Rosy Overdrive

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2025 So Far (Part 2 of 2)

If you’re only just now joining us: this is part two of my list of my favorite forty albums of 2025 thus far, presented in reverse alphabetical order. Thanks for reading!

View part one of the list here.

Here are links to stream a playlist of these selections via Spotify and Tidal (Bandcamp links are provided below for all records).

Kinski – Stumbledown Terrace

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Kinski are an experimental post-rock band from Seattle, forming at the tail end of the 1990s and spending this century steadily releasing albums on storied indie rock labels like Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. Stumbledown Terrace is the group’s tenth album, their first in nearly seven years, their first for Comedy Minus One, and their first as a power trio in over twenty-five years. Clearly this paring down hasn’t slowed Kinski, though–their latest LP is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. On Stumbledown Terrace, Kinski walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll like the best of their influences and peers like Sonic Youth, Trans Am, and Oneida. It has a live feel to it, certainly–and this applies to the moments in between the most kinetic ones, too. (Read more)

Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Southeastern
Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Foxes in the Snow is a tough one, the “divorce album” that Jason Isbell recorded entirely on his own with just his acoustic guitar partly so he could just get the songs out and not have to dwell on them. 2023’s Weathervanes was my favorite Isbell album in quite some time, and while Foxes in the Snow isn’t an LP to “throw on” frequently like that one is, I do get the sense that it’s built to stand beyond the circumstances of its creation. Isbell’s separation from his wife and former bandmate Amanda Shires colors these songs, certainly, although one would have to have one’s head in the clouds not to recognize Foxes in the Snow’s ability to glance beyond that just frequently enough.

Idle Ray – Even in the Spring

Release date: June 6^thRecord label: Life Like
Genre: Lo-fi pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

This one might be a little premature, because I only heard it for the first time the day before I’m writing this. But this Idle Ray album is sounding really good to me right now, and I had to make some space for it here. When the self-titled first Idle Ray album came out back in 2021, the Michigan “band” was pretty much entirely a Fred Thomas solo project; in the four years since, they’ve become a solid power trio with bassist Devon Clausen and guitarist Frances Ma joining Thomas, and the new members even wrote a few of the songs on Even in the Spring. Ma and Clausen’s contributions fit right in with Thomas’ lo-fi power pop/indie rock style, and the three of them zip through ten songs in a mere twenty-four minutes on this one.

Gum Parker – The Brakes

Release date: April 11^thRecord label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

If you’re familiar with Galen Richmond’s previous band Lemon Pitch, then that’s roughly what his current one, Gum Parker, sounds like, but if you aren’t then they’re sneakily difficult to define. Richmond’s a 90s indie rock devote, but with Gum Parker he comes off as much more interested in simply making loud pop music than trying to directly emulate his influences. The Portland, Maine group’s debut album The Brakes is “power pop” without that genre’s defining reverence, “pop punk” without a trace of what that term traditionally evokes, “slacker rock” made by people with the perpetual nervousness. Oh, and Richmond, despite being the primary songwriter, only sings about half the songs–bassist Kate Sullivan-Jones sings lead on the rest of ’em. (Read more)

Good Flying Birds – Talulah’s Tape

Release date: January 2^ndRecord label: Rotten Apple
Genre: Lo-fi pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: Cassette, digital

NOTE: Well, it looks like Rotten Apple has un-released this album with a cryptic note hinting at a possible re-pressing or new version of it coming next month. Good for the Flying Birds, but I don’t want to put an album that you can’t hear except through an unofficial YouTube upload on this list (Read more)

Fust – Big Ugly

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Dear Life
Genre: Alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

At this point, I’m ready to declare Aaron Dowdy’s Fust the best band making country-influenced indie rock in North Carolina (and yes, I’m aware of what kind of competition that description pits them against). I’ve loved everything that this band has done thus far, but it didn’t take long before it became clear to me that Big Ugly is the band’s masterpiece. In what I can only assume is directly pandering to the author of this blog, Big Ugly is an album-length journey to Dowdy’s roots in southern West Virginia, drawing its name and much of its imagery from the shadow of the Guyandotte River in Lincoln County. The record’s scenes of corner stores and cinderblock-propped-up cars are much more than cheap signifiers, and I don’t really have the space and time here to get into everything going on in it, but that just leaves more for you to discover.

Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

Release date: May 16^thRecord label: Merge
Genre: Alt-country, ambient country
Formats: LP, CD, digital

The more anthemic, immediately-gripping songs of Friendship’s 2022 triumph Love the Stranger are gone on Caveman Wakes Up, and the Philadelphia alt-country group have replaced them with more ambient, vibes-based music. I compared Love the Stranger to Lambchop, without properly appreciating the kind of range that “Lambchop-esque” would end up giving them. Perhaps the die was cast for how this album would be perceived when they released a song called “Free Association” as the lead single. Frontperson Dan Wriggins, who recently released his first book of poetry, does seem more “poetic” on Caveman Wakes Up than he’s been in the past, but he’s also quite direct in his own way. I didn’t need the press pack to infer that a breakup was involved in the composition of these songs, for instance. (Read more)

Fluung – Fluung

Release date: April 7^thRecord label: Setterwind/Den Tapes
Genre: 90s indie rock, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Seattle trio Fluung have been keeping Pacific Northwest indie rock loud, electric, and catchy since the mid-2010s, but Fluung is pretty clearly the band’s best work yet. An ambitious rock record that nearly doubles their last one in length, the third Fluung album has enough time to spit out a handful of blissful, hook-laden lost 90s alt-rock classics and push further into feedback-heavy, exploratory, lumbering fuzz rock terrain, too. Like the region’s best rock bands, Fluung is a record that’s about the journey as much as anything else, and the band make sure to leave us with a memorable and complete one. Fluung aren’t the first group to stumble onto something as fulfilling as this album, but it never gets old hearing a band figure it out like this. (Read more)

First Rodeo – Rode Hard and Put Away Wet

Release date: May 16^thRecord label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital

Tim Howe (Vista House) and Nathan Tucker (Cool Original) are accomplished artists in their own rights, but the 2022 album they made together as First Rodeo is some of the finest work by either of them, so I was pleased to hear about Rode Hard and Put Away Wet, the duo’s second album together. Their new label Bud Tapes boasts that First Rodeo have “moved beyond genre constraints to explore collaborative songwriting and arranging”, and there are certainly moments (like “Nothing”) that back this up, but Rode Hard and Put Away Wet isn’t a huge departure–it’s still grounded in the roots, country, and folk rock on which First Rodeo built their initial foundation. (Read more)

Craig Finn – Always Been

Release date: April 4^thRecord label: Tamarac/Thirty Tigers
Genre: Singer-songwriter, heartland rock, synthrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The music of Craig Finn (and his band, The Hold Steady) is already fairly…divisive for the fickle bunch known as indie rock fans, and even those who enjoy Finn’s most acclaimed works seem split on Always Been, his latest solo record. I, for one, am really into it–I’ve felt that Finn’s solo career has benefited from his attempts to grow his music palette (we already know he’s a great storyteller–what else you got?), and Always Been–produced by Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs and leaning further into shined-up, 80s synth-rock than ever before–certainly qualifies. As always, the narratives are dense and no amount of polished production will ever make it “easy listening”. But I still love Finn and Granduciel’s attempts to make it so.

FACS – Wish Defense

Release date: February 7^thRecord label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Wish Defense was the last-ever album recorded by Steve Albini before his sudden passing last year, but its tragic circumstances do not obscure the fact that this LP is actually a rebirth and revitalization of FACS. The Chicago art rock trio welcome back original guitarist Jonathan Van Herik for the first time since their 2018 debut Negative Houses, now playing bass after founding bassist Brian Case moved over to guitar to replace him. 2023’s Still Life in Decay found FACS pushing and probing their sound to the outer margins of “rock music”, a direction seemingly necessary for the band to continue to sound inspired and forward-glancing. The reintroduction of Van Herik seems to have changed this calculus, allowing FACS to find heretofore undiscovered life in the realms of (relatively) brief bursts of power trio post-punk and noise rock. (Read more)

Ex-Vöid – In Love Again

Release date: January 17^thRecord label: Tapete
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Yes, I know, we all love The Tubs, but have you been listening to their sibling band, Ex-Vöid? You know, the one that’s even better than The Tubs (although, to be fair, Cotton Crown is a gap-closer)? Lan McArdle and Owen Williams (who first debuted as members of Joanna Gruesome in the 2010s) singing together is one of the greatest sounds one can hear in all of indie pop/power pop/jangle pop/et cetera, and Ex-Vöid’s sophomore album In Love Again certainly delivers on that front. Perhaps a little less punchy and more refined than 2022’s Bigger Than Before, the latest from Ex-Vöid is as natural-feeling a guitar pop album as any of those to which its members have lent their talents.

Dick Texas – All That Fall

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Life Like/Tortilla Flat
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, post-rock, slowcore, art rock, folk rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital

All That Fall, the first Dick Texas album, has been over a half-decade in the making, but it’s pretty believable that letting this music marinate for as long as it did helped make the album as special as it turned out to be. Loosely speaking, All That Fall is a country rock record–and “loose” is the right word to use here, as Dick Texas’ lost, woozy, incredibly slow playing style really does sound on the verge of falling apart more often than not. The songs–all seven of ‘em, that’s all we need–sprawl out in their self-contained desert worlds, and Valerie Salerno is the steady center with vocals that murmur along with the music’s psychedelic haze, declining to hog the spotlight but still leaving a distinct mark on Dick Texas’ landscapes. (Read more)

Cootie Catcher – Shy at First

Release date: March 14^thRecord label: Cooked Raw
Genre: Indie pop, twee, electronica, bedroom pop, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

As one might expect from a band with a “DJ scratcher” enlisted, Toronto’s Cootie Catcher have a foot in the world of electronic music (largely due to the wobbly, wavering synths that Sophia Chavez injects over top of more typical indie pop instrumentals). The group strike a balance between tweeish guitar pop and the aforementioned synth touches on their sophomore album, Shy at First–sometimes Cootie Catcher lean more into guitar pop, sometimes into the stranger electronic impulses, and sometimes both flare up notably in the same song. Shy at First has a ton of obvious “hits”, but even the more curious moments on the album are still “pop songs”, just presented in a somewhat hazier fashion. (Read more)

Club Night – Joy Coming Down

Release date: May 2^ndRecord label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Art rock, math rock, emo
Formats: Vinyl, digital

There were plenty of groups in the late 2010s making music that could be described as some combination of “math rock”, “indie rock”, and “emo”, but the way that Club Night do it–an overall hugeness, jittery art-punk instrumentation, strange but welcome synth-centric additions–just works better than the others. It was enough to keep the band regularly on my mind in the six-year gap between their first album, What Life, and Joy Coming Down, which picks up right where Club Night left off–not that a band like this can ever really be predictable, but their second album packs as much of what makes this group special as it can in its forty-two minutes. Club Night alternate between sounding like a real, rumbling live rock band and a bunch of artists frantically sculpting something in a gigantic studio throughout the album. Like a good math rock record, a lot of these change-ups in Joy Coming Down happen in the same song. (Read more)

Cheekface – Middle Spoon

Release date: February 25^thRecord label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, post-punk, Cheekface
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

For the better part of a decade now, Los Angeles trio Cheekface have been making an incredibly specific type of music, a proprietary blend of power pop, dance-punk, and Television combined with Greg Katz’s everyman talk-singing vocals mixed up in a way scientifically guaranteed to garner Cake comparisons. The orations of Katz, a state-of-the-union collection of one-liners and fake-outs from somebody who has incomplete knowledge of every subject, have always been the immediate draw, but the band behind him and their mastery of “groove” have been an increasingly potent weapon. This growth is present on the fifth Cheekface LP, Middle Spoon, featuring more big-chorus power pop slingers than ever before. You can still dance to it, of course, but somehow it’s a more cathartic hip-swaying. (Read more)

Charm School – Debt Forever

Release date: January 24^thRecord label: Surprise Mind
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The 2023 Finite Jest EP introduced Louisville’s Charm School as devotees of Touch & Go Records-influenced post-punk, garage rock, and post-rock. On their first LP, Debt Forever, Charm School haven’t completely shaken up their sound, but they’re doing something a little different here. It’s somehow both looser and angrier; there’s still plenty of that modern Fall-influenced post-punk sound here, but there’s also some San Diego-style post-hardcore/garage rock and turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C. art punk in the mix, too. As the title hints at, Debt Forever spends a good deal of time focusing on financial anxiety and insecurity–whether the alternatively brooding and seething music drew this all-American fear out of frontperson Andrew Sellers or whether his preoccupations with such matters informed the music, there’s no denying the synergy here. (Read more)

Califone – The Villager’s Companion

Release date: February 21^stRecord label: Jealous Butcher
Genre: Folk rock, post-rock, art rock, blues rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

As the name implies, The Villager’s Companion is linked to the Califone record before it, 2023’s The Villagers: it was recorded around the same time and is augmented by a couple of covers that have been previously released over the past few years. Califone bandleader Tim Rutili referred to these songs as “misfit toys” when the album was announced, but The Villager’s Companion is just further confirmation that Califone thrives in a less formal environment. It gives Rutili and company a chance to both spin some simple blues-folk numbers and to journey beyond them right next to each other, to interpret other people’s songs and incorporate them into the Califone songbook like they’ve always belonged there. (Read more)

Bliss? – Pass Yr Pain Along

Release date: March 21^stRecord label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, garage rock, jangle punk, mod revival
Formats: Cassette, digital

The debut from a new power trio straight out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Bliss?’s Pass Yr Pain Along is a full exploration of the strains of guitar pop (“REM, power pop, and all varieties of jangly 80s college rock”) formative to the band–Josh Higdon’s vocals are incredibly Elvis Costello-reminiscent, while the band’s somewhat jangly post-Replacements pop rock and roll sounds like the Gin Blossoms as interpreted by basement punk musicians. It’s not a “punk” record per se, but it absolutely benefits from a little roughness–Higdon isn’t at all shy about putting the vocals up front, and the band are loose but clear in a way that puts the spotlight on a collection of songs that really could’ve been shipped straight from Homestead Records to your local college radio station circa 1989. (Read more)

The Bird Calls – Melody Trail

Release date: February 7^thRecord label: Ruination
Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, singer-songwriter, synthpop, sophisti-pop
Formats: CD, digital

2025’s album from Sam Sodomsky’s prolific project The Bird Calls has arrived already, and I’m pleased that the New York singer-songwriter (and music writer) has put together something a bit different this time with Melody Trail. The album was assembled entirely by Sodomsky and producer Ryan Weiner, and while these songs certainly sound like they were written and sung by the same artist who made last year’s casual country-folk Old Faithful, the duo give Melody Trail a more polished pop reading. It’s a path down which many of Sodomsky’s influences–Dan Bejar, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen–have wandered to rewarding ends, but Melody Trail retains the greatest strength of Sodomsky’s previous work: namely, that he’s able to evoke the art of such idiosyncratic, larger-than-life figures while coming off more or less as a regular guy. (Read more)

Alex Orange Drink – Victory Lap (#23)

Release date: May 9^thRecord label: Million Stars
Genre: Garage punk, power pop, folk punk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Click here to go back to part 1!

Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2025 So Far (Part 1 of 2)

Hello there, and welcome to the midway mark of 2025, I suppose (basically, I noticed other websites putting up their mid-year favorites and thought “well, guess I better start getting mine together now!”). Below, you’ll find forty records that RO loved more than anything else so far this year. Of course, there’s a bunch of good music I wasn’t able to fit on here (check the site directory for other records we’ve written about recently), but I’m quite happy with this list. I think you will be, too!

The list is unranked, ordered reverse-alphabetically by artist name (last year I did it alphabetically, and I alternate it every year).

Thanks for reading, and here are links to stream a playlist of these selections via Spotify and Tidal (Bandcamp links are provided for all records).

Click here for part two of the list!

Vulture Feather – It Will Be Like Now

Release date: February 14^thRecord label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Vulture Feather have such a distinct sound–Colin McCann’s otherworldly yowling vocals and chiming guitar, the steady, glacial movement, a rapturous devotion to minimalism and repetition–that they really only sound like themselves at this point. Like last year’s Merge Now in Friendship and 2023’s Liminal Fields, It Will Be Like Now is a powerful-sounding record, but I didn’t come away from it thinking “Vulture Feather just made the same album again”. The fact that they recorded the album after a bunch of touring might explain the subtle difference I hear–“looser” isn’t exactly the right descriptor…maybe “more alive”? Liminal Fields sounded like it just came into being one day, but I can actually imagine Vulture Feather playing the songs of It Will Be Like Now live, in person, in-studio. This is their punk album, maybe. (Read more)

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

You probably don’t need me to tell you that Cotton Crown is good if you’re tapped into the worlds of jangle pop and power pop that are this blog’s bread and butter–The Tubs have been one of the few such bands that regularly get lauded outside of our bubble, and I can’t even be hipstery about the praise that’s been bestowed upon them because this new album is the (already quite good) band’s best work yet. If you’re interested in learning about the personal nature of frontperson Owen Williams’ writing on this album, there are interviews (not to mention Williams’ own Substack) about it, but suffice it to say that the group’s sparkling, bright guitar pop collides with some tough, complex kinds of grief throughout Cotton Crown.

(T-T)b – Beautiful Extension Cord

Release date: April 4^thRecord label: Disposable America
Genre: Fuzz rock, synthpop, power pop, chiptune, slacker rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Boston’s (T-T)b incorporate chiptune and video game soundtrack instrumentation into their music as an accent, the way one might use synths or horns. Beautiful Extension Cord is the band’s second album and first new music of any kind in four years, and (T-T)b have evolved in the meantime, I’d say. It seems impossible for chiptune to ever be “subtly” incorporated into one’s music, but if it is, it probably sounds like this album–still quite visible, but integrated more seamlessly than ever into the group’s slacker rock, 90s alt-rock, and bedroom indie rock-evoking sound. Between the big old guitars, the chirping 8-bit sounds, and JM Dussault’s plain but capable vocals, there’s somehow a cosmic element to (T-T)b’s indie rock. (Read more)

Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6^thRecord label: Halloween
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Suburban Electric certainly sounds like a Telethon album, but it also sounds like a conscious attempt not to repeat their previous LP, the sprawling, overstuffed, guest musician-heavy Swim Out Past the Breakers. If it’s possible for Telethon’s blend of maximalist power pop, Midwestern workhorse pop punk, and dashes of ska and emo to ever be “streamlined”, Suburban Electric is it. Suburban Electric is still a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, though–every song on this album is a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on the album’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me), and Telethon set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers. (Read more)

Star 99 – Gaman

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

A year and a half after Bitch Unlimited (my second favorite album of 2023), San Jose power pop group Star 99 are back with a fifth bandmember, a more wide-ranging sound, and a sophomore album called Gaman. I’d be despondent if Star 99 completely abandoned the sugary power-pop-punk that they’d mastered on their last album, and thankfully Gaman is not a reinvention so much as an expansion. Star 99 have once again put together a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (twenty-five minutes, actually shorter this time around) collection of tour-de-force songs with plenty of knockout punches; they’ve merely diversified the way that they go about landing these blows, is all. (Read more)

Spring Onion – Seated Figure

Release date: March 14^thRecord label: Anything Bagel
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

I’ve listened to the music of Catherine Dwyer extensively thanks to her work as the bassist of Remember Sports, but this year I learned that she’s more than capable of making a great lo-fi/bedroom pop record on her own (well, with the assistance of many great Philadelphia DIY musicians and her Remember Sports bandmates, but Spring Onion is “her” project). Seated Figure, the sophomore Spring Onion album and the first since 2018, is about the death of Dwyer’s father, and her vibrant, meditative version of sunny guitar pop is a surreal but deeply-felt tribute and crystallization of a foggy, difficult-to-describe experience.

Alan Sparhawk & Trampled by Turtles – Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles

Release date: May 30^thRecord label: Sub Pop
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles is as tough of a listen as anyone familiar with the tragedy experienced by the former of the two artists would expect, although it’s “tough” in an entirely different way than last year’s confrontational electronic Sparhawk solo album White Roses, My God. An unlikely but ultimately very fitting team-up between two of Duluth’s most prominent acts, this album ends up synthesizing the glacial-paced, beautiful slowcore of the early work of Sparhawk’s Low and the more traditional folk music of Trampled by Turtles. The latter band’s bluegrass-trained sound is well-equipped to take these songs to the brink of the abyss, but Sparhawk steadies the ship with (one imagines) everything he’s got in him.

Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Indie pop, sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock
Formats: Digital

Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–Silo’s Choice mastermind Jon Massey mentions The Left Banke, early Destroyer, and Belle & Sebastian as touchpoints for this one, and he’s kind of right. At its most animated, Liberals has the same kind of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock that Massey had previously explored in the band Coventry, and even the slower numbers on this album display a renewal of vows with concise pop music. Liberals’ default mode of polished piano-led pop doesn’t come even close to getting stale, and there are plenty of deviations from it, dropping a bit into everything from folk music to disco. (Read more)

Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Release date: April 4^thRecord label: Lame-O
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Trash Mountain was written and recorded much more quickly than Lily Seabird’s previous two albums, and I found myself pretty surprised at where the Vermont singer-songwriter decided to go on her third LP. The explosive bursts of noisy country rock of last year’s Alas, are decentered for a quieter, more deliberate, and intimate record, but this pull-back (if anything) only makes Seabird’s writing and singing even more immediate. Trash Mountain (named after an artist-filled house on a “decommissioned landfill” site where Seabird lived while writing the album) is a gorgeously ragged collection of folk rock that finds avenues of contentment rather than searching feverishly for moments of catharsis. (Read more)

SAVAK – SQUAWK!

Release date: May 30^thRecord label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

I’m pleased to report that Brooklyn’s finest prolific veteran-studded indie rock group SAVAK still sound exactly like themselves on their seventh album, SQUAWK!. A tight ten songs and thirty-five minutes, the album finds Sohrab Habibion, Michael Jaworski, and Matt Schulz continuing to hammer out their by-now quite recognizable style of college rock, post-punk, and garage rock–tough but polished, familiar but surprising, catchy as ever. Detours into New York electric noise rock collages, a more overt kind of Lou Reed worship, and atmospheric pieces are infrequent but always done well. If you’re already part of the SAVAK society, I doubt you’ll need more convincing that they’ve done it yet again–but there’s always room for more. (Read more)

Saoirse Dream – Saoirse Dream

Release date: February 28^thRecord label: Lauren
Genre: Hyperpop, synthpop, indie pop, bedroom pop, noise pop, chiptune, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Since the beginning of this decade, Catherine Egbert has been connected to “hyperpop” as a movement, both through her work as Saoirse Dream and as part of collectives like webcage and User-177606669. Her debut album for Lauren Records is indeed a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, and lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy. Saoirse Dream isn’t as sonically chaotic as a lot of hyperpop I’m familiar with–I could imagine more typical pop punk/indie pop versions of most of these songs (in fact, they might already be in there somewhere), but Egbert has such a handle on these extra touches and tools that they pretty much always feel like they add to the music. Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas in any case, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music. (Read more)

Pigeon Pit – Crazy Arms

Release date: January 17^thRecord label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Folk punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

In the three years since their breakout album, 2022’s Feather River Canyon Blues, Olympia folk punk rockers Pigeon Pit have solidified into a six-piece “country/punk maximalist” group led by former sole member Lomes Oleander and featuring a bunch of Olympia-area ringers. Crazy Arms is both a culmination of “Pigeon Pit the Band” and a statement of their current power; Oleander is still a “folk punk” frontperson, yes, but her vocals and writing have evolved to also encapsulate the kind of world-reverent folk-y indie rock practiced by heroes like the Mountain Goats, The Weakerthans, and certain eras of Against Me!–and, of course, the band is key in helping her realize a more expansive sound for these songs, too. Pigeon Pit is always giving about 120 percent on Crazy Arms, even (perhaps especially) when Oleander is singing about being run-through and tired. (Read more)

Pacing – Songs

Release date: January 7^thRecord label: Asian Man
Genre: Anti-folk, indie pop, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk, twee
Formats: CD, digital

San Jose anti-folk/bedroom pop act Pacing have been working on a proper follow-up to their 2023 album Real poetry… for a while now, but that’s not what their first new music on Asian Man Records, Songs, is. Songs is twelve minutes long. It’s a “mini-album” if it has to be called anything, or maybe it’s just “songs”. Most of these are written and played by entirely bandleader Katie McTigue herself. Only one of these songs is more than two minutes long. The naming conventions are aggressively low-key and casual. If Songs is a hot dog-esque byproduct of the sessions for Pacing LP2, it functions very well as a teaser for it. It’s a throwaway release that’s too good to be a throwaway release, and instead just ends up being the latest reminder that McTigue is still one of the sharpest and most unique songwriters operating in the present. (Read more)

Options – Beast Mode

Release date: June 6^thRecord label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, synthpop
Formats: Digital

This one is a last-minute addition after I had to strike something else from this list, but I’m secretly happy that a spot opened up for this brand-new Options album. Chicago recording engineer and musician Seth Engel was incredibly active as Options in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but Beast Mode is his solo project’s first record in three years (in the meantime, he’s been playing with Mister Goblin and Patter and recording music from Nature’s Neighbor, Cusp, and Joey Nebulous, among others). Beast Mode is slick, snappy, heavily AutoTuned bedroom pop music (indeed, Engel writes that it was recorded “in my room 2021-2024”) that reminds me of a more fully-developed version of 2021’s On the Draw. It hits the same “fucking around and making timeless pop songs” sweet spot that, like, early This Is Lorelei did.

Open Head – What Is Success

Release date: January 24^thRecord label: Wharf Cat
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Kingston art punk group Open Head had grand ambitions for their second LP, naming hip hop and electronic music as equally influential on it as punk and art rock. Of course, any adventurous and forward-thinking band ought to be looking outside their own genre for ideas, and just because the resultant What Is Success is “merely” a rock album doesn’t mean that Open Head weren’t successful in making something that genuinely feels informed by things other than “merely” post-punk and noise rock. Although, to be clear, I do hear a lot of good noise rock and post-punk bands in What Is Success’ sound, too–New York no wave, Exploding in Sound-associated post-hardcore, and Rust Belt noise rock all likely had a hand in where Open Head end up here. (Read more)

Now – Now Does the Trick

Release date: May 16^thRecord label: K/Perennial
Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The second album from the difficultly-named Bay Area trio Now and their first for their new label is called Now Does the Trick, and it’s a different beast than their debut but no less strong of an LP. The psychedelic, kraut-y mud of 2023’s And Blue Space Is Burning Noon is turned down and the jangle pop guitars and hooks are turned up–Now sound like they’re aiming for the little big-time here. Now are still a bunch of weirdos, though–lo-fi, sparkling jangle can’t paper over all of that. Even though the dozen songs of Now Does the Trick total just a bit over a half-hour, it feels like they encompass so much more than that; Now eat their craft-sharpening cake and get to keep some skeletons in their collective closet, too. (Read more)

My Wife’s an Angel – Yeah, I Bet

Release date: April 18^thRecord label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

My Wife’s an Angel are a chaotic, piss-taking noise rock band from Philadelphia, although my intelligence suggests that they may have roots in the expansive wasteland known as “the rest of Pennsylvania”. The quartet’s second album, Yeah, I Bet, is positively a mess–it’s ugly, heavy noise-punk that sometimes doesn’t sound like any of those descriptors at all. The closest thing I can think to compare My Wife’s an Angel is, like, a more millennial and Appalachian version of Killdozer (if you understand what I mean by this, you’re probably going to hell, by the way)–the Midwestern classic rock devil worship subbed out for a big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong. (Read more)

Miscellaneous Owl – The Cloud Chamber

Release date: March 7^thRecord label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, indie folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital

This year’s Miscellaneous Owlbum is called The Cloud Chamber, and Madison, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Huan-Hua Chye promises something “folkier, quieter, and dreamier” this time around, as well as “1000% more theremin” than on her last record (You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow, one of my favorites of 2024). While the exact specifics of this description (other than the theremin part) are up for debate, I do agree that The Cloud Chamber displays a more thoughtful and subdued side to Chye’s writing. You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow ran out to greet us with early Magnetic Fields-worthy bright synthpop instrumentals, and while this new one has some such moments, on the whole it’s more of an album that one is “welcome to join in progress” than one that’s going out of its way to invite us inside. (Read more)

Mekons – Horror

Release date: April 4^thRecord label: Fire
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The Mekons are forty-nine years old this year. I’m not even going to try to figure out what number LP they’re on at this point. And yet here is Horror, an album that purports to “[look] at history and the legacies of British imperialism with mashed up lyrics” and that sounds a hell of a lot like the great Mekons records littered throughout history before it. Post-punk artsiness, alt-country rock-and-rolling, traditionalist folk instrumentation, reggae rhythms, and a good old communal feeling all permeate Horror, an album that keeps one foot in the past only to mainline all the power and humanity and bullshit that’s still ever-so-relevant today, always forging some kind of connection or another.

Lùlù – Lùlù

Release date: June 6^thRecord label: Howlin Banana/Taken by Surprise/Dangerhouse Skylab
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The self-titled debut album from Lyon/Marseille-based Lùlù is power pop in its most freewheeling, energetically fun form. Bandleader Luc Simone and his collaborators gleefully roll around in the histories of garage rock and punk rock to make ten massively hooky rock and roll knockout punches. Far removed from the refined, cosmopolitan sound that I associated with French indie pop, Lùlù has more in common with Australian garage-power-poppers like The Unknowns and Romero, American retro-pop groups like Sheer Mag and Free Energy, and, honestly, even a little bit of melodic lifer “orgcore” punk rock groups. (Read more)

Click here for part two!

Pressing Concerns: Salem 66, Smug Brothers, Career Woman, Lùlù

The Thursday Pressing Concerns is here, and it’s an instant classic! New albums from Smug Brothers, Career Woman, and Lùlù! A career-spanning retrospective compilation from Salem 66! And more! Well, I guess not really “more”, unless you count the also notable section. But, regardless, this is a great edition! Also, we had a Pressing Concerns go up (featuring John Galm, Now, Grant Pavol, and The Lilas) on Monday, and the May 2025 playlist arrived on Tuesday, so check those out if you missed them.

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.

Salem 66 – SALT

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Secret

Let me tell you some facts about a band from Boston called Salem 66. They were formed (by Judy Grunwald, Beth Kaplan, and Susan Merriam) in 1982. They released all four of their albums (and a few singles) on Homestead Records. They played shows with Butthole Surfers, Flipper, Big Black, Mission of Burma, and Dinosaur Jr., among others. A song of their was featured on 2020’s Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987, perhaps the greatest compilation of the decade so far, alongside bands like The Springfields, The Windbreakers, Great Plains, and 28th Day. The liner notes for SALT, a newly-issued career-spanning compilation of Salem 66’s work, were written by Franklin Bruno of The Human Hearts and Nothing Painted Blue. Judging by all that, I’d say they’re probably pretty good! Don Giovanni Records also thought so, as they went and made Salem 66’s entire discography available digitally earlier this year as well as putting together this physical LP/CD as a concise entrypoint. And SALT is, indeed, pretty good. It’s enough to make it clear that Grunwald and Kaplan (the band’s two songwriters and only consistent members) were two great lost college rock greats, and it’s much more than enough to make one wonder what took so long for something like this to come together in the first place.

Like I said, Salem 66 are perhaps most easily defined as “college rock”–hardly “power pop”, “jangly” enough to fit in with Strum & Thrum, early R.E.M., and their ilk, marked by a guitar-led psychedelic sound, that presumably coincidentally, fits alongside the Paisley Underground happening on the other coast of the United States. They’re a band that carried themselves like they were fluent in the heavier strains of indie rock practiced by the bands they associated with when they were active but weren’t interested in doing much more than refracting it as part of a larger, less categorizable form of music that I would call “doing their own thing”. The bands they remind me the most of are other underground rock iconoclasts like Scrawl and Tsunami (the latter of which also received the Franklin-Bruno-liner-notes-treatment recently); the fact that Salem 66 came earlier than both of those bands (as well as just about any I could think to name in the same vein) is impressive and not lost on me at all. I haven’t said a whole bunch about the individual songs on SALT yet, but rest assured they’re great–the compilation is (I believe) chronological, it starts off strong (see the jangle pop “Across the Sea” and the post-punk “Playground”) and it only gets better. The selections from their final two albums–1988’s Natural Disasters, Natural Treasures and 1990’s Down the Primrose Path–are my favorites, displaying a band who’d fully synthesized their parts into something confident, smooth, and heavy. I don’t think I’m done revisiting Salem 66, but SALT does exactly what it should to get us on board. (Bandcamp link)

Smug Brothers – Stuck on Beta

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Anyway
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, psych pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Prank Editions

You might’ve heard about this already, but Guided by Voices are not breaking up. They’re supposedly not going to play live any more, but rumors of a work stoppage at the Robert Pollard LP factory have proven to be unfounded. Even if this October’s Thick Rich and Delicious ends up being Guided by Voices’ final chapter, however, I’m not worried, as we’ve got plenty of other prolific Ohio lo-fi indie rock bands waiting in the wings. Well, I mean we have Smug Brothers at least. Vocalist/guitarist Kyle Melton and (ex-Guided by Voices) drummer Don Thrasher have been making Midwestern rock music that’s equal parts dark post-punk and bright, jangly college rock since 2004, and over the course of their past couple of albums, a new lineup featuring bassist Kyle Sowash and guitarist Ryan Shaffer has congealed. Stuck on Beta is Smug Brothers’ first album with Shaffer (who first appeared on last year’s Another Bar Behind the Night EP) on board, and while it seems like this ought to have led to a smooth continuity for Smug Brothers, the album actually became marked by “the death of an old friend”–the band’s twenty-year-old Tascam 424 MKIII 4-track, which had recorded “virtually every Smug Brothers track” up until that point (and a demise that led to Melton having to re-record many of his guitar parts).

As with Smug Brothers have done in the face of lineup changes and a move from Dayton to Columbus, however, they kept pressing forward, and Stuck on Beta is anything but a slowdown. Although the band have released a few brief, concise EPs in recent years, Stuck on Beta is (like 2023’s In the Book of Bad Ideas LP) for the true believers. Regardless of what the album was recorded on, the quartet still maintain their signature mix of lo-fi casualness and rock-and-roll exuberance, and Melton still certainly “has it”–“it” being the ability to make us really believe in the significance of phrases like “Paper Jane”, “Voltaire Basement”, “Ozone Bunker, and “Sidetrack Ghosts” (and I could go on–“Arcade Strange”, anyone?). So many songs on Stuck on Beta start with an undeniable guitar riff and go from there–the especially Guided by Voices-tinged “Prank Editions”, the chopping-starting of “Take It Out on Me”, the somersaulting solo of “Sidewalk Champagne”, the big, meaty power chords of “Flushing James”. Sowash plays saxophone on “Noble Harper”, which is pretty weird, but that’s a pretty weird and chilly song even without the saxophone, so the Smug Brothers were onto something with that choice. They procure an actual string section (well, violinist Sam Kim and Lung’s Kate Wakefield on cello) for “Cheers to Everything We Used to Do”, but they don’t dwell on the bite-sized balladry, as then it’s back to the grind for two more unflagging mid-tempo indie rockers. Up, up we go now. (Bandcamp link)

Career Woman – Lighthouse

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Pop punk, power pop, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Hit and Run

It’s strange to call the debut album from a twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter as “long-awaited”, but when you’ve been putting out music since you were fourteen, I guess it makes some sense. Melody Caudill started releasing songs on her own as Career Woman in Los Angeles in 2018, and has continued to do so as she’s moved to Santa Cruz for college, signed to Lauren Records (who put out the 2023 Grapevine EP and everything she’s done since), and put together a full Career Woman band (that’d be guitarist Allen Moreno, bassist Joey Chavez, and drummer Jackson Felton). I had previously only really been familiar with Caudill via her two collaborations with blog favorite Pacing–the excellent one-off single “Boyfriends” (which gets re-recorded for Lighthouse) and “New Song with Mel” from this year’s Songs mini-album. I suppose I was expecting Career Woman to sound more or less like Pacing’s anti-folk/bedroom pop sound, but that’s not what Career Woman LP1, Lighthouse, does at all. These songs are massive and polished, gigantic indie pop rock anthems that balance the clear might of the Career Woman Band with the just-as-obvious spotlight on Caudill herself (and it’s a truly collaborative enterprise that’s led to the songs ending up this way, as Felton is credited with arranging them and Moreno with recording them).

Lighthouse is world-conquering music. It’s the sound of a young songwriter and band excitedly reaching new heights together. Career Woman certainly aren’t the first band to put alt-country, Phoebe Bridgers-core indie pop, power pop, pop punk, and emo into a blender, but listening to Lighthouse is to be taken in by a powerful universality that can only really be achieved by saying “fuck it” and just putting everything “you” that you can fit into your music. “Piano Song” is “college rock” in a literal, messy sense, “Can You Tell Me?” really gains something from Chavez’s leading bassline, “Nosebleed” bounces along awkwardly but gracefully somehow nonetheless, “Hit and Run” is restless to the point of catastrophe (“This morning, we fucked up / And not Walgreens, Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart could pick us back up” might be my favorite lyric on this entire album). These are Lighthouse’s “anthems” (the re-recorded version of “Boyfriends”, which I’ve written about plenty before but sounds every bit as sharp and bittersweet as a power pop song, also qualifies)–but there’s more to Career Woman here between the power balladry of “Mel’s Drive In” and the sudden restraint of the record’s final three songs. I can confirm that Lighthouse sounds great in the car, but if you have somewhere to be you might not want to place yourself in the hands of a record that so confidently proclaims that it doesn’t know where it’s going to end up. (Bandcamp link)

Lùlù – Lùlù

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Howlin Banana/Taken by Surprise/Dangerhouse Skylab
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Tous les Etes

Hey, we’ve got some French power pop on the blog today! I’ve written about my fair share of French bands in Pressing Concerns recently, and while groups like Cathedrale, EggS, and Pretty Inside can be described as some combination of “college rock”, “garage rock”, and “jangle pop”, the Lyon-Marseille-based Lùlù is something different. Led by vocalist Luc Simone and completed by bassist Sabrina Duval, guitarists Simon Perrin and Théo Serre, and drummer Fanny Bouland, the self-titled Lùlù debut album is power pop in its most freewheeling, energetically fun form. Simone and his collaborators gleefully roll around in the histories of garage rock and punk rock to make ten massively hooky rock and roll knockout punches. Far removed from the refined, cosmopolitan sound that I associated with French indie pop, Lùlù has more in common with Australian garage-power-poppers like The Unknowns and Romero, American retro-pop groups like Sheer Mag and Free Energy, and, honestly, even a little bit of the brighter side of melodic lifer punk rock groups (“orgcore”, as it’s called). The album artwork for Lùlù (a drawing by Simone) is perfect–it’s undeniably cartoony and it looks like it belongs in a different decade (though it’s hard to place which one, exactly), but there’s a clear edge to it nonetheless.

We might as well jump right in–it’s not like Lùlù are going to wait for us before kicking out some tunes. I should mention that Lùlù is entirely in sung in French, a language that I don’t speak but, as it turns out, actually sounds really good in power pop form. Lùlù kick off their first album with–what else?–a song called “Lùlù”, and they barrel through four minutes of rock-and-roll hooks that assure that their title-song lives up to their reputation (at least, the reputation that they’ll surely have after some more people hear Lùlù). “Lùlù” isn’t even the best part, though–I actually think that the two songs that follow it, the cowbell-heavy classic rock throwback “Ma Si Ma Io” and the earnest poppy punk rock of “Sonic, Lyon” are even better. If “Sogni d’Oro” is a little more subdued, Lùlù immediately come roaring back with “Tous les Etes” (the moment when the guitar riff suddenly kicks back in with about a minute left in the song might be my favorite moment on the entire record), and they never slow down again, as the entire second half of the album is made-up of quick-tempoed, guitar-showcase power pop rock and roll. You only need to sample a little bit of Lùlù to get what this band is capable of, but, if you’re like me, you certainly won’t want to stop there. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

New Playlist: May 2025

Hey folks! Below we have the May 2025 playlist here for you, featuring a bunch of great new music that’s either recently been featured on the blog or is appearing on the website for the first time. No matter what, everything here is quality and has that “Rosy Overdrive seal of approval”.

Labrador, Pacing, Friendship, The High Water Marks, and Now have two songs apiece on this playlist.

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (missing a song), BNDCMPR. 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.

“Dogs”, Cash Langdon
From Dogs (2025, Seasick/Well Kept Secret)

Some really solid stuff from Cash Langdon, Birmingham, Alabama’s finest purveyor of fuzzy alt-country rock with classic power pop sensibilities baked into the mix as well. “Dogs” is the title track to his latest album (which follows up 2022’s sublime Sinister Feeling), and what an introduction it is–nearly a minute of droning, clanging guitars and train horns, and another thirty seconds before Langdon’s voice jumps into the fray. In the wrong hands this could all be tedious, but there’s just enough of the ragged melodicism that marks the meat of “Dogs” to be found in this introduction to make it engaging and just the right amount of anticipatory.

“Changes”, Alien Boy
From You Wanna Fade? (2025, Get Better)

The people who love Alien Boy seem to really love Alien Boy. I can’t say that has ever described my relationship with the fuzzed-out Portland pop rock group, but their most recent album, You Wanna Fade?, is my favorite of theirs thus far, and songs like “Changes” certainly help me to understand their appeal. In some ways, “Changes” peaks right at the beginning–the reverb-y, dream poppy guitars and Sonia Weber’s earnest vocals kick things off before the full band kicks in to take us the rest of the way. Combine that with a few other admitted bangers (check out “Pictures of You”) and–well, while I’m not exactly on the Alien Boy train yet, I’m looking up routes and ticket prices.

“Dry Out in June”, Labrador
From My Version of Desire (2025, No Way of Knowing/Safe Suburban Home)

The latest album from Philadelphia alt-country concern Labrador, My Version of Desire, just casually has an all-time power pop song sitting pretty in the number two slot. Apparently “Dry Out in June” has been kicking around for the better part of the decade, but Labrador finally fully realize it here–they turn frontperson Pat King’s frantic, fumbling reaches towards sobriety into maximum pop rock and roll gold with everybody on handclaps, Kris Hayes on squealing lead guitar, and Ther’s Heather Jones delivering a knockout massive keyboard hook (it’s, like, the midpoint between Jason Isbell and Perennial that I probably wouldn’t expect anyone other than Labrador to hit). Read more about My Version of Desire here.

“Nothing! (I Wanna Do)”, Pacing
From Pl*net F*tness (2025, Asian Man)

Another month, another great new Pacing single. “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” was released (alongside another good one called “Uno!”) as part of the official announcement for the group’s Asian Man Records debut album, PL*NET F*TNESS, and it continues Katie McTigue and company’s ascent into a more polished and full-band-focused sound. It’s not as much of a blunt-force punch of the album’s first single and title track, but “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” (a “classic upbeat depression banger” according to McTigue) might actually be the catchier one. That’s Pacing’s version of a surf rock riff at the start of the song, and the pounding, brisk drum machine keeps McTigue hurrying along in her vocals even as the song trudges through (or perhaps revels in) monotony.

“Things I Do”, Pretty Rude
From Ripe (2025, SideOneDummy)

James Palko and Matt Cook are Pretty Rude, a new duo from New York who embrace power pop and catchy radio-ready alt-rock quite readily on their first album. Fuzzed-out power chords and hooky riffs, suave vocals, and even some classic rock guitar heroics mark Ripe, a record that, at its most immediate, is right up there with Supercrush and The Trend in terms of modern Weezer-inspired giant power pop. Sometimes their version of catchy rock music is limber and targeted, other times it’s a wall of sound that leans on some of Pretty Rude’s less “punk” influences, but Ripe establishes its own language soon enough. “Things I Do” comes cruising into the picture in the track number two slot, and its windows-down collapsing euphoria harbors what’s actually the sneakily best hook on Ripe (not that there isn’t quite a bit of competition). Read more about Ripe here.

“Nothing”, First Rodeo
From Rode Hard and Put Away Wet (2025, Bud Tapes)

Their new label Bud Tapes boasts that alt-country duo First Rodeo have “moved beyond genre constraints to explore collaborative songwriting and arranging” on their second album, Rode Hard and Put Away Wet–I’m not entirely sure what they mean by that, but there’s a song on this album where they’re basically rapping, so I can see from where they’re coming. “Nothing” is that song, coming out of nowhere with drum loops, “Steal My Sunshine”-esque guitars, and sung-spoken (very nearly rapped) vocals from Nathan Tucker and Tim Howe. It took me a bit of time to adjust to it, but I’m fairly certain that this nearly six-minute journey is a masterpiece and exactly what First Rodeo should be doing (in particular, the switch from Howe narrating the later verses to Tucker singing the hook is very inspired). Read more about Rode Hard and Put Away Wet here.

“Left That Party”, Grant Pavol
From Left That Party (2025, Sonder House)

January’s College was a foray into stripped-down, quiet folk music featuring viola from Sloppy Jane’s Isabella Bustanoby, but Left That Party–Grant Pavol’s second EP out of four planned ones for 2025–switches gears towards power pop and the hooky side of guitar-driven indie rock. The title track is worth the price of admission alone–Pavol and his rhythm section announce their new sound with fuzzed-out guitars, surf-rock backing vocals, handclaps, and a tractor trailer truck of a melody and hook. Pavol’s tale of an unfortunate night out (with the song’s title referring to what he should’ve done, with you) is the one that really earns the Tony Molina and Weezer references in the record’s bio, and Pavol does the power pop balancing act as a frontperson who’s in shit-eating-grin, out-of-his-depth mode thematically but suavely in command of the tight pop song at the same time. Read more about Left That Party here.

“Similar”, Push Puppets
From Tethered Together (2025, Flowering Tree)

I really like this one, and I’m not entirely sure why. Push Puppets are a group from Chicago, and frontperson Erich Specht says that their latest album, Tethered Together, takes inspiration from “the artistic excesses of the 70s”. “Similar” certainly does that–it sounds huge, an expansive orchestral indie-power-pop type thing with a killer refrain that the band don’t overuse. I think that Specht’s unusual writing is what makes this one so memorable–it’s not that strange for a songwriter to write about “universal connections”, but to turn the phrase “We’re similar / But not the same” into a huge anthemic refrain? There’s something weirdly religious about “Similar”, and Specht is always gesturing at something that he’s sure we’ll understand but I’m not sure we do (at least, not in a literal sense).

“Tree of Heaven”, Friendship
From Caveman Wakes Up (2025, Merge)

The more “anthemic”, immediately-gripping songs of 2022’s Love the Stranger are gone on Caveman Wakes Up, the latest album from Philadelphia supergroup Friendship–they’ve been replaced with ambient, vibes-based music, and the skills of Peter Gill, Jon Samuels, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary are put to a different kind of use. I’m not sure if Friendship ever quite “get it together” on Caveman Wakes Up, but there’s some livelier moments that do a little more damage on first glance–“Tree of Heaven” is one of those, relying on a pained, worried guitar riff and clipped lyrics from frontperson Dan Wriggins, daring to look backwards for seconds at a time before coming up for air (“You know you changed me, babe” sums it all up). The hardiness of the titular tree has made it both the bane of countless arborists and landscapers as well as inspiring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; like the memories hovering in the song, it’s a blessing and a curse. Read more about Caveman Wakes Up here.

“Peonies”, Rodeo Boys
From Junior (2025, Don Giovanni)

Coming not so long after their debut album, 2023’s Home Movies, Junior is the classic leveling-up sophomore LP–Rodeo Boys enlisted The Menzingers’ Tom May to record it, and it’s hard to argue with what the Midwestern punks put to tape with him. Junior balances “polished” with “ragged”–frontperson Tiff Hannay’s impactful vocals (they’re always “giving their all” in that department) collide with huge-sounding, shined-up guitars, initiating some sort of chemical reaction the final product of which is a forty-minute cathartic punk rock record. My favorite track on the album, “Peonies”, kicks itself off with just Hannay delivering a dark and huge melody over electric guitar chords, which is a big “hell yes” moment in my book–and the rest of the song lives up to that exciting beginning. Read more about Junior here.

“The Works”, The High Water Marks
From Consult the Oracle (2025, Meritorio)

Consult the Oracle is business as usual at this point–a dozen indie power pop songs recalling both co-leader Hilarie Sidney’s previous band (The Apples in Stereo) and early High Water Marks material completed in a little over half an hour, featuring cameos from notable names like Rebecca Cole (Wild Flag, Pavement, The Minders) and Jennifer Baron (The Ladybug Transistor, The Garment District), among others. I don’t take Consult the Oracle for granted, though. After all, how could I do such a thing with an album that has highs as high as “The Works”, which is an absolute masterclass in the usage of power pop guitar riffs and handclaps? Read more about Consult the Oracle here.

“Grey to Green”, Strange Devotion
From A Demonstration of Devotion (2025, Fabulous Things)

The debut EP from London’s Strange Devotion is a well-informed and trickily-difficult-to-categorize record; there’s certainly a post-punk and even goth darkness hovering over these four songs, but it’s still a guitar-led experience and the six-strings feel equally informed by jangle pop and C86-associated indie pop as by these greyer areas. The single most thrilling moment on A Demonstration of Devotion for me is the beginning of the second song, “Grey to Green”–out of nowhere, Strange Devotion begin to sound like a classic Flying Nun/Dunedin Sound guitar pop group, the guitars running in a melodic circle and the synths taking on a Clean-like organ quality. “Grey to Green” resolves back into synth-y post-punk eventually, but the jangly catchiness is still there. Read more about A Demonstration of Devotion here.

“Stop Lion 2”, Mourning [A] BLKstar featuring Lee Bains III
From Flowers for the Living (2025, Don Giovanni)

Seven-piece Cleveland “Afrofuturist collective” Mourning [A] BLKstar are a little more sprawling and slow-moving on the forty-five minute Flowers for the Living than on their last LP. “Stop Lion 2” is, on its surface, quite simple, but the first song on Flowers for the Living is (perhaps appropriately) hard to categorize. There’s a drum machine beat, gospel ambience, funk bass, and piercing trumpet–it’s not particularly busy, but it doesn’t slot neatly into any of the boxes evoked by those pieces. Oh, and there’s guest vocals from Lee Bains III of the great southern rock group Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires (who’ve toured with Mourning [A] BLKstar and share a label with them); the southern rocker really pushes his vocals to fit in on the track, but something tells me that he didn’t have to try that hard given his background. Read more about Flowers for the Living here.

“Circles”, Artificial Go
From Musical Chairs (2025, Feel It)

Musical Chairs recalls plenty of offbeat, strange guitar pop artists of previous decades, from Flying Nun Records in New Zealand to The Raincoats in England to the general vibe of Athens, Georgia in the early 1980s. Angie Willcutt, Artificial Go’s vocalist and lyricist, is pretty clearly one of a kind–not content to simply compliment the tuneful instrumentals that the trio whip up, her cutting remarks, non-sequiturs, and frequently…unique delivery are the defining features of Musical Chairs. That isn’t to denigrate the rest of the band–her performances would be wasted without the talents of a group that can turn “Circles” into fluffy, bounding jangly indie pop (the way Willcutt says various dog breeds in the verses is the first thing that stuck with me in this one, but that chorus is the real gem of the song). Read more about Musical Chairs here.

“Rat Man”, Festiva
From Everything in Moderation (2025, Repeating Cloud)

A few members of Portland, Maine’s Festiva have played in Rory Strong’s band, and the most recent Festiva album, Everything in Moderation, might be the missing link between the emo-punk-tinged songwriting of Rory Strong and the guitar pop that more frequently characterizes their label Repeating Cloud’s roster. Carter Arena-Bruce is certainly an interesting writer, but the punchy garage rock instrumentals ensure that the vocals and lyrics don’t have to carry the entire record anyway. The trio clean up their sound just enough on “Rat Man” to pull off something a little dynamic and post-punk-influenced–there’s, like, fucked up Elvis Costello and surf rock in this one. It’s definitely a highlight. Read more about Everything in Moderation here.

“The Ballad of Joy Bang”, Now
From Now Does the Trick (2025, K/Perennial)

The second album from the difficultly-named Bay Area trio Now and their debut for their new label is called Now Does the Trick, and it’s a different beast than their debut but no less strong of an LP. The psychedelic, kraut-y mud of 2023’s And Blue Space Is Burning Noon is turned down and the jangle pop guitars and hooks are turned up–Now sounds like they’re aiming for the little big-time here, hitting the same highs as their now-labelmates Sharp Pins and The Smashing Times. Plenty of these hits are right up front–the lurching acoustic guitar and pop rock charms of “The Ballad of Joy Bang” are quite exuberant, serving as the perfect opener for the next chapter of Now. Read more about Now Does the Trick here.

“It’s Been a Landline Kind of Winter”, Hamlet
From Light Under Repair (2025, Subjangle)

Hamlet’s Chris Wales emailed me his latest EP and mentioned that he found my blog through my writing about lo-fi power pop group Mythical Motors; judging from Light Under Repair, that seems about right. Wales leads a trio from Cincinnati (if you doubt their southern Ohio credentials, let me tell you that Kate Wakefield from Lung plays cello on a song on their new record and Wales plays in a Guided by Voices tribute band) with jangle pop and power pop coursing through its veins; my favorite song from Light Under Repair is “It’s Been a Landline Kind of Winter”, which lets the choppy power chords lead the way in the verses and brings bright “jangle pop” guitars in the refrain (sample lyric: “It’s been a four-track kind of winter / My drum machine lost one arm”).

“Disney Girls”, Kilynn Lunsford
From Promiscuous Genes (2025, Feel It)

Promiscuous Genes is on the more oddball side of the Feel It Records spectrum, choosing to roll with a rank mix of skronky no wave, primordial funk crawling, creepy spoken-word, unusual synth odysseys, rhythmic art punk, and, well, more. Promiscuous Genes is hardly the kind of record that those looking for catchy, pop-fluent rock music would gravitate towards, but those willing to listen in on what Kilynn Lunsford (with the help of longtime collaborator Donald Bruno) is attempting to communicate will find something striking nonetheless. I have chosen Lunsford’s version of “Disney Girls” by The Beach Boys for this playlist, and how could I not–the two of them turn the piano ballad into a nervous post-punk toe-tapper featuring prominent use of some kind of referee whistle. Read more about Promiscuous Genes here.

“Unpopular Parts of a Pig”, Mclusky
From The World Is Still Here and So Are We (2025, Ipecac)

Well, yeah, of course I love Mclusky Do Dallas (The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire might actually be slightly better, but we’re not here to have this conversation today). I don’t subscribe to the train of thought that reunion albums are a serious threat to a “band’s legacy”, but I do find myself susceptible to the idea of unrealistic expectations and subsequent disappointment. This is all to say–I did my best to approach the first Mclusky album in over twenty years, The World Is Still Here and So Are We, on its own terms and not try to expect another Do Dallas. “Unpopular Parts of a Pig”, the opening track on the album, is a really great garage rock song that kind of sounds like Mclusky but doesn’t sound like a band trying too hard to retrace their steps. It’s still all kind of fucked, of course.

“Wilt”, Press Club
From To All the Ones That I Love (2025)

New to me, Press Club are a Melbourne-based quartet (vocalist Natalie Foster, guitarist Greg Rietwyk, bassist Iain Macrae, and drummer Frank Lees) who’ve toured their home country and Europe extensively and have just put out their fourth album, To All the Ones That I Love. I’ve seen Press Club referred to as a “punk band”, and maybe they were at first, but To All the Ones That I Love is something different–heart-on-sleeve, wide-open, power pop, heartland rock, Big Indie, “The Beths-core”, whatever you want to call it. “Wilt”, my favorite song on the album, just flat-out rules–it’s sparkling, soaring, ambitious guitar pop with a chorus that goes for it and lands it.

“1997, the End or the Beginning”, Thanks for Coming
From The IRS No Longer Has My Address, and Neither Do I (2025)

I don’t care anymore. I’m fully and loudly proclaiming that Thanks for Coming is my favorite Rachel Brown project. I’m aware that I might be alone in preferring them over indie darlings Water from Your Eyes (I don’t even think Brown themself would agree with me), but there’s just something to Brown’s less-frequent-these-days but always-welcome missives in the form of quick, earnest, and typically oddly catchy bedroom pop. A new EP entitled The IRS No Longer Has My Address, and Neither Do I was a nice surprise, and my favorite track on it, “1997, the End or the Beginning” needs little more than some frantically-strummed guitar, Brown backing themself on vocals, and some well-timed angst to work.

“Super Dilla Cancer Killah”, Alex Orange Drink
From Victory Lap (#23) (2025, Million Stars)

Alex Zarou Levine didn’t choose to pigeonhole himself as the punk rock musician who writes about his experiences living with and battling various medical ailments; he’s just attempting to live his life, I think. 2021’s Everything Is Broken, Maybe That’s O.K. is about Levine’s long-term metabolic genetic disorder homocystinuria, and this year’s Victory Lap (#23) came about after the So So Glos frontperson was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma and subsequently went through intense chemotherapy and radiation treatments. As it happens, Levine’s stepmother was also being treated for cancer at the same time, and this leads to my favorite moment on the record, “Super Dilla Cancer Killah”. I didn’t quite understand this song until I did a bit more research; Levine writes that he was listening to 90s gangster rap while undergoing treatment and that “Super Dilla Cancer Killah” conveys the necessary defiant optimism in an “almost cartoon-like fashion”; his stepmother, Sadhis Rivas, sings the chorus with Levine and the outro in her native Spanish.

“Mist (Surrounds Me)”, Living Dream
From Absolute Devotion (2025, Inscrutable)

Living Dream are keeping the dream of hazy, dreamy guitar pop alive in none other than Indianapolis, Indiana. While their peers in Good Flying Birds got a bit of attention at the beginning of this year, Living Dream seems determined to continue to fly under the radar with their psychedelic, murky take on jangle pop, as heard on their brand-new EP Absolute Devotion. And yet, “Mist (Surrounds Me)” is an undeniable pop song, and I think you all should hear it. The mysterious group honestly might even be a little more accessible here than on their 2023 self-titled debut album (which snuck onto my year-end list and has only risen in my esteem since), so now’s a great time to get on board the Living Dream train.

“Resident Evil”, Friendship
From Caveman Wakes Up (2025, Merge)

Half of Caveman Wakes Up feels like it could be the “climax” of the album, and “Resident Evil” is one of the strongest contenders. It’s a raw one, and it takes a while to really boot up. Dan Wriggins is “on one” from the start, of course, but it’s not until the ninety-second mark when he exclaims “Some shithead in my room / Playing Resident Evil,” with all his strength that the song really makes it mark. Your mileage may vary on that line, I suppose–I think it’s brilliant in three or four different ways, and adds a bit of surrealism to the otherwise fairly brutal self-excoriation. Read more about Caveman Wakes Up here.

“Company’s Eyes”, Ryan Allen
From Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge (2025, Setterwind)

Longtime Michigan indie rocker Ryan Allen played and recorded almost everything on Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge himself, and he calls it a record for “that 15-year-old kid inside of me”–formative alt-rock groups like Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr., and Swervedriver are mentioned as influences. Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge is above all else a power pop album, and the names that come to mind are the ones who’ve made great records in this field–Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, Tommy Keene, Fountains of Wayne, Daniel Romano. Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge has its share of gorgeous jangle pop, and “Company’s Eyes” is perhaps the best example of it. The instrumental is soaring, and the awkward corporate preoccupations (the title is preceded by “fail in the” when it appears in the chorus) really remind me of the aforementioned Fountains of Wayne. Read more about Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge here.

“Better Life”, My Raining Stars
From Momentum (2025, Shelflife/Too Good To Be True)

Another new record from a longtime indie pop musician, eh? Well, let’s see what My Raining Stars (the nearly three-decade-old solo project from Thierry Haliniak, formerly of Nothing to Be Done) has to offer on their latest album, Momentum. Haliniak claims by equally influenced by Creation Records and Sarah Records; my favorite song on it, “Better Life”, hews towards the former. It’s got a nice beat to it and a psychedelic streak; it’s not exactly full-on Madchester/“alternative dance”, but it’s certainly close enough for me.

“Sunny <3”, Pacing
From Hatemail (2022)

I’m throwing an old Pacing song on this playlist, too, because 1) I didn’t know Pacing when Hatemail came out and so I didn’t write about it then and 2) I got to see Pacing live recently and it was great (they were opening for Cheekface, who were also great) and they played this one. “Sunny <3” is a Pacing classic and certainly holds its own against the really great records that have followed since Hatemail came out; the anxiety, jealous, “fomo”, and obsession that shade Katie McTigue’s writing are all well-worn subjects for Pacing songs by now, but the bursting, floating refrain is evidence that Pacing, from the beginning, had designs greater than the lo-fi bedroom anti-folk sound they’re often reduced to in descriptions.

“Follow You Where You’re Talking”, Coffin Prick
From Loose Enchantment (2025, Temporal Drift)

Receiving help from members of Tuxedomoon, Tortoise, and LA Takedown (among others), the latest release from Ryan Weinstein’s shapeshifting Coffin Prick project is a slinky, wobbly, dubby collection of Los Angeles art rock and post-punk. Often danceable but rarely forthright about it, Loose Enchantment is a record that believes that having fun should be complicated. From the brightly-colored guitars that start off the album, it’s hard to tell where, exactly, Coffin Prick are going with all of this, but the rest of “Follow You Where You’re Talking” resolves this noise into a minimal post-punk bass riff and welcomes us to the Loose Enchantment show with a propulsive, low-end-led dance-punk introduction. Read more about Loose Enchantment here.

“Burn Me”, Salt
From The Books Are Blue (2025, ERASED! Tapes)

A demo version of “Burn Me” by Salt was featured on the True Names Trans Youth Emergency Project compilation that I wrote about last month; I didn’t talk about it at the time (in fairness, there were a lot of good songs to talk about on that one), but the studio version is out now (as part of a whole new Salt album, in fact!) and so we are hearing “Burn Me” as it was meant to be heard. The now Queens-based Salt goes way back in the world of lo-fi Philadelphia indie rock (they put out music on Sleeper Records alongside early stuff from Friendship, 2nd Grade, and Joey Nebulous) and it’s nice to get a new release from them; “Burn Me” has that mid-2010s kind of greyscale bedroom pop sound, the charms subtle but still very there.

“Casual Cruelty”, SAVAK
From SQUAWK! (2025, Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning)

A tight ten songs and thirty-five minutes, SQUAWK! finds the longtime indie rock veterans of SAVAK continuing to hammer out their by-now quite recognizable style of college rock, post-punk, and garage rock–tough but polished, familiar but surprising, catchy as ever. If SQUAWK! is on the whole a little bit trickier and thornier than their last couple of records, it’s not apparent from upbeat, rollicking highlights like “Casual Cruelty”, whose propulsive garage-y power pop might actually be the biggest “hit” on it. Read more about SQUAWK! here.

“Princess Road Surgery”, Alan Sparhawk & Trampled by Turtles
From Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles (2025, Sub Pop)

Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles is as tough of a listen as anyone familiar with the tragedy experienced by the former of the two artists would expect. An unlikely but ultimately very fitting team-up between two of Duluth’s most prominent acts, this album ends up synthesizing the glacial-paced, beautiful slowcore of the early work of Sparhawk’s Low and the more traditional folk music of Trampled by Turtles. “Princess Road Surgery” is, relatively speaking, one of the liveliest songs on the album–apparently it’s over a decade old, and Sparhawk had co-written it and played it in concert with his late wife and bandmate Mimi Parker in Low. It’s still heartbreaking, intentionally or otherwise (“So much for saving the world / I thought you’d make it for sure / Too much for one little girl”), and Trampled by Turtles’ unself-conscious folk dressings combined with Sparhawk’s strong voice helps it all kind of remind me of Richard Dawson, of all people.

“Pretty Eyes Lorraine”, Florry
From Sounds Like… (2025, Dear Life)

Florry bandleader Francie Medosch has recently moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, Vermont, but thankfully the band (whose members are already spread out between Pennsylvania and North Carolina) are still going strong and met up in Asheville to record Sounds Like… with Colin Miller. Medosch is a smart songwriter and lyricist, but Florry separate themselves from the alt-country pack by emphasizing the group jamming around their wise and trusting bandleader. Even when the music of Sounds Like… veers away from showiness, it’s still key in its success–see highlight “Pretty Eyes Lorraine”, where the band dial up a 70s-style pop rock sound that really goes well with Medosch’s (more emphasized than on most of the rest of the record) vocals. Read more about Sounds Like… here.

“FUA”, The Mary Column
From Very Sparrow (2025, Errol’s Hot Wax)

A jangle pop song called “Fuck You All”, huh? That’s got my attention. Jack Mellin played in the Glasgow indie pop group Spinning Coin in the late 2010s, and while I’m not sure if that band is defunct now, Mellin has gone ahead with a project called The Mary Column (which I initially thought was a new band but appears to actually predate Spinning Coin). Three-fourths of Spinning Coin contribute to Very Sparrow, a record that explores guitar pop both simple and streamlined and noisy and busy. “FUA” probably sports the best hook of the entire album–it’s simple and triumphant, conjuring up early Flying Nun-era noise pop in its blasts of tuneful noise. “Fuck you all / You’re all creeps / And you make my skin crawl / … / What’s it called / When all the creeps / Control the whole world?”–Mellin could be talking about any number of things here, but the fire these creeps have lit under The Mary Column burns all the brighter for it.

“People Like You and Me”, Labrador
From My Version of Desire (2025, No Way of Knowing/Safe Suburban Home)

Labrador bandleader Pat King has always been a vocal supporter of music far beyond his alt-country pigeonhole, and while I can’t say that, for instance, his love of metal is reflected in My Version of Desire, plenty of other threads are–power pop and college rock, certainly, as well as classic rock and 60s pop and soul and Roy Orbison (and so on). You’ll find laid-back AOR and soulful guitar pop on My Version of Desire, but Labrador are still plenty capable of knocking out streamlined pop rock–see first-half highlight “People Like You And Me”, whose simplicity has its own breezy charms, too (the first lines: “People like you and me / Will never smash guitars on stage”). Read more about My Version of Desire here.

“(My Girl’s a) Hologram”, The Rabies
From Dumb It Down (2025, Presidential/Bolt)

Dumb It Down is the first-ever Rabies full-length album, some forty years in the making–their initial incarnation ended in the early 1980s with only a single and an EP to their name, but the New York power pop/punk quartet reformed at the beginning of this decade. A new recording of that debut single, “(My Girl’s a) Hologram”, opens the album, and it’s easy to hear how this one (via a re-pressing) kickstarted the modern Rabies revival–it’s awesome Ramones-y surf-punk that plenty of new bands still love to make, and thematically it remains wildly relevant today (perhaps even more so, weirdly enough). Read more about Dumb It Down here.

“Noise”, Forty Winks
From Love Is a Dog from Hell (2025, Crafted Sounds)

Based off of their debut EP, Love Is a Dog from Hell, I certainly can see why Crafted Sounds refers to their latest signee, Forty Winks, as “riff evangelists” and “zoomer rock”–they fall somewhere in between textured, shoegaze-originating experimentation and fuzzed-out rock and roll, eagerly mixing chaotic noise, roaring guitars, and pop hooks together in a brief but memorable package. “Noise”, an advance single and quite possibly the best pop song on the EP, is saved for last–it comes to save the day with a huge noise-pop (no pun intended) conclusion. Punchy and fuzzed-out and delivering the goods in a straightforward way that Forty Winks hadn’t quite hinted at up until now on their debut EP, “Noise” is another reason to keep this band on our collective radar. Read more about Love Is a Dog from Hell here.

“I Just Want You (To Show Me How)”, Daphne’s Demise
From The Heart Is a Garden (2025, Orange Horse/Perpetual Doom)

The latest pickup from cult cosmic country record label Perpetual Doom is a low-key but quality addition to their roster. Zoë S-Bouffard has been making dreamy, folky indie rock from Sarnia, Ontario as Daphne’s Demise since the beginning of this decade, but their latest EP, The Heart Is a Garden, showcases how the project has grown into sporting “a rotating cast of collaborators and a full-band studio sound”. My favorite song on The Heart Is a Garden, “I Just Want You (To Show Me How)”, certainly doesn’t suffer from too many cooks or too much polish–somewhere between vintage, jangly dream pop and the laid-back side of Yo La Tengo, “I Just Want You (To Show Me How)” is gorgeous, plain and simple, and a stark display of S-Bouffard’s talents.

“1 Way to Go”, Now
From Now Does the Trick (2025, K/Perennial)

Now Does the Trick is a jangle/power pop album made by a bunch of weirdos, and the second half of the record in particular feels like it has its third eye on occasional lookout. That being said, Now are still good for no-strings-attached punchy power pop anthems even in the thick of their increasingly-recognizable “Now mire”; “1 Way to Go”, the penultimate song on the record, certainly does the trick. Vocalist and guitarist Will Smith really does continue to remind me of a young Scott Miller on songs like this, and the eager, sloppy, but always held-together instrumental of the song brings an unvarnished kind of excitement often missing from vintage-looking indie rock bands. Read more about Now Does the Trick here.

“Consult the Oracle”, The High Water Marks
From Consult the Oracle (2025, Meritorio)

In between the louder moments of Consult the Oracle are the songs that give the album its personality, the ones that make it a distinct entity from stuff like 2023’s fuzz-hook-fest Your Next Wolf. The title track certainly qualifies as one of these–it’s one of the catchiest songs on Consult the Oracle, yes, but instead of barreling right out of the gate, it builds a bit to its fuzz-pop refrain. The whole song is a lovely piece of twee pop featuring co-bandleaders Per Ole Bratset and Hilarie Sidney trading off lead vocals, an almost nursery-rhyme-like verse melody skipping lightly into the distorted guitars and nonetheless-still-saccharine melodies in the chorus. Read more about Consult the Oracle here.

“Multitap”, Captain Frederickson
From Introverts Unite (2025)

“I have a Multitap, but I don’t have multi-friends”–Jesus, that might be the saddest lyric I’ve heard this year. It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Buffalo-based noise rock/post-punk/drum-machine-hop duo Captain Frederickson (one of the first bands I ever wrote about on this blog), but they’re in rare form on Introverts Unite, pushing lo-fi, abrasive noise pop rock songs about topics including the Dyson Airblade, the mental health costs of driving a minivan, and extreme hoarding. I wouldn’t call Introverts Unite a concept album, but “Multitap” is perhaps the other side of the coin of the album’s introvert-call-to-arms title track; Captain Frederickson reach into their bag of tricks and pull out some mournful British jangly indie pop to maximize the emotional heft of “Multitap”, in which its narrator realizes that the titular contraption for playing video games with others will “sit and rust” on a shelf, unused forever.

Pressing Concerns: John Galm, Now, Grant Pavol, The Lilas

It’s the first Pressing Concerns of the week! We’re kicking June off with new albums from John Galm and Now and new EPs from Grant Pavol and The Lilas. Check them out below and find something great!

John Galm – River of Blood

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Imlu

Philadelphia’s John Galm has had a one-of-a-kind music career over the past decade and a half or so. He cemented his place in emo revival history as the frontperson of the band Snowing, who were one-album-in-2010-and-done (aside from some miscellaneous recordings and not-infrequent reunion shows), but the music Galm’s been involved with since then has tilted away from this starting point. I’ve written about a good deal of it on this blog before, specifically the hazy, dreamy bedroom pop of his quasi-solo project Bad Heaven Ltd. and the loud, shoegaze-y fuzz rock of Mt. Worry (also featuring Noah and Rowan Roth of Hell Trash). Galm’s only solo album before now was 2014’s Sky of No Stars, released on the defunct Broken World Media imprint, so it’s kind of curious that he decided to revert back to releasing music under his own name for River of Blood. Inspired by a much-needed new sobriety, the departure of half of Mt. Worry to Chicago and the subsequent icing of the band, and Galm spending more time at his mother’s house in Lehigh Valley (where he grew up), River of Blood is a rich and heavy folk album that certainly earns the “John Galm album” designation, and then some.

River of Blood came together piece by piece–some was recorded at Galm’s mother’s house, some of it at his apartment in Philadelphia, and he eventually traveled to Chicago to add more parts by Noah and Rowan Roth to the recordings. These slow, stark indie folk songs remind me a bit of the quieter sides of Noah Roth’s solo work, as well as a lot of notable “indie folk” names from the past few decades (of the ones that Count Your Lucky Stars mentions, Mount Eerie is probably the most accurate, but I also hear Galm’s stated goal of incorporating moves from “higher-produced indie rock records” like Phoebe Bridgers’ work, which works in spite of–or perhaps because of–the economical recording setup). This is a record that is best experienced as a single piece, I think, and it’s hard for me to single out specific tracks–yes, the eight-minute opening title track and the six-minute “Into the Fire” are breathtaking folk-art-rock canvasses, but I don’t think they’re any more complete than the quieter tracks that bridge the space in between them. The warbly “Darktown” reminds me a little bit of Bad Heaven Ltd., but on the whole River of Blood is a much more direct and cleaner-sounding album. The album ends with a quiet, hushed cover of “Stand by Me”–somewhat amusingly, the biography for the album says that “some of [Galm’s] close confidants balked at the idea” of closing River of Blood with it (Noah? Was that you?), but the song is there for him, much like River of Blood itself is for John Galm (and, now, us). (Bandcamp link)

Now – Now Does the Trick

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: 1 Way 2 Go

I remember when I first heard of San Francisco Bay Area guitar pop group Now–the end of 2023, when Andy Pastalaniec of Chime School (one of my favorite groups of the very large and incestuous Bay Area indie pop scene) listed their album And Blue Space Is Burning Noon as one of his favorites of that year. I loved And Blue Space Is Burning Noon immediately; I wrote that vocalist and guitarist Will Smith “sounds like a young Scott Miller” but that Now is “groovier, more psychedelic, and…more rubbery” than most of the vintage college rock bands they evoke. Smith (who has played in the band Cindy), drummer Oli Lipton (another Cindy contributor), and bassist Hannah Forrester (of Thunder Boys) got scooped up by Perennial and K Records not long after I found And Blue Space Is Burning Noon–the trio’s second album and debut for their new label is called Now Does the Trick, a different beast than their debut but no less strong of an LP. The psychedelic, kraut-y mud of And Blue Space Is Burning Noon is turned down and the jangle pop guitars and hooks are turned up–Now sound like they’re aiming for the little big-time here, hitting the same highs as their now-labelmates Sharp Pins and The Smashing Times.

Now are still a bunch of weirdos, though–lo-fi, sparkling jangle can’t paper over all of that. Even though the dozen songs of Now Does the Trick total just a bit over a half-hour, it feels like they encompass so much more than that; Now eat their craft-sharpening cake and get to keep some skeletons in their collective closet, too. Plenty of the hits are right up front–the lurching acoustic guitar and pop rock charms of “The Ballad of Joy Bang” are quite exuberant, “Careening” is a jangle pop version of the titular action, and if “A Hat to Match” has just a bit of melancholy to it by comparison, the rays are still shining through the clouds. Around the middle of Now Does the Trick is something called “Art Forger” that shifts the feel a little bit into dream pop and unhurried exploration, and while plenty of punchy power pop tunes follow it (check out “What Happened to Johnny?” and the penultimate track, “1 Way to Go”), it does feel like the second half has its third eye on occasional lookout. Not everything is as curious as the molasses-pop “Morning Trains Like Mirrors”, but the jangle of songs like “Join Our Treasure Hunt” and “M. Mather” have a bit of that increasingly-recognizable “Now mire” on them. I was pretty quick to proclaim Now as some of the best of the Bay after hearing And Blue Space Is Burning Noon, and Now Does the Trick keeps them right on track. (Bandcamp link)

Grant Pavol – Left That Party

Release date: May 9^th
Record label: Sonder House
Genre: Power pop, fuzz rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Left That Party

We’re back for round two of the Grant Pavol EP experience! The New York-based musician (perhaps most well-known for his time playing with indie pop musician Shamir) declared an intent to release four four-song solo EPs over the course of 2025, and he’s on track to hit his benchmarks with two of them out in sixth months. January’s College was a foray into stripped-down, quiet folk music featuring viola from Sloppy Jane’s Isabella Bustanoby, but Left That Party switches gears towards power pop and the hooky side of guitar-driven indie rock. Recorded with the rhythm section of Bustanoby on bass and Anya Good (George Clanton, Grumpy) on drums, Left That Party is much more “in the Rosy Overdrive wheelhouse” than College was, so it’s not exactly surprising that I really enjoy the direction Pavol’s taken his music with these songs. It’s easy enough to cite Tony Molina, Weezer, and Elliott Smith as influences (which Pavol, who is notably also a music publicist, does), but Pavol drops into the world of guitar pop with an eager studiousness that feels quite distinct from any kind of genre tourism–this kind of stuff feels just as dear to Pavol as the folk music of College came off.

“Left That Party” is worth the price of admission alone–Pavol and his rhythm section announce their new sound with fuzzed-out guitars, surf-rock backing vocals, handclaps, and a tractor trailer truck of a melody and hook. Pavol’s tale of an unfortunate night out (with the song’s title referring to what he should’ve done, with you) is the one that really earns those Molina and Weezer namedrops, and Pavol does the power pop balancing act as a frontperson who’s in shit-eating-grin, out-of-his-depth mode thematically but suavely in command of the tight pop song at the same time. Left That Party reminds me more than a bit of 2nd Grade (a band pulling from the same influences as Pavol is here), and the wilting, wistful jangle of “He Ain’t Right” is probably the moment that hews closest to Peter Gill’s power pop project. The second half of Left That Party is a bit less immediate, but the hooks are still there–“Don Juan”, the shortest song on the album, is ninety seconds of bummer pop brilliance that’s up there with other modern underappreciated humble pop groups like Buddie and Brian Mietz, and “The World at My Feet” jettisons the rhythm section entirely for an acoustic track with a little rootsiness that’s the clearest link between College and this record. I still think “The World at My Feet” belongs on Left That Party, though–for an eight minute EP, Pavol really is able to stretch out his definition of power pop to surprising lengths. (Bandcamp link)

The Lilas – Vaquero Tropical

Release date: April 25^th
Record label: Epicentro
Genre: Surf rock, psychedelic pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Marina

Hey, they’ve got surf rock in Guatemala now, that’s pretty cool! I’m not familiar at all with the current state of Central American indie rock (unless I’m forgetting something, I’m pretty sure this is the first act from somewhere between Mexico and Ecuador I’ve written about in Pressing Concerns), but I did have the good fortunate to hear The Lilas, a one-man-band led by Sebastián Villatoro, so I can tell you about one good indie rock act currently active down there. Vaquero Tropical (that’s “tropical cowboy”) appears to be the second EP from The Lilas, following a debut in 2020 called Motel Couleur. Things had been a bit quiet on the Lilas front ever since Motel Ceouleur, but last year’s non-album single “El Dorado” signaled a return from Villatoro, who linked up with a musician named Bumont who helped produce, mix, and master five new Lilas songs released as Vaquero Tropical. The latest entry into The Lilas’ discography is a fifteen-minute exploration of slow, languid guitar pop that’s a bit dreamy, a bit surfy, and a bit psychedelic. This kind of music can fade into the background, but Villatoro’s take on it is resistant to this for several reasons–his deep, clipped-crooner voice is front-and-center, the guitars are crisp and clear, and there’s no percussion anywhere on the record, forcing us to listen to the six-string interplay around which The Lilas build these songs.

The opening title track to Vaquero Tropical is an instrumental, starting things off with a creeping, noirish bassline that slinks and eventually struts over two and a half minutes. “Marina” continues the relaxed crawl and eventually adds Villatoro’s voice into the fray, singing in a casual, loping way to match the song’s infinitely patient energy. The slightly gothic balladry of “La Mala Sangre” is the most surprising thing on Vaquero Tropical (up until that point, at least), and while “Culebra Coral” isn’t as shocking, the dark, rushing surf rock instrumental keeps the momentum going strong into the EP’s home stretch. If there’s a “hit” to Vaquero Tropical, it’s probably closing track “Ojos Tristes”–whereas the rest of the EP is direct and clean, it’s the one track where The Lilas indulge in just a little bit of trebly, time-warped haziness in the production. The lo-fi, minimalist jazz-pop track (“a confessional bolero”, the bio calls it) is the one song on Vaquero Tropical that might be able to sneak itself onto a coffeeshop playlist somewhere, although Villatoro’s talk-singing confessions might lead to one’s mind drifting away from composing emails and drinking a caffeinated beverage should it make it there. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Labrador, SAVAK, Foxwarren, Lung

The Thursday Pressing Concerns this week brings us four albums coming out tomorrow (May 30th), specifically new LPs from Labrador, SAVAK, Foxwarren, and Lung. Check them out below, and also catch up on this week’s early blog posts (a brief remembrance of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas on Monday, a Pressing Concerns featuring Friendship, COR1, Credit, and Jonathan Rundman on Tuesday) if you missed them, too.

Labrador – My Version of Desire

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: No Way of Knowing/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dry Out in June

Sometime in the chilly winter of early 2023, I wrote about Hold the Door for Strangers, an album from a Philadelphia alt-country group called Labrador. After years of being a New York-based solo project for singer-songwriter Pat King, the bandleader reinvented his project as a “lumbering, Neil Young-inspired” five-piece country rock group, and King began working on a follow-up album almost immediately afterwards. My Version of Desire, the latest Labrador album, features a retooled lineup–they’re down to a trio, with King joined by newcomers Will Hochgertel on bass and Steve Kurtz on drums (although former full-time member Kris Hayes does play guitar on the majority of these songs). Labrador and Hayes trekked over to So Big Auditory to have Heather Jones of Ther record these nine songs (Jones also plays keyboard on a few songs), and together they all help the Labrador project take a big, satisfying step forward. King has always been a vocal supporter of music far beyond his alt-country pigeonhole, and while I can’t say that, for instance, his love of metal is reflected in My Version of Desire, plenty of other threads are–power pop and college rock, certainly, as well as classic rock and 60s pop and soul and Roy Orbison (and so on).

Hold the Door for Strangers had an all-timer power pop song that stood out among the rest of the record in its opening track, “State Line to Eagleville”; My Version of Desire has one too in “Dry Out in June”, sitting pretty in the number two slot. Apparently this one’s been kicking around for the better part of the decade, but Labrador finally fully realize it here–they turn King’s frantic, fumbling reaches towards sobriety into maximum pop rock and roll gold with everybody on handclaps, Hayes on squealing lead guitar, and Jones delivering a knockout massive keyboard hook (it’s, like, the midpoint between Jason Isbell and Perennial that I probably wouldn’t expect anyone other than Labrador to hit). I don’t want to get hung up on one song, as great as it is–we’ve got a lot of other good moments on My Version of Desire’s lightning-quick thirty minutes to acknowledge. The driving, Westerberigan college rock of “Heavy Hearts” brightens up the record’s B-side in the one moment that rivals “Dry Out in June” in pure power pop excess, but the streamlined pop rock of “People Like You And Me” has its own breezy charms, too. Elsewhere on My Version of Desire, Labrador make turns (of varying subtlety) to laid-back AOR (opening track “Someday I’ll Pay”), the electric country rock of their previous album (“Every Day Is Something Different”), and lilting, soulful guitar pop (the title track). There’s a Labrador song for most moods and occasions here–and listening to the brief, incredibly tight record front beginning to end is both of those things in its own right. (Bandcamp link)

SAVAK – SQUAWK!

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Casual Cruelty

Brooklyn’s SAVAK have been putting out records at a steady clip since their debut in 2016, and things have been no different as of late–2024’s Flavors of Paradise is barely a year old now, as is the split EP they released with France’s Contractions around the same time. It’s no surprise, then, that the trio (founding co-bandleaders Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski, plus longtime drummer Matt Schulz) are back already with the seventh SAVAK album, SQUAWK!. Seemingly recorded piecemeal (some songs recorded by Habibion and Jaworski themselves, with Guided by Voices’ Travis Harrison, among others, credited on other tracks), SQUAWK! features a bunch of guest musicians–most notably bassist Matt Hunter and drummer Jeff Gensterblum, but also Maria Marzaioli of the much-missed Slum of Legs on violin for “Your Mother Is a Mirror”. I’m pleased to report, however, that SAVAK still sound exactly like themselves here. A tight ten songs and thirty-five minutes (plus the two Contractions split EP songs as digital bonus tracks), the longtime indie rock veterans continue to hammer out their by-now quite recognizable style of college rock, post-punk, and garage rock–tough but polished, familiar but surprising, catchy as ever.

“The Moon Over Marine Park” is a surging opening track that’s just as strong as “Up with the Sun” from last year, turning SAVAK’s garage-post-punk sound into something quite agreeable without losing its agitated center. If SQUAWK! is on the whole a little bit trickier and thornier than their last couple of records, it’s not apparent from the album’s opening stretch–“Child’s Pose” and “Talk to Some People” both bring vintage, somewhat jangly SAVAK-pop to the forefront, and Will Fitzpatrick of Good Grief and Witching Waves (and a former SAVAK bassist) calls “No Man’s Island” “a a Lou Reed/Velvets vibe” in the record’s bio (he’s onto something with that). The second half of SQUAWK! brings a couple of new SAVAK rippers in “Casual Cruelty” (propulsive garage-y power pop that might actually be the biggest “hit” here) and “Tomorrow and the Day After” (more mid-tempo, stuffed with melodic brilliance). First, though, SAVAK bridge the record’s two sides with a nearly ambient, hushed atmospheric piece called “American Vernacular” (it still sounds like a SAVAK song, but kind of inverted), and the group return to the “strange” for the record’s final two tracks. Marzaioli’s violin adds to the lost-in-time dream-like haze of “Your Mother Is a Mirror”, and “Empty Age” is SAVAK’s own entry into the New York electric noise rock collage tradition. If you’re already part of the SAVAK society, I doubt you’ll need more convincing that they’ve done it yet again–but there’s always room for more. (Bandcamp link)

Foxwarren – 2

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: ANTI-/Arts & Crafts
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, folk rock, dream pop, soft rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Listen2me

My familiarity with the increasingly-beloved Regina, Saskatchewan-based folk rock musician Andy Shauf is, admittedly, fairly limited. I heard his 2020 album The Skyline and absolutely loved the song “Try Again”, but the album as a whole didn’t stick with me all that much and I’d never dug further. Still, “Try Again” combined with co-signatures from plenty of people whose taste I respect made me willing to listen to an advance of the latest album from a band he’s also in, and I’m glad I did, because I quite enjoyed 2 by Foxwarren. Since I don’t know that much about Shauf, I didn’t realize that Foxwarren actually predate most of Shauf’s solo work–he formed the band with Dallas Bryson, Avery Kissick, and Darryl Kissick in the late 2000s, though they didn’t release a formal debut album until 2018’s self-titled one. Since then, Foxwarren has added Colin Nealis to their lineup, Shauf’s solo work has garnered more acclaim, and the five of them slowly but surely worked on what would become 2. Stepping away from the folk rock of Foxwarren, 2 is a work of “collage art” featuring sampled recordings of the quintet’s instruments, vocals, and outside audio clips shaped delicately but vibrantly into pop music.

Foxwarren make a big deal of the “classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète” ideas that went into making 2, and they’re certainly there, but I don’t want to overstate the avant-garde-ness of the album–it’s still within the realm of Shauf’s folk-pop sound, with the songs congealing into familiar shapes built in a completely novel (for Foxwarren, at least) way. It’s “indie folk” with plenty of “dream pop” and “psychedelia” mixed in, not far from fellow Canadian folk auteur Jon McKiel, Flotation Toy Warning, or the more rustic sides of the Woodsist and Elephant 6 catalogs. The snippets of what sound like old movie dialogues (or, at least, audio that evokes old movie dialogues) are the most obvious departure from a “rock band” setup, although there are plenty more oddities that stick out like objects ready to be moved in Hanna-Barbera cartoons–pianos and strings are beamed in from another time zone, sampled bass notes shape themselves, against all odds, into the hearts of several tracks, and Shauf is his usual distinct, direct self on top of it all. The most exciting moments on 2–“Listen2me”, “Deadhead”, and “Round&round”–are that way because of the instrumental moments Foxwarren are able to find hidden within these ingredients, but, to Shauf’s credit, his skills as a frontperson aren’t lost in these translations either. In some way or another, all of Foxwarren are speaking the same language on 2. (Bandcamp link)

Lung – The Swankeeper

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: The Mattress

Cincinnati, Ohio duo Lung have been an “if you know, you know” kind of band for several years now. The band (who call themselves “art rock” and “cello-core”) are led by classically trained opera singer and cellist Kate Wakefield, and the drumming of Daisy Caplan is the only other accompaniment that she apparently needs. They’ve been putting out records since at least 2016–their bio calls The Swankeeper their fourth studio album, but they’ve put out at least five LPs of some sort as well as a few split records. Their distorted, heavy cello-rock sound doesn’t really fit cleanly anywhere, but that hasn’t stopped Lung from touring heavily and associating with punk, noise rock, and garage rock crowds over the past eight years (and contributing a version of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” to a Neil Young covers compilation that I singled out as a highlight when I wrote about it). Similarly, I wouldn’t have really expected Feel It Records to pick them up (shared hometown aside), but there’s no reason why The Swankeeper can’t sit alongside the prolific label’s typically more, uh, guitar-based garage punk fare. These thirteen songs are as good an introduction to Lung as any, another thirty-seven dramatic minutes of Wakefield and Caplan doing the thing they do so well.

And what do Lung do so well, exactly? Well, it’s a combination of Caplan’s loud, pounding, noise rock drumming, Wakefield’s intense and wide-ranging vocals (comparisons to the likes of PJ Harvey and Kate Bush are not unearned), and, of course, plenty of cello heroics. “Everlasting Nothingness” is an intense opening track that puts Wakefield’s opera skills (in her voice, yes, but also in how the song unfolds itself) in the forefront, while “The Money” and “The Mattress” showcase how Lung can adapt their sound to the worlds of post-punk and grunge, respectively. The Swankeeper has its fair share of heavy hitters–I mean, all of these songs are to some degree, but “Sunshine’s Over” and “Paved With Gold” in particular are “cello as noise rock”. The banging, almost dance-punk “Clown Car” spotlights a different side of Lung’s talents to equally great ends (both Wakefield and Caplan restrain themselves just a little bit compared to how mighty we know they can work themselves up to be), and the prowling “Lucky You” finds some surprising depths in Lung’s writing, too. It doesn’t exactly take the full length of The Swankeeper to grasp what Lung are onto here, but I’m still glad they’re riding out this sound as long as they can. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Friendship, COR1, Credit, Jonathan Rundman

The first Pressing Concerns of the week is on a Tuesday, and it’s a great one, featuring new albums from Friendship and Jonathan Rundman plus new EPs from COR1 and Credit. Check these out! There wasn’t a Pressing Concerns yesterday, but I did take the holiday to pay tribute to David Thomas of Pere Ubu in light of his recent passing.

Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: Merge
Genre: Alt-country, ambient country
Formats: LP, CD, digital
Pull Track: Resident Evil

It seems that my mental health always disintegrates in the spring (it craters over the winter, which is a different thing). I was white-knuckling it over a rough couple-day stretch around the time that the latest Friendship album came out without realizing it, but Caveman Wakes Up set me straight. It was like Dan Wriggins and company sat me down and told me things weren’t right. Of course, it takes one to know one, and Caveman Wakes Up is a real “game recognize game” moment in that regard. I’ve believed in Friendship the alt-country heroes since I first heard “Skip to the Good Part” in 2017, and their last album, 2022’s Love the Stranger, felt like vindication. They’d successfully transformed into a tight four-piece indie rock band, linked up with the legendary Merge Records, gained a respectable following, and its members had all found success with endeavors outside of the band as well (some of which you can read about on this very blog). Caveman Wakes Up is the sound of what comes after that.

The more anthemic, immediately-gripping songs of their last album are gone here, replaced with ambient, vibes-based music, and the skills of Peter Gill, Jon Samuels, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary are put to a different kind of use. I compared Love the Stranger to Lambchop, without properly appreciating the kind of range that “Lambchop-esque” would end up giving them. Perhaps the die was cast for how this album would be perceived when they released a song called “Free Association” as the lead single. If Wriggins’ lyrics occasionally do sound like “free association”, though, it might be on you for not listening to closely. The one-of-a-kind frontperson, who recently released his first book of poetry, is certainly more “poetic” on Caveman Wakes Up than he’s been in the past, but Wriggins is also quite direct in his own way. I didn’t need the press pack to infer that a breakup was involved in the composition of these songs, for instance.

“I got married on a cloudy day / And I figured the clouds would magically roll away,” Wriggins sings in the centerpiece of the album, “Hollow Skulls”, and a few lines before that “Radiator shuts off, it’s a whole new level / Of silence”. These are the twin pillars of “Hollow Skulls” and subsequently Caveman Wakes Up to me–the after and the before, the former realized before the latter and prompting the association (not a particularly “free” one, though). “Hollow Skulls” also defines Caveman Wakes Up sonically–delicate but insanely charged, on the brink of collapsing in some way much like Wriggins is himself. I’m not sure if Friendship ever quite “get it together” on Caveman Wakes Up, but there’s some livelier moments that do a little more damage on first glance–“Tree of Heaven” is one of those, relying on a pained, worried guitar riff and clipped lyrics from Wriggins, daring to look backwards for seconds at a time before coming up for air (“You know you changed me, babe” sums it all up). “Resident Evil” also took my breath away at first–it’s a raw one, and “Who’s that shithead in my living room / Playing Resident Evil?” is brilliant in three or four different ways. The last one I want to mention is “Love Vape”, the only real pop song on Caveman Wakes Up. “Too late to turn back now / If you don’t know how to end it, you can just fade out,” Wriggins quips in that one in a nod to the “Motown and ’70s ballads” that inspired some of the playing on this record. Friendship, of course, decline to take the easy out that Wriggins offers up as “Love Vape” draws to a surprisingly perfunctory close. (Bandcamp link)

COR1 – Take What You Need

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Antithesis of Everything
Genre: Pop punk, emo-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Country Browns

There seems to be some interesting things going on on the Pacific Island of Guam. I’d written about music from a few expats of the tiny U.S. overseas territory before (Star 99, Rosa Bordallo), but earlier this year I learned that Guam actually has an active power pop/pop punk/indie rock scene being chronicled by Pure Chance Records thanks to their most recent single (“Out Comes Crazy” by a band called In Bedrooms). And, just like that, I’ve heard even more music out of Guam–COR1 aren’t a Pure Chance band, and I’m not sure if they’re associated with them or In Bedrooms in any way (it’s a small place; I’d assume that they know each other), but their debut EP Take What You Need fits in with the other music I’ve heard coming out of the island so far. I don’t know much of anything about the band’s members (one of them is named Sam), but the credits on their Bandcamp page paint an interesting and mysterious picture of their hometown music scene–these five songs were recorded by Jeremy Muñoz and RJ Aguon II in places called “100dB Studios” and “Marca Museca” (at least one of those places is located in the village of Harmon).

Regardless of where Take What You Need originated, the emotional vocals and guitar riffs contained herein are geographical barrier-breakers. While In Bedrooms have a bit of a slacker power pop streak to them, COR1 reveal themselves to be more emotional, sloppy, and heavier emo and pop punk devotees on their first record. Most of the EP’s eighteen minutes is spent with the band fully pressing the gas pedal, from the math-y leads and power chords of exciting opening track “New Fursona (alt)”, the melodic punk firebomb of “Lost”, and the post-hardcore-tinged punk anthem-waving of “Blame” (there are at least two lead vocalists in COR1, and they’ve both giving it their all whenever they can). Post-hardcore screams, emo melancholy, and fiery guitars all collide in the EP’s climax (and the one that gives it its title) “Incognito”, and then the whole thing ends with the biggest outlier on the record, the four-minute comedown of “Country Browns”. Upon further reflection, “Country Browns” is my favorite song on Take What You Need–it incorporates a bit of acoustic power balladry, although the shout-along chorus is as strong as anything else on the record, and the “Take Me Home, Country Roads” nod is unexpected but works quite well (as a native West Virginian, I give Guam full permission to co-opt that song all they want). Now I’m eager to hear what other good punk rock is coming out of the northern Pacific. (Bandcamp link)

Credit – The Last Few Years

Release date: May 23^rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, art punk, post-punk, noise rock, post-rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Britt

An interesting email alone isn’t going to get your band on Rosy Overdrive, but I do always appreciate it. Recently, a Baltimore-based “experimental rock/punk collective” called Credit showed up on my radar claiming The Four Tops, Nico, and Madlib as influences and Nation of Ulysses, The Pillows, and “Minutemen (With Keys)” as “for fans of”. This type of thing seems par for the course for Credit, upon further research–they’re led by somebody who only refers to themself as “The Keyboard Player”, who co-founded the band with someone only referred to as “The Original Writing Partner” in the 2010s. I don’t think this initial incarnation of Credit released anything; The Keyboard Player resurrected this dormant material with guitarists Luke Mayhew and Sandy Wilbur, bassist Alex Dicken, and drummer Gabe Fricks-Starrat a few years ago. Some combination of those musicians recorded Notes on Naturalism in Performance and Tone: 4 More Songs Live, an EP that came out in 2023, and all five of them appear on the most recent Credit recording, another four-song EP called The Last Few Years. I’m pleased to say that The Last Few Years lives up to Credit’s own bizarre and somewhat nonsensical hype, featuring four compelling live recordings that range from “brief, noisy punk rock band” to “experimental, jammy post-rock-and-roll music”.

No two songs on The Last Few Years sound alike, but each of these four tracks presents a lively and exciting version of the band Credit. By some metrics, “Britt” is the most “easy listening” song on The Last Few Years, but by others it’s the strangest thing on the EP–the opening track (which, per the EP’s Bandcamp page, was initially written in 2009) is a hazy recollection of a classic rock band heard from a couple of rooms over, beginning with a clean electric guitar drone for around two minutes before the amorphous country rock blob initially settles into place. “Exercise #2” is perhaps more like what one would expect from Credit based on their self-comparison to the Minutemen (and Beefheart, and Cap’n Jazz)–a deranged, noisy jazz-punk torrent. The six-minute “Anywhere” is the longest track on The Last Few Years, and there’s a disciplined post-punk/no wave track hidden in here somewhere–it’s strong enough to keep marching forward while the Credit players chip away and whir around the song in a frantic buzz. The Last Few Years closes with a hardcore song, of course–or, at least, Credit’s version of hardcore punk. It’s ninety seconds of ragged punk vocals, furious instrumental speed, and that classic Credit noisiness. Maybe there is something tying these disparate recordings together after all. (Bandcamp link)

Jonathan Rundman – Waves

Release date: April 11^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Roots rock, alt-country, college rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Living on the Lakeside

If you think that Jonathan Rundman’s first new album of original material in ten years, Waves, sounds like The Silos–well, there’s a good reason for that. For the past decade, Rundman has been a touring member of the aforementioned legendary alt-country band, and many of the other musicians who play on Waves have performed the same role backing Walter Salas-Humara as he keeps his long-running band alive. It should be noted, though, that Rundman has had a long and productive music career outside of The Silos–one that, spanning over three decades, is nearly as long as The Silos’ journey. Rundman was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and while he’s been based in Minneapolis for twenty years, the title of Waves nods to the continued importance of the Great Lakes (and specifically Lake Superior, the sounds of which can be heard on this album) in his life. All of this adds up to a solid and inviting roots rock album where Rundman and his collaborators–including Ron Gomez, Eric Kassel, and Gerald Dowd, among others–paint plain-spoken character sketches and Midwestern slices of life with the help of twelve-string guitars, accordions, mandolins, and a host of other tools eagerly.

As character-driven as Rundman’s writing is, the first subject we meet on Waves appears to be the man himself–“Living on the Lakeside” feels as autobiographical as anything on the album, a mandolin-and-accordion tribute to Rundman’s obscure peninsula of origin that’s sure to please fans of Los Lobos and Peter Buck. Organs and locked-in bass grooves move us into the character-study section of the album–“Veronika Ann” and “Elizabeth, Don’t Waste Your Breath” are written from the outside looking in at the titular characters, sympathetic but hardly tearjerkers in their power pop-indebted beds. The latter of those two tracks was co-written by Salas-Humara, and The Silos’ bandleader also has fingerprints on “Diner by the Train”, the obvious centerpiece of Waves. If you’re looking for waterworks, “Diner by the Train” has ‘em, a piece of Americana that certainly gained some sharpness with the help of an all-timer in the field. It’s strong, but it doesn’t overshadow the rest of Waves, and I find myself actually enjoying the more laid-back touch that Rundman brings to second-half highlights like “Evidence” (just as affecting as “Diner by the Train” in its own way) and “Let’s Put on an Opera” more upon repeated listens. I’ve heard music from the shores of Lake Superior before, but I’m not sure that I’ve heard anything so tied to its banks as Waves. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

David Thomas, R.I.P.

I’ve been wanting to acknowledge the passing of David Thomas on this blog ever since it happened on April 23rd of this year, and I suppose Memorial Day is as good a time as any to finally do it. I’m not in the business of writing “obituaries” or “tributes” or any such thing, but Thomas’ music was and is a huge one for me personally and for a lot of the music I write about on Rosy Overdrive. Only Steve Albini has had more of an impact among those who’ve departed from this world during this blog’s lifespan, but while Albini’s passing brought forth a truly amazing amount of tributes from his peers and influences, the reaction to Thomas’ death seemed much more muted; it got the requisite coverage, the “importance” of Pere Ubu acknowledged, and everyone moved on. Sure, Thomas’ death was less shocking–he’d effectively been publicly dying for the past half-decade or even more–but also, this means that everyone had plenty of time to do the (admittedly difficult) task of wrapping their heads around Pere Ubu and what they’ve meant since the 1970s before the moment finally came.

Everything you need to know about David Thomas the artist is in Pere Ubu. He was certainly a fascinating (and frequently frustrating) interview subject, and I’ve seen plenty of memorable quotes of his surface in the past month, but his work as the bellowing ringleader of the Pere Ubu experience gives us so much (he was the only constant member of Pere Ubu, but I believe he would bristle at being compared to other “difficult” one-man-bandleaders like Mark E. Smith, claiming to be on good terms with “almost” all of the band’s former members). It’s not hard to see why the critics who bothered to look past the band’s abrasive surface loved Pere Ubu, and so much of that has to do with Thomas’ mixture of the highbrow and the lowbrow–listening to him sing/speak/yell, you get cultural references on the level of the band’s name, a sincere but not naive love of America and all its strange, freakish wrinkles, crude humor, opaque fury, and, above all, a deeply intentional surrealism. This mixture applied to his very performance, too–was his voice a confrontational statement of his own, or one strange man from Cleveland just throwing all of himself into his work?

It was definitely “Breath” that first made an impression on me. It wasn’t the first Pere Ubu song I heard, and I was aware of their reputation as challenging art rock oddballs, but hearing “Breath” altered everything about Pere Ubu for me–at least at first. A band that can make music as abrasive as some of their most famous works and make pop music as committed and simple (on the surface, at least) as “Breath”? That’s a band to remember. I got into Pere Ubu’s initial albums (from 1978 to 1982) and their “middle years” (1995 to 2002) first, but I always loved “Breath”. It might be my favorite song. I’ve definitely referred to the recording of them playing it on Night Music as “my favorite video on the Internet” before.

The four albums that Pere Ubu released on Fontana after reforming from 1988 to 1993 are referred to as their “pop albums”. This is correct–they’re the band’s most commercial offerings, conscious attempts to make pop music in a way that others could understand. I’ve always liked that all four of them had distinct personalities, though. The first and the fourth of them are the “buffer zone”, where we can see the weirdness of earlier and later Pere Ubu trying to creep in–1988’s The Tenement Year is the busy, chaotic blast-off, effectively brilliant pop music with strange, often frustrating industrial and drilling synth sounds laid over top of it. The final one, 1993’s Story of My Life, is Pere Ubu’s simplest, most stripped-down album from a band lineup perspective, but there’s also a restlessness to it (strange choices, potent injections of oddness) that indicated their time as respectable alternative rock musicians was coming to a close. In between them are the two most pure “pop” albums Pere Ubu ever made, Cloudland and Worlds in Collision. The former is perhaps the band’s masterpiece (it’s certainly the masterpiece of this era of Pere Ubu, but of course it has competition elsewhere)–Cloudland is the sound of Thomas and his band approaching pop music frantically and intensely, obsessed with getting every little detail of it right. Worlds in Collision, conversely, is the closest thing to “comfortable” Pere Ubu ever sounded–they were fully immersed in the world of pop with this one, no longer weirdos pretending, and could focus on just delivering the music.

Still, if I had to pick one era of Pere Ubu to define that band (and, subsequently, David Thomas), it would be the one after their “pop music”, the one that their website calls “The Modern Era” and the one that was collected on a Fire Records box set called Drive, He Said 1994-2002. 1995’s Raygun Suitcase retained some of the accessible structure of the records that came before it, but it’s all wrong and messed up (it is, again, perhaps the band’s masterpiece); 1998’s Pennsylvania and 2002’s St. Arkansas are burned out, dilapidated, rusted-shut Americana records for those of use who don’t believe in the concept of time passing (and thus are constantly bewildered by the change happening around us).

Pere Ubu famously (infamously?) got increasingly difficult during their initial run together–1982’s Song of the Bailing Man is a little less challenging than 1980’s The Art of Walking, but it mostly follows a straight line–but the hardest Ubu albums for me to appreciate have always been the newest ones. When Fire Records did their Nuke the Whales 2006-2014 box set, I was skeptical that those albums deserved a retrospective revisit, but I came away from it fully convinced that three out of the four records included in it (sorry, Long Live Pere Ubu) were great works of art all along. 2006’s Why I LUV Women is a busted rock and roll album that probably would’ve made them garage rock superstars if Thomas hadn’t been so committed to what he saw as an obvious ironic wink in the album’s original title, 2013’s The Lady from Shanghai is a dark electronic cloud that befuddles to fascinating ends, and 2014’s Carnival of Souls is effectively the best of the both of them.

Pere Ubu released three albums after Carnival of Souls, and they (with the exception of 2017’s 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo, which is one last rocking ride at the art punk rodeo) still leave me cold and confused to this day. That’s what I’ve come to expect from Pere Ubu, though–The Long Goodbye and Trouble on Big Beat Street don’t really make sense to me right now, but that’s fine, and I won’t be surprised if they lock into place for me a few years down the line. When Pere Ubu announced that Thomas had passed away, they dutifully updated us on what he’d been working on as he stared down his own mortality–a new album, an autobiography, archival Pere Ubu recordings. I took note of all of this, aware that I’ll be exploring all of it some day in the future, and proceeded to do the thing that I always proceed to do when I think about David Thomas. I listened to his music.

Pressing Concerns: Headphones, Florry, Forty Winks, Wipes

Wake up, it’s the Thursday Pressing Concerns! Four records that are coming out tomorrow, May 19th! New albums from Florry and Wipes, a new EP from Forty Winks, and a deluxe reissue of a twenty-year old album from Headphones! And if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: Rodeo Boys, Beasts, Kilynn Lunsford, and a compilation from Worry Bead Records; Tuesday: Ryan Allen, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Son of Buzzi, and Pretty Rude), check those out too.

Headphones – Headphones (Deluxe 20th Anniversary Edition)

Release date: May 23^rd
Record label: Suicide Squeeze
Genre: Synthpop, synth-rock, singer-songwriter, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Pink and Brown

David Bazan has quite possibly the most fascinating discography in all of indie rock. I didn’t say “best discography” (though I wouldn’t argue with you if you said so), but specifically in the way that he’s been able to stay steady and recognizable across different project names, musical styles, and thematic journeys from the personal to literary (not to mention a change in his religious beliefs and relationship to the Christian Church, which is reflected in his music as well). The simply-titled Headphones and their sole self-titled album have been a particularly well-loved hidden release in Bazan’s career–recorded and released while his band Pedro the Lion was still together but after they’d already put out their final pre-reunion album, this new project found Bazan, frequent collaborator T.W. Walsh, and drummer Frank Lenz (Starflyer 59) making a unique synthesizer-and-live-drums style of music that nonetheless felt in line with the emo-y indie rock that Bazan had been pursuing with his “main” band. Remastered and re-released with two bonus tracks for its twentieth anniversary, Headphones is both wildly of its time and just too potent to be left there, the synths only sharpening and highlighting the darkness of this album.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the person who wrote the frequently-bleak dramas of Winners Never Quit and Control would continue writing uncomfortable tales of interpersonal and geopolitical strife in a new project, but–either due to the minimalist instrumental setup or just because that’s where Bazan was at at the time–Headphones really feels like a trip to somewhere one never wants to end up on purpose. A lot of that has to do with the ugly, humiliated, and murderous opening track “Gas and Matches”; I still don’t quite know what to make of it two decades later, but I still get a visceral reaction listening to it. The fairly rudimentary synths are part of the appeal of Headphones, I think–Bazan would make more layered and fully-developed synth-based music later in his solo career, but I’m not sure stuff like the dead-eyed, dead-hearted hatred of “I Never Wanted You” and the sociopathic shrug of “Shit Talker” would’ve been improved by any kind of refinement.

The bonus material of Headphones also highlights the album’s mean streak–the acoustic version of “Gas and Matches” pulls no punches, and the bright, floating nature of “The Five Chord” only underscores how much it didn’t belong on Headphones. My favorite song on Headphones when I first became a fan of Bazan’s music was “Natural Disaster”, the appeal of which has as much to do with its blatant Bush-era concerns as the fact that it’s the most upbeat thing on the entire album (as obvious as what “Maybe a couple of airplanes could crash into buildings / And put the fear of God into you” is about, there’s still plenty of headscratching stuff in that one, too). Both because of the subject matter and because of a few fairly blunt lines, I wouldn’t expect something like “Natural Disaster” from Bazan in 2025 (and I think he’s gotten stuff like the creepy “Hello Operator” out of his system too), but it’s vivid picture of what 2005 looked like for a very talented writer. (Bandcamp link)

Florry – Sounds Like…

Release date: May 23^rd
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Country rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Pretty Eyes Lorraine

In 2023, I wrote about an album called The Holey Bible by a Philadelphia alt-country group called Florry (I also wrote about an EP from them; it was a busy year for Florry), and at the time I noted that the album reflected a shift from Florry as a Francie Medosch solo project to a raucous, powerful, and comfortable seven-piece band. Clearly, Medosch and company also viewed The Holey Bible as the start of something–when I wrote about it, I called it the third Florry album, but the press material for Sounds Like… calls their previous album their debut and the new album as their “sophomore” one. Medosch has recently moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, Vermont, but thankfully the band (whose members are already spread out between Pennsylvania and North Carolina) are still going strong and met up in Asheville to record Sounds Like… with Colin Miller. Sounds Like… features a similar but not exactly the same lineup as their last one–Medosch, guitarist John Murray, drummer Joey Sullivan, bassist Collin Dennen, pedal steel player Jon Cox, multi-instrumentalist Will Henriksen, vocalist Katya Malison, and a few guests. While (unlike The Holey Bible) Medosch sings lead vocals on all of Sounds Like…, it’s still a very collaborative and collective-feeling album, leaning on the many talents found within Florry to deliver another overstuffed country rock adventure.

Medosch is a smart songwriter and lyricist, but Florry separate themselves from the alt-country pack by emphasizing the group jamming around their wise and trusting bandleader. The yarn that Medosch spills on the awesome six-minute opening track “First It Was a Movie, Then It Was a Book” needs no help emphasizing its brilliance, leaving the guitars more time to devote to their true passions of rocking out. The first half of Sounds Like… is full of unintuitive but immediately-hitting classics like the opener, with the harmonica-aided “Waiting Around to Provide”, the country rock groove of “Hey Baby”, and the lumbering, dramatic “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” all qualifying. “Big Something” and “Say Your Prayers Rock” ensure that there’s plenty of liveliness in the record’s second half, too, but Sounds Like… isn’t entirely a big-tent-party version of that classic “Burlington-Asheville-Philly alt-country sound”. Medosch only gives herself a few real houselights-dimmed, spotlight-fully-trained-on-her moments, and she takes them to get surprisingly sweet and tender with “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone” and “Pretty Eyes Lorraine” (the 70s-style pop rock of the latter really goes well with her voice). The eight-minute closing track “You Don’t Know” counts too, I suppose, although I find myself impressed with how orderly and measured Florry are able to play over the length of the entire final odyssey. Even when the music of Sounds Like… veers away from showiness, it’s still key in its success. (Bandcamp link)

Forty Winks – Love Is a Dog from Hell

Release date: May 23^rd
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Noise pop, fuzz rock, shoegaze
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Noise

In the time I’ve been doing this blog, Crafted Sounds has established itself as the go-to record label for Pittsburgh’s burgeoning shoegaze, fuzz rock, and noise pop movements (see Gaadge and Feeble Little Horse and Flower Crown, among others). The imprint’s latest signee is a quartet that fits right alongside Crafted Sounds’ lineage–Forty Winks, who are made up of bassist/vocalist Cilia Catello, guitarist/vocalist Conner McGee, drummer Colin Klink, and guitarist Kyuhwan “Q” Hwang and who have just released their debut EP, Love Is a Dog from Hell. Via these five songs, I certainly can see why Crafted Sounds referred to Forty Winks as “riff evangelists” and “zoomer rock”–they fall somewhere in between the textured experimentation of shoegaze-originating acts like They Are Gutting a Body of Water and fuzzed-out rock and roll groups like Ex Pilots and A Country Western, eagerly mixing chaotic noise, roaring guitars, and pop hooks together in a brief but memorable package. A more rock-devoted version of early Feeble Little Horse might the most succinct comparison for Love Is a Dog from Hell that I can offer, but the quartet pack so much personality in a dozen minutes here that they deserve to be considered on their own already.

“Noise”, an advance single and quite possibly the best pop song on the EP, is saved for last, but Love Is a Dog from Hell isn’t just a delayed gratification-fest. It’s true that the opening track, “liadfh”, is a textural piece featuring dreamy shoegaze guitar tones gliding smoothly over minimal percussion and unobtrusively melodic vocals, but it’s catchy in its own right, plus it leads right into the other possible catchiest song on the EP, “Commie BF”. The skewed, oddly dramatic gaze-pop song is like a more mall-punk version of the Gaadge/Ex Pilots side of fuzz rock; it alone presents an exciting future for this young band. Lead single “Spurs” is a bit more standoffish than these aforementioned tracks, but I can still see why it was an advance track–it’s perhaps the most complete “shoegaze” moment on the EP, the quartet really letting the guitars run wild in this odd but certainly fully-realized track. After getting a bit tricky with “Spurs” (and the interlude of sorts “Faith”, into which the previous song bleeds), “Noise” comes to save the day with a huge noise-pop (no pun intended) conclusion. Punchy and fuzzed-out and delivering the goods in a straightforward way that Forty Winks hadn’t quite hinted at up until now, “Noise” is another reason to keep this band on our collective radar–not that we needed another one by this point in Love Is a Dog from Hell. (Bandcamp link)

Wipes – Don’t Tell My Parents

Release date: May 23^rd
Record label: Hex
Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, sludge
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Milk Dreams

The hottest new noise rock band is a trio simply called Wipes. No, not “Wipers” (you imbecile), they’re from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (although their label, Hex Records, is from the same Portland that the legendary, similarly-named proto-grunge band hailed). Two-thirds of Wipes (bassist/vocalist Ray Gurz and guitarist Daryl Fogel) previously played together in Allentown group Tile, which I can only imagine was also a noise rock band, and they reconvened with new drummer Garrett Groller as Wipes at the beginning of this decade. Wipes debuted in a big way in 2022 with a debut album called Making Friends and a split cassette with the band Day Job, both via Hex; they strayed from their label of origin by releasing an EP called Vacuum on Avarice in 2024, but they’re back with Hex for their sophomore album, Don’t Tell My Parents. I don’t know what to say about Don’t Tell My Parents other than the fact that it’s just plain-old good noise rock music. It’s not particularly wedded to any specific part of the genre–some of it is sludgy and metallic, some of it’s punky and furious, but all of it is music that’ll please fans of all rock music that’s heavy and pummeling.

“Pummeling” is how Don’t Tell My Parents feels from a structural level, too–it’s thirteen songs long, always with its gaze set on maximum noisiness, and thus has a bit of an “endurance test” factor to it. Big, downtuned, grungy riffs begin to drill their way into our skulls with the mission statement opening track “Good Luck in the Future”, and they don’t stop: “Stone Eater” and “Bleeding Gums” are just as mean as their titles suggest. “Inhuman Highway” sounds a little more post-punk in its guitars and almost Devo in its vocals, but it’s hardly a respite, and even if it were, there’s nothing here that could slow down the march of tracks like “Machine” and “Taste the Chain” soon afterwards. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I do see new shapes emerging in Wipes’ constant assault towards the end of the album, the trio trying on new tricks with the Dischord-reminiscent post-hardcore of “Speedway”, the dramatic, creepy drone-rock of “Condition”, and the kind-of-catchy garage punk “Milk Dreams”. Don’t Tell My Parents ends in much the same way it begins, though–the four-minute noise rock hurricane of “Ezra”, heavy and slowly inflicting as much damage as possible before things come to a close. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Ryan Allen, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Son of Buzzi, Pretty Rude

It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week! This one features brand-new albums from Ryan Allen, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Son of Buzzi, and Pretty Rude. Great stuff! If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Rodeo Boys, Beasts, Kilynn Lunsford, and a compilation from Worry Bead Records), check that one out here.

Ryan Allen – Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge

Release date: April 25^th
Record label: Setterwind
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Company’s Eyes

Ryan Allen has been playing around the Michigan indie rock scene for a quarter-century at this point–the bands he’s been in since the early 2000s include Thunderbirds Are Now!, Destroy This Place, Friendly Foes, and Red Shirt Brigade. Allen’s main focuses as of late have been his power pop band Extra Arms and his wide-ranging solo career (sometimes the lines between the two are blurred, as he’s also released a couple of records attributed to “Ryan Allen & His Extra Arms”). Allen’s been as active as he’s ever been these past few years–Extra Arms albums in 2022 and 2024, a solo record in 2023, and now 2025 has brought us Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge, an album that’s attributed to Allen solo but has as at least as much rocking power pop energy as the last Extra Arms LP (Radar) did. Allen played and recorded almost everything on Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge himself, and he calls it a record for “that 15-year-old kid inside of me”–formative alt-rock groups like Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr., and Swervedriver are mentioned as influences. I won’t say that there aren’t moments on this album that are a little bit shoegaze- or noise pop-influenced, but Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge is a power pop album, and the names that come to mind are the ones who’ve made great records in this field–Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, Tommy Keene, Fountains of Wayne, Daniel Romano.

Allen is a zippy, garage-y power pop musician, but his songwriting still has a whimsical side that’s reminiscent of Robert Pollard or even Pollard’s 60s prog-pop influences (not to mention a band you might’ve heard of called “The Beatles”), as evidenced by the absurd “The Construction Man” and the pogo-ing “Spider Sally”. Some of the other fun excursions to be found on Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge include the snotty but catchy garage punk of “Devil’s Juice” (the most Daniel Romano moment, to me) and “So What Who Cares”, built around some droning synths and guitar chords in the way somebody who likes Stereolab might do (I want to emphasize that it’s a power pop song and thus doesn’t actually sound like Stereolab, but I do hear the connection that Allen makes when discussing the song). Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge has its share of gorgeous jangle pop, with both “Anxious All the Time” (as in “don’t wanna be”) and “Company’s Eyes” (as in “fail in the”) qualifying. If you think either the nagging mental unwellness of the former and the corporate preoccupations of the latter are particularly emblematic of a middle-aged guy from the Midwest navigating getting older, wait until you find out that there are songs called “When I’m Gone”, “After I’m Dead”, and “In the Next Life” on here, too. Maybe that’s what Allen means when he calls Livin’ on a Prayer on the Edge “the most ME record I’ve ever made”; that fifteen-year-old kid may still be young in some ways, but he’s not naive anymore. (Bandcamp link)

Mourning [A] BLKstar – Flowers for the Living

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Soul, gospel, experimental rock, jazz-funk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Stop Lion 2

New music from seven-piece Cleveland “Afrofuturist collective” Mourning [A] BLKstar is always welcome, and it’s been a rewarding twelve months for those of us who enjoy the work of the genre-melding soul- and gospel–inspired group. The band’s seventh album, Ancient//Future, showed up last July, and Mourning [A] BLKstar is back less than a year later with LP number eight, Flowers for the Living. Saying that Flowers for the Living sounds like a Mourning [A] BLKstar album is (while true) not particularly helpful, as their sound encompasses a bunch of different corners. Compared to the relative brief, more rock-focused Ancient//Future, the septet (vocalists RA Washington, James Longs, and LaToya Kent, drummer Dante Foley, bassist Jah Nada, trumpeter Theresa May, and guitarist/keyboardist Pete Saudek) are more sprawling and slow-moving on the forty-five minute Flowers for the Living. The jazz and funk influences are still there, but delivered in a much more laid-back manner (don’t call it “smooth”, though–the album is large enough to include a little bit of the group’s past experimental tinkering and a song that surpasses the eight-minute mark).

“Stop Lion 2” is, on its surface, quite simple, but the first song on Flowers for the Living is (perhaps appropriately) hard to categorize. There’s a drum machine beat, gospel ambience, funk bass, and piercing trumpet–it’s not particularly busy, but it doesn’t slot neatly into any of the boxes evoked by those pieces. Oh, and there’s guest vocals from Lee Bains III of the great group Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires (who’ve toured with Mourning [A] BLKstar and share a label with them); the southern rocker really pushes his vocals to fit in on the track, but something tells me that he didn’t have to try that hard. A lot of the first half of Flowers for the Living is similarly slow-moving and striking (“Can We?”, “Letter to a Nervous System”); things start to get a little more busy with the jazz-rock beat of the title track, and the hypnotic percussion is the glue that holds the eight-minute “Legacy to Begin” together. Flowers for the Living is probably at its “liveliest” once it makes it past the high peak of “Legacy to Begin”; between the slightly sunny R&B of “Let Em Eat” (featuring the album’s other notable guest vocalist, rapper Fatboi Sharif) and the dark psych-funk of “Lil’ Bobby Hutton”, two of the most immediately-hitting songs on this album are right near the end of it. Coming down from the dizzying righteousness of the latter of those two tracks, Mourning [A] BLKstar close with another gospel-indebted song in “Choir A’light”. At the very least we can always count on Mourning [A] BLKstar to be entertaining and interesting, but it’s apparent here that they also took great care to properly guide Flowers for the Living to the right conclusion. (Bandcamp link)

Son of Buzzi – Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: Shrimper
Genre: Fingerstyle guitar, folk, drone, ambient, post-rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Spiegelebene

Even those who were deep into the world of underground lo-fi rock music of the 1990s may not be aware that one of that era’s most consistent labels, the Inland Empire’s Shrimper Records, remains active to this day releasing new music from longtime indie rock veterans (just in the past year, we’ve seen new music from Refrigerator, Goosewind, and Jad Fair via them). Somewhat surprisingly, though, my favorite thing that Shrimper has released in quite a while is by an unfamiliar (to me), newer face: Son of Buzzi, aka Sebastian Bischoff. Bischoff is a “self taught finger style guitar player” who’s “now” based in Zurich, Switzerland (implying he’s originally from somewhere else, although I don’t know where) and has been making music as Son of Buzzi since 2019. Bischoff’s music seems to be comprised of meandering, peaceful acoustic guitar playing interspersed with synthesizers and “electronic” sounds provided both by Bischoff himself and producer Michael Potter, an experimental musician from North Carolina who appears to be a frequent contributor on Son of Buzzi releases. The acoustic guitar of the latest Son of Buzzi album, Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan, was recorded by Bischoff “inside a hut in the Ticino Mountains in Switzerland alone over a long weekend”, and he and Potter put the finishing touches on the LP after the fact.

Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan is made up of five songs, and about half of the album is taken up by the first one–the twenty-minute title track, a massive and challenging opening statement if I’ve heard one this year. The first half of “Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan” is effectively an ambient/drone piece with occasional harmonics and brief guitar interjections from Bischoff–about halfway through, Bischoff begins fingerpicking in earnest, though the atmospheric synths don’t fade and in fact take over the track yet again before it finally draws to a close. Son of Buzzi wisely don’t try to best “Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan” immediately after it takes its final bow–going in a different direction, the plain and bright fingerpicking of “Spiegelebene” is pretty easily the most immediate song on the album, and while “Geschlossene Räume” is a little darker, it’s still a relatively straightforward fingerstyle folk guitar piece and stays that way for a fairly concise four minutes. The nine-minute “RKHS” is a noise/drone number that’s arguably even more challenging than the opening track (at least that song resolves into something eventually), and the brief “Heimweg, Mondlicht am Strassenrand” closes the record with a quieter and more delicate version of the friendlier mid-record songs. Bischoff takes us all manner of places with his playing on Ein Hase, ein Phönix, ein Schwan. (Bandcamp link)

Pretty Rude – Ripe

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: SideOneDummy
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Things I Do

I’m primarily familiar with James Palko as the bassist and backing vocalist for the awesome New York 90s indie rock revivalists/power pop group Taking Meds, but you may also know the Queens-based musician from his soft rock alter ego Jimmy Montague or his time playing in cult New England emo band Perspective, a Lovely Hand to Hold. So what differentiates his latest group, Pretty Rude, from his slew of other projects? Well, it’s a duo, an equal-parts collaboration between Palko and Matt Cook, who drummed in Perspective, a Lovely Hand to Hold until they broke up a couple years ago. And, judging from their debut album together as Pretty Rude, Ripe, this partnership has led to a cleaner embrace of power pop and catchy radio-ready alt-rock than either of them have ever dared to pursue before. Fuzzed-out power chords and hooky riffs, suave vocals, and even some classic rock guitar heroics mark Ripe, a record that, at its most immediate, is right up there with Supercrush and The Trend in terms of modern Weezer-inspired giant power pop. Sometimes their version of catchy rock music is limber and targeted, other times it’s a wall of sound that leans on some of Pretty Rude’s less “punk” influences, but Ripe establishes its own language soon enough.

A brief record that leaves us anything but shortchanged, Pretty Rude get in there and do their business in eight tracks and under thirty minutes. If you’re looking for a Pretty Rude-defining anthem, the opening track (which also happens to be called “Pretty Rude”) will do the trick between its post-Rozwell Kid grunge-power-pop guitar explosions and Beach Boys backing vocals hidden in the rough, while the choppy, meaty alt-rock slickness of single “Call Me, Ishmael” also does the trick. The breezy power pop of “Things I Do” bridges the two songs and its windows-down collapsing euphoria harbors what’s actually the sneakily best hook between the three of them, but this is a theme for Ripe–“Debbie and Lynn” figures to be a relatively nondescript mid-record track until the slight XTC influences starts showing up in the verses and the spirit of Fountains of Wayne possesses them for the chorus, for example. In the second half, the surprisingly bright rock and roll of “Polish Deli” and the 2000s alt-rock/pop-punk-via-Beach Boys charms of “The Work” are both highlights–I’ve named nearly every song on the record at this point, but that’s what happens when you’ve got a no-filler declaration of a debut LP like what Pretty Rude have done here with Ripe. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: