New Playlist: April 2026

A bit later than I would’ve liked (so it goes), the April 2026 playlist has landed! Featuring a bunch of good music from the past month or so as well as some miscellaneous older songs I’ve also been enjoying lately.

Cape Crush, Prism Shores, Teen Suicide, and Sacred Heart Academy have two songs on this playlist. The Blackburns have three.

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing four songs), Tidal (missing three). 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.

“New Music”, The Blackburns
From Alternative Rock (2026, Sell the Heart)

Everything on the honestly-titled Alternative Rock is written like it could be the focal point of the entire album, and The Blackburns are rewarded for their ambition with a transcendent record that juggles nostalgia and pastiche and develops its own style in defiance of all of that. “I wanna hear new music / Come on, I’m trying to do this,” goes the chorus of “New Music”, the opening track to Alternative Rock, a surging power pop song that takes its grappling with losing touch with the present and makes sharp, catchy art with it (the vocal trade-offs are a really nice touch). Read more about Alternative Rock here.

“Calm & Delivered”, Cape Crush
From Place Memory (2026, Wanna Hear It)

A self-described “power-emo” band from Massachusetts, the quartet Cape Crush first showed up in 2023 with an EP called San Souci, and they released a split record with the bands Impossible Dog and Good June early last year. Place Memory is the group’s first full-length album, as well as their first release with new drummer Mike O’Toole joining vocalist/guitarist Ali Lipman, guitarist James Christopher, and bassist Jake Letitiza. Cape Crush throw one of the best pop songs I’ve heard this year at us in Place Memory’s first half with “Calm & Delivered”, an archetypal emo-power-pop anthem carried by an instantly-engrossing performance from Lipman as frontperson. Read more about Place Memory here.

“I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind”, Prism Shores
From Softest Attack (2026, Meritorio)

With last year’s Out from Underneath, Prism Shores claimed a spot for themselves at a Montreal guitar pop table that’s been impressively crowded as of late. Merely a year later, Softest Attack is a classic leveling-up moment, taking the spirited energy of Out from Underneath and marrying it with larger, more confident hooks and a studio polish designed to accentuate them. ”I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind”, my favorite song on the album, is a massive-sounding, achingly earnest, top-of-the-mountain guitar pop anthem that sounds like a larger version of the most recent (also Meritorio-released) Fazed on a Pony album. Read more about Softest Attack here.

“Suffering (Mike’s Way)”, Teen Suicide
From Nude descending staircase headless (2026, Run for Cover)

With Nude descending staircase headless, Teen Suicide make a bid to join their more polished peers, the ones against which bandleader Sam Ray had been content to position himself as a scrappy underdog in his past “lo-fi indie” days.  The effort that Sam and Kitty Ray put into sharpening up Nude descending staircase headless (title comes from a David Berman poem, of course) is quite impressive, and it’ll probably be one of my most listened-to Ray-related records for this reason. It’s when we get to track three, “Suffering (Mike’s Way)”, when it becomes apparent just how successful Teen Suicide can be at making straight-up power pop. Read more about Nude descending staircase headless here.

“One Small Step”, High Back Chairs
From Curiosity and Relief (1992, Dischord)

I’ve been digging into 1990s Dischord albums recently (instead of keeping up with the blog’s inbox, I guess), and they really had some good things going on in 1992. Landmark records from Jawbox, Shudder to Think, Lungfish (more on them later), Nation of Ulysses, Circus Lupus…and these guys. Notably featuring Minor Threat drummer Jeff Nelson and Velocity Girl’s Jim Spellman, the High Back Chairs decided they wanted to use the iconic Washington, D.C. hardcore label to release their power pop and Smiths worship. This doesn’t sound like “Dischord” at all! But it rules! Especially “One Small Step”, probably the song I’ve listened to the most over the past month. This is perfect power pop–irreverent, esoteric, confusing, but always finding its way right back to the hook.

“Give It a Little More Time”, Sacred Heart Academy
From Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP (2026)

Eilee and Evren Centeno are a sibling duo from North Carolina who’ve appeared on the blog before thanks to their record label, Trash Tape Records, which has released albums from Tombstone Poetry, Hill View #73, and Rain Recordings. Lately, both of them have moved from Chapel Hill to Chicago, where they started making music together as Sacred Heart Academy sometime around late 2024, leading to the group’s first record. I was lucky enough to catch one of those early Sacred Heart Academy shows, and I came away from it looking forward to hear the alt-country/power pop anthem of “Give It a Little More Time” on-record; it doesn’t disappoint, ending up one of the best pop songs I’ve heard this year. Read more about Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP here.

“Angel’s Share”, Bullseye
From Bullseye (2026, Ever/Never)

Bullseye are a Brooklyn band with roots in Minnesota and Texas who’ve followed up four-song EPs in 2024 and 2025 with a self-titled six-song EP. Bullseye is a compelling mix of power pop, garage rock, roots rock, college rock, and 90s indie rock that sounds like a band still in touch with Texas and Minnesota alt-rock/punk history. Jangly guitars, “slacker rock” vocals, and a winning power pop chorus greet us in opening track “Angel’s Share”, a declaration that Bullseye isn’t beating around the bush when it comes to crafting guitar pop hooks. Read more about Bullseye here.

“The Tiny Wave”, Ceylon Sailor
From The Tiny Wave (2026, Stunning Models on Display/Ghost Types)

Ceylon Sailor is a sextet from Brooklyn led by one KM Sigel on guitar and vocals and also featuring keyboardist Andrew Wood, drummer Kieran Kelly, guitarist/trumpet player Dave Long, trombonist Paul Broadhead, and bassist Seth Ondracek. They claim Elephant 6 and Chapel Hill 90s indie rock as influences–the title track to their newest EP The Tiny Wave reminds me of The Wrens, Hallelujah the Hills, and the recently-defunct, similarly-minded Brooklyn group Fixtures. It’s maximalist, horn-aided pop music made by clear “indie rockers”; it’s incidentally “power pop”, but not particularly dogmatic about it. I like the whole EP; listen to it if any of this sounds relevant to you.

“Reality Cheque”, TV Star
From Music for Heads (2026, Father/Daughter)

TV Star’s first album is the latest example of the strong shoegaze/dream pop-inspired indie rock scene in the band’s home cities of Seattle and Tacoma. Compared to some of their noisier peers, TV Star’s take on the genre is more crystal-clear and pop-forward, with a psychedelic and even “alt-country” bent that claims Mojave 3 and The Brian Jonestown Massacre as influences. Music for Heads doesn’t hide its penchant for jangly, dreamy, often acoustic-heavy indie pop, but fans of more electric, perhaps even “power pop”-curious indie pop will also enjoy early highlight “Reality Cheque”. Read more about Music for Heads here.

“Hooked”, Josephine Network
From Hooked (2026, Lolipop)

Hooked is, I believe, the third Josephine Network album, and it’s an all-too-brief jolt of classic, retro power pop piecing together Cheap Trick, 60s girl groups, Sparks, The Beach Boys, and Thin Lizzy. Fans of Sheer Mag, Romero, and recent Diners will find plenty to enjoy in these ten songs and twenty-six minutes; most of Hooked qualifies as a “highlight”, but the Big Riff that ensnares us in the title track might be my favorite moment on the album. Read more about Hooked here.

“Friend to Friend in Endtime”, Lungfish
From Talking Songs for Walking (1992, Dischord)

Another selection from my time sifting through the Dischord Records archives. Unlike High Back Chairs, Lungfish are hardly a new discovery for me–I don’t think I’ve heard all of their albums, but I’ve spent a good deal with them, and this wasn’t my first time listening to Talking Songs for Walking. This time, though, it sounded like one of the best rock records I’ve ever heard when I listened to it. Not sure why I found myself more receptive to Lungfish’s whole deal than ever before last month, but “Friend to Friend in Endtime” now feels like a sleeper cell calling me to do things I’m better off not writing about on this blog. Damn, this sounds so cool. 

“Saving My Life Every Day”, Doug Gillard
From Parallel Stride (2026, Dromedary)

With Guided by Voices’ touring schedule finally slowing down, the band’s longtime guitarist Doug Gillard apparently had time to return to solo act mode. Parallel Stride, the fourth Gillard solo album, is unmistakably him, a strong collection of songs that emphasize his pop songwriting, art rock fluency, and, of course, renowned guitar playing. Gillard is low-key vocalist; maybe he sounds like somebody who’s more used to the sideman role than the spotlight, but it’s the right tone for the subtle, workmanlike beauty of Parallel Stride. Second half standout “Saving My Life Every Day” has a propulsion and tension to it that very few people who haven’t been in Guided by Voices can pull off. Read more about Parallel Stride here.

“Same Mistakes”, Cashier
From The Weight (2026, Julia’s War)

Julia’s War has, in recent years, established themselves as the vanguard of the abrasive, confrontational, and experimental extremes of what can still be called “shoegaze”, so it’s nice to see that they can still appreciate a good shoegaze-pop group when they hear them. Lafayette, Louisiana grunge-gaze quartet Cashier have more in common with mainstream 90s alt-rock like The Smashing Pumpkins or even punky indie rock like Dinosaur Jr. than they do with the “ethereal”–check out the grunge-pop anthem “Same Mistakes” for proof of their chops in this department. Read more about The Weight here.

“Who Told Mary?”, Josey Wails
From Sweetheart Darling (2026)

I’m not sure I have all that much to say about “Who Told Mary?”; it’s just a really great pop song. Josey Wails is a power pop/garage rock kind of guy from Baltimore, and this is the second song on a three-track EP called Sweetheart Darling. Maybe you can clock it just based on that title, but Mr. Wails is a dead ringer for a certain kind of punk musician, a retro-fetishist with a Westerberg/Morrisey-fluent smirking sensitive side (check out the Bones Shredder album from last year to see more of what I mean). The moment it’s clear that Wails has pulled it off on “Who Told Mary?” is when his voice goes ragged repeating the title line in the chorus.

“Ripoff”, Goodwill Suck Machine
From TV for Dogs (2026, Club)

I wasn’t familiar with Charlie Sills before now, but he’s pretty active in the Ontario indie rock world–he plays guitar in the Royal Mountain group Madfolk, and his new solo project Goodwill Suck Machine just put out its second EP (the three-track TV for Dogs) on Ottawa’s Club Records (founded by members of Fanclubwallet). TV for Dogs is solid overall, but I really like “Ripoff”, a captivating song that takes emo-y pop punk like PUP and Snow Ellet and runs it through a glossy, dreamy filter. Goodwill Suck Machine is probably worth watching if “Ripoff” is any kind of indication of their future.

“Where Our Rivers Meet”, Big Bluestem
From Take Care, Stay Warm (2026, Midewin)

Mike Fox is one-half of the Chicago folk rock/studio pop duo Coventry, and after a detour into electronica in 2024, his new solo project Big Bluestem is a return to folk-based songwriting. Take Care, Stay Warm pretty different from Coventry, and in fact can be seen as a reaction to the polish of that band’s debut album: it was recorded “on a handheld recorder with a hard three-take limit”, and the songs themselves are hushed and intimate in a way that clearly benefits from the recording style. Opening track “Where Our Rivers Meet” does actually feel Coventry-like in its comfortable, jazzy piano playing, but that instrumental is slowed to a crawl and accompanied only by Fox’s whispered vocals, welcoming us into the world of Take Care, Stay Warm while giving us a realistic picture of where Fox is at on this record. Read more about Take Care, Stay Warm here.

