 2022 to 2024. Nussbaum is now a lecturer in Liberal Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but The Early haven’t slowed down, releasing a three-song EP called Cusp last December and quickly following it with a full-length called I Want to Be Ready this February.

Named after choreographer and dancer Danielle Goldman’s book of the same name, I Want to Be Ready is a five-song, forty-one minute exploration of spontaneity and improvisation drawing heavily from the duo’s formative Chicago-based 90s post-rock. Like a lot of post-rock, I Want to Be Ready often starts in a challenging, minimal place and builds to something bigger and louder, though there’s no clear roadmap to these five songs. “Hill Forms” is beautiful, relatively approachable instrumental jazz-post-rock, sure, but “The Laughing Earth” is ten minutes of mostly-percussion-led emptiness before getting a little busy in the last couple, and thirteen-minute penultimate track “Flossless” ends more or less as it begins. The Early’s playing sounds natural and fluid, but I can also hear the communication between Nussbaum and Lewis in how they guide these tracks along. I Want to Be Ready stands out among experimental rock music thanks to the titular desire expressed and, eventually, realized by it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Status/Non-Status, Abi Reimold, Human Potential, Powerwasher

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring three records coming out tomorrow, March 6th (new LPs from Status/Non-Status and Human Potential, and a new EP from Powerwasher), plus one that came out on Tuesday (an album from Abi Reimold). Check ’em out, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: a Pressing Concerns featuring Heavenly, Royal Ottawa, Me, You, & My Metronome, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary; Tuesday: the February 2026 playlist), check those out, too.

Status/Non Status – Big Changes

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, art rock, psychedelia, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Good Enough

Anishinaabe indie rocker Adam Sturgeon exploded onto the scene (well, my scene) in 2021 with an EP called 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years that introduced his Status / Non Status project (he’d previously made music as Whoop-Szo). Over the next three years, another Status / Non Status EP, an LP, and two albums from OMBIIGIZI (Sturgeon’s duo with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman) followed, and the chaotic, all-over-the-place energy of 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years began to congeal into a recognizable sound combining 90s indie and alt-rock, psychedelia, and folk. Big Changes is nonetheless the first Status / Non Status album since 2022, and Sturgeon takes the opportunity to make an overwhelming, emotional Canadian rock album. Of course, as per usual, Sturgeon shares the spotlight: contributors to Big Changes include members of Sunnsetter, Zoon, and Broken Social Scene, as well as Julie Doiron (anyone who’s heard Sturgeon’s music knows how much of an influence Doiron’s old band Eric’s Trip has been on it, so that feels significant).

Sturgeon has the gift of pulling together blunt alt-rock with the mistiness of dream pop, and “At All” opens Big Changes with a nice, fuzzy, vaguely unsettled summation of Status / Non Status’ core sound. Speaking of unsettling, “Peace Bomb” embodies the contradiction of its title, buzzing and whirring and sounding apocalyptic and catchy all at once. If Big Changes isn’t the most outwardly friendly Adam Sturgeon album, the moments of beauty are still there; “Basket Weaving” (featuring Colleen “Coco” Collins) is an obvious example, the six-minute Canadian rock hymn “Good Enough” (featuring Doiron) perhaps even more so. I would call “Good Enough” the album’s centerpiece if not for “Arnold”, an intense, uncomfortable song that is uplifting at times but without waving away the darker details. Big Changes’ finale, the six-minute post-rock monolith “Tom Climate”, is able to rival the record’s aforementioned emotional peaks without a word; it sounds like mountains moving. “Tom Climate” careens to a stop amidst feedback, electronic sputtering, and a pounding drumbeat; Big Changes are here, indeed, but Status / Non Status haven’t proclaimed a winning faction yet. (Bandcamp link)

Abi Reimold – Picking Stones

Release date: March 3^rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, bedroom folk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Destiny

It’s been ten years since Abi Reimold released Wriggling, their first and, up until now, only album. Put out via Sad Cactus (Floral Print, Maxshh, Powerwasher), it was a dingy indie rock album from the basements of mid-2010s Philadelphia; Pitchfork’s Nina Corcoran compared them to Mitski and Angel Olsen at the time, believe it or not. Lurch forward a decade, and Reimold is back with a humble collection of eight songs called Picking Stones, reinventing themself as a dusty slacker folk/alt-country singer-songwriter. Though it was recorded with a full band (drummer Evan Campbell, pedal steel player Zena Key, bassist Bill Magerr, and Evan McGonagill, with whom Reimold has played in Hour, on cello), Picking Stones puts the spotlight entirely on Reimold’s writing. These intimate songs of infatuation, yearning, drinking, and smoking are, despite the vibe they give off, not shrinking violets themselves.

“Pining like an evergreen / On the curb your Christmas tree,” Reimold sings to open Picking Stones via its title track, a sparse acoustic one–the torch song is very nearly extinguished, but we can still see a little light. I can hear the classic country influence in the occasionally-rousing “Drinking Song” (“I don’t care if it’s twelve o’clock or it’s noon”, indeed), while the twee-folk turn of “Open to Suggestions” is content to lackadaisically sketch out a nice little life (“We’re good together, you and me and Mary Jane”), punctuated by the fifty-second coda of “Stoned” (“I wanna get stoned on you / You’re the highest that I ever fell”). Late-album highlights “Phasing” and “Destiny” present perhaps the most “complete” version of 2026 Abi Reimold’s sound, a mixture of the greyscale 2010s indie rock in which they came up, confounding, slowcore-ish turn-of-the-century singer-songwriters like Nina Nastasia, Hannah Marcus, and Jenny Mae, and just a touch of the orchestral work Reimold’s done in Hour (McGonagill’s cello is what really knocks “Destiny” out of the park for me). There’s a lot to like in Picking Stones if you get to know it, and I wouldn’t mind Reimold making another one of these in under ten years. (Bandcamp link)

Human Potential – Eel Sparkles

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: What Delicate
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Art Beat

In the early 2000s, Andrew Becker was the drummer for cult Washington, D.C. trio Medications, playing on their first EP and LP (both released on Dischord) before departing. He resurfaced in the Brooklyn group Screens not long afterwards, but they broke up in 2011, and Becker has been helming a solo project called Human Potential ever since. Eel Sparkles is the seventh album from the musician and filmmaker (currently based in Los Angeles) under the Human Potential name, self-released on Becker’s own label What Delicate Recordings like the six albums before it. Not that I necessarily expected Becker’s current music to sound like a band he drummed for twenty years ago, but it’s notable just how far away Eel Sparkles is from Medications’ relatively minimal post-punk/post-hardcore; this is a polished, layered, slightly dreamy, slightly psychedelic indie rock record.

Opening track “Sun-E Corporation Teenage Anthem” is very nearly prog-pop, just as contorted as it is sunny, and “The House That Kept Hemingway Alive” does something similar with the added layer of brisk, fidgety percussion. Speaking of percussion, the drumbeat that anchors the five-minute “Art Beat” (lives up to its title, yes) goes a long way towards making that one’s relatively chaotic, boisterous energy one of Eel Sparkles’ clearest standouts. Human Potential rarely rock straightforwardly, but Eel Sparkles does rock–the folk-tinged “Practice Songs for the Unloved”, the incredibly wonky art punk of “The Sightseer”, and the constantly-in-motion “I Have Always Been Some Human” ensure that the album is arguably even more engaging in its back half. There’s a tension between these bursts of energy and the more suspended-animation moments on Eel Sparkles (like most of “Do You Remember Albert?” and “Street Sweeper’s Daughter”); this helps the album feel like the work of an artist intensely piecing together an overarching vision. (Bandcamp link)

Powerwasher – Pressure

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Parachute

Back in 2024, the Baltimore quartet Powerwasher put out their debut album, Everyone Laughs, which combined the garage-y post-punk of their 2020 EP The Power of Positive Washing with some noisier post-hardcore. Almost exactly two years after Everyone Laughs, Powerwasher are back with Pressure, an EP that condenses their whole deal into five songs and fifteen minutes. The band are still very much the explosive, fun, hardcore-ish punk rock group of their past work (you’ll hear bits of classic SST Records, Nomeansno, and, of course, Dischord here), but Powerwasher have taken this between-album release to get a little weird, too.

“Parachute” is a hard-charging, electric punk opener, but the no wave-y horns and strange whirring sounds hint at some of the odder undercurrents (and, occasionally, straight-up currents) on Pressure. “10,000 Cuts” is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard from Powerwasher yet, switching between aggressive hardcore-ish punk to more subtle, almost dreamy math rock around halfway through. The metallic egg punk of “Mirage” is simple enough until RXKNephew kamikazes in for the last minute or so (finally, the collaboration we’ve all been clamoring for!); Neph is (somewhat sadly) the only guest rapper to appear on Pressure, but the drilling post-punk of “3-meo-pce” and the avant-hammer “Haste” ensure the EP ends on a bang nonetheless. This noisy, busy dispatch from the world of Powerwasher should hold us until the four of them get another LP together. (Bandcamp link)

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