It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new records from The Chutes, Inland Years, and Me, You, & My Metronome, plus a reissue from Great Plains. Check them out below!
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.
Great Plains – Naked at the Buy, Sell, and Trade (40th Anniversary)
Release date: June 5th Record label: Tone Scholar Genre: College rock, jangle pop, post-punk, cowpunk, punk rock, new wave Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dick Clark
If you were to design one of those web-map graphics to represent “Columbus, Ohio indie rock”, Great Plains might as well be in the center of it. The central Ohio quintet–vocalist/guitarist Ron House, guitarist Matt Wyatt, keyboardist Mark Wyatt, bassist Paul Nini, and drummer David Green–released three albums on Homestead Records in the mid-to-late 1980s, and they went on to either play in, inspire, or support in some way a staggering amount of the “indie rock” bands in their home city that followed in their footsteps. Great Plains’ second album, Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade, turned forty last year, and the band have celebrated this milestone with a vinyl and CD reissue through Elastic Stage and Tone Scholar Recordings, the latter of which is run by Nini (also of Closet Mix and Sanpaulo).
Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade (presented with four bonus tracks on the CD version) is shining proof of just what a weird, difficult, and unique band Great Plains were while they were active. Certainly a “college rock” band, this LP is equal parts catchy jangle pop, bizarre 1980s American-style post-punk, and a bit of Midwestern roots rock–they appeared on the landmark Strum & Thrum jangle pop compilation back in 2020, but this album is equally comparable to underground misfits like The Dead Milkmen, Violent Femmes, or even Pere Ubu. Just in Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade’s first half, we’re treated to the catchy jangle-power pop opening track “Dick Clark” (which imagines an Ohioan Meat Puppets to some degree), the sardonic new wave “Letter to a Fanzine”, and the seven-minute post-punk endurance test “Chuck Berry’s Orphan”. Naked at the Buy, Sell and Trade (and Great Plains as a whole) doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes into which music from forty years ago gets reduced, but their records are still right there to listen to for anyone who wants to hear what the underground actually sounded like. (Bandcamp link)
The Chutes – The Chutes
Release date: July 24th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop, twee Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Scraping the Last Bits of Light
You’re probably wondering when Rosy Overdrive is going to introduce a new jangle pop band from the Bay Area, preferably with a new record on one of the San Francisco region’s leading lights like Dandy Boy Records. Well, wait no longer, because the self-titled debut EP from a San Francisco husband-and-wife duo called The Chutes is here to give you everything you could possibly want in a seven-song guitar pop record. Kenneth Turner (vocals/instruments) and Erika Calderon-Turner (vocals) actually have a very different background from your typical indie pop duo, however: the former is most famous for leading the San Francisco hardcore bands Foghorn and Fentanyl, and while I’m not sure the specifics of the latter’s music history, she’s also been involved with the Bay Area hardcore scene in some way.
Some hardcore musicians bring a more punk edge to indie pop when they pick it up, but The Chutes bears virtually no signifiers of that scene. Kenneth and Erika trade lead vocals over top of jangly, sunny guitars like they’re veterans of the art form: opening track “Scraping the Last Bits of Light” sounds like a band who are students of British C86-style indie pop, and “What Have I Gotten Myself Into” is just as sugary and vibrant. “Like Waves” and “Nowhere in Particular” have a nice propulsion to them, and while only two of the seven tracks have anything of a “ballad” quality to them, The Chutes pull off the more melancholic vibes of “Mise en Place” and “Twin Lens” as well as anything else on their debut record. The Chutes is anything but a dabbling by a couple of genre tourists; Kenneth and Erika are very good at this already, and hopefully this EP is the start of more contributions to the modern jangle pop movement. (Bandcamp link)
Inland Years – Nowadays
Release date: July 14th Record label: BSDJ Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Nothing Left to Say
Last year, I wrote about Keep Your Eyes on the Road, a cassette of jangly, lo-fi, folky guitar pop from a longtime punk musician named Ryan Daniels. Daniels’ Inland Years solo project is quite prolific: we’re only a year and a couple of months out from Keep Your Eyes on the Road, but they’ve put out The Bunker Sessions (featuring full-band recordings of a few older Inland Years songs), a cassette called The Meadow, and Nowadays, which finds Daniels once again linking up with Japanese tape label BSDJ for a thirteen-song, fifteen-minute record. As you can probably tell from that length breakdown, Daniels favors shorts bursts of pop music hovering around the 60 to 90 second range, sounding like a lo-fi Teenage Fanclub with a Tony Molina or early Guided by Voices attitude to song construction. One shouldn’t necessarily mistake “lo-fi” for “simple”, as the self-harmonies and interesting instrumental interjections of “Morning Train” prove, although the more straightforward folk-pop of “I Know This More Than Anyone”, the tape-hiss indie pop of “A Thousand Miles”, the rustic power pop of “Haunt”, and the jangly sendoff of penultimate track “Nothing Left to Say” are all equally as effective. It’s another dispatch in brevity from Inland Years, who seem to be experts at paring things down without leaving us shortchanged. (Bandcamp link)
Me, You, & My Metronome – Family Plan
Release date: July 24th Record label: Petit Village Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Zip Codes
I wrote about Jon Sakata and his noise pop project Me, You & My Metronome just a couple months ago, when the Montreal-based artist put out the seven-song Hooray for the Status Quo EP. Sakata has been making music since the mid-2000s (and apparently has lived everywhere from Hawaii to Japan to Austin to San Francisco before settling in Quebec), but Family Plan is the debut full-length album from his current project, and it expands upon the dreamy guitar pop Hooray for the Status Quo displayed. The forty-one minute album kicks off with two songs displaying Me, You & My Metronome’s range in the sublime, meditative opening track “Big Stadium” and the full-on, fuzzed-out, shoegaze-inspired pop of “Zip Codes”. Rockers like “Sunday Someday” and “Embroiled in Meaning” sit gamely alongside more thoughtful dream pop material like “Sad Waterpark” and “Westward Bound”, both sides of which highlight Sakata’s ability to write a pop song with the best of them. Me, You & My Metronome seems like it’s on a hot streak between the quick turnaround and the expansion of themselves to a larger stage, so those who appreciate Sakata’s strain of indie pop would do well to check out Family Plan. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to a Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have two albums coming out tomorrow, July 31st (from Mopar Stars and Bondo), plus two albums that came out earlier this week (from Cheekface and Grass Jaw). Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Josaleigh Pollett, Nocturnal Prose, Picastro, and Jake King), check that one 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.
Cheekface – Podium
Release date: July 28th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, power pop, new wave, dance-punk, pop rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Peanut Butter Prawns
I’ve said it before, but I really do appreciate bands who put out an album every year (it used to be quite common, believe it or not, kids). It’s a very unpretentious way to go about making art (and I do recognize the irony as using that descriptor with respect to Cheekface of all bands, but I’ll get to that). Technically, it makes my (unpaid) job as a music writer harder: there’s more music to cover, and there’s less of an obvious “narrative” or “journey” when you just have a band putting out a “here’s what we’ve created lately” document every few months. You could listen to Podium, shrug and say, “well, it sounds like a Cheekface album”, and move on–and indeed, it does sound about midway between the two most recent Cheekface albums, 2025’s Middle Spoon and 2024’s It’s Sorted. You could cut the most “power pop” songs from those albums or the most “dance-punk” ones and stick them together and create totally different records–and I imagine that’s what most bands would do. But that’s not Cheekface, a band who are dedicated to giving us the entire “Cheekface experience” on each one of their records and everything that that entails.
That’s partially to say that, if you haven’t been charmed by Cheekface in the past, Podium isn’t going to be the one to break that streak. One clear artistic choice that the trio have made on this album is opening the LP with their most confrontational side: “Hostile Street” and “There Is a God” are the deadpan post-ironic, rhythm-driven, late-90s-alt-pop trash heap Cheekface at their most uncut. If you’re the “scissors in hand for the best-of playlist” time, you’ll perk up at the massive new wave pop rock success “Peanut Butter Prawns” (that’s the best song They Might Be Giants never wrote right there), and you’re also going to be particularly interested in “Black Site” (“When they lock me in a black site, here’s the music to put on,” is the band at their self-aware best), “No Fly Zone” (this is the patented Cheekface “should not work anywhere near as well as it does” one), and “U Can’t Do It” (what is this one about? I’m not sure but it rules). What else do we get with Podium? Bassist Amanda Tannen takes the lead vocals for a verse on “The Weather” (they should let her sing more, but her voice has a much different tone than Greg Katz’s does which I’m sure makes it tricky), we get The Ballad(TM) with “Rent Is Down”, and there’s also this dadaist industrial anti-fascist thing called “Discrete” (I respect the ambition even if it doesn’t end up being one of my favorite Cheekface songs here). Prolific or no, I can’t imagine anyone running out of things to say about Cheekface anytime soon. (Bandcamp link)
Mopar Stars – Official Researchers of the NJ Devil
Release date: July 31st Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Power pop, punk rock, fuzz rock, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Drinkallnite
The Philadelphia project Mopar Stars has been one of the best-kept secrets in power pop ever since their 2023 debut EP Shoot the Moon. Led by guitarist/vocalist Nao Demand of post-punk/goth-rock group Poison Ruïn and metal band Zorn, Mopar Stars have particularly been heroes at the “power” end of the power pop spectrum, adding classic rock and roll, punk rock, and 90s alt-rock energy to their Lemonheads/Replacements-influenced pop rock in a way that evokes everyone from Sugar to Liquid Mike. After two strong (and Rosy Overdrive-praised) EPs, K and Perennial Records made Mopar Stars the latest very smart buzz-band signing (adding them to a list of new acquisitions also including Sharp Pins, Now, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, and Paper Jam) for their debut album, Official Researchers of the NJ Devil.
Demand and the rest of Mopar Stars (guitarist Bill Magerr, drummer Evan Campbell, and bassist Alex Karraba, the latter of which has since been replaced by Nneka Anyaoku) recorded Official Researchers of the NJ Devil with Philly punk producer Trish Quigley, and the result is a fiery, lean eleven-song/twenty-eight-minute LP with all the energy and hooks of the band’s tantalizing earlier releases. It’s hard to come up with a better opening duo than “Wreck the Bike” (what a riff-based hook on this one!) and “Drinkallnite” (ah, you can just feel the desperation here), and the hits keep coming with the lightly jangly college rock car song “Suped Up Coupe” and the very nearly bouncy “Everyone Wants What I Got”. Official Researchers of the NJ Devil careens wildly into its second half and is over before you know it, but not before “American Fast Thing” gives us one last high-gear guitar pop finale. I don’t think I could ask for a better way for Mopar Stars to introduce themselves to a wider audience. (Bandcamp link)
Grass Jaw – Fix Your Heart
Release date: July 27th Record label: Self-released Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, slowcore, post-rock, doom-folk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Loser Bus
Grass Jaw is Brendan Kuntz, an Ithaca, New York-based musician who put out seven albums under this project’s name from 2019 to 2024 (four of which have been covered in PressingConcerns over the years). Kuntz’s recognizable blend of doom-ish folk/alt-country, slowcore, and noisy Northeastern-U.S.-style indie rock has been missed during the uncharacteristic two-year gap between 2024’s I Don’t Want to Believe and Fix Your Heart, Grass Jaw’s triumphant return, but it’s not like Kuntz hasn’t been busy in the meantime–I imagine the short break might have something to do with the reunion of Kuntz’s old noise rock group Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, who’ve put out two newLPs of their own since 2024. Perhaps playing in a new old band again inspired Kuntz to adopt a similar strategy for Grass Jaw, whose latest album was largely recorded with the rhythm section of bassist Christine Klunk and drummer Clayton Dow.
Time away and new lineup aside, Fix Your Heart sounds like the Grass Jaw I remember from those earlier albums, probing the darker depths of slow, Crazy Horse-inspired indie rock with occasional help from saxophone (provided by Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death bandmate Tom Yagielski and Gary Gahan) and trombone (Jack Kuntz). The opening title track is especially dour-feeling, and “Time War” and “Cleveland” similarly circle the low-end drain, and these electric workouts are separated by more folk/country-inspired but no more “upbeat” songs like “Blood Swimming” and “Block Universe”. The supernatural bent to I Don’t Want to Believe isn’t as explicit here, but there is something otherworldly about Fix Your Heart’s concluding stretch: the droning electric guitars of “Loser Bus” and the saxophone-laden abyss of “Purgatory Chasm” ensure a memorable final journey. Grass Jaw have jumped right back into the black hole with their return. (Bandcamp link)
Bondo – Bondo
Release date: July 31st Record label: Solid Brass Genre: 90s indie rock, post-rock, slowcore Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Listen Back
The Los Angeles group Bondo turned up on my radar back in 2023 with their debut album, Print Selections, an incredibly low-key take on 90s post-rock, slowcore, and underground indie rock that spilled into 2024’s Harmonica. The quartet (guitarist/vocalists Nikolas Escudero and Brian Bartus, bassist Gerry Dykes, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian) are now on Solid Brass Records (Franklin, The Pines of Rome, Convinced Friend) for their third album in four years, a self-titled LP that continues Bondo’s patient, time-unmoored journey through music still conjuring up names like “Slint”, “Bedhead”, and “Duster”. As always, vocals are intermittent occurrences, and “On the Cross” introduces us to Bondo in a quiet and sleepy fashion. “Listen Back” and “Strummer” only marginally perk things up; it’s the fuzzed-out outlier “Brian Screams” (accurate title, I assume) that reminds us that Bondo can explode every once in a while when they want to. Things never boil over again like “Brian Screams”, but there’s a lot to enjoy in the slow-moving side of Bondo’s sound (see the relaxed “Spin Cycle” or the slightly unwound “While My Guitar Gently Peaks”). I can’t imagine it’s easy to make music like this that actually sounds gripping and vibrant, but the needle has been threaded once again on Bondo. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got a new album from Josaleigh Pollett and new EPs from Nocturnal Prose, Picastro, and Jake King below; check ’em out!
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.
Josaleigh Pollett – If I Let It Quiet
Release date: July 24th Record label: Audio Antihero/Lavender Vinyl Genre: Art rock, indie folk, experimental pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Tacit
It’s been a little over three years since I wrote about In the Garden, By the Weeds, the third album from Salt Lake City, Utah singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett. In the Garden, By the Weeds was also Pollett’s second collaboration with Jordan Watko (aka Crowd Shy), who at that point had become Pollett’s producer, co-writer, and co-performer; together, Watko and Pollett pushed the latter’s indie folk starting point into more fractured and electronic directions (I compared In the Garden, By the Weeds to later-period Low at the time). Soon after that album’s release, Watko moved to Japan, but If I Let It Quiet nonetheless continues the duo’s collaborations, assembled remotely between Salt Lake City and Osaka over a period of three years. The end result is an album marked more than anything by the emerging “Josaleigh Pollett sound”, one that isn’t “indie folk” nor “experimental pop” but somewhere down a trail marked by those two starting points.
Pollett has been a fan of the “low-key, slowly-revealing” album opening strategy, and If I Let It Quiet is faithful to that via the ambient introduction piece “Shed Piano, Birds” and “Cherry”, the first “proper” song on the album which also features contributions from co-producer Andrew Goldring. “The Witness” and “Like a River” both sound like they were built from acoustic guitar-originating material, although the wall-of-sound orchestral vibe of the former and more languid, almost soft rock sheen of the latter find the material ending up in two wildly divergent directions. There’s not really a “dominant” sound to If I Let It Quiet –the more strongly electronic songs on the album like the minimal “Repeating”, the bubbling “Escape Routes”, and the dynamic single “Radio Player” all work, as do the songs more prone to showing their folk skeletons like “We All Got It Right” and “Tacit”. I would imagine there are challenges keeping a project coherent and in tune with itself when its creators are separated by continents and time zones, but If I Let It Quiet and its architects have a strong enough bond to push forward like they did when they both were in the same city. (Bandcamp link)
Nocturnal Prose – Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency
Release date: May 1st Record label: Total Agency/Obscura Waves Genre: Post-punk, goth/deathrock, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl (with Demo 2022), cassette, digital Pull Track: Familiar Pain
Nocturnal Prose are a post-punk quartet from San Antonio, Texas–I don’t know their exact lineup, but I do know that they share members with the power pop group Faulty Cognitions. They debuted in 2022 with a three-song demo tape, and quickly recorded three more songs that nonetheless sat in storage for a while as they were unhappy with their production. Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency finds these three songs seeing the light of day having been remixed and remastered by Jason Tucker, and it also adds two new tracks for a five-song EP (and the three-song 2022 demo appears as a B-side on the vinyl edition of the record, too). Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency, remixed or not, is still relatively “lo-fi”, but this works to these songs’ advantage. Most of my favorite modern post-punk sounds like it came out of a dark basement (I’m thinking of what bands like The Drin, Crime of Passing, and Corker have done in Cincinnati in recent years), and Nocturnal Prose’s dour, noisy take on 80s goth and post-punk fits right into that world. The first two songs on Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency are quick-hitting, two-minutes-ish post-punk garage rippers, and then the final three songs are drawn-out, circling-the-drain endurance tests. Both sides of Nocturnal Prose sound great on Our Mi$ery Is Their Currency, and I look forward to hearing more of them. (Bandcamp link)
Picastro – Double on Time
Release date: June 12th Record label: We Are Busy Bodies Genre: Experimental, slowcore, folk, post-rock, ambient Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Ring Description
I introduced Toronto’s Picastro to the readers of Rosy Overdrive back in 2022, when the long-running slowcore group had just released a covers EP called I’ve Never Met a Stranger. That record found the band putting their own “sprawling folk-orchestral…sound” on a bunch of relatively obscure songs and The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”, marked by frontperson and sole consistent member Liz Hysen’s distinct, haunting vocals. Picastro have returned again; they’re now a trio featuring guitarist Tim Condon and bassist Alex Fournier, and their newest release is an EP of original material called Double on Time, apparently inspired by Hysen’s fascination with the somewhat mysterious famous boxer Sonny Liston. For the most part, I’m not sure how Double on Time relates to Liston–well, the title of opening track “Fell the Family Tree” probably refers to a story about how the only record of Liston’s birthdate was written on a tree that was subsequently cut down, but that’s about it. What I do take away from Double on Time is that Hysen was, somehow, inspired to make music in a particularly hazy, uncertain, and half-disintegrating way; it kind of sounds like you stripped all of the “rock” and “pop” out of a PJ Harvey album. As is typical with Picastro, it’s hard to get a handle on, but that’s the point of Double on Time. (Bandcamp link)
Jake King – Rock and Roll
Release date: April 30th Record label: The New Disposable Genre: Lo-fi punk, garage punk, fuzz rock, rock and roll Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Feel So Paranoid
Jake King is a musician from Buffalo, New York, where he runs a tape label called The New Disposable to release cassettes of his various projects. In the past, his band T.T.T.T. dealt in lo-fi garage punk while his solo releases “leaned quiet/freak-folk”, but all that seems to have been upended by a new five-song cassette EP called Rock and Roll. Spurred on by a new live Jake King backing band (which recently played a show with fellow upstate New York act Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death), King cut Rock and Roll, an aptly-titled seven-minute EP of incredibly fuzzed-out, lowest-of-fidelity garage rock hits. This is indeed pop music, filtered through the lens of squealing shitgaze distortion, punk fury, and the brief side of Ty Segall-style garage rock. Everything on Rock and Roll is under two minutes long, but that doesn’t prevent King from evoking the Wipers (“2026”) and The Cramps (“Feel So Paranoid”) among other trash-punk heroes in these quick sprints. Considering what Jake King is doing here, Rock and Roll is exactly as long and as polished as it needs to be. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Thursday blog post! We’ve got new albums from Little Gold, Cel Ray, Dom Sensitive, and Mesh, all out tomorrow (July 24th). Check them out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Fig Dish, Hail Maria, Crash Outfit, and Red Star Sky), catch up on that one, 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.
Little Gold – Public Dog
Release date: July 24th Record label: Tall Texan Genre: Country rock, alt-country Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: What You Want
A lot has happened since the Athens, Georgia alt-country group Little Gold released their last album, Wake Up & Die Right, in mid-2020. The band’s frontperson, Christian “Smokey” DeRoeck, has put out albums as a member of the bands Deep State and Blunt Bangs (in both cases, with other members of the lineup that recorded Wake Up & Die Right), and as of late he’s found himself playing guitar in Ryan Davis’ Roadhouse Band (Davis’ label, Sophomore Lounge, had co-released Wake Up & Die Right). Nonetheless, DeRoeck has brought Little Gold back for their fifth album, Public Dog, recorded by Jesse Mangum with a new, expanded lineup featuring Brandon Page, Tyler Key, Drew Beskin, Stephen Payne, Michael Friday, Julia Barfield and Elisabeth Fuchsia. The world around Little Gold may have changed, but DeRoeck is still doing with the project what he’s been doing for nearly two decades now: making a very catchy, humble, and “Athens, Georgia” mixture of country rock, power pop, and “college rock”.
We’ve been living through an era of alt-country that’s very “rambly”, one that takes its cues from Jason Molina and Neil Young above all else. To be clear, I asked for this and I enjoy it–but it’s still such a breath of fresh air when Little Gold open up Public Dog with “Cochise”, an unabashed, concise power pop barnburner. The rootsy guitar pop hits keep coming immediately with “What You Want”, the title track, and “Born to Loose”, and the first acoustic song on the album, “The Queen’s Weed”, is technically as catchy as anything else on the LP. Side 1 is all hits, and the B-side is…well, it’s also all hits, but it’s the misfit hits between the nearly six-minute “Early Internet”, the uncharacteristic interlude “Webistics”, an out-of-nowhere Barfield-sung cover of Kathleen Edwards’s “Mercury”, and the quiet, brief send-off “Twerp”. It’s been heartening to see Ryan Davis get his due over the last few years after a long time in the alt-country underground; maybe Public Dog is the ticket for another lifer whose pen is just as sharp and whose hooks are even sharper. (Bandcamp link)
Cel Ray – Cel Rayzer
Release date: July 24th Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Punk rock, garage punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Snake’s Maw
The Chicago quartet Cel Ray established themselves as major players in the colorful world of “Midwestern egg punk” when they made their on-record debut in 2023 with a pair of fierce garage punk EPs in Cellular Raymond and Piss Park. I (and many others) have been waiting for the debut Cel Ray LP ever since, and it’s none less than the legendary Exploding in Sound Records who’ve brought Cel Rayzer to us. The band (vocalist Maddie Daviss, drummer Alex Watson, bassist Kevin Goggin, and guitarist Josh Rodin) recorded the album with Doug Malone at Jamdek, and it debuts “a more collaborative approach” to Cel Ray’s compositions. Cel Rayzer reveals a band who’ve spent the three years since their first two EPs (ahem) sharpening their sound via regularly touring and playing together–Daviss is still delivering irreverent diatribes via vocal acrobatics, and the power trio of instrumentalists are still ripping through material fastly and furiously, and there’s just a bit more of a Windy City noise rock edge to their hard-hitting post-punk/garage rock this time.
Opening track “Gotta Get Away” is very nearly new wave in its first thirty seconds, but Cel Ray’s heavier instincts win out and they eventually end up closer to frenetic John Dwyer territory as the song comes to a close. This is a common theme of Cel Rayzer, whether we’re talking about ninety-second hardcore(ish) microbursts like “Price of Gas” or slower, sludgy material like “Snake’s Maw” (now that’s a bassline!). Always one to keep things brief, Cel Ray wrap up their first album in ten songs and twenty-three minutes, which means that the band churn out plenty of their “bread and butter”–writhing, drilling garage-punk tracks like “Trash”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, and “Teen (Cult) Song”. Cel Ray are barreling down every inch of their new, longer runway–we’d best get out of Cel Rayzer’s way. (Bandcamp link)
Dom Sensitive – Pop Contest
Release date: July 21st Record label: Chrüsimüsi Genre: Psychedelic rap, minimalist post-punk, experimental pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Faint Like a Star
One of the more interesting debut albums of 2024 was Leather Trim by Dom Sensitive, a new project started by Adelaide, Australia’s Dom Trimboli. Most well-known for his time in Aussie garage rock and post-punk groups like Wireheads and Dom & The Wizards, Dom Sensitive was Trimboli’s chance to experiment with wonky sampled piano instrumentals, “patchwork hip-hop production”, and rambling sung-spoken verses delivered by an emcee in the vein of Mark E. Smith and Gareth Liddiard. Despite the strangeness of Leather Trim, it still kept one foot in the world of “Australian post-punk”, an obscure but discernible starting point from which Pop Contest, the second Dom Sensitive LP, moves notably further.
Alongside “longtime friend and collaborator” Tom Spall, Trimboli turns the opening salvo of Pop Contest into his most confrontational and least “rock” material yet. The rumbling, low punk rap of opening track “Queen Bess Row” removes almost all of the “old” Trimboli for six minimal minutes, and “Super Mary Image” is only slightly less stark. For fans of “pop music”, “Faint Like a Star” has more than enough of it in its hook, done the “Dom Sensitive” way of course, and the minimal Television Personalities goof “I Know Where Dan Treacy Lives” nonetheless has enough of its subject matter in its DNA. Dom Sensitive is just as likely to veer into even more novel territory as to recall their areas of origin, though–see “Waiting on a Ship to Come In”, the song that comes closest to justifying the album’s “influenced by MF Doom” tag. As unique as Leather Trim felt, Pop Contest is the odder, more mutated horse in practically every fashion–if we weren’t sure that Dom Sensitive was committed to the margins before now, this seals it. (Bandcamp link)
Mesh – No Fun at All
Release date: July 24th Record label: Feel It Genre: Garage punk, jangle pop, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Atrophy
The debut album from Philadelphia quartet Mesh has been a long time coming–it was five years ago that the band (vocalist/guitarists Sims Hardin and Allison Durham, bassist Tom Riese, and drummer Steve Darling) put out their self-titled debut EP on the now-defunct Born Yesterday Records. Now with Feel It Records, Mesh have at long last returned with No Fun at All, an LP that elaborates on the “jangle-punk” sound they introduced back in 2021. See, Mesh (not to be confused with the electronic duo of the same name, or with the U.K post-punk revival group Mush) have a style that owes plenty to early post-punk and garage punk, but there’s also a lot of Flying Nun Records and even C86 indie pop in their songs–and their secret weapon is Durham’s twelve-string guitar, played like it’s always belonged in a Philadelphia basement rock group.
This eleven-song, twenty-eight-minute album is right in the center of “rough-edged and rowdy” and straight-up guitar pop–opening track “Hold On To” is messy, jangly, post-punk-y, and quite catchy, setting the stage for the sweet spot in which Mesh thrive. “Violent Peasant” and “Potatohead” are great punk songs that nonetheless fit in with jangle-pop highlights “Atrophy”, “Sign”, and “Weapon of Peace” (it’s not lost on me that Durham sings lead on more of the overt pop songs on No Fun at All, but the push and pull between the two contrasting vocalists is all part of Mesh’s charm). I think “egg punk” is supposed to be dead, but if you want that microgenre’s combination of goofiness, fury, and unflagging energy, No Fun at All nicely subverts its title. (Bandcamp link)
In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve gathered up new albums from Hail Maria and Crash Outfit, a new EP from Red Star Sky, and a reissue of Fig Dish‘s second album. Check them out below!
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.
Fig Dish – When Shove Goes Back to Push (Vinyl Release)
Release date: June 26th Record label: Forge Again Genre: Alternative rock, power pop, post-grunge Formats: Vinyl Pull Track: Pretty Never Hurts
I’ve been enjoying the recent Fig Dish revival perpetrated by Forge Again Records over the past couple of years. The Chicago power pop/alt-rockers broke up in 1998 after two major label albums that went nowhere and a shelved third, but 2024 saw the first Fig Dish shows in nearly three decades and a belated release of the shelved album as Feels Like the Very First Two Times, and last year brought a thirty-year-anniversary release of their debut album That’s What Love Songs Often Do on vinyl for the first time. To complete this revisitation, Forge Again Records have now prepped a double-LP release of the second and (for a long time, at least) final Fig Dish album, When Shove Goes Back to Push. Founding members Blake Smith, Rick Ness (both guitar/vocals), and Mike Willison (bass/vocals) welcomed new drummer Bill Swartz into the band, released When Shove Goes Back to Push in 1997 to commercial and record label indifference, and were defunct by the following year.
A fresh listen to When Shove Goes Back to Push reveals a capable swan song for a quality Midwestern rock band, a group who seemed to be perfectly able to fit into the concurrent power pop and post-grunge movements but with a strong core guaranteed to allow this music to reverberate beyond the era’s expiration date. There are plenty of “hits” on When Shove Goes Back to Push to my ears; the chopper-flight opening track “Come On (Don’t Come On)”, the mid-tempo grunge-power-pop flop of a lead single “When Shirts Get Tight”, the fascinating anthem “Pretty Never Hurts”, and the surging pop punk “Sleep Startles” are all as good a pop song as any you’ll hear on the radio when the 90s block comes rolling around. A “CD era” album like this gives Fig Dish space to try oddities like “Wheel Holders”, the kind of thing that’d probably get cut if they were trying to make a thirty-five minute LP; it’s interesting and unique to have a double-vinyl version of this collection thirty years later. It’s almost like, whichever era’s lens you view them through, Fig Dish are always a little bit out of step. (Bandcamp link)
Hail Maria – What Kind of World Is This?
Release date: June 27th Record label: Digital Hotdogs Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, art rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: City So Loud
Hail Maria are a Memphis, Tennessee underground supergroup; the four members (vocalist/“nylon” player Michael Peery, George Williford on “Hofner”, Keith Cooper on “Telecaster”, and Ben Bauermeister on “rhythm”) have played in notable bands like Ibex Clone, Optic Sink, Hash Redactor, and Ex-Cult, among other local acts. The quartet’s other projects run the gamut from wild, all-out garage rock to icy post-punk, but the debut album from Hail Maria, What Kind of World Is This?, is a journey into the weird, unclassifiable corners of Memphis underground rock. One minute, Hail Maria will be digging into a nice groove that reminds one of their city of origin, the next they’re throwing a bit of a bossa nova touch into the mix, and then after that they’re getting a little psychedelic with it. What Kind of World Is This? was made by four people who clearly know “how to rock”, and while it certainly does that at times (just listen to “City So Loud”, which kicks off the album’s B-side), Hail Maria also feels like an outlet for a bunch of punks/garage rockers to explore the realms beyond their bread and butter (I mean, it’s a forty-five minute tape; that alone is a bold choice for these guys). The connective tissue for me when it comes to What Kind of World Is This? is how consistently fun of a listen it is, no matter where Hail Maria end up on the map. That’s more than enough for a solid foundation for a promising new act. (Bandcamp link)
Crash Outfit – Crash Outfit
Release date: March 17th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, 90s indie rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, garage punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Soft Hands
Wow, time really does fly. Crash Outfit are a trio from Santa Rosa who put out their self-titled debut album back in mid-March of this year, and I heard it shortly after its release; after over three months in “I’m going to write about it eventually” purgatory, I’m finally getting around to telling you about a strong new band operating in the realms of post-punk, post-hardcore, and noise rock. If the trio (guitarist/vocalist Paul Warner, bassist Rebecca Davenport, and drummer Braden McGraw) don’t precisely sound like a brand-new band, it’s likely because all of them have been doing the “indie rock” thing for a while now; the members’ previous bands have supposedly shared stages with groups like Archers of Loaf, Mission of Burma, and Future of the Left, though I don’t know who played in what band and when. What I do know is that Crash Outfit is a lean, razor-sharp collection of punk rock made by people intimately familiar with the 1990s Dischord Records discography and the Rick Froberg/John Reis oeuvre. The music is “post-punk power trio”, anchored in rhythm and repetition, and Warner’s vocal performance sounds a bit possessed (that’s a good thing). There are more than a few survivors still making this kind of music out there (see Stomatopod, Blank Banker, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, to name a few), and Crash Outfit have done more than enough to keep the torch alight. (Bandcamp link)
Red Star Sky – Debt
Release date: April 30th Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk, acoustic, singer-songwriter, country Formats: Digital Pull Track: Debt
Corey Layman is a longtime Pittsburgh indie rock veteran; most notably, he played bass in the final incarnation of the legendary Karl Hendricks Trio (appearing on their last two LPs), but he’s also led the projects Hovland, Developer, and Line Forms from the 1990s to the 2010s. Red Star Sky began as a pandemic-era solo project that evolved into Layman’s chance to explore his Appalachian roots with more alt-country and folk influences than the indie rocker’s typical fare; after a debut CD in 2021 and a couple of miscellaneous singles, the project’s latest release is a four-song digital EP called Debt. This acoustic collection is “folk music” in concept and execution, particularly in its first half with the title track (a stark, spare meditation on the titular subject) and “Fascist Blues” (a pedal-steel aided folk-country protest song, clean and straightforward in a way you wish present-day Neil Young was still able to write). The most spirited moment on Debt is the vaguely Appalachian condemnation “Oh Commodified Humans”, while the most ethereal one is the closing track “That’s Fine” (apparently written immediately after seeing Silkworm live in 2025, a show I also attended). “That’s Fine” fades away as Debt quietly bows out; Layman doesn’t aggressively seek our attention on this EP, but we’d do well to give it to him. (Bandcamp link)
This Thursday Pressing Concerns features four records coming out tomorrow, July 17th: new albums from DUM1, Brian Ennals & Blockhead, and Tiger Bear Wolf, plus an expanded reissue of Franklin‘s debut album. Read ’em below! If you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Hurry, William Matheny, TIFFY, and Twin Bloom), check that out too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Franklin – Go Kid Go (Expanded)
Release date: July 17th Record label: Solid Brass Genre: Post-hardcore, emo, noise rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Sliding
From 1992 to 2000, Franklin were a pillar in the Philadelphia chapter of 1990s underground indie-punk. The quartet (initially guitarist/vocalists Ralph Darden and Brian Sokel, drummer Greg Giuliano and bassist Roy Binnion, the latter of which was eventually replaced by Joshua Mills) put out three albums in addition to the era’s requisite 7” singles and compilation appearances. Franklin played shows with The Jazz June, The Van Pelt, and Unwound during their period of activity, a range that’s reflected in this recent expanded reissue of 1995’s Go Kid Go via Solid Brass Records. This double LP edition of Franklin’s first album contains the band’s “complete recorded output from 1993–1996”, gathering up odds and ends to supplement the original eleven-song Go Kid Go with eleven more Franklin recordings.
Go Kid Go is certainly a Rites of Spring-influenced punk record, very much in the vein of bands synthesizing Dischord Records post-hardcore and noisy indie rock into the first wave of emo music. The original album is a hard-edged and wonky version of this sound–it’s not at all surprising to me that Franklin ended up going in a weirder direction in later releases after they got these initial emotional bursts out of their system. It’s a noisy and unpredictable album, but not exactly “confrontational”; I do hear a link to the more drab Pacific Northwest version of post-hardcore/noise rock in these songs. Much of Franklin’s most straightforward “punk” material can be found in the second half of the expanded Go Kid Go; if anything on here could be called “anthemic”, it’s either the alternate version of “Sliding” or “Sprinkler” later in the album. Of course, we also get Franklin messing around in this “bonus” material with stuff like “The Didelpho” and “Slow into Questionable”, where a see-sawing between emotional rock songs and instrumental blasts of noise starts to look somewhere else entirely. The moment that Go Kid Go captures is an exciting one, and what Franklin were doing for three years in the mid-90s still sounds very current. (Bandcamp link)
DUM1 – On a Dime
Release date: July 17th Record label: Take a Turn Genre: Indie pop, lo-fi pop, jangle pop, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: No1’s Good
Another Oakland lo-fi indie pop group? One that began as somebody’s solo home recording project but is now a full-fledged band? Well, I’m listening. DUM1 was started last August by Mack Narragan, who’s also been seen playing in Dandy Boy Records group CVCC. Narragan initially started quickly writing and recording songs in response to “the loss of several family members and a close friend”, soon having an entire album’s worth of homespun folk rock, slacker-pop, and jangle pop that’s now being released on Ray Seraphin’s Take a Turn label as DUM1’s debut album (you’ll only hear Narragan on these recordings, but DUM1 is now a quintet featuring members of The Greasy Gills, Rip Room, and CVCC).
Of Narragan’s stated influences, the one I hear the most in On a Dime is Paul Westerberg; namely, Westerberg’s lo-fi demo-core output towards which he tended after some time removed from The Replacements. There’s that similar uncertain quality of “I’m keeping these songs close to the vest and/or letting them speak for themselves” to this cassette’s low-key presentation. Every once in a while, DUM1 pulls a sparkling jangle-pop nugget out of nowhere (see “No1’s Good” and “Gilbey’s Landing”), but On a Dime is equally marked by frostier cuts like “From Here to Sebastia” and “Plastic Clovers”. Much of On a Dime lands somewhere in between, living and dying with songs like “Mercury Sabre” and “Pacing” that are propulsive and “power pop” but relatively unadorned while on their missions. These mysterious qualities, balanced with unambiguous pop moments in every track, form the basis for a promising first album from DUM1. (Bandcamp link)
Brian Ennals & Blockhead – Boatshoes
Release date: July 17th Record label: Phantom Limb Genre: Experimental rap, jazz-rap Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Signed Sealed Delivered
One of my favorite rap albums in recent memory was A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, the third LP from the inimitable Baltimore duo of Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals. That wide-ranging, genre-hopping, experimental, fun record was more than enough to get both of its creators on my radar, and it turns out that I didn’t have to wait too long for new music from one of them, as Ennals has returned this year with a brand-new album called Boatshoes. This LP pairs Ennals with Blockhead (AKA Tony Simon), a prolific New York composer who’s had a hand in records from Armand Hammer, Aesop Rock, and Open Mike Eagle, among others. Ennals reveals himself to be just as capable and clever on Boatshoes as he is with Infinity Knives to back him–it’s Blockhead’s slippery, streamlined, and just-a-bit-jazzy production that separates this album from Ennals’ previous work. There aren’t very many “party” moments on Boatshoes compared to A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, but there are plenty of tracks that are gripping and fascinating nonetheless; I’m definitely intrigued by the team that can come up with stuff like “Smirnoff, Via a Straw”, “Now That’s What I Call a Posse Cut”, and “Soy Boy”. In terms of harder-hitting material, “Roll Call” and “Signed Sealed Delivered” are riots, and I mean that in a different way than I would’ve used in the context of Ennals’ last album. Ennals deserves props for turning around and making something so different so soon, and Blockhead deserves plenty of credit for facilitating it. (Bandcamp link)
Tiger Bear Wolf – Tiger Bear Wolf
Release date: July 17th Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co. Genre: Psychedelic rock, southern rock, garage rock, noise rock, post-punk, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Wolf
Tiger Bear Wolf emerged in the early 2000s out of Greensboro, North Carolina, releasing two self-titled albums of garage punk and post-hardcore with a distinct Southern flavor in 2003 and 2005 before seemingly going the way of so many other forgotten bands from that era. The quartet (guitarist/vocalists Jonathan Moore and Noah Howard, bassist Matt Bostick, and drummer Lawrence Holdsworth) never broke up, however, and in fact had been working on the third Tiger Bear Wolf album (self-titled again, naturally) for the past sixteen years. Geographical separation and a (temporarily) lost hard drive slowed the release of Tiger Bear Wolf (2026), but it couldn’t stop this bizarre and fascinating collection of southern rock riffs, math rock twists, and full-on punk rock energy from surfacing eventually. The Tiger Bear Wolf stew is attention-grabbing from the get-go, with “Bronco Town, USA” taking its time winding through heavy psych-fuzz-rock riffs to get to its gigantic final form and “Silver Heart” riding a steady groove through noodly garage rock until all of a sudden it isn’t. “Hands Out Honey” is the most “indie rock” song on Tiger Bear Wolf up until that point (it kind of sounds like if The Grifters were overachievers), but don’t think that doesn’t mean “Silver Tongues” and “Wolf” aren’t waiting around the corner to ambush you, to say nothing of the MC5-like fuzz-punk shit-kicking “Floater” or eight-minute closing track “Bayonet”. On its surface, Tiger Bear Wolf doesn’t seem like an album that took sixteen years to make, but it’s probably not as easy as Tiger Bear Wolf make it sound. (Bandcamp link)
In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from Hurry and William Matheny as well as new EPs from TIFFY and Twin Bloom. This also would’ve more or less been last Thursday’s Pressing Concerns if I’d been able to post a “normal” one (I’ve been experiencing computer difficulties lately, which has impacted the blog schedule a little bit). I’m hoping to get things back on track this week, though.
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.
Hurry – Zoned Out
Release date: July 10th Record label: Lame-O Genre: Power pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: All Sunk In
Hurry has been the anchor of Philadelphia’s jangle and power pop scenes for over a decade now; every three years or so, we seem to be able to count on Matt Scottoline to show up with ten great Teenage Fanclub-inspired guitar pop songs regardless of which political party is in the White House or which microgenres Uproxx happens to be extolling. We are now at Zoned Out, which is the seventh Hurry album. Once again it was released by Lame-O Records, recorded by Slaughter, Beach Dog’s Ian Farmer, and features a similar cast of musicians to the last Hurry album (Scottoline, Farmer, Rob and Joe DeCarolis, and Justin Fox). This is the one where Teenage Fanclub co-founder Gerard Love (one of the biggest influences–quite possibly the biggest influence–on Hurry) sings on a track, and it’s also the one where Scottoline decides to cover a song from his labelmates U.S. Highball (to me, that’s just as exciting as the Gerard Love thing).
In a not-totally-hopeless future in which Hurry keeps adding to their stack of records at a steady clip, those abovementioned wrinkles might be how I keep Zoned Out separate from Fake Ideas and Don’t Look Back in my mind. But the core of Zoned Out is exactly what I would expect from Scottoline–world-class delicate power pop. The first song on the album, “All Sunk In”, is already one of my favorite Hurry songs –I love how simply it starts, just clean guitar chords and Scottoline’s voice for forty-five seconds. It’s a moment that brings “How does he keep doing it?” to the tongue, but the rest of Zoned Out is a humble but inarguable reminder of the pop talent that allows Scottoline to, indeed, get away with it. There’s something fascinating about how “The Dumbest Person You’ve Ever Seen” is built around some really gripping guitar soloing and “Just Fine” almost mathematically cuts away any excess, yet they still evoke the same mood. The U.S. Highball cover is impressive, too–I’ve never once listened to that Glasgow indie pop duo’s quick-hit drum machine jangle-pop and thought “you know, I wish somebody slowed this song’s tempo down and stretched it out a lot”. And yet, “Laughing in Reverse” is a Hurry song now, with Scottoline wringing every bit of melody out of it. Hearing Hurry do what they do never gets old. (Bandcamp link)
William Matheny – Material Witness
Release date: July 10th Record label: Diamond Teeth Genre: Alt-country, country rock, power pop, roots rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Babylon Man
William Matheny has been playing in bands in and around his native West Virginia since the early 2000s, and he’s as booked as ever lately between playing the bass for alt-country star John R. Miller and the keys for Washington, D.C.-based Music Critic Rock act The Paranoid Style. Despite his commitments, Matheny found time to write and record Material Witness, his third solo LP and first in three years–in a pleasant surprise, he halved the time it took between his 2017 debut Strange Constellations and 2023’s That Grand, Old Feeling. Not only that, but Matheny gathered up some of his talented collaborators (bassist Tucker Riggleman of The Cheap Dates, guitarists Adam L. Meisterhans of Rozwell Kid and Slaughter Beach, Dog and Bud Carroll of American Minor, pianist Jeremy John Batten, and drummer Clint Sutton) to head down to Nashville to record with Justin Francis, a Pittsburgh-originating producer with big-name country and underground punk rock records on his resumé.
The album that Matheny and his band recorded sounds a lot like a William Matheny album, which is a very good thing to sound like. Material Witness is as comfortable as ever between the “power pop” and “alt-country” labels frequently applied to its creator, made by a singer-songwriter with new wave and honky tonk in his DNA but who doesn’t really make either of them. I’d say that Material Witness is Matheny’s “tightest” album, but they’re all very tight so this might be recency bias talking. At the very least, the six-piece barrelling through the ragged, longing pop of opening track “Babylon Man” sounds as close to Matheny’s rock-and-roll live act as they’ve ever gotten on-record. Matheny isn’t the first musician to explore the “roots rock” end of Nick Lowe and Marshall Crenshaw (and probably not even the first one to put an Appalachian twist on it, though we could always use more of that). But he’s the only person who could write “If I Were a River”, a road-worn hymn about punk sticker-covered bathrooms, canaries in coal mines, and trying to make something out of the intrinsic pain and randomness of being. At the very least, I don’t think anyone else could write and sing “If I Were a River” and make it go down as easy as Matheny does. (Bandcamp link)
TIFFY – I Wanted to Know
Release date: July 10th Record label: Repeating Cloud/Totally Real Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: IRB
Somerville, Massachusetts’ Tiffany Sammy has been making self-described “dream-rock” music since the late 2010s as TIFFY, eventually adding other musicians like guitarist Tom Stevens, bassist JK Wong, and drummer Palana to the project. Sammy’s pursuit of the “dream-rock” sound has led to her crossing paths with plenty of notable Northeastern indie rock institutions, releasing records on labels like Totally Real and Dollhouse Lightning and recording with Justin Pizzoferrato of Easthampton, Massachusetts’ Sonelab. TIFFY’s latest EP, I Wanted to Know, links up with three more like-minded collaborators–it’s being co-released on cassette by Maine’s Repeating Cloud Records, features Sadie Dupuis (Sad13, Speedy Ortiz) on guitar on one track, and also contains a track recorded live at Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island.
The “proper” version of I Wanted to Know–the one you’ll hear on streaming services–is five tracks long and comprised of three new compositions, an interlude, and the aforementioned Big Nice-recorded alternate take of one of the new tracks. The physical cassette contains a lot more than that, namely two demos and an entirely different four-song EP called Divine Hand. I’ll refrain from commenting too much on Divine Hand in anticipation of if and when it gets a wider release (in summary: it’s pretty good) but the I Wanted to Know side is enough on its own to continue TIFFY’s strong streak. Sammy’s songwriting, inspired by classic dream pop, 60s girl-group melodies, and jangly indie rock, is once again punched up by a full-band sound–the sublime “Scam Likely” is enhanced by Stevens’ pedal steel, “Drive Thru Deja Vu” surges into the realm of power pop power chords and heroic guitar soloing, and “IRB” has just a bit of Dupuis’ math-pop in its DNA. I Wanted to Know is a snippet of where TIFFY is currently at, and both the digital and expanded cassette versions of this snapshot paint a promising picture. (Bandcamp link)
Twin Bloom – Twin Bloom
Release date: July 10th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Summer’s Gone
Twin Bloom are a new indie rock quartet from Oakland; their debut single, “Magazine Dreams” b/w “Summer’s Gone”, was released early last year by Bay Area indie pop label Dandy Boy Records. Both of these songs are on Twin Bloom’s self-titled debut EP, which the group (guitarist/vocalist Gvir Aviv, guitarist Mickle Nguyen, bassist/keyboardist Joshua Cano, and drummer Sandra Alva) recorded with Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone and Best House Studios. While Twin Bloom can indeed be described as “indie pop”, these four songs are less directly inspired by the straightforward jangly twee pop of many of their labelmates and instead chase a more cavernous, 1980s-evoking sound–Twin Bloom’s pop music is filtered through ambitious reverb-y dream-gaze and new wave sheens.
Opening track “Magazine Dreams” is large enough to introduce us to Twin Bloom’s range of influences–it’s a big, glitzy, blinking, synth-tinged 80s pop rock statement, although I can still glimpse that guitar pop center of the track among the trappings. The dream pop “Signals” is a little more subdued in the verses, but the chorus shoots for the stars, too; the same can be said for closing track “Under the Current”, an earnest jangle-dream-rock send off. The closest thing to “Bay Area indie pop” on Twin Bloom is probably “Summer’s Gone”; it fits in with the rest of the EP, but it’s a little more overtly “Teenage Fanclub-y guitar pop”. No one direction “works” more than the others for Twin Bloom, and I look forward to hearing how they present themselves on a longer-form record sooner or later. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: July 10th Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co. Genre: Noise pop, noise rock, space rock, art rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
My first thought when I saw that Parts & Labor had reunited after an eleven-year hiatus was, of course, joy–they are, after all, one of the best bands of the 2000s, and more than likely responsible for the best “rock music” to emerge out of Brooklyn during the George W. Bush administration. My second thought was: well, who’s going to be the drummer? Was it going to be Christopher Weingarten, the music journalist whose frenetic, deranged playing pushed the power trio into lightning-speed territory in the first half of their legendary four-album run, or would it be Joe Wong, the film-scorer whose relatively refined style led the band through a swooning, space-rock evolution in the final half of their career? The answer, I’m happy to report, is both: on Parts & Labor’s first album since 2011, band co-leaders Dan Friel (guitar/keys/vocals) and BJ Warshaw (bass/vocals) are now a quartet rounded out by Weingarten and Wong behind simultaneous kits.
Parts & Labor were a card-carrying member of the technicolor 2000s underground noise rock movement, associating with the likes of Deerhoof, Melt-Banana, Oneida, and Lightning Bolt as they made their own aggressive, squealing, tinnitus-inducing (literally, unfortunately, in the case of Warshaw) version of pop music. If you’ve kept up with Friel’s work in recent years as leader of Upper Wilds, it’s more or less in the same vein–gigantic choruses and loud, distorted music–but with squelching synths and (especially early on) a neck-breaking tempo. It’s music for people who can get into both the aforementioned Lightning Bolt and power pop, although they were certainly also “punk” in their own way (they did a very good Minutemen cover on their best album, Mapmaker). I love Upper Wilds a lot (and I am excited for their upcoming fifth album, Mercury) but there’s nothing out there that did what those Parts & Labor LPs did.
And that includes Set of All Sets, the new Parts & Labor album. Because it’s more than what Parts & Labor used to be, somehow. It has twice as many drummers, for one. And it’s twice as long! For a band that stuck to clean forty-minute albums (and once put out an “EP” of fifty songs in under a half-hour), this seventy-nine-minute double LP is like nothing else they’ve ever done. So, all of a sudden, Parts & Labor are back and flexing by barreling through several lengthy space-krautrock tracks in completely new terrain for the band. And yet, it’s recognizably the same brilliant Parts & Labor underneath the makeup. There are plenty of moments in the four-part “Endless Cycle” song series that harken back to those earlier albums, from the choral refrain in Part 1 to the tuneful squall of synths at the start of Part 2 to the rumbling rhythms in Part 3 to the big finish of Part 4. Set of All Sets is more than a pop album, but when it’s particularly interested in being one–like in the jaw-dropping eight-minute “Many Worlds” (which sounds like getting run over by a spaceship) and “Haunted Limbs” (one of the most Dan Friel songs to ever Dan Friel)–it’s unmatched.
There are seventeen tracks here, and while the terrain is rugged and varied, there’s hardly much in terms of respite. Assuming you treat the “Endless Cycle”s as separate songs, “Indecision Tree” is the longest one, and you do get a little bit of a breather in its industrial scraping before it eventually takes off (and not long after that, Friel is once again bellowing at us in “Parallel Tracks”, a classic Parts & Labor trash-compactor pop number). Otherwise, nearly everything in Set of All Sets is unrelenting, pummeling catharsis, although sometimes that can be as simple as the pied-piper synth riff that leads us through “Like They’re Here to Stay”. That little detail is key to why Set of All Sets works–beyond the glitzy, overwhelming exterior is the intricacies of a world all to itself.
Welcome to the June 2026 playlist! We’ve got a bunch of songs on here that I enjoyed last month, and I think you’ll enjoy them too. Check them out below!
Emperor X and Vesuvian have three songs on this playlist. Spacemoth and Bellows have two.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing two songs), Tidal (missing one). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Cassandra (The Ox Is on My Tongue)”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
I first heard the Philadelphia group Vesuvian thanks to a song on a Gaza benefit compilation, which led me to their 2023 debut album, More Treble. At the time, they were more or less a Joey DeGrado solo project, and the name of their game was fuzzy, lo-fi alt-country. Now a solid quartet, Vesuvian appear to have completely reinvented themselves on their self-titled sophomore album: there’s still a slight twang, but Vesuvian is a mesmerizing mixture of riff-forward classic rock as filtered through abrasive underground indie/noise rock and lyrics preoccupied with mythology, history, and other esoteric subjects that sound particularly gripping coming from DeGrado’s deadpan, almost Albini-esque mouth. “Cassandra (The Ox Is on My Tongue)” is the kind of seething, puzzling, and catchy rock song of which we could always use more.
“Delta9 Self Immolation”, Bellows From “Que Bello!” (2026, Bloody Knuckles)
Even in Rosy Overdrive’s most long-winded era I probably would’ve struggled to do justice to something like the hour-long double LP “Que Bello!”; it’s an album that has so much to it that I’m still finding new and interesting angles every time I put it on. Bellows draw us in perfectly with two of the record’s best songs right up front: “Delta9 Self Immolation”, in slot number two, is the punchy, sub-two-minute hook-infested robot-pop song that follows a more expansive opening track. Read more about “Que Bello!” here.
“Haunted Limbs”, Parts & Labor From Set of All Sets (2026, Ernest Jenning)
Parts & Labor were a card-carrying member of the technicolor 2000s underground noise rock movement, associating with the likes of Deerhoof, Melt-Banana, Oneida, and Lightning Bolt as they made their own aggressive, squealing version of pop music (gigantic choruses and loud, distorted instrumentals). Set of All Sets, the first new Parts & Labor album in eleven years, is a seventy-nine-minute double LP that’s like nothing else they’ve ever done. Set of All Sets is more than a pop album, but when it’s particularly interesting in being one–like in highlight “Haunted Limbs”, one of the most Dan Friel songs to ever Dan Friel–it’s unmatched. I’ll have more to say about Set of All Sets soon.
“Do We Exist?”, Spacemoth From Inward Eye (2026, Greenway)
2022’s No Past No Future was an excellent-sounding debut album, a charming and exciting mixture of Stereolab-worshipping analog synths, hard-hitting percussion, and pop music of the “space”-y variety. Still very much a pop album, Inward Eye feels like an accentuation of the layered and psychedelic sides of Spacemoth’s debut; it’s an album that feels very “tinkered with”, an area in which Spacemoth clearly thrive. Opening track “Do We Exist?” is an actually pretty streamlined take on Stereolab and krautrock via up-front pop music, with Spacemoth’s trademark rubbery hooks front and center. Read more about Inward Eye here.
“Feeling Nothing”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
Deeply-felt personal (real or fictional) narratives have always been the glue holding Emperor X’s Chad Matheny’s writing together, and Unified Field offers up beautiful examples of the form, like probably my favorite song on the album, “Feeling Nothing”. Songs like this bolster the granular details throughout Unified Field but they also live and breathe on their own. With Unified Field literally on the front lines (it was largely recorded in Ukraine, a subject touched on more explicitly elsewhere on the album) and subsequently sounding more urgent than ever in parts, it’s absolutely needed. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Of Some Use”, Sun Kin From Bobby’s Voice (2026)
Bobby’s Voice is a “cross-generational collaboration” between Kabir Kumar (aka Sun Kin) and Rajesh Prakash (“RP”) Kumar, Kabir’s father: the elder is the lyricist and the younger Kumar wrote the music and performs vocals. Kiran “Bobby” Kumar was RP’s brother and Kabir’s uncle, who passed away in the Kumars’ native Delhi in 2018; Bobby’s Voice is RP’s attempt to tell his brother’s story from the deceased Kumar’s perspective. The material with which Kabir has been given to work is undeniably difficult, in multiple ways, but, all things considered, the Kumars pull this off admirably; at the very least, “Of Some Use” (which soundtracks something of a rebirth) is one of Sun Kin’s best pop songs in its own right. Read more about Bobby’s Voice here.
“Falling Star”, Dark Surfers From Falling Star (2026)
Dark Surfers’ first new music since their 2024 EP Songs from a Wednesday Night is here in the form of a two-song single called Falling Star. The A-side of this single is maybe my favorite song that I’ve heard from the Trenton, New Jersey quartet yet, finding the band (vocalist/guitarist Christopher Yaple, guitarist Ian Everett, bassist Kelli Kalikas, and drummer George Miller) taking a detour from the softer indie pop of their last record to a more college rock and power pop-indebted sound. It’s still excellently “laid-back”, don’t get me wrong, but the handclap-bait beat and the slowed-down rock and roll riff are nice touches.
“Firecracker (4th of July)”, Jr. Juggernaut (2026, Nickel Eye)
Dave Alvin by way of X. Elliott Smith. Cymbals Eat Guitars. Jr. Juggernaut? Yes, I’m ready to induct the newest single from the Los Angeles power pop/punk power trio into the “indie/alt songs about the 4th of July” Hall of Fame already. Vocalist/guitarist Mike Williamson, drummer Wal Rashidi, and bassist Noah Green (also of The Pretty Flowers) won me over with 2024’s Another Big Explosion, a huge, loud album of Bob Mould/Sugar worship with the hooks and desperation to back it up; “Firecracker (4th of July)” would’ve been one of the best songs on that album, and it shines on its own here this holiday weekend just like a….uh…something that’s bright?
“Before the Feeling’s Gone”, National Photo Committee From Red Hot Photo Committee (2026, Ever/Never)
The debut album from Chicago alt-country group National Photo Committee, Red Hot Photo Committee, has been a while in the making (you can hear some of these songs in their initial forms in the 2023 live tape Live Nude Photo Committee) but I’m happy to report that the first proper album from the group was worth the gestation time. Bandleader Maxwell Bottner is compelling and clever, of course, but the reason I enjoyed this album at first is because so much of it–particularly highlight “Before the Feeling’s Gone”–genuinely country-rocks. Read more about Red Hot Photo Committee here.
“Your Name”, Chorus Truly From Is As Real As You Are (2026, Gentle Reminder/Home Late)
On Chorus Truly’s first proper EP, Is As Real As You Are, bandleader Zo Talkin and their collaborators make snappy, polished guitar pop with bits of college rock, jangle pop, and power pop in the mixture. Talkin’s confident, centered vocals separate Chorus Truly from a lot of modern college rock-influenced bands; there’s more than a bit of the classic Pretenders sound in these six songs. Everything on Is As Real As You Are is decidedly pop music, but the smooth-sailing jangly indie pop of opening track “Your Name” is the “hit” if I’ve ever heard one. Read more about Is As Real As You Are here.
“Blind Horse”, NAYAN From In the Dirt (2026, Red Stapler)
Two years after their debut album, Rock N Roll Ruined My Life, Washington, D.C.’s NAYAN have pared down to a quartet and have returned with a six-song EP called In the Dirt, recorded by J. Robbins at his Magpie Cage Recording Studio. In the Dirt is nothing less than an extremely vigorous, open-hearted rock and roll record bearing the mark of longtime musicians doing it purely for the love of the genre. Opening track “Blind Horse” is a brilliant, surging anthem, a foot-on-gas beginning to an impressively varied, compact package. Read more about In the Dirt here.
“Hecate in the Highlands”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
Our second Vesuvian song on this playlist (out of three) finds our Philadelphia punk rock heroes developing and nailing a bunch of touchpoints to their sound: a big old Thin Lizzy guitar riff, Greek mythology deployment front and center, grousing talk-singing (or muttering) verses, and a singalong chorus. It could be from a musical that absolutely tanks but gets a cult following in the years afterwards. I just don’t know what to tell you if you don’t like this one.
“Bridget Because”, Hypnolovewheel From Parallel Universe (2026, Octopeace)
Hypnolovewheel were one of the great lost college rock bands of the late 1980s and early 90s; they formed in New York in 1986 and released five LPs before dissolving in 1993. Their music was pop with a healthy amount of distortion, psychedelia, and post-punk attitude–it would’ve fit in well with what was going on in New Zealand at the time, and it did fit in well with their sonic and geographical neighbors in Yo La Tengo. The first fifteen songs on the retrospective compilation Parallel Universe are from the band’s five studio albums, presented in no particular order–well, no particular chronological order, I mean, as the front end of Parallel Universe is stacked with could’ve-been-hits like “Bridget Because”. Read more about Parallel Universe here.
“Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds”, the Mountain Goats From Days (2026, Cadmean Dawn)
Everything on the eleven-song, thirty-eight minute Sea of Night was recorded by Wade Easy himself, and the entirety of the album is devoted to building a singular, striking ambience. Easy’s signature sound is a hushed, molasses-slow, Appalachian-shaded, “atmospheric” and “gothic” one. It’s electric, but I don’t know if I’d call it “rock” music. If early Songs: Ohia is “folk music” than I suppose that Sea of Night is too, but there’s a hazy, psychedelic side to Wade Easy that was never really the style of Jason Molina. It’s hard to call out specific songs from Sea of Night, but “Dead Moons” captures the entire thing as well as anything else on it. Read more about Sea of Night here.
“Make Me Whole”, Lovewell From Everything You Ever Wanted (2026, Another Year/Financial)
Everything You Wanted finds Lovewell’s founding duo of Mark Palladino and Joe Bradshaw welcoming new members Bobby Pettigrew and Jake Watkins into the band. Rather than shaking up their sound, these new recruits seem to have fallen right into lockstep with the sublime, hook-driven emo-dream-gaze sound that Palladino and Bradshaw did so well on 2022’s Around the Flowers. Few bands are doing the “delicate, crystal-clear vocal melodies mixed with fuzzed-out, gas-pedal-driven punk/alt-rock instrumentals” thing better than Lovewell right now; guitar pop anthems like “Make Me Whole” feel second-nature for them. Read more about Everything You Ever Wanted here.
“Pharmacies”, The Laughing Chimes From Behind Your Blue Fields (2026, Slumberland)
Early last year, Athens, Ohio jangle pop group The Laughing Chimes debuted a darker, more post-punk/goth-indebted sound with Whispers in the Speech Machine. The journey from 2022’s Zoo Avenue EP to that endpoint was captured in an album’s worth of outtakes and scrapped sessions, which the band decided to release this year as Behind Your Blue Fields. As someone who first got into the Chimes as a Guided by Voices-inspired lo-fi guitar pop group, Behind Your Blue Fields is full of gems, nuggets, and whatnot; the seventy-second jangle-snippet “Pharmacies” just might be the best of them all (plus, The Laughing Chimes say their band name in the lyrics, so that’s cool).
“Coin”, Comfy From Steel Chimp (2026)
Always nice to hear new music from Rochester, New York power pop/pop punk quartet Comfy (who share members with another good and likeminded group in Big Nobody). The four-song Steel Chimp EP is the group’s first new music since late 2024’s Goated & Foreboded LP, and it’s a sharp ten-minute collection of power pop, alt-rock, pop punk, and post-grunge hooks. My favorite track on Steel Chimp is “Coin”, which opens with wobbly, uncertain power chords and wobbly, uncertain vocals and ends on a fire-and-brimstone, Raytheon-and-Lockheed-namechecking note.
“Cold”, Yea-Ming and the Rumours From Residue (2026, Dandy Boy)
I’ve good news: the 60s pop, folk rock, and gentle-side-of Yo La Tengo conjured up by I Can’t Have It Allonce again factor heavily into Residue, Yea-Ming and the Rumours’ fourth album. The Rumours are heavily linked to the San Francisco Bay Area’s indie pop scene (their label, Dandy Boy, is at the center of it, and most of their members are pulling double duty, at least), but their take on the genre has always been a different, “proto-” version compared to that of their janglier/twee-er peers. There’s a freedom to this that The Rumours embrace in Residue; the stop-and-go power pop of “Cold” is one of my favorites, but it’s just one facet of what they do here. Read more about Residue here.
“Somebody Wants to Send You a Message”, Styrofoam Winos From Any River (2026, Dear Life)
The exploits of the Nashville-based supergroup Styrofoam Winos and its members are numerous, spilling over into neighboring scenes in Louisville and Asheville and sharing members with both Ryan Davis and MJ Lenderman’s bands. Still, there’s something special about when Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel get together, swapping instruments, lead vocals, and song ideas to the tune of breezy but adventurous folk rock. Aside from a truly incredible bass clarinet solo from Equipment Pointed Ankh’s Jim Marlowe on “Somebody Wants to Send You a Message”, Any River is entirely the work of the three of them, and it sounds like a band still very in-tune with one another. Read more about Any River here.
“Ostrich Toss”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
“Ostrich Toss” might be the most interesting thing on Unified Field. It’s a bouncy one, a Looney Tunes-esque see-saw between the narrator and their foil before the titular flightless bird delivers a speech condemning, I guess, all of humanity, at the end of the song. Perhaps the characters in the song have State-level analogues, or perhaps the ultimate driver of “Ostrich Toss” is a different kind of subjugation or industrial violence. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking about it and turning it over in my head–Unified Field, as with the rest of Emperor X’s best work, is expertly designed to provoke in such a way. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Only a Matter of Time”, Eliksa From From Falmer Court (2026, Crafting Room)
Eliksa’s debut EP, From Falmer Court, was recorded live at something called The Great Thatch Barn in the record’s titular city over an “intensive five-hour window” and initially released earlier this year as a video before the audio was put out by Crafting Room. Crafting Room calls Eliksa a “slacker-folk” act, but I’m not sure many slackers make high-concept, well-produced concert film debut releases in historic British barns. There’s a compelling contradiction between the polish of the video and the music, which is ultimately pretty simple and stripped down folk-pop. In terms of immediately-hitting guitar pop, “Only a Matter of Time” is the biggest success, but not the only one. Read more about From Falmer Court here.
“Here We Go Again”, Shrubs From Rising (2026, FABCOM)
From 1994 to 2018, Shrubs were a New Jersey rock trio making what we’d sometimes call “college rock”, a mixture of power pop, garage rock, psychedelia, folk rock, and roots rock that recalls bands like Refrigerator, several Flying Nun Records acts, and frequent associate The Feelies. Rising is a posthumous Shrubs CD collection featuring the two songs that Shrubs had written for their next album before guitarist/vocalist Jay LoRubbio’s death and augmented by two WFMU radio sessions the band recorded in 2008 and 2011. My selection is from the WFMU sessions, as there’s something very compelling about hearing a band rocking stripped-down versions of their own original pop songs like “Here We Go Again”. Read more about Rising here.
“First Greens”, Sea Moss From Big Tube Scene (2026, Zum Audio)
Sea Moss and Miscomings are two noise punk bands from the Pacific Northwest; after the two bands shared a bill in Portland, they hit it off and the split album Big Tube Scene took form. Each band gets a side on this split album, and each half ends with a collaborative track featuring all six musicians playing together. The A-Side is Sea Moss doing what Sea Moss does best, absolutely pummeling us with electronic-driven noise punk for five torrential tracks; opening track “First Greens” tells you more or less everything you need to know. Read more about Big Tube Scene here.
“Cruisin’”, Big Nothing From Big Nothing (2026, Dead Broke)
Philadelphia’s Big Nothing were sneakily one of the better guitar pop bands of the turn-of-the-last-decade, mining later-Replacements, The Lemonheads, and Buffalo Tom styles for diamond-in-the-rough pop songs on strong albums like 2022’s Dog Hours. They’ve jumped from Lame-O to Dead Broke Rekerds for their latest album and first in four years, a self-titled one that ends up being a low-key collection of mid-tempo guitar pop I’ll likely appreciate more as time passes. “Cruisin” is definitely the hit to my ears, a mid-tempo, slightly jangly alt-rock-radio could’ve-been-hit that hits all the right marks.
“Who’s Gonna Love You Now?”, The Tubs From Hard Life (2026, Merge)
Everyone loves The Tubs, the most visible band to emerge from the scrum of post-Joanna Gruesome projects from some combination of Owen Willams, Lan McArdle, Max Warren, George Nicholls, and Matthew Green. The Williams-led Tubs put out excellent albums of Welsh jangle pop on Trouble in Mind in 2023 and 2025, and with that label’s unfortunate shuttering, they’ve leapt to Merge for this year’s upcoming Hard Life. The first taste of Tubs LP3 is a breezy one in “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?”, a typically-desperate-sounding power pop jangler that feels shorter than its three-minute runtime.
“Meetcha at Minnies (The Captain’s Song)”, Onesie From Way Thousand Bump to the Sky (2026, Sell the Heart)
I first heard Brooklyn quartet Onesie back in 2023, when the excellent Liminal Hiss–an electric mixture of power pop, jangle pop, psychedelia, and prog-pop–became one of my favorite albums of that year. On their most recent album, Way Thousand Bump to the Sky, Onesie have “stripped down” to the trio of bandleader/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Ben Haberland, guitarist Rob Lanterman, and drummer Jason Bauers, but this album (recorded by Guided by Voices producer Travis Harrison) doesn’t abandon the ambition and maximalist pop rock of their last LP. The choppy beginning of “Meetcha at Minnies (The Captain’s Song)” doesn’t prepare us for everywhere this song ends up going, for instance.
“Paper Cup”, Spacemoth From Inward Eye (2026, Greenway)
Maryam Qudus spent several years working as a producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, producing records from Forest Bees and Sour Widows, among others. When it came time for her own project Spacemoth to debut, Qudus was more than ready. Qudus has spent a lot of time since her 2022 debut No Past No Future on tour–both with Spacemoth and as the keyboardist for garage-pop act La Luz–and it was on the road that the second Spacemoth album, Inward Eye, started to take shape. While Spacemoth’s studio-experimentation frequently yields vibrant, kaleidoscopic pop music, Qudus is just at home in the grainy, distorted sheen that covers up the just-as-strong pop song “Paper Cup”. Read more about Inward Eye here.
“Elixir”, Supermilk From Grief Hospital (2026, Specialist Subject)
Always nice to have more new music from Supermilk, one of the bright lights in London’s indie pop/rock underground. The four-song Grief Hospital EP follows the 2024 album High Precision Ghosts and last year’s live collection Lazy Teenage Boasts, and if you liked either of those then I have some good news for you about what you’ll hear on this one. Supermilk’s unique sound remains intact on Grief Hospital, one part Superchunk/Bob Mould revival like their peers in Good Grief but with a more British indie pop and even a bit of XTC/post-punk undercurrent to highlights like “Elixir”.
“Are You Looking for Something?”, The Hobknobs From Helmets Off (2026, 12XU/Cargo)
The Hobknobs are the new duo made up of a couple of Dutch indie veterans in Lewsberg vocalist/guitarist/violinist Arie van Vliet and The Klittens’ Yaël Dekker. Even compared to the relatively stripped-down indie rock of Lewsberg and the streamlined post-punk/indie pop of The Klittens, Helmets Off is a quiet affair. Those who appreciate “minimalism” in indie pop will find a lot to love in Helmets Off, in which van Vliet and Dekker sing together twee-ly over guitars, percussion, and keys all used sparingly. On “Are You Looking for Something?”, my favorite song on Helmets Off, The Hobknobs sound like a C86 band confidently making their way through a Peel Session. Read more about Helmets Off here.
“Diana’s Jacket (As Told by Danny DaChamp)”, Fishboy From Bravest Neighbor (2026, XLFNT)
I’ve been (ahem) waiting for a new Fishboy album ever since the high-concept twee-power-pop rock-opera Waitsgivingbecame one of my favorite albums of 2021. The recently-announced Bravest Neighbor finds the Denton, Texas singer-songwriter Eric Michener and his project prepping a suite of songs just as ambitious as Waitsgiving was, if not more so (I hope to get into it more as the album gets closer). For now, we’re left to turn over “Diana’s Jacket (As Told by Danny DaChamp)”, a hard-charging (for Fishboy, at least) twee-power-pop song that does indeed revolve around the titular jacket (it’s somewhere between The Weakerthans and The Apples in Stereo, I think).
“Chrysanthemum Flowers”, Bellows From “Que Bello!” (2026, Bloody Knuckles)
Arriving four years after Next of Kin, Bellows’ newest record once again lands on the maximalist side of indie pop, but the hour-long double LP “Que Bello!” puts the project’s intricacies on an even larger canvas. The core of Bellows (Oliver Kalb, Jack Greenleaf, Ian Cory and Frank Meadows) recorded the bulk of “Que Bello!” in 2023 and 2024, with Kalb, Greenleaf, and vocalist Emily Reo putting the finishing touches on it last year; the band has released the eighteen-song album in five “chunks” over the past two months, perhaps an acknowledgement that it is indeed a lot to take in. “Chrysanthemum Flowers” is the jaw-dropping, kaleidoscopic “tapestry” piece as the opener, the first indication that “a lot” doesn’t have to be “difficult”. Read more about “Que Bello!” here.
“Do You Feel It Too?”, …or Does It Explode? From Realities Disguised as Symbols (2026, Middle-Man)
Last year’s Tales to Needed Outcomesfound Madison’s …or Does It Explode? exploring post-rock, slowcore, and even orchestral music, which, as it turns out, was something of an outlier for the quintet. Their “normal” sound is much more indebted to the post-hardcore side of 1990s emo, and it’s to this genre they return on their fourth album, the Electrical Audio-recorded Realities Disguised as Symbols. The endlessly floating ambience of the last LP has been replaced by something noisier and grittier, and fans of vintage Touch & Go noisy post-rock will enjoy the one-two opening punch of “Instincts” and “Do You Feel It Too?”. Read more about Realities Disguised as Symbols here.
“Fortunate Death”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
I absolutely love that Vesuvian swiped the Third Eye Blind “Never Let You Go” riff for this song. And why not? It’s not like they were doing anything good with it. “Fortunate Death” is subsequently a little less explosive than the other two Vesuvian songs on this playlist, but it does alright for itself. At the very least, it’s nice to imagine an alternate universe where I get to hear lyrics like “Cold stone beneath my back / Your knife held up aloft / Let my blood spill / To seed the summer crops” on the Modern Rock radio.
“Line Go Up Line Go Down”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
“Line Go Up Line Go Down” is the shining example of big-picture, global Emperor X on Unified Field. Everything is perfect on that one, an extremely fervent rejection of the invisible hand with a complex but understandable call to action. When I talk about the “uniqueness” of Emperor X, I’m absolutely thinking of the bridge to “Line Go Up Line Go Down”, the clearest journey into Chad Matheny’s personal politics on the record. No matter where one falls on the political spectrum, one could certainly find something objectionable in Matheny’s linking together of the Soviet Union, United Nations, and European Union as he weighs the failures and ideals of all three–the brilliance and righteousness of “Line Go Up Line Go Down” is such that any quibbles with framing I might have start to look like the luxurious window-dressing they ultimately are. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Sugar in the Shoe”, The Cowboys From Captain Easy’s Downfall (2026, Feel It)
The Bloomington, Indiana-originating band The Cowboys may be spread out between Indiana, Ohio, and Mexico City these days, but that didn’t stop the Feel It Records flagship garage rock/power pop legends from assembling the rollicking nineteen-song Captain Easy’s Downfall. Rock ‘n’ roll/power pop missiles like “Sugar in the Shoe” are Stiff Records throwbacks that The Cowboys could probably bash out in their sleep, but the time and distance haven’t dampened the energy they inject into them. Read more about Captain Easy’s Downfall here.
“Velvet Rabbit Portal”, Some Velvet Sidewalk From Critters Encore (2026, K/Perennial)
Initially active from 1987 to 1997, Eugene, Oregon’s Some Velvet Sidewalk were a K Records band who seemed to hew towards the noisier/punk-er side of that label. Their first album in over twenty-five years, Critters Encore, is right out of their original era in the best way: it sounds like 1980s underground punk and post-punk filtered through a heavy lo-fi Pacific Northwestern lens. It’s the same pressure cooker that made “grunge”, though Critters Encore is a specific kind of Cascadian noise rock that feels like a later part of a caveman evolution drawing also featuring the Wipers, Dead Moon, Mudhoney, and the U-Men. The world needs weird rock and roll records that kind of don’t make sense, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have, after all these years, risen to the occasion. Read more about Critters Encore here.
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a bit of a hodge-podge this week (it’s a holiday weekend in the States, which may have something to do with it), but there’s still plenty to enjoy here with a new album from Smirk, a posthumous release from Shrubs, and new EPs from Eliksa and Mirrorball. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Fire Man, NAYAN, Lovewell, and The Hobknobs), check that out too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Shrubs – Rising
Release date: July 4th Record label: FABCOM! Genre: College rock, folk rock, power pop, roots rock, garage rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Here We Go Again
From 1994 to 2018, Shrubs were a New Jersey rock trio making what we’d sometimes call “college rock”, a mixture of power pop, garage rock, psychedelia, folk rock, and roots rock that recalls bands like Refrigerator, several Flying Nun Records acts, and The Feelies (with whom Shrubs rubbed elbows on multiple occasions). Just as Shrubs started work on what was to be their sixth album, the death of guitarist/vocalist Jay LoRubbio brought the band to a sudden and seemingly final halt. Last year, though, drummer/vocalist Rob Takleszyn and bassist/vocalist Bob Torsello met up with Feelies frontperson Glenn Mercer to record the two songs that Shrubs had written for their next album. These two new recordings lead off Rising, a posthumous Shrubs CD collection that’s augmented by two WFMU radio sessions the band recorded in 2008 and 2011.
Of the two “new” songs, I’m most partial to “Let’s Go”, a Torsello-penned guitar pop tune that sounds like a great lost NRBQ recording, but there’s no denying the poignancy of “Lou’s Place”, which LoRubbio wrote in tribute to what I can only imagine was one of his biggest influences in Lou Reed and which Takleszyn sings in his departed bandmate’s stead. Not only do Shrubs get a nice coda to their career, though, we also get to hear twenty-one tracks’ worth of the band, vibrant and alive, plowing through their catalog on WFMU. If you’re intrigued by bands who “sound like they should be on WFMU” and garner Feelies and NRBQ comparisons, Rising is a must-listen as an introduction to Shrubs’ whole thing. There’s something very compelling about hearing a band rocking stripped-down versions of their own original pop songs (like highlights “Gone to Hell” and “Here We Go Again”) and paying tribute to their influences and peers (they cover The Bevis Frond and, of course, The Feelies here) all in one. It speaks very well of Shrubs that they conducted themselves such that something as strong as Rising could be assembled in their wake. (Bandcamp link)
Eliksa – From Falmer Court
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Crafting Room Genre: Folk rock, indie pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Only a Matter of Time
We all only get one chance to make a first impression, and the Brighton project Eliksa seems intent on putting together a unique one. Eliksa is led by the eponymous, mononymous singer-songwriter who grew up “in the French countryside” before moving to Brighton and assembling a backing band including Noah Fox, Tim Spencer, Monty Taft, and Mina-Mae Alexander. Eliksa’s debut EP, From Falmer Court, was recorded live at something called The Great Thatch Barn in the record’s titular city (it’s a historic 13th century “Tithe Barn”, a concept I admit I didn’t learn about until now) over an “intensive five-hour window”. They filmed this five-song, fifteen-minute session, and it was first released as a video on Elika’s YouTube channel before Crafting Room Recordings put out the audio as a standalone digital EP this week. The video is very nicely done and you ought to watch it if Eliksa’s thing sounds up your alley, but this is technically just about the audio of From Falmer Court and I do need to get around to talking about what it sounds like.
Crafting Room calls Eliksa a “slacker-folk” act, but I’m not sure many slackers make high-concept, well-produced concert film debut releases in historic British barns. There’s a compelling contradiction between the polish of the video and the music, which is ultimately pretty simple and stripped down folk-pop. Basically, we get four pieces of laid-back, acoustic-driven British indie pop as well as one instrumental interlude connecting them. “Never Enough” was the advance single and it’s strong enough to be one, but I might have a slight preference for “Only a Matter of Time” in terms of immediately-hitting guitar pop. The low-key rock and roll of “Aquamarine Lampshade” and the bittersweet closing track “After All the Trouble” aren’t slouches either, though. On From Falmer Court, Eliksa do indeed have the material to back up their ambition.
Smirk – Speculative Fiction
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Smoking Room Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, post-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Perfect World
When we last checked in on Los Angeles garage rock group Smirk, it was late 2022, and the Nick Vicario-led project had just put out their debut LP, Material, on Feel It Records; I called it classic West Coast punk rock with a “dark streak” at the time. Vicario has actually been playing in garage bands since the early 2000s (first in his hometown of Portland, Oregon), although that tantalizing edge I detected in Material hasn’t dulled a bit over the years and various projects. The first three Wipers albums loom large over Speculative Fiction, an album that takes a garage punk’s sound, slows it down and cleans it up just a bit, but keeps (and, arguably, enhances) the fresh-feeling dark post-punk energy at the heart of Smirk. At thirteen songs and nearly forty-five minutes, Speculative Fiction is by far the most substantial Smirk release yet, and features members of Advertisement, Ceremony, Pardoner, and Poison Ruin backing Vicaro up at various points on the LP.
The band claim relatively lighter, more pop-forward acts like Big Star and Guided by Voices as influences for Speculative Fiction, which I find amusing, as I find very little overt reference to that kind of sound in these songs. Do not get me wrong, it’s a pretty catchy punk album, but the strongest examples of the art on Speculative Fiction are either snotty garage rock rippers like “I Shall Be Released” or loud, all-out punk rock like “Perfect World”. Then, after that all-out sprint, we’re treated to “Abide”, the “Wipers doing a post-punk update of a Christian hymn” exercise we never knew we needed, and “Ritual Torture”, which is, of course, the closest thing to genuine “jangle-punk” on the LP. Speculative Fiction is anything but an abandoning of Smirk’s earlier releases, but Vicario is clearly wrestling with something here, and it’s just what this album needs. (Bandcamp link)
Mirrorball – Mirrorball
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Take a Shot
Mirrorball are a duo from Los Angeles made up of vocalist Alexandra Johnstone and guitarist/keyboardist Scott Watson who’ve been putting out singles together since 2019. As best as I can tell, though, Mirrorball is the band’s first EP, made up of three songs released in the past few years and two new ones. Mirrorball evoke a very specific, 2010s kind of dreamy, psychedelic indie pop–it’s no coincidence that they recorded these songs with Chris Coady, who’s produced records from Beach House, DIIV, and Smith Westerns, among others. Mirrorball is polished but hazy-sounding, evoking several decades’ worth of southern California history. “Red Hot Dust” introduces us to Mirrorball with perfunctory piano keys and up-front, meandering vocals from Johnstone; it’s intriguing, and they keep us on such a ride through the Mazzy Star-like guitars of “Take a Shot”, the (relatively) glitzy indie pop of “Tinsel for a Tear”, and the busier, lightly sunshine-psych touches of closing track “Devil Mirror”. With that, the first chapter of Mirrorball’s hopefully lengthy career is wrapped up quite neatly.
Rosy Overdrive 