“Solace”, FakeYou
From Promise to Disappear (2026, 59 X)

Hailing from Montreal, the punk quartet FakeYou take us back to the world of late-1990s emo-tinged melodic punk rock for an entire LP of the “orgcore” experience: raspy melodies, bursting, anthemic guitars, a palpable earnestness that will be an immediate turnoff to some and the core of FakeYou’s appeal for others. Recorded with Max Lajoie of Spite House, Promise to Disappear is one dire-feeling pop punk song after another; take your pick as to which example of it is the best, but “Solace” is a particularly strong place to start. Read more about Promise to Disappear here.

“Alternative Rock”, The Blackburns
From Alternative Rock (2026, Sell the Heart)

“Thousands of years before the mainstream Earth / Twelve poseur composers went over and over the cycle of death and rebirth”. I didn’t even talk about the title track to Alternative Rock when I wrote about that album because there were a lot of other things to get to, but The Blackburns’ grand finale is one of the best things on the LP. Nick Palmer and Joel Tannenbaum trade off vocals again on this one, which as best as I can tell is some kind of epic mythical poem about a character named “Rattail” who practices the titular art of Alternative Rock. It’s very catchy. Read more about Alternative Rock here.

“Tracing”, Golden Tiles
From Set Up on the Leaves (2026, Antiquated Future)

Led by vocalist/guitarist Oliver Stafford and also featuring bassist Joshua James Amberson and drummer Justin Hocking, Golden Tiles practice a religious devotion to familiar, fuzzy, vaguely Pacific Northwestern indie rock throughout Set Up on the Chairs. The chords and drumbeats are kept simple, Stafford’s vocals are relatively clear for this kind of thing, and there are unmistakable pop melodies–yet there’s something about Set Up on the Chairs that keeps it at a slight distance. The Portland trio’s debut LP is the kind of record that invites you to listen again just to see if the picture starts to come more into focus this time. Read more about Set Up on the Leaves here.

“Wish I Were Here”, The Lives of Famous Men
From End Times Elevator Music (2026)

The Lives of Famous Men, a Portland, Oregon act with Alaskan roots, are survivors of 2000s “alternative” music. Their biography is littered with references to forgotten, often Christian rock-adjacent names like Shiny Toy Guns, Anarbor, and We Shot the Moon (as well as the very much not-forgotten fellow Alaskans Portugal. The Man). And yet here they are twenty years later, making synth-y Death Cab for Cutie-esque indie pop. Acquired-taste high-pitched vocals, a brisk, skipping tempo, and a giant power pop chorus–you could almost convince me that it’s 2009 again, and “Jack Antonoff” is just a backing musician in a second-tier Fueled by Ramen band.

“Place Memory”, Cape Crush
From Place Memory (2026, Wanna Hear It)

Recorded with frequent collaborator and prolific producer Zach Weeks (Cowboy Boy, Really From, Friendship Commanders), Cape Crush’s Place Memory is a strong and confident debut of emo-tinged power pop and pop punk songwriting. The Massachusetts band arguably top the previously-discussed “Calm & Delivered” just one song later on the LP’s tracklist with the title track. We get a heroic guitar riff at the center of the song, some nice choppy power chords in the verses, and the first line of the refrain is an instant classic (“Ain’t it funny how the wrong kind of night…”). Read more about Place Memory here.

“High School”, Winston Hightower
From 100 Acre Wood (2026, K/Perennial)

Winston Hightower spent a decade in the background of the Columbus indie rock scene before K and Perennial Records signed him in 2024 and put out Winston Hytwr, a compilation of songs from across his discography. 100 Acre Wood is the first album of new material of Hightower’s K/Perennial era, and while it certainly sounds like the eclectic artist of Winston Hytwr, this album finds the musician honing in on a more cohesive set of post-punk and lo-fi pop-influenced indie rock. The extra-lo-fi charm of “High School” in particular sticks out in its surprising guitar pop sweetness. Read more about 100 Acre Wood here.

“Undercover Lover”, Softjaw
From Softjaw (2026, Dandy Boy/Bachelor)

Softjaw are a quartet from Long Beach co-led by singer-songwriters Dustin Lovelis and Tanner Duffy, and their debut for Bay Area indie pop label Dandy Boy Records collects all nine tracks they’ve released thus far in one handy vinyl and/or CD package. Softjaw is a twenty-five-minute tribute to classic 1970s power pop–hooks, harmonies, and guitars, not “punk” or “garage rock” precisely but certainly knowledgeable about “rock and roll” enough to give these songs an extra kick. “Undercover Lover” is a really fun rave-up–and, given that it’s one of the two newest original Softjaw songs, suggests they’re hitting some kind of stride. Read more about Softjaw here.

“Urban Myth”, The Chop
From Third Window (2026, Lost Sound Tapes)

Gemma Fleet and Andrew Doig have put out a lot of music in recent years as one half of Dancer, and they debuted a new project called The Chop just last year. Third Window, a six-song “mini-album” coming less than a year after The Chop’s debut LP, continues the duo’s journey into more subdued indie pop; combine the brief length, sparse arrangements, and the creators’ ever-expanding discography, and you’ve got a recipe for a record destined to be “unfairly overlooked”. Personal disorientation and uncertainty shade these half dozen-songs (Doig’s recent health issues having perhaps altered his relationship to music), although this doesn’t mean that Fleet hasn’t remained an engrossing yarn-spinner. “Urban Myth”, the record’s opening track, satisfyingly elaborates on its title. Read more about Third Window here.

“You Will Never Be That Free”, Sacred Heart Academy
From Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP (2026)

Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP is an instantly likeable six-song introduction; these songs are all great, and Evren and Eilee Centeno both establish themselves as compelling bandleaders. Evren is the “slacker”-adjacent alt-country/folk rocker, and they’re countered nicely by a more openly expressive/heart-on-sleeve performance from Eilee (they both get three songs, and they both establish impressive range within them). Sacred Heart Academy don’t come off as guitar pop-history nerds like some of their Chicago peers, but there’s a Hallogallo/New Now-like power pop undercurrent on some of the material, particularly the Eilee-sung “You Will Never Be That Free”. Read more about Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP here.

“Water Drops”, Above Me
From Soften the Blows (2026, Dandy Boy)

The second Above Me record and debut LP, Soften the Blows, was once again recorded almost entirely by Rick Altieri himself. Above Me seems to be Altieri’s place to play around with non-rock influences, specifically electronica (Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never are listed as inspiration by their label, Dandy Boy), but Soften the Blows is still primarily dreamy indie pop with plenty of guitars. “Water Drops” is one of the strongest pop songs on the album, a lilting one with a bit of the modern alternative-dance-influenced sound practiced by the likes of Dummy and Aluminum. Read more about Soften the Blows here.

“Big-Box Store Heart”, Prince Daddy & The Hyena
From Hotwire Trip Switch (2026, Counter Intuitive)

I’ve never had much of an opinion on “Prince Daddy & The Hyena” one way or another, believe it or not–heard a song here and there, understood the appeal, never felt called to investigate them much further than that. This is all to say that I liked Hotwire Trip Switch a lot more than I thought I would–although I don’t think it’s any mystery as to why I like it to anyone who’s heard it. It’s really fun Weezer-y power pop/pop punk worship type stuff. “Big-Box Store Heart” is one of those bowling ball-style songs; I have to imagine it emerged fully-formed with “lead single” stamped on it. It sounds like if Oso Oso wasn’t wimpy (but was still, you know, in touch with their emotions and shit).

“Theoretical”, Special Friend
From Clipping (2026, Skep Wax/Howlin’ Banana/Hidden Bay)

The French indie pop duo Special Friend got on my radar back in 2023 when they released their sophomore album, Wait Until the Flames Come Rushing In, a pleasing mixture of 90s indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze, C86, and slowcore. Guitarist/vocalist Guillaume Siracusa and drummer/vocalist Erica Ashleson returned this year with an album simply titled Clipping, and my favorite track on it is the smooth-gliding chamber-pop-by-way-of-Stereolab “Theoretical”. It hits all the high notes–a propulsive tempo, intertwined vocals from both band members, tastefully catchy guitar lines–in under two-point-five minutes.

“Spiders”, Teen Suicide
From Nude descending staircase headless (2026, Run for Cover)

The exhilarating power pop of the previously-discussed “Suffering (Mike’s Way)” is the most immediately head-turning moment on Nude descending staircase headless, but the (relatively) gentler pop music of “Spider” is arguably even more impressive and important in how it establishes a more sustainable way for an “accessible Teen Suicide album” to sound. Kitty Ray’s vocals contort themselves exactly how “Spider” needs them to be–angelic and dreamy in the verses, ferocious and dramatic in the chorus. Read more about Nude descending staircase headless here.

“The Browns”, Pile
From Dripping (2012, Exploding in Sound)

Pile! A good band! I got to see them live recently, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but the realization of which would always end up getting foiled by some nefarious outside force when they came to town. They didn’t play this one when I saw them, but it did stick out to me when I found myself cycling through their discography (which I do from time to time). Even though it’s probably their most popular album, I’ve never been as into Dripping as I was the records immediately surrounding it, but the thing about Pile records is that they’re constantly rearranging themselves (I swear the music changes in between listens sometimes). Maybe Dripping is their best album. Maybe “The Browns” is a perfect distillation of this “era” of Pile, wonky, asymmetrical, and explosive.

“A Home Until Something Better Comes Up”, Loto
From _____ (2026)

Montreal musician Lautaro Akira Martinez-Satoh (aka Loto) and a rotating cast of guests throw themselves headfirst into art pop, chamber pop, and soft rock on their latest album, bravely looking beyond “Bandcamp experimentalism” to “60s/70s studio-pop wizardry” for inspiration. “A Home Until Something Better Comes Up” starts with a subdued two-minute opening before letting a little more “rock” creep into the “soft” in its second half (it’s not quite as electric as their similarly-minded peers in Curling, but it’s in that direction). Read more about _____ here.

“Precarity”, Prism Shores
From Softest Attack (2026, Meritorio)

If you’re familiar with last year’s Out from Underneath (or with any number of Prism Shores’ Meritorio labelmates), you won’t be surprised to learn that Softest Attack is stuffed with C86 and Flying Nun-influenced power pop and “fuzz pop”; even with that in mind, I was still surprised by how many of these tracks immediately jumped out at me as top-notch examples of the form. The aforementioned “I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind” is certainly one of them, as is the note-perfect jangle pop/college rock tribute of “Precarity”. Read more about Softest Attack here.

“Sunset Provisions”, Dipper Grande
From Sunset Provisions (2026)

Georgian “alt-cosmic bootgaze” quintet Dipper Grande pull together several strains of “alt-country” and “Americana” on Sunset Provisions; there’s undoubtedly the Rust Belt country rock traditionalism of Magnolia Electric Co. here, with a Deep South molasses-slowness and, indeed, a cosmic side reminiscent of the spacier aspects of their hometown of Athens’ college rock. “Well, they shut down the power plant / Guess they couldn’t keep the lights on,” goes the first line of the opening title track; Dipper Grande effectively survey an expanse of industrial decay and decide to take their time with their art. Read more about Sunset Provisions here.

“Blow Up the Outside World”, Soundgarden
From Down on the Upside (1996, A&M)

I revisited Soundgarden recently, partially spurred on by this song being significantly better than I remembered it being. This was a single from Down on the Upside, and it was a sizable hit at the time (it topped the Mainstream Rock chart), but I don’t ever hear it on the radio now. I made a crack that it “kind of sounds like if The Beatles were straight” on Bluesky, which I genuinely think is the key to understanding “Blow Up the Outside World”. There’s a Kim Thayil quote acknowledging the influence on Wikipedia–there’s an interesting “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” thing going on here, the tension between the pop and more straightforward hard rock/quote unquote grunge. I still don’t know how much I like this song, but I like chewing on it.

“A Reunion Show”, The Blackburns
From Alternative Rock (2026, Sell the Heart)

“A Reunion Show” can’t help being self-effacing (it hits close to home, as band co-leader Joel Tannenbaum’s old group, Plow United, does indeed have a reunion show on the books for later this year); like a lot of Alternative Rock, it could’ve stopped once it made its “point”, but “A Reunion Show” is way too well-written and -executed to be constrained by that. “They say you can’t duplicate the magic from back in the day / They say there’s something that’s mildly tragic about trying to anyway,” The Blackburns observe as “A Reunion Show” catches a breath, only to plow forward anyway. “Mild” or not, tragedy has been one of the most enduring forms of art throughout civilization for a reason. Read more about Alternative Rock here.

“Heat Lightning”, Gawshock
From Leaves to the Sun (2026, Patchwork)

Gawshock began in 2021 as the bedroom pop/lo-fi indie rock project of Huntsville, Alabama musician David Broome, quickly releasing three albums of chilly, greyscale indie rock in four years . Broome cites classic 90s folk/slowcore acts like Idaho and Acetone as well as the delicate underground pop music of Sparklehorse as influences, and the fourth Gawshock LP, Leaves to the Sun, bears this out. It’s a brief record, around twenty-five minutes long, but Gawshock don’t hurry through these eleven songs. “Heat Lightning”, probably my favorite song on the record, is Gawshock’s turn at electric, crawling, empty-space slowcore a la Bedhead. Read more about Leaves to the Sun here.

“We Don’t Need This Song”, Urq
From This Dismal Village (2026, Exploding in Sound)

Matthew Urquhart may be known to blog readers and general music weirdos as one-half of Spllit, the New Orleans-based avant-post-punk duo who put out an album on Feel It Records in 2023. Now known simply as Urq, the Louisiana artist has entered the “solo project” sweepstakes with This Dismal Village, an art punk/psychedelic concept album (of a sorts) recorded entirely on cassette Portastudio. The whole thing is over in a mere twenty-three minutes; before we know it, Urq is waving goodbye from This Dismal Village via the tape-warped guitar pop finale “We Don’t Need This Song”, straight out of the Bee Thousand cutting room floor. Read more about This Dismal Village here.

Pressing Concerns: Rural France, The Sleeves, Cola, Unwed Sailor

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We’ve new albums from Rural France, The Sleeves, Cola, and Unwed Sailor in this one. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Northeast Regional, Comprador, Josephine Network, and Lirra Skirra), 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.

Rural France – SLOTHS

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, indie pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High Hopes (Ballad of Rural France)

I’ll try to keep this brief: Tom Brown is a British singer-songwriter who’s released four power pop albums (of varying fidelity) under the name Teenage Tom Petties since 2022, as well as an indie pop album as Lone Striker last year. He’s also one-half of Wiltshire’s Rural France, a duo he started with his ex-roommate Rob Fawkes in the mid-to-late 2010s. Brown writes and sings the songs, Fawkes adds his signature guitar lines (and, occasionally, another instrument of some kind)–it’s a collaboration that’s worked well on records like the 2024 LP Exactamondo!. Brown’s trademark fuzzed-out, 90s lo-fi power pop sound took on a bit of a melancholic streak on that album, and SLOTHS, the latest Rural France LP, seems to lean into that terrain as well. Deciding to make something “a little slower and a little more melancholy”, the duo cleaned up their sound from “early Pavement” to “mid-period Pavement”, invited John Hare to play horns on a couple songs, and even enlisted a full-time drummer (Teenage Tom Petties’ Jeff Hamm, in fact). 

The result is an intriguing entry in the ever-expanding Tom Brown universe. “Thirty Seven Forever” would be given a beer-raising heft to it on his previous albums; here, it’s somewhat jaunty slacker pop. “Lonely Heart Pyramid Scheme” is perhaps the most immediately infectious song on SLOTHS; instead of slowing this one down, Rural France decide to indulge in some “Carrot Rope”-like keyboards as a way of putting a unique stamp on it. The manipulated vocals in the chorus of opening track “Slab” are the closest Brown’s gotten yet to returning to the cut-and-paste pop music of the Lone Striker LP, keys and Malkmus-style guitar noodling mark “Soulseeker”, and “Casio” is underscored by, well, perhaps you can figure that one out. I think my favorite song on SLOTHS is “High Hopes (Ballad of Rural France)”, a slowly-unfurling anthem that embraces a bit of the worldbuilding of the most recent Teenage Tom Petties album as the LP draws to a close. It takes no small amount of patience for Rural France to get to the key-change and energy-releasing final verse; for once, patience is what Fawkes and Brown have in spades. (Bandcamp link)

The Sleeves – The Sleeves

Release date: May 8th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Post-rock, slowcore, folk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Rip It Up

London musician Jack Cooper has spent the better part of the last decade leading Modern Nature, a group who’ve explored post-rock, psychedelic folk, and chamber music over the course of several LPs. On their most recent album, last year’s The Heat Warps, Modern Nature became a quartet with new member Tara Cunningham joining Cooper on guitar, and the four of them made something warmer and more propulsive than Modern Nature’s previous work. The Heat Warps is only one piece of Cunningham and Cooper’s burgeoning musical partnership, however: they put out an instrumental album as a duo last year called Pond Life, and this year they’re debuting a new project called The Sleeves. The Sleeves’ self-titled debut album is, loosely speaking, a song-based folk album; Cunningham and Cooper both sing and play guitar. 

Although Cunningham’s arrival in Modern Nature resulted in a more vibrant record, The Sleeves is proof that both she and Cooper can thrive in a more glacial, stark, wide-open emptiness, too. Of course, the unique trick that The Sleeves pulls is that it’s all done with just the two members’ guitars and vocals: they’ve got their “minimalism” locked and loaded. Previous Cooper touchpoints like early Low and later Talk Talk are reached with the barest of ingredients, and, just as impressively, he and Cunningham are able to create distinct song units with them, too. Not that it won’t take a few listens to really get a handle on what The Sleeves are doing here, but the duo are able to make themselves sound insistent on tracks like “Rip It Up” and “You, Now, Again”–just because The Sleeves are slow doesn’t mean they’re leisurely. Bits and pieces of its authors’ previous work are certainly present, but The Sleeves serves to show that Cunningham and Cooper’s current hot streak is taking them to novel places, too. (Bandcamp link)

Cola – Cost of Living Adjustment

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Fire Talk
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, 2000s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hedgesitting

I really enjoyed The Gloss, the sophomore album from Montreal trio Cola, back when it came out in 2024. A couple of former members of the post-punk group Ought (vocalist/guitarist Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy) and drummer Evan Cartwright made a compelling indie rock album evoking everything from Flying Nun to Television to 2000s groups like The Strokes and Spoon (I called it “post-post-punk”). Cost of Living Adjustment follows a little under two years later (if you refer to it by its acronym, it’s sort of a self-titled album), finding the band taking an uneasy step ever so slightly out of their comfort zone.

Of course, The Gloss was such a smooth experience than any amount of deviation from it would naturally feel less “comfortable”, so I don’t want to overstate the effect that these wrinkles (more emphasis on vocal melodies, a healthy amount of studio layering and experimentation, just a bit more Feelies nervousness) have on Cola’s overall sound. The warped early highlight “Hedgesitting” and the late-record (sort-of) ballad “Conflagration Mindset” are new terrain for Cola, but “Haveluck Country” and “Much of a Muchness” more dominantly display the band that made The Gloss in their DNA. Time will tell if Cost of Living Adjustment lives up to its predecessor–it can feel like splitting hairs writing about differences in sound when it comes to bands like this, but it’s a credit to Cola that I continue to want to dig into their finely-hammered-out details. (Bandcamp link)

Unwed Sailor – High Remembrance

Release date: May 8th
Record label: Current Taste
Genre: Post-punk, post-rock, dream pop, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: West Coast Prism

The Tulsa-based bassist Johnathon Ford has led the instrumental project Unwed Sailor since 1998, but the band has hit a career high in productivity in the past few years–High Remembrance, the eleventh Unwed Sailor album, is their fourth LP in as many years. Like last year’s Cruel Entertainment, it features Matt Putman on drums and David Swatzell on guitar (Patrick McGill, also on drums, is credited on this album as well), and it once again finds Unwed Sailor following Ford’s melodic basslines into realms of instrumental new wave, post-punk, and dream pop. Single “West Coast Prism” is Unwed Sailor at their 80s-evoking best with its bass-led, New Order-influenced charm, and penultimate track “Three Jewels” also takes us to that particular decade with a dreamy, synth-y streak. Not everything on High Remembrance is as easily classifiable as those, of course–“Cinnamon” is inspired by country music and the American Southwest and “Punk Broke” nods to the grunge movement that started in Unwed Sailor’s city of origin, Seattle. I wouldn’t call the latter “punk” at all and the former is only “country” in the loosest sense of the word, but the dimensions they add to High Remembrance are welcome nonetheless (not to mention the layers added by opening track “Truest Sentence”, a strange mixture of shimmering indie rock and brisk rhythms). High Remembrance already feels like it’ll sit nicely next to Cruel Entertainment as part of Unwed Sailor’s current renaissance. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Northeast Regional, Comprador, Josephine Network, Lirra Skirra

New albums from Northeast Regional, Comprador, Josephine Network, and Lirra Skirra. Simple enough for a Monday Pressing Concerns, right? Perhaps. You can be the judge after reading and listening below.

The April 2026 playlist is on hold until (probably) next week. The blog will be back on Thursday!

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.

Northeast Regional – In the Desert

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Tor Johnson
Genre: Post-hardcore, garage punk, 90s indie rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Meander

Northeast Regional are a rock band from Richmond, Virginia founded by vocalist/guitarist Jeff Byers and congealing into a quintet rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Mike Morris, guitarist James Doubek, bassist Tyler Worley, and drummer Tyler Worley over the course of a few singles, an EP, and an LP from 2022 to 2024. They’re back this year with In the Desert, their second album and first made with a firm lineup; the five of them plus percussionist/vocalist Dana Morris recorded the album with Ricky Olson at Spacebomb Studios and have linked up with Rhode Island punk/heavy label Tor Johnson (Late Bloomer, Leopard Print Taser, Aneurysm) to release it. When I first listened to In the Desert, I thought I had a handle on them after the first three songs: a garage-y post-hardcore punk band from the D.C. area, inspired by the punk history surrounding them and inflamed by Byers’ Rick Froberg yelp. 

However, as Northeast Regional have grown into a proper band, Morris has started to sing and contribute songs to the project as well, and his contributions take In the Desert in a different, more power pop-friendly direction. After the grinding noise rock/post-punk of “Deconstructive Surgery”, the fiery garage rock of “MR”, and the Dischord choppiness of “Indulgence”, it’s positively whiplash-inducing for Northeast Regional to hand us over to “Alt Bounce” and “Meander”, two songs that owe more to Superdrag, The Lemonheads, and even Teenage Fanclub than Fugazi or Hot Snakes. The two sides of Northeast Regional are still pretty disparate, but the middle of the record attempts a connection with “Sick Days” and “Long Live the Dullness”, which are both “sprawling” in their writers’ different ways. I like plenty of Froberg/Swami John Reis-inspired punk bands, and I like plenty of 90s alt-rock/power pop revival groups, and I even like a few groups that land somewhere in between, but I can’t recall a band that pingponged between the two so casually as Northeast Regional do on In the Desert. That’s one way to have a new take on some well-worn styles. (Bandcamp link)

Comprador – Please Stay Off My Ass

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Baggy
Genre: Power pop, alt-rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Reduce Your Motion Blur

Comprador’s Please Stay Off the Statue was one of the more refreshing and inspired albums I heard in 2024. It’s the long-running project of Philadelphia-based musician Charlie D’Ardenne (who also plays in Humilitarian), and Please Stay Off the Statue found an unlikely mid-point between Jon Brion/Brian Wilson-esque power pop/indie pop, heavier alt-rock and post-grunge, and even a bit of “prog/math” rock (in attitude, at least). A little under two years since that album, Comprador are back with a similarly-titled album that once again combines pop brilliance with a vague unease, perhaps more hand-in-hand now than before. The music of Please Stay Off My Ass is largely played by D’Ardenne, recorded in a bunch of different locations from 2022 to 2025 and featuring a few guest contributors including Lung’s Kate Wakefield (cello/vocals), Karl Blau (saxophone/synth), and Parker Drew (bass/guitar).

Intense, intricate pop music is the name of the game in the opening salvo of Please Stay Off My Ass– the atmospheric beginning of “Having Fun” gives way to a confused, nervous, and fuzzed-out mid-tempo pop song, and “Reduce Your Motion Blur” walks an interesting tightrope between “grand, sweeping anthem” and “apologetic”. “Constant State of Shock” flirts with “jaunty”; it’s Comprador’s foray into the realm of 60s-ish folk-pop, I think. After the hard-charging rocker “Bleed & Crawl” (not too hard to figure out what that one’s about for anyone who cares to read the lyrics), Please Stay Off My Ass commits to a noticeably quieter second half–not that “U Got the Dud” and “Now Is a CIA Psyop” aren’t powerful in their own ways, of course. “Party Buzz”, the record’s grand finale, does an excellent job of summing up Please Stay Off My Ass–buzzing, twinkling, crescendoing, and swerving orchestral (in mindset, and, in this case, instrumentation) indie rock music that raises questions as compellingly as possible. (Bandcamp link)

Josephine Network – Hooked

Release date: March 12th
Record label: Lolipop
Genre: Power pop, glam rock, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hooked

The power pop contingent of Rosy Overdrive’s readership (which, I must assume, is effectively all of you) have hit the jackpot with this one. Josephine Network, led by the titular singer and songwriter, have been turning heads in their home of New York City and elsewhere with a regular live show regimen (including with the likes of Sheer Mag, The Lemon Twigs, and Geese) and a steady stream of rock and roll records (including the 2020 and 2023 LPs Music Is Easy and No One’s Rose). Hooked is, I believe, the third Josephine Network album (featuring the lineup of Josephine with help on the drums from Nat Brower and “Hershguy”), and it’s an all-too-brief jolt of classic, retro power pop piecing together Cheap Trick, 60s girl groups, Sparks, The Beach Boys, and Thin Lizzy.

Fans of the aforementioned Sheer Mag as well as Romero and recent Diners will find plenty to enjoy in these ten songs and twenty-six minutes–opening and closing your record with twin bar-rock songs about rock and roll (“Rock & Roll Singer” and “The Rockers”) is a Bat Signal for a certain kind of guitar pop fan. Most of Hooked qualifies as a “highlight”–the Big Riff that ensnares us in the title track might be my favorite moment on the album, but the exuberant “Mary Jane Girls” (the requisite Song About The Concept of Girls), the silky-smooth-sigh of “All I’ll Do”, the toe-tapping, crushed-out “Babbling Fool”, and the groovy 70s rock throwback “Revved Up Things” all merit mentions too. Like I alluded to earlier, I would’ve been happy to take another twenty minutes of Hooked, but there’s something to be said about Josephine Network’s surgically-precise journey to the heart of “power pop” on her latest LP. (Bandcamp link)

Lirra Skirra – On Chemical Lawns

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Dead Definition
Genre: Post-rock, experimental, slowcore, ambient, electronic, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Swamp Thing

Chrystine Rayburn and Patrick Glennon are Lirra Skirra, an experimental duo who have been putting out music on their label Dead Definition for a decade now (their debut release, a split with New England ambient act Moves, was in fact also the imprint’s debut release). From 2016 to 2021, Lirra Skirra was based in Philadelphia and putting out a record a year; now they’re in Richmond, Virginia, and On Chemical Lawns represents their first new release after a half-decade away. The duo claim Mark Hollis as an influence, and while I certainly hear Talk Talk-like empty-space chamber-post-rock on this album, Lirra Skirra’s compositions can more cleanly be divided into “electro-acoustic ambience” and “slowcore-esque folk rock beauty”. Opening track “Grimrock” decidedly falls into the former camp, and I’d slot the woodwind-touched “Plant Engineering” and the sleepy “Cargloumic” on that end of the spectrum, too. Blog readers who hew towards the “indie rock” side of things will more likely gravitate to the other four songs on On Chemical Lawns, particularly the slightly electronic but mostly guitar-based slowcore of “Swamp Thing” and the very nearly “breezy” folk attitude of the title track. Throw the brief but compelling jazz-folk of “Four” and the downcast chamber music of “Two”, and you’re left with an album that covers a lot of ground while being pretty quiet about it. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Above Me, Cape Crush, No Peeling, Golden Tiles

Thursday Pressing Concerns! New albums from Above Me, Cape Crush, and Golden Tiles! A new EP from No Peeling! Check out the Monday post (TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, and Lupo Citta) if you missed it! Also check out the Tuesday post (Big Bluestem, Softjaw, Loto, and Shapes Like People) if you missed it!

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.

Above Me – Soften the Blows

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Dream pop, shoegaze, electronica, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Water Drops

The San Francisco musician Rick Altieri currently drums in a couple of Rosy Overdrive-approved indie rock groups (Aluminum and Blue Zero) and he also played in the now-defunct Slumberland group Blue Ocean. Shortly after Blue Ocean dissolved, Altieri debuted a new solo project called Above Me, putting out a self-titled CD EP early last year on Bay Area fixture Dandy Boy Records. I called Above Me “heavily fuzzed-out, psychedelic pop music” with a “drum-machine-heavy palette” as it took Blue Ocean’s experimental shoegaze into a home-recorded indie pop setting. The second Above Me record and debut LP, Soften the Blows, was once again recorded almost entirely by Altieri himself, with guest vocals from Lauren Matsui (Rhymies, Seablite, Neutrals) the only outside contribution. Above Me seems to be Altieri’s place to play around with non-rock influences, specifically electronica (Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never are listed as influences by Dandy Boy), but Soften the Blows is still primarily dreamy indie pop (when it’s not outright “dream pop”) with plenty of guitars.

Soften the Blows commits to the bold opening with one of the clearest forays into electronica in the soundscape “Feelsee” (oh, I see what Above Me’s doing with the title to that one). “Water Drops” follows it up with the first real pop song on the album, a lilting one with a bit of the modern alternative sound practiced by the likes of Dummy and the aforementioned Aluminum. “Monolith” is pretty much the only thing on Soften the Blows that I’d designated a straight-up shoegaze-rocker; it’s nice to know that Altieri can still pull those off even if his mind seems to be largely elsewhere here. It’s not all trending linearly to “more computer” necessarily, as the acoustic-favoring “Dissolving Charms” and (especially) “Windmill” prove (there are plenty of different ways to dream your pop music, you know). Subdued, perky, ambient, electronic, folky, distorted, glitchy…the “pop” part is the common thread on Soften the Blows. (Bandcamp link)

Cape Crush – Place Memory

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Wanna Hear It
Genre: Emo-punk, power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Calm & Delivered

A self-described “power-emo” band from Massachusetts, the quartet Cape Crush first showed up in 2023 with an EP called San Souci, and they released a split record with the bands Impossible Dog and Good June early last year. Place Memory is the group’s first full-length album, as well as their first release with new drummer Mike O’Toole, joining vocalist/guitarist Ali Lipman, guitarist James Christopher, and bassist Jake Letitiza (former drummer Cody Rico, who left the band for health reasons, is credited with co-writing these songs). Recorded with frequent collaborator and prolific producer Zach Weeks (Cowboy Boy, Really From, Friendship Commanders), Place Memory is a strong and confident debut of emo-tinged power pop and pop punk songwriting. 

Cape Crush throw two of the best pop songs I’ve heard this year at us in Place Memory’s first half with “Calm & Delivered” and the title track; both tracks are archetypal emo-power-pop anthems carried by instantly-engrossing performances from Lipman as frontperson. Even if the rest of Place Memory was kind of a dud, those two would be worth the price of admission, but the rest of the LP is Cape Crush’s bid to establish themselves as a “long-player” kind of group, too. The bookends are a rainy-day emo-pop-punk track called “I Don’t Care About Anything” and then a leave-it-all-out-there finale called “I Care Too Much About Everything”; “Come Shed Your Light on Me” and “North Street” demonstrate Cape Crush’s ability to hold back just a little bit to let the eventual wrecking ball swing effectively, while “Train in Motion” and “Also-Ran” are slick emo-rockers from the get-go. Cape Crush came more than ready to fill an album’s worth of space with their ideas on Place Memory. (Bandcamp link)

No Peeling – EP2

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Egg punk, synthpunk, post-punk, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Night Idea

The British quintet No Peeling brought together “five friends in the fertile Nottingham DIY underground” last year, and their self-titled debut EP was released last September on Feel It Records before the group (Dom Durkin on synths, Dan Sheen on bass, Nick Oakden of Plaids and Without Maps on drums, JT Soar studio-runner Phil Booth on guitar, and Sophie Diver on vocals) had even played live together. Featuring seven songs in eight minutes, No Peeling was a torrent and clatter that established the group at the forefront of British egg punk, synthpunk, no wave, or whatever they call it over “across the pond”. The once-again seven-song, eight-minute EP2 was recorded immediately after the group’s first tour of the United Kingdom; it’s recognizably the same band from their still-young debut record, but the tougher backbone and more easily-flowing journey of their sophomore EP shows off what No Peeling have learned in the interim. I’m not sure if 2025 No Peeling would’ve had the patience to pull off “Night Idea”, a droning synth-punk tune that’s as much Stereolab as it is Devo, and I’m also impressed by just how tuned into “power pop” they’re able to make their more new wave/jerky sound in “Stationery”. They still kick up plenty of synth-whirring dust, don’t worry– “Campaign for a Nice Time” and “HGV Ted” start EP2 by refusing to let anyone catch their breath, for instance. EP2 catches a band moving quickly and purposefully. (Bandcamp link)

Golden Tiles – Set Up on the Chairs

Release date: May 1st
Record label: Antiquated Future
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz pop
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tracing

I first heard the Portland, Oregon trio Golden Tiles in late 2024–they’d just released their first record, a six-song collection appropriately titled The First EP, and I used phrases like “basement rock”, “fairly lo-fi”, and “low-key pop music” to describe it. Needless to say, Golden Tiles’ whole deal is very much up Rosy Overdrive’s alley (and, I’d imagine, plenty of its readers’ alleys, too), so a debut LP from the group is more than welcome. Led by vocalist/guitarist Oliver Stafford and also featuring bassist Joshua James Amberson (who runs the band’s label, Antiquated Future) and drummer Justin Hocking, Golden Tiles practice a religious devotion to familiar, fuzzy, vaguely Pacific Northwestern indie rock throughout Set Up on the Chairs. The chords and drumbeats are kept simple, Stafford’s vocals are relatively clear for this kind of thing, and there are unmistakable pop melodies–yet there’s something about Set Up on the Chairs that keeps it at a slight distance. Pick your favorite 90s underground event–Elephant 6, K Records, Guided by Voices–and you can hear a bit of it in Golden Tiles’ music, which feels like a long-buried cassette that’s been newly unearthed. Set Up on the Chairs is the kind of record that invites you to listen again just to see if the picture starts to come more into focus this time. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Big Bluestem, Softjaw, Loto, Shapes Like People

In the first Tuesday Pressing Concerns in a “hot minute”, the blog is looking at new albums from Loto and Shapes Like People, a compilation from Softjaw, and a new EP from Big Bluestem. Check ’em out, and if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, and Lupo Citta), load that up 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.

Big Bluestem – Take Care, Stay Warm

Release date: April 14th
Record label: Midewin
Genre: Singer-songwriter, indie folk, lo-fi folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Where Our Rivers Meet

Back in 2023, I wrote about Mike Fox’s music via his work as one-half of the Chicago folk rock/studio pop duo Coventry alongside Jon Massey of blog favorite Silo’s Choice. It’s a beautiful record–one of my favorites from that year–so I was excited to hear that Fox has (after releasing an intriguing electronic album in 2024) returned to folk-based songwriting with a new project called Big Bluestem (named after the iconic native Midwestern prairie grass, of course). The six-song, twenty-five minute Take Care, Stay Warm (is it an EP or album? Not sure) is nonetheless pretty different from Coventry, and in fact can be seen as a reaction to the polish of that band’s debut album: it was recorded “on a handheld recorder with a hard three-take limit”, the instruments (baritone guitar, piano, and Wurlitzer) are all played by Fox himself, and the songs themselves are hushed and intimate in a way that clearly benefits from the recording style. I compared Fox’s voice to Bill Callahan when I wrote about Coventry, but this is the first time that the songs actually sound Smog-like.

Opening track “Where Our Rivers Meet” does actually feel Coventry-like in its comfortable, jazzy piano playing, but that instrumental is slowed to a crawl and accompanied only by Fox’s whispered vocals, welcoming us into the world of Take Care, Stay Warm while giving us a realistic picture of where Fox is at on this record. Fox pulls out the guitar for a trio of sparse songs in the center of Take Care, Stay Warm; the sendoff of the title track and its repeated refrain give way to thornier laments in “Is It Worth It?” and “Dead on the Vine”. The six-minute “Portraits” feels like the most complex song on the record in multiple ways, the opening lyrics (“We can’t rely on our memories / Images fade into mystery”) effectively mirrored by the recording itself. The grand finale is the one song on Take Care, Stay Warm that takes on a classicist version of folk music, the John Prine-ish epilogue of “Root for You”. The limited palette isn’t at all a hindrance for the journey on which Big Bluestem take us on their debut record. (Bandcamp link)

Softjaw – Softjaw

Release date: April 1st
Record label: Dandy Boy/Bachelor
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Undercover Lover

We’re always able to count on Dandy Boy Records to deliver the finest West Coast power pop. The Oakland label’s latest acquisition is a quartet from Long Beach called Softjaw, co-led by singer-songwriters Dustin Lovelis and Tanner Duffy. On the group’s self-titled debut EP in 2024 they were joined by drummer Vinny Early and bassist Daniel Michicoff; on subsequent recordings, Graeme Whynot has replaced the latter. Those “subsequent recordings” are two original singles released last year and two covers from early this year; Softjaw, their debut for Dandy Boy, collects all nine Softjaw tracks thus far in one handy vinyl and/or CD package. The group’s first physical release is a twenty-five minute tribute to classic 1970s power pop–hooks, harmonies, and guitars, not “punk” or “garage rock” precisely but certainly knowledgeable about “rock and roll” enough to give these songs an extra kick.

Lovelis and Duffy are kindred spirits as songwriters; I don’t think I could differentiate them if the credits didn’t clue me in as to who did which one. Both of them can do really fun rave-ups; “I Need You” and “Undercover Lover” back to back give each of them a chance to helm one (and, given that these are the two newest original Softjaw songs, suggests they’re hitting some kind of stride). The original EP has something of a “flow” to it, with (relatively) mid-tempo guitar pop like “Dragging My Feet” and “Don’t Go Walking Out” hanging out with explosives like “Pleased With Me”. The first cover is “Working Too Hard” by The Paul Collins Beat, which Softjaw give a weird but rocking reading that reminds me of the dB’s (not a bad reference point for Softjaw as a whole), and they end with a version of “Playing Bogart” by the short-lived new wave group 23 Jewels. “Playing Bogart” is as fun as anything else on Softjaw, which makes sense–they are clearly a band who understands good power pop, then and now. (Bandcamp link)

Loto – _____

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, soft rock, chamber pop, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: A Home Until Something Better Comes Up

Towards the beginning of 2024 I heard A Year in Review, an intriguing four-song EP from a musician from Montreal named Lautaro Akira Martinez-Satoh, aka Loto. Martinez-Satoh’s work is wide-ranging and fairly experimental, but something about those four songs in particular stuck with me–the push-and-pull between emotional, insistent lo-fi indie rock and polished art pop, perhaps. Martinez-Satoh released a “beat tape” under the name HJKHLHL last year, but the first Loto release since A Year in Review is a six-song album labeled “_____” (officially speaking, it’s untitled). Despite only having two more songs than their last EP, this album is a much grander-feeling affair. Some of that likely has to do with the length–thirty-six minutes long, with the majority of tracks pushing past six minutes–but it’s also in the kind of music Loto pursue in the LP.

Martinez-Satoh and a rotating cast of musical guests (saxophonist Maya Hoss, guitarist Jonathan Theriault, drummers Seyjii Schultz, Michael Jalil Khayat, and Michael Tomizzi, flautist Riley, and bassist Rayne) throw themselves headfirst into art pop, chamber pop, and soft rock, bravely looking beyond “Bandcamp experimentalism” to “60s/70s studio-pop wizardry” for inspiration. The beautiful six-minute opening track “Worst Case Scenario” (title notwithstanding) is all smooth sailing, while “A Home Until Something Better Comes Up” lets a little more “rock” creep into the soft (it’s not quite as electric as their similarly-minded peers in Curling, but it’s in that direction). Loto then drift towards jazzy indie-folk-pop in “Come Back in the Winter” and echoing, dreamy chamber pop in “ttm” before ending everything on a true “noise” note with the eight-minute soundscape “30minstoprovo”. It’s kind of a testament to Loto that they transition out of pop music entirely without it feeling too jarring, and that this still feels like a “pop” album regardless of how it ends. Loto is as compelling a project as ever with this one. (Bandcamp link)

Shapes Like People – Under the Rainbow

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Jangleshop/Subjangle
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, jangle pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: First Version of You

The British indie pop duo Shapes Like People debuted last year with an album called Ticking Haze, introducing us to the husband-and-wife duo of Carl and Kat Mann (the latter on vocals, the former providing the instrumentals) with a very solid collection of guitar pop of both the “dream” and “jangle” varieties. Merely a year after Ticking Haze, the Manns have returned with yet another twelve songs and forty minutes’ worth of pop music melding Carl’s seasoned songwriting (as the leader of The Shop Windows earlier this decade, and as a songwriter-for-hire before that) with Kat’s knack for dream pop melodic delivery. The 1980s-evoking artwork for Under the Rainbow feels right; it’s not a huge departure from Ticking Haze or anything, but it’s a cleaner amalgamation of new wave, C86-ish indie pop, and jangly, folky indie rock that sounds even more directly of that era. Carl also contributes more vocals this time around, melding his voice with Kat in early highlights like the title track and “Lately”. I tend to hew towards janglier material in general, and the polite power pop of “First Version of You” and the more leisurely “Life of Time” are two excellent examples of the form–but their forays into dream pop (“Be OK”) and post-punk (“Crushing Silence”) are welcome as well. The second entry in their discography finds Shapes Like People being just as impressive at what they do. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, Lupo Citta

In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ll be looking at brand-new albums from TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, and Lupo Citta. That’s a good haul, so be sure to check them out below.

There will be a Tuesday post this week (yay!), so load up “Rosy Overdrive dot com” in your browser of choice tomorrow morning, 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.

TV Star – Music for Heads

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Father/Daughter
Genre: Indie pop, shoegaze, fuzz pop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Reality Cheque

The debut album from Washington indie pop quintet TV Star has been a few years coming now. The group (vocalist/keyboardist Ashlyn Nagel, guitarists Bryan Coats and Che Hise-Gattone, drummer Tucker Devault, and Supercrush frontperson Mark Palm on bass) put out two EPs in 2023 and a collaborative release with similarly-minded Seattle group Spiral XP in 2024 before signing with Father/Daughter Records (The Softies, Mui Zyu, Remember Sports) for Music for Heads. TV Star’s first album is the latest example of the strong shoegaze/dream pop-inspired indie rock scene in the band’s home cities of Seattle and Tacoma (chronicled on the 2024 compilation From Far It All Seems Small, on which they appeared). Compared to some of their noisier peers, TV Star’s take on the genre is more crystal-clear and pop-forward, with a psychedelic and even “alt-country” bent that claims Mojave 3 and The Brian Jonestown Massacre as influences (I’m not sure how large the Paisley Underground looms over this record, but I’d imagine it would appeal to fans of those acts, too).

Music for Heads doesn’t hide its penchant for jangly, dreamy, often acoustic-heavy indie pop, as the majority of the LP’s first half indulges in it to some degree. “The Package” is an easing-into-things opening track, “Two Revolutions” turns towards anthemic folk-dream-indie-rock, “Texas Relation” adds strings from Spiral XP’s Max Keyes into the mix, and the two-minute “Greener Pastures” streamlines things to little more than acoustic strumming and Nagel’s vocals (helped out by harmonies from, I believe, Lena FM of Coral Grief). Fans of more electric, perhaps even “power pop”-curious indie pop will enjoy “Reality Cheque” and “Lodestar”, as well as “Out of My Bag”, which adds just a bit of the Madchester/Primal Scream-indebted sound to the mix. TV Star may not “rock out” or hide behind walls of sound as frequently as their shoegaze-revivalist peers, but their pop songwriting and infectious confidence ensure their place in the scene is well-earned. (Bandcamp link)

Urq – This Dismal Village

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Post-punk, math rock, art punk, egg punk, psychedelic punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: We Don’t Need This Song

Matthew Urquhart may be known to blog readers and general music weirdos as one-half of Spllit, the New Orleans-based avant-post-punk duo who put out an album on Feel It Records in 2023. Now known simply as Urq, the Louisiana artist has entered the “solo project” sweepstakes with This Dismal Village, an art punk/psychedelic concept album (of a sorts) recorded entirely on cassette Portastudio. The album’s Bandcamp page mentions that “all songs except track nine utilize a custom tuning: C# A C# E F# C#” and that the design of the physical record’s lyric sheet is inspired by the quilt artist Susan Shie; for the album itself, Urq lists everything from a 1960s instrument called the Optigan to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to Fitzcarraldo to math rock weirdos Palm as influences. 

While This Dismal Village bears the mark of an “egg punk”-associated artist (just check out the trebly, noodly guitars and rickety tempos of “Another Mystery” and “Airs of the Sledgehammered”), Urq is beautifully unrestrained by garage rock parameters: This Dismal Village hops from the math-pop/soft rock-esque “Glutton’s Coupon” to the towering, Ty Segall-esque psych-rock title track to the creepy-crawling “An Honest Film” to the lovely Elephant 6-esque dream-psych-pop piece “Kings in Bed” at lightning speed. The whole thing is over in a mere twenty-three minutes; before we know it, Urq is waving goodbye from This Dismal Village via the tape-warped guitar pop finale “We Don’t Need This Song”, straight out of the Bee Thousand cutting room floor (another one of This Dismal Village’s myriad influences, by the way). With This Dismal Village, Urq makes a bid for one of the most innovative guitarists in the wider indie punk underground and has some head-scratching fun with it, too. (Bandcamp link)

Dipper Grande – Sunset Provisions

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Cosmic country, alt-country, psychedelia, college rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sunset Provisions

Dipper Grande are an “alt-cosmic bootgaze” quintet from Athens, Georgia, made up of a bunch of veterans of other local bands in bassist Mark Callahan, drummer Rick Field, and vocalist/guitarists Iain Cooke, Jackie Hales, and Jesse Wooten. Their first release was a three-song live EP last December, previewing their debut LP, Sunset Provisions. The five of them headed to Watkinsville, Georgia to record Sunset Provisions with engineer Matthew Greer at Full Moon Studio, and they received help from guitarist Hampton Campbell and vocalist Julia Barfield on some of these eight songs. Dipper Grande pull together several strains of “alt-country” and “Americana” on Sunset Provisions; there’s undoubtedly the Rust Belt country rock traditionalism of Magnolia Electric Co. here, with a Deep South molasses-slowness and, indeed, a cosmic side reminiscent of the spacier aspects of their hometown college rock.

“Well, they shut down the power plant / Guess they couldn’t keep the lights on,” goes the first line of the opening title track, a motif that returns in the psychedelic country rock of penultimate song “Decommissioned” (“Sundown over the decommissioned power plant,” Dipper Grande set the scene for us). While parts of “Decommissioned”, “Bodies”, and “Tape Tricks” are genuine rockers, Dipper Grande typically practice a sunny, lackadaisical version of psychedelia/cosmic country, aided by unhurried tempos and Cooke’s pedal steel. With Sunset Provisions, Dipper Grande effectively survey an expanse of industrial decay and decide to take their time with their art, giving it a better chance at outliving the manmade ruins around them. (Bandcamp link)

Lupo Citta – Inverno

Release date: April 24th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Garage rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Profile

Boston’s Lupo Citta made an intriguing debut at the beginning of 2024 with their first LP, Lupo Cittá, which found three longtime indie rockers (guitarist/vocalist Chris Brokaw, guitarist/bassist Sarah Black, and drummer/vocalist Jenn Gori) making “ragged garage rock with plenty of impressively screeching guitars” (as I said at the time). The second Lupo Citta album, Inverno, continues Lupo Cittá’s trend of mixing crashing rock and roll numbers with more pensive material, and, like a good sophomore record should, reflects a band getting more comfortable and automatic in traversing the different waypoints of their sound. The almost-dub influenced drone-rock of opening track “Wandering Eyes” and the quiet “Something Else” are a bold duo with which to lead off your indie rock record, but you’re rewarded with fuzzed-out garage rockers “Can’t See” and “Southern Forests” if you can hang with them (particularly in the former, they sound like their 12XU labelmates Weak Signal). For such a jagged-sounding band, Inverno is a smooth journey–the closing stretch is perhaps the trio’s most impressive work yet, moving from the dreamy “Red & Yellow” to the noisy indie pop of “Profile” to the minimalist, witchy title track to the perfunctory fuzz-rock closing track “Nap at Dawn” with ease. Lupo Citta have a very nice “greater than the sum of their parts” thing going on with Inverno. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: 

Pressing Concerns: The Blackburns, Doug Gillard, My Wife’s an Angel, The Chop

In what should go down as an all-time classic edition of Pressing Concerns, we have new albums from The Blackburns, Doug Gillard, and My Wife’s an Angel, plus a mini-album from The Chop, for you below. Check them out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, The Clearwater Swimmers, and FakeYou), 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.

The Blackburns – Alternative Rock

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Sell the Heart
Genre: Power pop, college rock, Alternative Rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Video Den

The Blackburns are a 90s power pop revival band from Philadelphia co-led by the songwriting duo of Nick Palmer (vocals/guitar/drums) and Joel Tannenbaum (vocals/bass) and rounded out by vocalist/keyboardist Lynna Stancato and vocalist/guitarist Abe Koffenberger. After a couple of singles, The Blackburns’ self-titled debut album came out back in 2024, a promising collection that paid tribute to the Angus soundtrack and other mid-90s Buzz Bin ephemera. A couple of very good singles last year indicated that The Blackburns were ready to level up, and their sophomore album delivers on that promise. It’s called Alternative Rock, and that’s what we get: post-Paul Westerberg guitar pop hooks with Weezer guitars, Rentals keyboards (or The Cars keyboards, if you want to look in other decades), and a Fountains of Wayne outlook on life. Everything on Alternative Rock is written like it could be the focal point of the entire album, and The Blackburns are rewarded for their ambition with a transcendent record that juggles nostalgia and pastiche and develops its own style in defiance of all of that.

“I wanna hear new music / Come on, I’m trying to do this,” goes the chorus of “New Music”, the opening track to Alternative Rock, a surging power pop song that takes its grappling with losing touch with the present and makes sharp, catchy art with it (the vocal trade-offs are a really nice touch). I loved “Video Den” when The Blackburns released it last year, and I am fully convinced that it’s a modern masterpiece at this point–I’m not sure there’s another “power pop” song quite like it. The other singles live up to that status–the title of “ASM KoP” stands for “Assistant Store Manager, King of Prussia” and the song contained therein is some of the best Fountains of Wayne worship I’ve heard in a while, and “Two People Running in the Rain” is a Springsteen-level heartland rock revival piece that hurtles headlong into its anticlimactic finale (the lampshade here–how could it live up to the buildup?–is a recurring theme of Alternative Rock).

Speaking of Fountains of Wayne, the Stancato-sung “Ceteris Paribus” evokes a different kind of 90s alternative music by floating more in the direction of Adam Schlesinger’s other band, Ivy–it’s a nice break from the chunky power chords, but I get the sense that The Blackburns could bash out plenty of songs like “A Reunion Show” without getting stale. “A Reunion Show” can’t help being self-effacing (it hits close to home, as Tannenbaum’s old band, Plow United, does indeed have a reunion show on the books for later this year); like a lot of Alternative Rock, it could’ve stopped once it made its “point”, but “A Reunion Show” is way too well-written and -executed to be constrained by that. “They say you can’t duplicate the magic from back in the day / They say there’s something that’s mildly tragic about trying to anyway,” The Blackburns observe as “A Reunion Show” catches a breath, only to plow forward anyway. “Mild” or not, tragedy has been one of the most enduring forms of art throughout civilization for a reason. If we’re lucky, “alternative rock” as The Blackburns practice it will join the pantheon too one day. (Bandcamp link)

Doug Gillard – Parallel Stride

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Dromedary
Genre: Power pop, college rock, psychedelic pop, Guided by Voices
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Saving My Life Every Day

It’s been too long since we’ve heard new music from Doug Gillard, the solo artist. Of course, the Cleveland-originating guitarist has been quite busy over the past decade playing in Guided by Voices, the group he initially played in from 1997 to 2004 and then rejoined in 2016. He’d previously put out three solo albums, the most recent of which, Parade On, came out in 2014, right before he signed up again for a band famous for releasing several albums’ worth of music a year (if you’ve heard August by Cake, the 2017 Guided by Voices album featuring two Gillard-penned songs, you know that he still had some good material floating around). With Guided by Voices’ touring schedule finally slowing down, Gillard apparently had time to return to solo act mode–aside from Danny Lipsitz’s saxophone and a parade of guest drummers (including Guided by Voices engineer Travis Harrison), Parallel Stride is written, sung, and played by Gillard himself. The fourth Gillard solo album is unmistakably him, a strong collection of songs that emphasize his pop songwriting, art rock fluency, and, of course, renowned guitar playing.

Gillard is a much more low-key vocalist than his longtime collaborator Robert Pollard; maybe he sounds like somebody who’s more used to the sideman role than the spotlight, but it’s the right tone for the subtle, workmanlike beauty of Parallel Stride. “Face of Smiles” opens the album with an irresistible guitar riff, setting the stage for an automatic power pop hit that, along with the slightly-garage-rock-tinged title track, is just rousing enough for a one-two punch. Parallel Stride doesn’t falter, but it settles in nicely into a groove of Gillard songs with unusual but engrossing melodies, guitar flourishes, and subtle twists by somebody who knows his way around progressive rock but isn’t trying to work out those muscles directly. The anxious “My Friends” and the taut “Saving My Life Every Day” are standouts in the second half; both of them feel “heavier” than most of Parallel Stride, but they’re also both some of the best pop songs on the album (particularly the latter, which has a propulsion and tension to it that very few people who haven’t been in Guided by Voices can pull off). Hard to believe it’s been a dozen years since Gillard has made one of these; he sounds great here. Parallel Stride is an instant high point in an illustrious career. (Bandcamp link)

My Wife’s an Angel – Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, noise punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Goz Chile

My Wife’s an Angel get it. Last year I wrote about Yeah, I Bet, the Philadelphia quartet’s second album, using phrases like “ugly, heavy noise-punk” and “big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong” (and bands like “Butthole Surfers” and “Killdozer”) to describe it. Like the best of their predecessors, My Wife’s an Angel (vocalist G, guitarist Boone, bassist Fancy, drummer JAGWAH) wield shock value imagery, assaulting music, and straight-up funny shit in a tasteless but hardly pointless manner; they don’t beat us over the head with it, exactly, but it’s understood that Yeah, I Bet is fucked up for plenty of good reasons. All that applies once again for the third My Wife’s an Angel album, Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself (Jesus Christ, lmao–I can’t even explain what I felt when I got sent that album title).

I cannot imagine listening to songs like “Goz Chile” and “Karaoke” without feeling insane to some degree, and those are the “rockers” on Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself–elsewhere, “Bowser’s” more or less sneers at the idea of “music” and “PAUSE!” and “Help the Homeless” dissolve into noise. Keep Honking I’m About to Fucking Kill Myself is such that the noisy, industrial post-punk piece “Doom Scroll” starts to sound like a reprieve–at least its subject and point is fairly straightforward, no? My Wife’s an Angel can pull something like that off, but the closing track, “American Dream”, is their real bread and butter. Apparently, most of the lyrics to “American Dream” are taken “verbatim” from billboards seen by the band on tour–with them, My Wife’s an Angel make a terrifying, noisy hell of lawyers, sports gambling, questionable medical advice, and other such American topics. I’m not sure if there’s any other way for “Americana” to sound in this present moment. (Bandcamp link)

The Chop – Third Window

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, minimalism
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Urban Myth

Third Window is yet another record by Gemma Fleet and Andrew Doig to add to the pile they’ve amassed over the past few years: a couple albums and a couple EPs as one-half of the Glasgow indie pop/post-punk quartet Dancer, the debut album from their duo together The Chop last year, not to mention other acts in which they’ve been involved like Nightshift and Current Affairs. It’s the Chop found Fleet and Doig exploring a more minimal and quieter sound than they’ve done in Dancer; the obvious Young Marble Giants comparison isn’t inaccurate, for instance. Third Window, a six-song “mini-album” coming less than a year after their debut, continues the duo’s journey into more subdued indie pop; combine the brief length, sparse arrangements, and ever-expanding discography, and you’ve got a recipe for a record destined to be “unfairly overlooked”. 

Aside from the typical Moxham brothers, Life without Buildings, and Raincoats influences, Third Window was inspired by the “brutal Glasgow winter of 2025/2026” and Doig’s diagnosis of SCDS (a “rare hearing and balance disorder” originating from the inner ear). Personal disorientation and an underlying uncertainty regarding a future in music at all shade these half dozen-songs, although this doesn’t mean that Fleet hasn’t remained an engrossing yarn-spinner (see “Urban Myth”, “Deserter 1940”, and “First Contact”, all of which satisfyingly elaborate on their titles). The slide whistle-like sound in the otherwise very delicate “Ok Kid” is a headscratching addition, which I suppose is the point (the dolphin-synths in “The Auditor”, while still being decidedly odd, do sound a little more in line with the uneasy rest of the track). Whatever the future holds for Fleet and Doig’s music, Third Window is a particularly strong document of the present. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, The Clearwater Swimmers, FakeYou

Welcome to the Monday Pressing Concerns! It’s got new albums from Winston Hightower, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, and FakeYou, plus a new EP from The Clearwater Swimmers! Check them out below. The next blog post will be on Thursday.

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.

Winston Hightower – 100 Acre Wood

Release date: April 17th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: High School

Winston Hightower spent a decade in the background of the Columbus indie rock scene playing with a bunch of recognizable names in the city and quietly self-recording and self-releasing a bunch of solo records before K and Perennial Records signed him in 2024 and put out Winston Hytwr, a compilation of songs from across his discography. Hightower’s hometown is known for Guided by Voices-influenced guitar pop and 90s indie rock, but the wide-ranging Winston Hytwr was just as likely to pay respect to those influences as wander into minimal art punk, experimental noise, or even psychedelic hip hop. 100 Acre Wood is the first album of new material of Hightower’s K/Perennial era, and while it certainly sounds like the eclectic artist of Winston Hytwr, this album finds the musician honing in on a more cohesive set of post-punk and lo-fi pop-influenced indie rock.

Aside from bass on closing track “Circling the Dream” by Mystic 100’s’ Charles Waring, the fourteen songs of 100 Acre Wood are all Winston Hightower. The Ohioan comes out swinging after the relatively restrained opening track “Moonside”; from “On Our Own Time” to “Virtue Signaling”, Hightower is snapping, garage-rocking, and econo-jamming his way through some strong pop songs. Hightower takes us on a surprising detour into early Modest Mouse-style wonkiness with “Help Is on the Way” (hey, it is a K Records album) and “High School” is just as surprising in its guitar pop sweetness. For the most part, though, 100 Acre Wood really rocks, with electric material like “Me Time (I Need Some)”, “Beyond the Thicket”, and “The Me I Know” all showing up well into the record’s second side. Perhaps the percussionless, hazy psychedelia of “Circling the Dream” is Hightower’s way of reminding us that he’s capable of a lot more than ripping lo-fi rockers as 100 Acre Wood comes to a close; it’s a beautiful finale, but it doesn’t lessen the excitement we get in the thirteen songs before it. (Bandcamp link)

Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death – Earthquake Lights

Release date: March 13th
Record label: Resident Recordings
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Spirit of the Radio

The upstate New York noise rock supergroup Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death was formed in the late 1990s by guitarist/vocalist David Nutt (why+the+wires), bassist Tom Yagielski (The 1,000 Year Plan), guitarist Joe Kepic (Chimes of Bayonets), and drummer Brendan Kuntz (Grass Jaw). The Ithaca-originating quartet’s existence has been characterized by wide gaps in between releases, so it’s a pleasant surprise that, merely two years after a third album called Thirds, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death have offered up a fourth LP entitled Earthquake Lights. Last year, the four of them returned to Chris Ploss’ Sunwood Recording in Trumansburg, NY (where they’d recorded Thirds) to lay down nine more blunt-force post-punk tracks inspired by noisy 90s indie rock from Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

From the big muff-adorned cover to the studious gear-listing on the Bandcamp page’s credits to, well, pretty much everything about the music, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death fit in pretty well with modern “lifer”-piloted, Electrical Audio-inspired “PRF-core” acts like Stomatopod, Blank Banker, and Constant Greetings, although that doesn’t mean Earthquake Lights has to be completely predictable. The forty-five minute runtime means that several of these songs stretch out extensively, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death are able to indulge Sabbath-inspired heaviness and occasional lighter, melodic bouts, too. As Dischord-friendly as opening track “Joe Sabbath” is, “Comet Flasher” and “Spirits of the Radio” delve into less-easy-to-classify corners of 90s indie rock in their not-so-flashy but clearly present pop attributes. The second half of Earthquake Lights is where the “heavy” is concentrated (“Sleeper Holds” hits like a brick wall, and “Into the Totality” and “Untitled” get there eventually, too), although the heaviness of “Pacific Paving” has less to do with the music and more with its overall atmosphere. That’s the kind of twist that you go to the experts in Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death to experience. (Bandcamp link)

The Clearwater Swimmers – Seasons

Release date: March 20th
Record label: New Martian
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Engine

The Clearwater Swimmers are a folk- and slowcore-influenced indie rock band split between New York and New England, initially more or less a solo project for frontperson Sumner Bright (vocals/guitar) but now a full-fledged quartet featuring multi-instrumentalist Connor Kennedy, guitarist Sander Casale, and drummer Timothy Graff. After recording a self-titled debut album with Bradford Krieger in 2024, The Clearwater Swimmers’ second record, the Seasons EP, is their first with all four members prominently contributing to songwriting. The band, after writing these four songs (five on the cassette edition) collaboratively, went to Morrill, Maine to record Seasons with Garrett Linck (Boreen, Lily Seabird, Strange Ranger) and came out of the experience with a collection of deliberate, delicate, electric folky indie rock.

Although there’s a clear Songs: Ohia influence on Seasons, these northeasterners haven’t taken that as an excuse to do alt-country drag–it’s not any more close to Molina than it is to a host of other 1990s slowcore bands, or even to meandering, Real Estate-esque pastoral guitar pop. Seasons opens with the starkest song on the EP with its title track, a three-minute crawl to cavernous empty space that ends with a (relatively) upbeat trip into electric folk rock with “Landline”. “Engine” and “Radio” continue The Clearwater Swimmers’ journey into louder climes, the former succeeding as an early Wild Pink-esque glacial heartland rock piece and the latter being the closest the quartet get to truly “rocking out”. Don’t miss out on bonus track “Branches”, either; if you liked the quieter side of The Clearwater Swimmers in “Seasons”, this is the one song that goes down that road yet again (and to an even further degree than the title track). It’s a nice little addition to Seasons, though the four songs on the “proper” EP are enough to make the record stand out in the vast expanse of “folk-y indie rock”. (Bandcamp link)

FakeYou – Promise to Disappear

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: 59 X
Genre: Pop punk, punk rock, orgcore
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Solace

Hailing from Montreal, the punk quartet FakeYou released their debut EP back in 2024, and they’ve linked up with Atlanta pop punk label 59 X Records to put out a debut LP called Promise to Disappear. The band (vocalist/guitarist Guillaume Ménard, drummer Frank ”kickup” Lessard, bassist Phil Archambault, and lead guitarist Ben Pommier) take us back to the world of late-1990s emo-tinged melodic punk rock for an entire LP of the “orgcore” experience: raspy melodies, bursting, anthemic guitars, a palpable earnestness that will be an immediate turnoff to some and the core of FakeYou’s appeal for others. FakeYou recorded Promise to Disappear with fellow Montreal punk revivalist Max Lajoie of Spite House, and while they aren’t quite as heavy as Lajoie’s post-hardcore-ish band, that’s a good starting point for this album (some more clues would be Off With Their Heads, Hot Water Music, Leatherface, and, of course, Jawbreaker). Over the course of ten songs and thirty-five minutes, FakeYou bash out one dire-feeling pop punk song after another; if opening track “Wanderlost” feels oddly subdued, “Tieluck”, “100 Million Sheep”, and “Solace” are evidence enough that they aren’t half-assing this thing. I’m not sure if it is possible to make music like this half-assed; I’m sure FakeYou don’t think so, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Teen Suicide, Bullseye, Frog, Gawshock

Hey folks! Brand new Pressing Concerns! New albums from Teen Suicide, Frog, and Gawshock, and an EP from Bullseye. Check’ em out, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Sacred Heart Academy, Market, Black Beach, and Cashier), 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.

Teen Suicide – Nude descending staircase headless

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Fuzzy indie rock, art rock, alt-rock, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Suffering (Mike’s Way)

The narrative’s there for the taking when it comes to Nude descending staircase headless, the latest from Sam and Kitty Ray’s Teen Suicide project. After Sam spent the 2010s making his band nearly synonymous with that decade’s strain of “lo-fi indie rock”, this is the first studio-recorded Teen Suicide album (Mike Sapone, who’s been at the controls for many successful post-hardcore and pop punk albums, recorded it). It’s “accessible” in its willingness to embrace bowling ball alt-rock and, occasionally, big pop hooks. It’s a full-fledged comeback after Sam and Kitty both dealt with physical illnesses at the beginning of this decade, returning to an audience that has only grown thanks to the eternal appeal of lo-fi, opaque, challenging indie rock music with “the youths”. With Nude descending staircase headless, Teen Suicide make a bid to join their more polished peers, the ones against which Sam Ray had been content to position himself as a scrappy underdog in the past. 

The effort that Sam and Kitty Ray put into sharpening up Nude descending staircase headless (title comes from a David Berman poem, of course) is quite impressive, and it’ll probably be one of my most listened-to Ray-related records for this reason. It’s when we get to track three, “Suffering (Mike’s Way)”, when it becomes apparent just how successful Teen Suicide can be at making straight-up power pop, and, with “Spider”, Nude descending staircase headless establishes a more sustainable way for an “accessible Teen Suicide album” to sound. To be clear, though, we are still talking about a band called Teen Suicide here, one founded and co-led by one of the most divisive and chaotic figures in the last decade of indie rock. I have to thank “Everything in My Life Is Perfect” for not letting me totally lose track of who I’m dealing with, here (that song begins with “The day Luca Magnota got arrested / I was getting head outside of Denny’s / A new folk hero for the nihilists”, sung like the most wounded Will Sheff performance). Even after a few grunge-gaze instrumentals in the middle of the record, Nude descending staircase headless ends with some classically odd Teen Suicide recordings (“Hypnotic Poison” and its noise pop overload, the acoustic psychedelia of “Kindnesses”, and the epilogue “Come and See the Clown”). It all just happens to be a lot more clear this time around. (Bandcamp link)

Bullseye – Bullseye

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock, roots rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Angel’s Share

We’re getting some good old-fashioned guitar pop from the eclectic New York label Ever/Never Records (Workers Comp, Split Apex, Garden of Love). Their latest signee is Bullseye, a Brooklyn band with roots in Minnesota and Texas who’ve followed up four-song EPs in 2024 and 2025 with a self-titled six-song EP (the CD edition comes with six more bonus tracks, apparently). Beginning in 2020 as the solo project of guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Jake Barczak, Bullseye are now a solid quartet featuring guitarist Oliver Ohaver, drummer Humberto, and bassist Clara, and their Ever/Never debut is a compelling mix of power pop, garage rock, roots rock, college rock, and 90s indie rock that sounds like a band still in touch with Texas and Minnesota alt-rock/punk history. 

Jangly guitars, “slacker rock” vocals, and a winning power pop chorus greet us in opening track “Angel’s Share”, a declaration that Bullseye isn’t beating around the bush when it comes to crafting guitar pop hooks. “Blue Eyes Blue” features just a touch of Dinosaur Jr./Meat Puppets-y rootsiness without taking too hard of a left turn away from the opener (we’re in Late Bloomer territory here), and “Dangers of the Heart” bravely tries to find middle ground between Elvis Costello and Pavement (it also sounds a little alt-country). “Papillyou Papillons” and “Kid” close out the “proper” part of Bullseye with a pair of vintage power pop throwbacks, both making great use of power chords and meandering vocals that nonetheless get it together for the hook. I haven’t heard all the bonus tracks, but “Tell Tale Signs” is jangly college rock at its finest and “Everything Is True” has a Guided by Voices-style melancholy to it, both indicating that Bullseye have an excess of worthy material with which to work. With this record, Ever/Never have really hit the…jackpot. (Bandcamp link)

Frog – Frog for Sale

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Tapewormies/Audio Antihero
Genre: Indie pop, piano pop, folk-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Max von Side-Eye

Breaking news: Frog are back with their fourth album in under three years, and their eighth overall. Ever since the New Rochelle, New York duo of Daniel Bateman (vocals and most instruments) and Steve Bateman (drums) returned from a hiatus in 2023 with Grog, they’ve been hard at work pumping out their distinctive mixture of prominent pianos, falsetto vocals, and bedroom pop hooks evoking everything from Alex G to hip hop to classic country to 70s singer-songwriter LPs. After getting progressively wonkier and weirder with their twin 2025 albums, Frog for Sale is probably their most immediate album since the hit parade of Grog; the highs hit in these dozen songs are ample assurance that Frog aren’t running out of steam in the middle of their stride. The toe-tapping, nearly twee “Bad Time to Fall in Love Again” and the R&B organs of “Best Buy” ease us into Frog for Sale by leaning on what the Batemans do best, and the exuberant “Dark Out” and the surprising acoustic yarn of “Yonder This Way Comes” knock it right out of the park from that tee-up. It really can’t be emphasized enough how excitable, bouncy, and upbeat Frog come off on “Max von Side-Eye”, “All the Things You Get”, and “Je Ne Sai Pas”. Their most recent album, The Count, was confident in its oddness and eccentricities; Frog for Sale is confident too, cocky but friendly enough that it’s hard not to be taken with it anyway. Frog continue to feel themselves on Frog for Sale, and it’s pretty contagious. (Bandcamp link)

Gawshock – Leaves to the Sun

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Patchwork
Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Heat Lightning

Gawshock began in 2021 as the bedroom pop/lo-fi indie rock project of Huntsville, Alabama musician and aerospace engineer David Broome, quickly releasing three albums of chilly, greyscale indie rock in four years (2021’s Friendship 7, 2023’s Gawshock, and 2024’s Unless If). Broome cites classic 90s folk/slowcore acts like Idaho and Acetone as well as the delicate underground pop music of Sparklehorse as influences, and the fourth Gawshock LP, Leaves to the Sun, bears this out. It’s a brief record, around twenty-five minutes long, but Gawshock don’t hurry through these eleven songs. “Brighter Hue” sets the tone with a slow-moving, deliberate, and intricate piece of Mark Linkous-inspired indie rock, and the lilting, warm title track is Broome’s version of a “rocker”. “Heat Lightning” is Gawshock’s turn at electric, crawling, empty-space slowcore a la Bedhead, while “Everything I Want” and “What Do You Dream About” lean a bit more on acoustic instruments and subsequently explore the folkier side of slowcore. Like a lot of this kind of music, Leaves to the Sun enters and exits the picture quietly, but there’s plenty to appreciate upon returning to it (in the second half, the dreamy “Great Outdoors” and the sharp “Still Shining” currently stick out to me). There is, in its own way, a lot of beauty in Leaves to the Sun.

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sacred Heart Academy, Market, Black Beach, Cashier

We’ve got new EPs from Sacred Heart Academy and Cashier and new LPs from Market and Black Beach in the Monday Pressing Concerns! Check them out below!

We’ll be back on Thursday.

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.

Sacred Heart Academy – Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP

Release date: March 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, bedroom pop, folk rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Give It a Little More Time

Eilee and Evren Centeno are a sibling duo from North Carolina who’ve appeared on the blog before thanks to their record label, Trash Tape Records, which has released albums from Tombstone Poetry, Hill View #73, and Rain Recordings (the latter of which is also co-led by Evren). Lately, both of them have moved from Chapel Hill to Chicago, where they started making music together as Sacred Heart Academy sometime around late 2024 or early 2025, leading to shows in North Carolina and Chicago, a three-song Christmas EP, and Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP, the group’s first record (that isn’t just them singing Christmas classics, I mean). Sacred Heart Academy have added two new members in recent times, but Oh Good! is almost entirely the work of the Centenos; they both sing, play various instruments, and Evren engineered and mixed it (except for the drums on “Give It a Little More Time”, where the third co-founder of Trash Tape, Nathan McMurray, stepped in to engineer them).

Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP is an instantly likeable six-song introduction; these songs are all great, and the Centenos both establish themselves as compelling bandleaders. Evren is the “slacker”-adjacent alt-country/folk rocker, landing somewhere between their home state hero MJ Lenderman and Windy City pop tinkerer Noah Roth, and they’re countered nicely by a more openly expressive/heart-on-sleeve performance from Eilee (they both get three songs, and they both establish impressive range within them). They don’t come off as guitar pop-history nerds like some of their Chicago peers, but there’s a Hallogallo/New Now-like power pop undercurrent on some of the material, particularly “You Will Never Be That Free” and “Give It a Little More Time”, the EP’s two “hits”. I was lucky enough to catch one of those early Sacred Heart Academy shows, and I came away from it looking forward to hear the alt-country/power pop anthem of “Give It a Little More Time” on-record; it doesn’t disappoint, ending up one of the best pop songs I’ve heard this year. Despite Evren leading that one, they also helm the quietest moments on the album, “Piece of My Heart” and “Free Fallin’ II” (the former makes great use of Eilee’s clarinet and the latter, which reminds me of an old Okkervil River ballad, lives up to its title). The lo-fi pop of the Eilee-led “4,5 Seconds” and “Chicago” feels notably distinct from the Evren-led folk rock tracks, but there’s enough overlap to make Oh Good! work, and, more importantly, both members sound on the same page and in-sync no matter which “side” of their sound they’re exploring. (Bandcamp link)

Market – Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies

Release date: February 27th
Record label: Western Vinyl
Genre: Art pop, art rock, synth-rock, sophisti-pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: The Visitors

I wrote about Brooklyn musician Nate Mendelsohn and his project Market in late 2024, when he released his fourth album, Well I Asked You a Question. I called it a “relaxed but intricate art pop album”, built from soft rock, indie folk, chamber pop, and psychedelia. A year and change later, Mendelsohn released the fifth Market album, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies. A digital-only record released fairly quietly, it’d be easy to miss Cleanliness 2 even if it wasn’t seemingly committed to being a much more low-key album sonically than its predecessor. Although once again featuring many frequent Mendelsohn collaborators (Stephen Becker, Katie von Schleicher, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish, among others), Mendelsohn’s voice on Cleanliness 2 is often accompanied by little more than minimal synths and percussion. It feels like a “bedroom pop” album in how it pulls together pop, electronic, and even R&B into an assuming but transfixing package.

The vibrant, bizarre art pop of opening track “The Visitors” is classic Market, although Cleanliness 2 mostly declines to make itself as busy as it is in that one. A good portion of Cleanliness 2 is actually percusionless, giving songs like “Tripping Wire”, “Neighbor”, and “Fuck Famous People” trippy suspended-in-amber feelings. The pop rock second half of “Yenylpines” and the piano ballad “40 Years” change things up a bit in on the album’s B-side, as does Mendelsohn’s ceding of the lead vocals to Rose Droll in “Church”. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of Cleanliness 2, but I do keep returning to it. Part of that has to do with some memorable train-of-thought lines from Mendelsohn (“I’m a hetero man, but I’ve got feelings though / What a novel idea like forty years ago” from “40 Years”, “You ate the sticker right off of the apple / I mean who does that when you’re upset?” from “Tripping Wire”), but the non-lyrical choices are just as baffling and intriguing. (Bandcamp link)

Black Beach – Mail Thief

Release date: March 20th
Record label: Best Brother
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Something Sinister

The Boston noise rock trio Black Beach have been around for a decade now–they put out LPs in 2016 and 2019, along with a handful of EPs, most recently Giallo in 2021. Mail Thief is the long-awaited third LP from the group (guitarist/vocalist Steve Instasi, bassist Ben Semata, and drummer Ryan Nicholson) and their first for the (relatively) new high-batting-average New England label Best Brother (Rick Rude, Hallelujah the Hills, Be Safe). Continuing to take their cues from classic early noise rock, Mail Thief is a bleak, dark-sounding post-punk record; it’s like Meat Wave minus the garage rock side, or if Pissed Jeans tried to make a record of “dirges”. These eight songs and thirty-two minutes aren’t all that linked to the modern “post-punk” revival, though I’m sure they can be enjoyed by fans of Protomartyr and whichever British band is currently getting accolades for cribbing from the Touch & Go catalog.

“Something Sinister” and “Broken Glass” start Mail Thief with competing definitions of “dour”; the former is a circling-the-drain post-hardcore song somewhere along the Unwound-FACS axis, while the latter continues the Birthday Party-Cramps-Swans tradition of dark gothic-country in their post-punk. If you’re starting to get depressed, fear not, because there’s some fun stuff in Mail Thief’s mid-section–“Dream Shake” has a nice Stuck-ish garage-post-punk bent to it, “Secret World”, quite nearly an anthem, sounds like U2 from hell, and “Psychic War” is a surprisingly straightforward trip into dance-punk. I’m not even really sure what to categorize “Parking Garage” as, but that’s one for the art punk weirdos, for sure. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, making greyscale music with a vibrant streak, but Mail Thief is a very good example of how to make it work. (Bandcamp link)

Cashier – The Weight

Release date: March 13th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, alt-rock, fuzz rock, noise punk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Same Mistakes

Cashier are a new grunge-gaze quartet out of Lafayette, Louisiana, led by vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Kylie Gaspard and rounded out by guitarist Joseph Perillo, bassist Austyn Wood, and drummer Zachary Derouen. A handful of singles in 2023 and 2024 led to the group signing with Philadelphia label Julia’s War and recording their debut EP, The Weight, in Lafayette with engineer Chad Viator (who co-produced the record with the band). Julia’s War has, in recent years, established themselves as the vanguard of the abrasive, confrontational, and experimental extremes of what can still be called “shoegaze” (aided by their founding band, They Are Gutting a Body of Water), so it’s nice to see that they can still appreciate a good shoegaze-pop group when they hear them.

Cashier have more in common with mainstream 90s alt-rock like The Smashing Pumpkins or even punky indie rock like Dinosaur Jr. than they do with the “ethereal”. “A Curse I Know So Well” kicks off The Weight with a polished mess, lumbering and tumbling through killer riffs and jerky tempos; in “Like I Do” and “Part from Me”, Cashier embrace full-on heavy, distorted pop rock hooks. After a screeching interlude called “For I Never Knew You” (there’s the Julia’s War we all know and love), Cashier fit in one more grunge-pop anthem (“Same Mistakes”) before the eighteen-minute EP closes with the title track, the closest thing to “pure” shoegaze on the record. Cashier slow the tempo down just a little bit on “The Weight”; if anything, this shines an even greater spotlight on their pop writing. It’s a warmly familiar debut from a band that sounds greater than the sum of their parts. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: