Rosy Overdrive

Pressing Concerns: Oruã, Suzie True, Garden of Love, Six Flags Guy

It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring new albums from Oruã, Suzie True, and Garden of Love, and a new EP from Six Flags Guy. Check them out below, and if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Sam Woodring, Cusp, E.R. Visit, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), dial that one up, too.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Oruã – Slacker

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: K
Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Marejar

Half of the Rio De Janeiro psych rock quartet Oruã (guitarist/vocalist Lê Almeida and synth player João Casaes) were members of the ever-changing latter-day Built to Spill lineup for a few years, co-producing and playing on the Idaho indie rock institution’s latest album, 2022’s When the Wind Forgets Your Name. One imagines that this Pacific Northwest connection is how stalwart Olympia, Washington label K Records came to signing the Brazilians (Almeida, Caseas, bassist Bigu Medine, and drummer Ana Zumpano) for their latest album, Slacker, but that’s hardly Oruã’s only accomplishment: they’re important figures in their home city’s music scene, with Almeida running Transfusão Noise Records (Gueersh, Disco Doom, Retrato) for over twenty years. It’s not even the group’s first Washington State collaboration, as they put out a split LP with Seattle act Reverse Death earlier this year.

That split LP featured some songs that would go on to be reworked for (or cut from) Slacker, and if you enjoyed that record, Oruã’s version of psychedelia remains in familiar terrain on this more formal exploration of it. The rhythm section is still the bedrock of the quartet’s sound, with Zumpano and Medine providing the foundation on songs like “Deus Dará” and “De se Envolver” for Almeida and Caseas to intone and accent these tracks with their voices and instruments. They’re still an incredibly electric band, as the Big Riffs anchoring tracks like “Slave of the Golden Tooth” and “Marejar” make clear, but Oruã are remarkably even-keeled in their division of the spotlight–the album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Inaiê”, is an exercise in tension and subtlety, and the pensive “Soft” has languid guitar lines relying on the rest of the band to carry them. Oruã might be new to North Americans, but they’ve been at this thing for a while, and it shows with Slacker. (Bandcamp link)

Suzie True – How I Learned to Love What’s Gone

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Pop punk, indie pop, garage punk, twee, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Leeches (Play Dead)

After releasing a debut EP in 2018, Los Angeles pop punk group Suzie True has put out three records on indie punk veterans Get Better Records–How I Learned to Love What’s Gone follows in the footsteps of 2020’s Saddest Girl at the Party and 2023’s Sentimental Scum. The trio (bassist/lead vocalist Lexi McCoy, guitarist/vocalist G Leonardo, drummer Sarah Pineapple) are just as likely to mention The Powerpuff Girls or Sailor Moon as influences as they are “alt-rock” acts like Hole and The Breeders; as one might expect, How I Learned to Love What’s Gone is marked by a dogged pursuit of pop hooks and a boundless energy. Produced by Chris Farren, How I Learned to Love What’s Gone sounds at home evoking 60s girl groups (“Oh, Baby!!!”), interpolating “Cherry Bomb” (“Get Prettier Overnight!!!”), and doing a blistering Veruca Salt impression (“Love Like Cement”), and McCoy’s slick but very open writing hits as hard as fellow pop-ish punk-ish labelmates like Bacchae and Cowboy Boy. Suzie True are refreshingly unconstrained by their various influences’ orthodoxy–we wouldn’t get a song that verges towards post-hardcore (“So Blame Me”), a really good twee-punk number hidden towards the end of the record (“Love for Nihilists”), or cheerleader backing vocals proclaiming “Leeches!” (that’d be in “Leeches (Play Dead)”) otherwise. If you’re going to try to make this kind of pop music, it requires the kind of ambition Suzie True bring nonstop on How I Learned to Love What’s Gone. (Bandcamp link)

Garden of Love – Love Is Coming

Release date: September 26^th
Record label: Ever/Never
Genre: Lo-fi pop, garage rock, psychedelic pop, experimental pop, lo-fi punk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Another Wall

Garden of Love are a new trio formed by a few Montreal indie rock/punk ringers, specifically vocalist/guitarist synth player Jane Harms (Donna Allen), drummer Cole Woods (Laughing, Faze), and bassist Sony (Cheap Wig, Ursula). Garden of Love’s debut album, Love Is Coming, is delivered to us via cult label Ever/Never Records (Workers Comp, Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, Kilynn Lunsford), who proclaim it to be (via a quote from WFMU DJ Erick Bradshaw) “miniature prog-pop suites condensed into radio-friendly runtimes”. At its most accessible, Love Is Coming sits comfortably amongst tinny, lo-fi guitar pop acts like Home Blitz, Silicone Prairie, and much of the Inscrutable Records catalog, although Garden of Love are just as apt to veer into noisy chaos as to deliver spindly, jangly guitar lines. There’s no denying the pop cores at the hearts of psych-prog-trash creations like “Another Wall” and “Garden Window”, and “Letter” ups the ante by coming out the other side into straight-up slapdash surf rock. The noise punk “T.V.B.” is the record’s first really off-the-rails moment, but it’s not the last, as Garden of Love continue embracing their wild side right up into the four-point-five-minute prog-blues-punk-pop suite “Carry On”, which puts a cap on the too-brief twenty-one minute cassette. Whether it’s the tossed-off collaboration between three busy musicians or the start of something larger, Love Is Coming holds its own. (Bandcamp link)

Six Flags Guy – In Texas, We Hang Horse Thieves and Let Murders Go

Release date: October 2^nd
Record label: 329
Genre: Post-rock, noise rock, post-hardcore, math rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Yow Tools

Columbus, Ohio quartet Six Flags Guy are one of the strongest bands sitting at the corner of post-rock and post-hardcore in recent memory, and their sophomore album, You Look Terrible (which came out in June), only cemented the mantle they claimed with 2023’s And Nothing Did So What. After releasing a sprawling fifty-minute album of “eerie slowcore and guitar-based post-rock” (as I said at the time), it’s surprising to have Six Flags Guy back again so quickly, but here we are with a four-song EP called In Texas, We Hang Horse Thieves and Let Murders Go. You Look Terrible had some kinetic moments, but In Texas… is a lot punchier, landing just as many blows in fifteen minutes between the EP’s twin pillars of “Concrete Beach” and “Yow Tools”. The former starts off in Spiderland and builds to a tense, fiery art-punk conclusion, while the latter (after the requisite meandering introduction) is straight-up squealing in its fury. Bookending these songs are a noise-piece introduction called “I Bought a Dream Journal” and a surprising seventy-second retreat into Duster-esque slowcore called “Planning My Exit”; it’s nearly a photo-negative of their last album, the dominant elements reduced to the periphery and vice versa. Either seems to look good on Six Flags Guy. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sam Woodring, Cusp, E.R. Visit, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week! It features new albums from Cusp, E.R. Visit, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and a new EP from Sam Woodring. It’s all pretty good, in my opinion.

Sam Woodring – Mechanical Bull

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Pretzle
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Back Then

Mister Goblin is dead; long live Sam Woodring. From 2018 to 2024, the artist formerly known as Sam Goblin made a unique mixture of post-hardcore, folk rock, and guitar pop under the “Mister Goblin” moniker, including two of my favorite albums of this decade so far. The D.C.-area-originating Woodring spent time in Indiana and Florida before ending up in Louisville, Kentucky (where he also plays in the band Deady); whether it was the change in scenery or something else, Woodring announced he was retiring the Mister Goblin name (for the moment at least) earlier this year. Mechanical Bull is the first record Woodring has ever put out under his own name (well, first and middle name, apparently), and it’s certainly the furthest he’s wandered yet from his punk/math rock/Exploding in Sound-core roots. Even the bedroom pop touches of 2021’s Four People in an Elevator and One of Them Is the Devil wouldn’t prepare us for these five stark songs, recorded by Deady member Chyppe Crosby and featuring nothing but Woodring’s voice and acoustic guitar.

It’s not like there weren’t acoustic moments on those Mister Goblin records, and Woodring is still the same songwriter even in his “solo troubadour” era; gentle folk playing aside, opening track “1,000 Ways to Die” is full of Mister Goblin-isms like images of “spider eggs in your eyes” and references to both Faces of Death and “Nick Cannon’s Wild N’ Out”. As understated as a writer like Woodring could ever be, Mechanical Bull takes us on a flatly un-nostalgic trip down memory lane in “Back Then” (“Back then they didn’t want me / Now I’m old / … / I don’t want them either now / It’s just a circle jerk of jerk offs anyhow”), to another entry into the Woodring “songs taking place in or near rock shows” canon with “Wait Outside”, and, most scarily of all, to “2014” (“‘We Dem Boyz’ ‘Move That D’ blaring from every speaker in twos”). Woodring has called this EP “the best songs I’ve written” and there’s plenty to be proud of here–it can’t be easy to write something as direct as “You’ll Live” and as dodgy as “2014”, play them back to back without any accompaniment, and have it all work out. Mechanical Bull is something new, to be sure, but I wouldn’t call Sam Woodring’s first release a debut. (Bandcamp link)

Cusp – What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Give Up Your Garden

When Cusp first got on my radar in 2021, they were a quartet from Rochester led by vocalist/guitarist Jen Bender and making noisy but punchy indie rock that I explicitly compared to Exploding in Sound Records’ discography. A lot has changed in the time since that debut EP, Spill–Bender and guitarist Gaelen Bates relocated to Chicago, added bassist Matt Manes, keyboardist/synth player Tessa O’Connell, and drummer Tommy Moore to their lineup, and released a slew of new music: 2023’s You Can Do It All, last year’s Thanks So Much EP, and now What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, their second LP and first for (who else?) Exploding in Sound.

It’s been a steady progression, but jumping into What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back (the first album made entirely by the Chicago iteration of Cusp) reveals a different band entirely, one that has immersed themselves in the world of kind-of-“poppy”, kind-of-“arty” Windy City indie rock–the album, it should be noted, was recorded at Electrical Audio and at Chicago mainstay Seth Engel’s Ohmstead Recording. The common thread between the synth-heavy indie pop opening track “Healthy Living”, the Ratboys-like indie-alt-country “The Upper Hand”, and the doom-tinged fuzz of “I Like My Odds”? Well, they’re all quite good–I’m not sure if I can come up with anything else that would connect them, and especially not with further disparate material like the breezy folk rock of “Give Up Your Garden” and the quick punk-pop detour “Lie Down”. However Cusp got to What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, though, it sounds like where they should be. (Bandcamp link)

E.R. Visit – My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: LocalHost3000/Funnybone
Genre: Psychedelic folk, experimental pop, lo-fi pop, prog-pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Tea Water

Stone Filipczak is one-half of the annoyingly-named Philadelphia folk-pop duo @, and, though I haven’t really gotten into his more well-known band, the debut release from his new solo project E.R. Visit caught my attention nonetheless. My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen came about parallel to @ taking off via a 2023 album and 2024 EP, and followed Filipczak as he moved to Philly from Baltimore (forced out of his apartment by a landlord who “believed Filipczak was a spy”). An ambitious “bedroom pop” album, My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen dresses itself in laid-back acoustic colors at first but throws orchestral pop music, psychedelia, and bits of classic 60s prog and pop into its twenty-five-minute journey, too. Easy strummers like “Tea Water”, Animal Collective/Bruiser & Bicycle-ish psych-folk like “Wind Through the Trees”, bursts of lo-fi angst like “Absolute Midnight”–My Children Will Ignore You, My Children Will Type Amen never fully settles down, but there’s a picture of Stone Filipczak that emerges through the change-ups. E.R. Visit is a pop act at its core, with even its most challenging material (the eight-minute campfire psych glow of “Bracken Mountain Funeral Pyre”) displaying a devotion to brightness and melody. It’s a brief but promising glimpse of a new-to-me songwriter, to the point where I may indeed find myself listening to a band named @ sooner or later. (Bandcamp link)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like the Sky

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Art rock, dream pop, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: White Kites and Sky Blue

I first heard the Michi Saagig Nishinaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosae Simpson via her first album for You’ve Changed Records, 2021’s Theory of Ice. Loosely-speaking a folk record, it was a forceful but gentle collection of writing about Canada (and much more) from a sharp writer’s perspective. Simpson’s latest record, Live Like the Sky, follows the thread of Theory of Ice but drifts even further from recognizably “folk music”. Simpson cites fellow Indigenous Canadian acts like OMBIIGIZI and Status / Non Status as inspirations for the music for this album, and it comes through on a collection of songs that owe just as much to dream pop and classic indie/alternative rock (which she says she heard via the “static and poor reception” of Toronto radio stations while growing up in rural Ontario) as folk. An impressive cast of Canadian musicians (including Steven Lambke, Nick Ferrio, and Simpson’s sister Ansley) helps shape the music on large-sounding, dynamic rock songs like “White Kites and Sky Blue” and “Niizhoziibing” and more electronic-tinged dream pop ones like “Pyrrhic Victories” and “Murder of Crows”, but it’s the quietly intense frontperson and writer that holds the tapestry together. This is the kind of rich LP that can’t really be done justice in two-hundred-odd words, but I’m parking it in Pressing Concerns in hopes that it reaches the right people nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Teenage Tom Petties, Joel Cusumano, Fanclubwallet, Verity Den

Thursday Pressing Concerns! Four albums coming out tomorrow, from Teenage Tom Petties, Joel Cusumano, Fanclubwallet, and Verity Den. Check ’em out, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, and Left Tracks; Tuesday: The Felt Tips, Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, and Yuasa-Exide), dial those up, too.

Teenage Tom Petties – Rally the Tropes

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Fuzz pop, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: East Coast Comebacks

Teenage Tom Petties albums seem to be a yearly occurrence–Tom Brown has dropped one every year since 2022’s self-titled debut, and Rally the Tropes make it four for four. This is all, of course, in addition to the Bath, England power pop musician’s solo work as Lone Striker and his time co-leading Rural France–with all that in mind, I can’t really complain that Rally the Tropes is “only” eighteen minutes long. It’s also the second Teenage Tom Petties album with the full five-piece bicontinental band (guitarists Galen Richmond and James Brown, bassist Jim Quinn, and drummer Jeff Hamm), and, like 2023’s Hotbox Daydreams, it was recorded by Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island. It may seem like there’s a steady stream of new music from Tom Brown that he just can’t turn off, but he specifically wrote the songs of Rally the Tropes with this full-band New England jaunt in mind–after a pair of self-recorded albums in last year’s Teenage Tom Petties LP and the Lone Striker one, Brown is ready to once again put his songs in his friends’ hands to elevate them.

Even more so than the garage-y, punk-y, jangly power pop sound of Rally the Tropes, the band’s presence is felt via Brown’s writing; it’s communal in a winking (read: British) way, from the triumphant slacker-pop opening of “American Breakfast” (“I’m glad to be involved in it, I’m glad to play my part” goes the refrain, after Brown gets situated with a rental car and motel coffee) to a dizzying different kind of trip in “Kudzu Pop” (“dropping acid at the Peach Pit show / In my Bon Scott jacket phase”) to the excitement of “Teenage Thin Lizzys” (“Oh my god, it’s happening to me and all my friends / We’re all together and I hope it never ends”) to the victory lap closing track “East Coast Comebacks” (“Had some palpitations for lunch / … / In the Miller High Life we trust”; I do worry about Tom Brown’s long-term health sometimes).

The opener and closer feel like bookends for a concept album about making a garage-punk-power-pop album in New England–and in between them are a bunch of brief but great examples of the fruits of the Teenage Tom Petties’ labor. I’m personally partial to “Tough Cookies”, an amusing, incredibly catchy mid-tempo garage rock stomp in which the Beastie Boys memorably catch a stray (but there’s also “Faculty”, a song that sounds even more like Thin Lizzy than the song that’s called “Teenage Thin Lizzys”). It’s “East Coast Comebacks” that really sells Rally the Tropes as a mini-masterpiece, though–it starts with some arena rock-style Guided by Voices chords and pumped-in cheers (and Brown soaks the lyrics in beer to boot). It’s about as “indulgent” as a group like the Teenage Tom Petties can get–and though it may be Brown’s pen to paper, it’s the rest of his band giving him the freedom to fly on Rally the Tropes. (Bandcamp link)

Joel Cusumano – Waxworld

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Two Arrows

Power pop fans who read this blog may have heard Oakland musician Joel Cusumano via his work as the guitarist in R.E. Seraphin, or maybe they’re familiar with him as the frontperson of Sob Stories. Cusumano’s first-ever solo album, Waxworld, cements him as a key figure in the Bay Area indie pop scene I’ve written about extensively on this blog, as members of Chime School, Ryli, Yea-Ming and the Rumours, and The Pennys, among others, guest on the LP. Waxworld is a great spotlight-earning debut for a consistent indie pop practitioner, confirming that Cusumano can write jangle pop as well as his associates but also revealing that he’s a much different bandleader than the likes of Ray Seraphin or Andy Pastalaniec.

The more immediate songs on Waxworld are some of the best guitar pop I’ve heard this year–the bottle-rocket power pop of opening track “Two Arrows”, the triumphant Martin Newell-worthy jangle of “Mary Katharine”, the self-contained wistful guitar pop meditations of “Another Time, Another Place” and “Maybe in a Different World” (which kind of reminds me of the last Spirit Night album). The mythology, art history, and religious references dotted throughout Waxworld reflect somebody alight with the kind of inspiration that, while far removed from Cusumano’s direct musical influences, has historically resulted in some of the most interesting “college rock” and/or indie pop music. I see why Cusumano tapped the titular uncanny lifelike art form to represent Waxworld–it’s a good metaphor, but it’s also an entire medium beyond that. No doubt an intriguing prospect for somebody seeking to make something striking with these well-worn tools. (Bandcamp link)

Fanclubwallet – Living While Dying

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, bedroom pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Me Time

After beginning as the solo bedroom pop project of Hannah Judge in the early 2020s, the Ottawa-based Fanclubwallet recently swelled to a four-piece band also made up of guitarist Eric Graham, drummer Michael Watson, and bassist Nat Reid, a lineup that made its debut with last year’s Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines EP. Living While Dying, Fanclubwallet’s second LP, accomplishes a few milestones–it’s their first album for Lauren Records, and the first recorded as a quartet (Judge and Watson made 2022’s You Have Got to Be Kidding Me as a duo). The title of Living While Dying refers to Judge’s experience being diagnosed and living with chronic illness, and the vehicle with which Fanclubwallet tackle this hurdle is with their by-now-recognizable dreamy, vibrant, but somewhat chilly kind of indie pop. Bleary-eyed but determined, Fanclubwallet tackle quick-paced nerve-pop (“Cotton Mouth”), bouncy, almost danceable synthpop (“Know You Anymore”), and straight-up gorgeously-unfolding dream pop (“Head On”). Single “New Distraction” desperately searches for the balm of its title to the tune of, well, just about as close as a band like Fanclubwallet can get to “mall punk”, and a pair of dark synthscapes in “I Love the Hell I Know” and “Guts” give way to one last pounding indie pop closer in “Me Time”. “Me Time” is an abrupt ending, both musically and thematically–Judge is “setting up for…a little downtime”, but it’s clear from the rest of the song that she hasn’t done it yet. And so it (it being life, death, various struggles, Fanclubwallet, a growing list of indie pop bangers) continues. (Bandcamp link)

Verity Den – Wet Glass

Release date: October 24^th
Record label: Amish
Genre: Experimental rock, post-rock, dream pop, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Green Drag

Last March brought the self-titled debut album from Verity Den, a North Carolina trio of musicians with backgrounds in both indie rock and experimental music. Verity Den reflected the varied talents of Casey Proctor, Trevor Reece, and Mike Wallace, ranging from pop-forward shoegaze to post-rock and ambient territory; not long after its release, live member Reed Benjamin joined on full-time to make the band a quartet and work on a sophomore LP began. Wet Glass picks up where Verity Den left off, more or less, merging odder instrumental turns with catchy Yo La Tengo/Sonic Youth-esque fuzz rock and dream pop in album opener “Vacant Lot” and the title track. In between punches like the wiry post-punk rocker “Spit Red” and underwater fuzz-pop of “Green Drag” are the trickier ones–we’ve got an ambient noise collage sitting in the track number three slot with “Unresolved Mystery”, and the uncertain haze of “Push Down Hard / Tess II” stretches for seven minutes. There’s something compelling and even tangible to be glimpsed throughout the latter’s journey, though, much like how “To Trees” and “Highway Fifty Four” close the book on Wet Glass by drifting in and out of lucidity. Verity Den aren’t the first ones to mix indie rock with the further reaches of music, but the balancing act they’ve been honing on two LPs and counting is impressive and not to be taken for granted. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Felt Tips, Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, Yuasa-Exide

For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve flagged new albums from Missed Cues, Dylan Mondegreen, and Yuasa-Exide, as well as a new reissue from The Felt Tips. If by chance you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, and Left Tracks), you ought to check that one out, too.

The Felt Tips – Living and Growing (Reissue)

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Unspun Heroes
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Garden of Roses

Since 2024 I’ve written about two albums from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, the solo project of a Glasgow singer-songwriter named Andrew Paterson. After a decade or so away from releasing music, Virtual Virgins and World to Rights were both strong, catchy, and amusing indie pop records that were a return to form from the former frontperson of The Felt Tips. On the heels of all this new music, Paterson’s old band is seeing their debut album, 2010’s Living and Growing, reissued and given a vinyl release for the first time thanks to Unspun Heroes. If you’ve enjoyed those Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour records, you’ll be pleased to hear that Paterson sounded virtually the same a decade and a half ago, with the more full-band (but still very indie pop) sound being the primary difference.

Guitarist Miguel Navarro, drummer Kevin Carroll, and bassist Neil Masson give Living and Growing an electric jangle pop/C86-influenced sound, carrying on a lineage Paterson is happy to make clear via “Dear Morrissey”, a song about the limits of those formative influences that unsurprisingly still sounds pretty prescient today. It really is remarkable how ageless Paterson’s voice apparently is, although there are subtle differences in his songwriting in parts of Living and Growing. There’s a bluntness to songs like “Silver Spoon” and “Not Tonight” that works well in the full-band setting but doesn’t crop up in Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour as much–and yet, there are diatribes, cyphers, and Scottish tapestries to be had in songs like “Lifeskills” and “Engaged for a Visa” nonetheless. It’s a time capsule and it’s good indie pop, for all who appreciate both such attempts at hanging on to a bit of youth. (Bandcamp link)

Missed Cues – Don’t Turn Off the Lights

Release date: August 22^nd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Pop punk, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Don’t Turn Off the Lights

I’ve got good news for those of you who enjoy the more haggard side of pop punk. It’s called Missed Cues, a new quartet from New Haven and Middleton, Connecticut (band member names: Matt, Tim, Marty and Matt) who’ve just put out their debut album, Don’t Turn Off the Lights (engineered by New England singer-songwriter Ezra Cohen). The band referenced Lookout Records, The Replacements, and Tom Petty when they sent this album to me, and the resulting no-frills, thirty-one minute LP seems determined to get me to work the term “orgcore” into this review somehow. Words like “workmanlike” and “unassuming” come to mind with regards to Missed Cues’ lead vocalist(s) (see, I can’t even tell if there are more than one), but don’t let that fool you–they’re very good at bashing out frayed power-pop-punk hits. You can’t fake this kind of thing–it takes true devotees to rip through a dozen of these, from the bouncy 90s gruff-punk opening title track to the Lookout-worthy spleening of “It’s a Long Way” to the rueful “You and I” to the sped-up sprint “In Your Head” to the power pop winner “Don’t Wanna Break Your Heart” (positively handclap-worthy, that one). Missed Cues don’t seem like ones to show off, but Don’t Turn Off the Lights is a shining example of how to pull this kind of thing off regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Dylan Mondegreen – A Sound Rings True

Release date: September 5^th
Record label: Fastcut/Saiko
Genre: Soft rock, sophisti-pop, synthpop, indie pop, twee, chamber pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Moleskine Notebook

Dylan Mondegreen is Børge Sildnes, a longtime Oslo-based indie pop musician who’s been making albums in the realms of folk pop, soft rock, and chamber pop since 2007. A Sound Rings True is Mondegreen’s sixth LP and his first since 2018; he writes that “vocal issues” impaired his ability to sing for a “few years” and thus the instrumentals of A Sound Rings True had more time than normal to incubate. Without much familiarity with Mondegreen’s previous discography, I can’t tell how much more comparatively “developed” the songs of A Sound Rings True are, but I do know that the incredibly-polished, synth-forward 80s pop (some call it “sophsti-pop”) sound of this album is incredibly apt for Mondegreen’s songs. The music is still fairly demure and delicate enough to reflect a singer-songwriter well-versed in the realms of “twee” and chamber pop, but when the garish synths and smooth-jazz saxophones show up in “Moleskine Notebook”, Mondegreen has done a good job of paving the road to get there without a hitch. Eighties debt aside, A Sound Rings True could’ve come out during any point in the past twenty-five years as part of the “lush indie pop” universe, and a more sketched-out instrumental palette hasn’t removed Mondegreen from the more direct end of that spectrum. (Bandcamp link)

Yuasa-Exide – Go to Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica

Release date: August 29^th
Record label: Round Bale Recordings/Ape Sanctuary
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Wrong End

It’s high time we check back in on Douglas Busson and his Yuasa-Exide project. A brief recent history of the Twin Cities-based musician: seventeen records of no-fi, clanging, fuzzy, frequently catchy indie rock from 2022 to 2024, eventually linking with Round Bale Recordings last year to release some of them via cassette. 2025 has seen “only” three Yuasa-Exide records so far: Hyper at the Gates of Dawn in March, a split cassette with Madison’s Boo/Hiss in July, and now Go to Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica, once again out on tape via Round Bale. If you’ve heard any previous Yuasa-Exide album, you shouldn’t be surprised that Busson and his team of Twin Cities-area collaborators have turned in another collection of tinny, garbled garage rock and lo-fi pop; perhaps it is a little more refined and ambitious than the slew of earlier Yuasa-Exide albums (it’s looking like it’ll be the only full-length we’ll get this quarter–that’s a lot of weight to put on it!). You’ll get the slacker fuzz-fests where you have to strain a bit to hear the melodies, but stuff like “More Surreal” and (especially) “Wrong End” feels really automatic and immediate. Yuasa-Exide were born into distortion–they know when to ride it and when to cut right through. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sueño Púrpura, Goodbye Wudaokou, Generifus, Left Tracks

During this eventful Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ll be looking at new albums from Sueño Púrpura and Goodbye Wudaokou, a career-spanning compilation from Generifus, and an EP or mini-LP or whatever from Left Tracks. Let’s go!

Sueño Púrpura – Souvenir

Release date: September 26^th
Record label: Buh
Genre: Shoegaze, art rock, dream pop, post-rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: La Niebla

Lima, Peru-based Buh Records has done an impressive amount of excavating both new and historical experimental music from Latin America in its two decades of activity–with that in mind, providing a home for contemporary South American shoegaze bands like Thank You Lord for Satan and Sexores to put out new material is just one of the services they’ve provided us, but it’s probably the most relevant one for this blog. Buh’s latest signee is a five-piece from Lima called Sueño Púrpura, co-founded in 2022 by two guitarists who’d played together in the instrumental band Parahelio (Rodolfo Ontaneda and Christian Ortega) and quickly joined by vocalist Jandy Torres, bassist José Andrés Lezma, and drummer Juan Camba. The first Sueño Púrpura album, Souvenir, is a sprawling forty-four minute, six-song shoegaze LP (it’s bookended by a nine-minute opening track and a thirteen-minute closing one) with pieces of post-rock, dream pop, and fuzz pop baked into their sound.

Souvenir’s opening track, “Sueño Púrpura”, may indeed stretch to nearly ten minutes, but it’s a go-ahead dream-pop-infused shoegaze masterpiece for nearly its entire runtime–after this relatively friendly opening, Souvenir gets thornier once we get into the meat of songs like “Granate” and “Luz Inerte”. For the most part, these are meandering, lost-sounding psychedelic post-rock pieces with bits of noisy reprieves flaring up whenever Sueño Púrpura threaten to stray too far from shoegaze. “La Niebla” brings a little “pop” more directly back to the surface, and “El Tiempo Es Una Flor” tempers its atmospheric first half with a surging fuzz rock conclusion. The frenetic dozen-minute closing track “Mora” starts with a few minutes of setup that lead towards Sueño Púrpura upping the ante with nearly krautrock-level percussion and amplifiers on the brink. “Mora” doesn’t really sound like the rest of Souvenir, but Sueño Púrpura leave enough chaos strewn about their beauty-seeking music that it’s not unclear how we got here. (Bandcamp link)

Goodbye Wudaokou – Anything of Us

Release date: October 1^st
Record label: Subjangle/YYZ
Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, dream pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Glimmers

Last year’s Mirror Skies by Goodbye Wudaokou was a special thing–a lifelong musician finally makes a debut album, turning in an expansive record steeped in his influences (post-punk, new wave, college rock, C86) with a strong personal stamp on them. Manchester’s Mat Mills apparently decided not to wait long before continuing down this path, as the second Goodbye Wudakou album, Anything of Us, arrives scarcely a year after the first one did. If you liked Mirror Skies, you’ll probably like this one, though it’s clearly not a retread–it’s a more polished and propulsive listen, with Mills (still recording and performing all the instruments himself) pursuing a sound more clearly indebted to the jangly indie pop from his home city and country. In making a more recognizably “indie pop” record with a more traditional guitar-led sound, one might fret that Goodbye Wudaokou could lose the personal homespun touch of Mirror Skies, but that’s not the case here thanks to Mills’ vocals–still even-keeled, unassuming, and high in the mix. It’s not like the New Order synths and post-punk have disappeared from Anything of Us–Goodbye Wudaokou, impressively, is able to conjure up the same backwards-glancing melancholy with one of its strongest ingredients reduced a bit in the concoction. Presenting a winning formula is always welcome, and being able to tinker with it effectively just as much so. (Bandcamp link)

Generifus – Best Of

Release date: September 19^th
Record label: Perpetual Doom
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Good Graces

I’ve written about Generifus on this blog before–specifically, the Olympia, Washington-based project’s 2023 album Rearrangel–but that doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of the discography that Spencer Sult has amassed under the name over the past twenty years. Thankfully, Perpetual Doom (Lee Baggett, Austin Leonard Jones, Bill Baird) has given us an easy way in via Best Of, an hourlong cassette tape featuring songs from across the folk rock act’s two-decade career. I believe it’s in roughly chronological order–at the very least, we get early cuts like “And I Tried” and “Good Graces” (from 2011’s I Don’t Have to Worry) at the beginning and songs from Rearrangel and 2024’s Summerberrys (“Didn’t Even Look at the Mountain”, “Rearrangel”, “Charm”) bring up the rear. Best Of starts as a lo-fi, acoustic, slow-crawling Pacific Northwest indie folk rock act and ends as a confident, polished alt-country group, but it’s not such a linear progression–highlights from both the first (early rocker “Back and Time” and country rock breezer “Favorite Thing”) and second (the quiet contemplation of “On God” and the boisterous retro-party vibes of “I Love Music”) halves defy easy placement on such a spectrum. That’s the mark of a successful survey, and of a wealth of work from which to draw it. (Bandcamp link)

Left Tracks – LT2

Release date: September 26^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop, synthpop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I’m Gone

I’ve written about Los Angeles-based musician Kabir Kumar thanks to their work as Sun Kin–their 2024 album Sunset World was one of my favorites of that year–so it’s nice to see them back again in some form with a record, this time as one-half of the duo Left Tracks. Left Tracks’ roots actually go back to around 2020, when Kumar and Phil Di Leo (DI LEO, Seemway) co-founded the group as a way to stay musically connected after the latter’s departure to SoCal from Oakland. The appropriately-titled LT2 is the second Left Tracks release, following a five-song EP in 2023 called End Times Hauling, and the record (it’s eight songs and sixteen minutes long, take your pick on “album” or “EP”) contains plenty of the vibrant, colorful indie pop that I’ve enjoyed via Sun Kin. LT2 is both more streamlined and weirder than Kumar’s solo project, somehow–I’m not sure how else to describe a record that opens with a minimal, sort of hip-hop spoken word experiment (“Conversation”) into a bright, sunny two-minute pop song (“I’m Gone”) into deconstructed dream folk (“Something from Last Night”). Perhaps Left Tracks could’ve elongated these songs and made a “proper” thirty-minute album, but I like the quick bursts of energy LT2 sprints towards instead. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Jeff Tobias, The Dream Syndicate, Good Luck, Citric Dummies

In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we are looking at four records that come out tomorrow, October 17th. We’ve got new albums from Jeff Tobias, Good Luck, and Citric Dummies, plus a reissue from The Dream Syndicate. Whoa! And if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover, and Tuesday’s had The Ekphrastics, Fini Tribe, Marni, and Laveda), check those out, too.

Jeff Tobias – One Hundredfold Now in This Age

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Art rock, orchestral pop, experimental pop, jazz-pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Gimme Coherence

I do think that Jeff Tobias’ 2022 album Recurring Dream was the right experimental, political synthpop album for that particular moment–poking at the post-pandemic malaise that was the Biden era, Tobias (who also plays in art rock group Modern Nature and noise-jazz ensemble Sunwatchers) meditated on pinkwashing and lampooned nonprofit-industrial-complex grifters to the tune of offbeat but quite catchy synth-rock. Things are different now, though, and it’s time for something different. It’s time for One Hundredfold Now in This Age, Tobias’ second album of “songs” and first for Repeating Cloud (a partnership for which I can personally claim maybe about 5% of the credit). It’s time for an album whose first lyrics are “Burn the American flag / One hundred times a day,” set to smooth jazz-pop saxophones made by somebody who not only declines to attempt to view everything at a remove, but openly illustrates the futility of trying to do so at the moment.

Musically speaking, One Hundredfold Now in This Age is more orchestral and jazz-indebted than Recurring Dream was, but if you enjoyed that album’s smooth yet dense take on pop music, Tobias does it again here, more or less. With an impressive list of guest musicians in tow (members of Editrix, The Mountain Movers, Office Culture, and American Football, among others), Tobias turns these songs into a single chaotic, vibrant, and seething beast. Taking off from the aforementioned yacht-rock-soundtracked First Amendment exercise endorsed by opening track “END IT”, Tobias then very explicitly tells us “No one gets to go home” in “Gimme Coherence”, the exhilarating, deteriorating “hit” of One Hundredfold Now in This Age (“What’s the paperwork I gotta sign so I don’t die?”– straight and to the point, Mr. Tobias, I like it).

Tobias’ apocalyptic spoken-word narrative in “Arp (Burning Property)” is both absurd and the day-to-day reality of multiple American cities at the time of me writing this. Tobias dips out of a torture-kidnapping session to “deal with email stuff” and later remarks “I can see the place where I live, but it’s also Beirut. It’s also Johannesburg…It’s Greensboro, and it’s Warsaw. It’s home”. If that doesn’t wake you up, Tobias has reserved the most maximalist, noisiest, most insistent moment on the album for a song called “This Is Everybody Not Talking About It” (featuring a kind of dazed, frantic repetition that also really sells late-album highlight “I Feel Hated”). One Hundredfold Now in This Age ends with a long horn-laden, slow-moving pop song called “Don’t Quit the Band” in which Tobias encourages us to “stay alive” for each other and punctuating it with “Don’t quit the band / We need you around”. My irony-poisoned mind did indeed toy with the idea that this was a sardonic closing message, but no–it’s Jeff Tobias once again meeting the moment, in the most difficult and correct way. (Bandcamp link)

The Dream Syndicate – Medicine Show: I Know What You Like (Deluxe Edition)

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Fire
Genre: Paisley Underground, psychedelic rock, alternative rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: John Coltrane Stereo Blues

All four of The Dream Syndicate’s 1980s albums are behemoths as far as I’m concerned, and all of them were also, as it turns out, merely incomplete reflections of the high-power, constantly morphing rock band behind them at various points throughout the decade. Fire Records’ reissue series of these albums has been a thorough presentation of The Dream Syndicate and everything that they entailed until their 1989 breakup–over the past few years, we’ve gotten deeper looks at their classic 1982 debut album The Days of Wine and Roses and their undersung 1986 third LP, Out of the Grey. The Dream Syndicate have been praised plenty by critics over the past forty years, and while they may not have the cache in 2025 of several bands for which they helped pave the way, this has nothing to do with the music itself. What The Dream Syndicate accomplished over four LPs–injecting psychedelia, hard rock muscle, and electric Dylanesque rock-and-roll Americana into then-nascent “alternative rock”–is quite impressive, but what Medicine Show: I Know What You Like displays more than anything is that they’re a timeless classic rock band.

This reissue of the band’s 1984 sophomore album is–like its predecessors–as exhaustive as anyone could want, with the CD edition spanning four discs of live recordings, rehearsals, and studio outtakes. Those curious about The Dream Syndicate need only to make their way to the first disc (and the entirety of the vinyl edition), containing the original album (remastered) plus a couple of bonus tracks. Not quite as streamlined as Out of the Grey but on its way, Medicine Show hits like a ton of bricks, and the sprawling track lengths don’t slow down the group’s probing, fuzzed-out rock explorations. An expanded version of the 1984 live album This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album…Live! is also vital for the history of the band, and the mostly-previously-unreleased rehearsals and live tapes appended onto the third and fourth discs are quality, too. It’s not really meant to be sat down and listened to in one sitting (hearing this many versions of “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” in short order probably isn’t good for you), but they’re all laid out for us to get whatever we can out of them. And that’s still a good deal in 2025. (Bandcamp link)

Good Luck – Big Dreams, Mister

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Lauren/Specialist Subject
Genre: Indie pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No T-Shirts

The Bloomington, Indiana trio Good Luck (Ginger Alford, Matt Tobey, and Mike Harpring) released two albums–2008’s Into Lake Griffy and 2011’s Without Hesitation–before breaking up the following year, quietly bowing out of the indie rock/punk underground right before the “scene” began to be dotted with bands making some similar combination of earnest Midwestern indie rock, pop punk, and power pop. I’ve only seen the band (and, in particular, Into Lake Griffy) grow in stature in their absence, but the first Good Luck album in fourteen years doesn’t really feel burdened with that (admittedly still relatively niche) weight. For all I know, Good Luck would’ve reformed and made Big Dreams, Mister as soon as their lives aligned to make another record together regardless of whether anyone remembered them.

But people did remember Good Luck. Hop Along member and producer extraordinaire Joe Reinhart (based in Philadelphia, where Harpring now lives, too) recorded Big Dreams, Mister in several sessions, Jeff Rosenstock wrote the biography accompanying the album, and longtime DIY chroniclers Specialist Subject and Lauren Records stepped up to release it. Opening track “Into the Void” arrives with communal flair, nonstop pop hooks, and sneakily impressive guitars like no time at all has passed, and the rest of Big Dreams, Mister ensures no letdowns follow. The lean power pop of the Alford-sung “No T-Shirts”, the swinging crunch of “Hold on We’re on the Way”, the rock and roll tug-of-war of “What Young Me Wanted”–these are self-evidently great songs, with no barriers or blockades between them and us whatsoever. This still works, and, though it certainly must take work to get these songs as intricate as Good Luck make them, Big Dreams, Mister doesn’t sound like there were any doubts about that among its creators. (Bandcamp link)

Citric Dummies – Split With Turnstile

Release date: October 17^th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, rock and roll, hardcore punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: I Don’t Like Anything

That’s right, everyone’s favorite garage punk/rock and roll trio from Minneapolis, the Citric Dummies, are back. Bassist/vocalist David Lunch, drummer D.V. Tinner, and guitarist David Cronutburger (replacing Patrick Dillon aka Blob Mould) are, I believe, on their fifth album now with the amusingly misleadingly-titled Split with Turnstile (considering that their previous LP’s name was a take on Hüsker Dü, the Baltimore pop-hardcore sensation alluded to via this album’s title should wear it as a badge of honor). Always goofy but serious about making fast-paced, gas-pedal-to-the-floor punk rock, Split with Turnstile continues the thread of 2023’s Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass and last year’s Trapped in a Parking Garage EP; maybe it’s just recency bias, but it feels like the riffs hit harder and smoke heavier than ever on this one. Songs like “I Don’t Like Anything” and “I Can’t Stand the Weekend” are the ideal Citric Dummies songs, positively melting into an explicable rage for ninety seconds at a time to deliver anti-social, anti-societal garage punk diatribes. Citric Dummies don’t slow down–certainly not on the heavy-ripping lead single “I Am Your Napkin”, not on the high-concept (I mean, for them) “Grant Richardson’s Burning Wreckage Welcome Home”, and not on the final track, which is appropriately titled “Ain’t Got Time (To Live)”. I suppose I should be glad that they found twenty minutes for Split With Turnstile anyway. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Ekphrastics, Fini Tribe, Marni, Laveda

Welcome to Pressing Concerns number two (of the week)! Today’s edition features new albums from The Ekphrastics and Laveda, a compilation from Fini Tribe, and an EP from Marni. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover), check that out here.

The Ekphrastics – All of a Sudden, Pow!

Release date: October 1^st
Record label: Harriet
Genre: Indie pop, folk-pop, twee
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Five Things Lynn Knows

Both Frank Boscoe (a Pittsburgh-originating singer-songwriter known for 90s indie rock bands like Wimp Factor 14 and The Vehicle Flips) and Harriet Records (the independent indie pop label who put out music from Boscoe’s bands as well as Tullycraft, Crayon, and Linda Smith) have been in the midst of a revival lately. After seemingly folding at the end of the 1990s, Harriet’s been quite active this decade, and Boscoe’s new band The Ekphrastics (based out of Camden, Maine) have been at the center of it all. All of a Sudden, Pow! is the third Ekphrastics album in as many years, and it contains a batch of songs in the same historical-record-digging vein as last year’s Make Your Own Snowboard.

Using the same comfortable laid-back, folk-y indie pop in which The Ekphrastics deal, Boscoe leads us through gripping tales like “I Am Going to Read You the Riot Act” (in which we are, in fact, read the 1715 British act that gave the expression its name), “This Month at the Roman Bros. Gallery” (which situates itself in a particularly refined money-laundering operation), and “My Character Was Killed Off in a Fiery Car Wreck” (self-explanatory). The phrase “too esoteric for its own good” was bouncing around my head listening to “The Wind Chill Factor? That Was Me” at first, but I’ve come around to that one, too–the song’s narrator, an anonymous Canadian soldier who will forever be unrecognized for his contributions to meteorology, is as good an avatar for The Ekphrastics as any. That’s Frank Boscoe’s talent–he can be going on and on, delivering a narrative that doesn’t seem remarkable in any way, but then he’ll sneak in a line or two that builds an entire world and character, and all of a sudden… (Bandcamp link)

Fini Tribe – The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Shipwrecked Industries/Finiflex
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, industrial
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Splash Care

The Edinburgh-originating electronic/trance act Finitribe put out five albums (and considerably more singles and EPs) on labels like Wax Trax!, One Little Indian, and FFRR between 1988 and 1998 before disbanding. Before any of that, however, the sextet (Chris Connelly, Simon McGlynn, Andy McGregor, Davie Miller, Philip Pinsky, and John Vick) called themselves Fini Tribe (two words!) and had a much more post-punk sound. These early years didn’t seem to get the on-record representation that the later eras of Finitribe did, but The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987 does its best to make up for that. The definitive 3-CD edition of this compilation pulls together the singles Fini Tribe released contemporaneously, Peel and BBC Sessions, rehearsal tapes, and live recordings in a forty-seven song package (the vinyl edition selects nine from across the sprawl).

The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe is an exciting look into a fertile time and place in rock music history through the lens of a band dabbling in a bit of all of it–given the presence of some more industrial/dance-influenced material, it’s not surprising where this group eventually ended up, but these recordings also capture a muscular six-piece rock band, a bunch of nervous post-punks, and a team of noisy experimenters. It’s hard to say whether, had they consolidated this era into a single LP at the time, Fini Tribe would have taken a place alongside some of their more canonized peers–but for any early post-punk fan, there’s more than enough here to recommend a deep dive. (Bandcamp link)

Marni – fml era

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, alt-rock, slowcore, 90s indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Washed Up

When I wrote about the band Marni briefly in 2023, they were the solo project of Palm Springs vocalist/guitarist Nicolas Lara (who was also playing in Garb around that time, I believe). Since their 2022 debut album Whiskey Girl (and the non-album single I highlighted that came out a couple of months later), they’ve developed into a full band also featuring vocalist/guitarist Michaela Gradstein, bassist Kai Zeleznik, guitarist Manny Trujillo, and drummer Joey Anderson. The Los Angeles-based group has settled in nicely with West Coast groups playing some mixture of slowcore, shoegaze, and fuzz-punk (they opened for Idaho last year, if that helps), and that’s what you’ll hear on their latest EP, fml era. It’s the best that Marni has sounded yet, even if (perhaps because) they’re still kind of hard to get a handle on. “Bee Stings” and “99¢” are both awesome heavy alt-rock rippers to open the EP, but fml era’s final three songs use Marni’s electricity for subtler, more slowcore-indebted, and (at least in the case of “Boozer”) alt-country ends. Lara namechecks the late great Ohioan Jason Molina in “Washed Up”, although the wide-open, star-filled indie rock of the track in question betrays Marni’s southwestern desert origins; maybe you’ll find a band seeing how their heroes play in new environments as worthwhile as I do. (Bandcamp link)

Laveda – Love, Darla

Release date: September 12^th
Record label: Bar/None
Genre: Fuzz pop, noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Cellphone

Just what we all needed: another noisy indie rock band from the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. To be fair, Laveda are originally from Albany, but their third album, Love, Darla, clearly owes a debt to their adopted home city’s underground rock music from the 1980s and 90s. Band co-founders Jacob Brooks (who also makes music as Retail Drugs) and Ali Genevich have picked up a rhythm section (drummer Joe Taurone and bassist Dan Carr) somewhere between their 2020 debut album and Love, Darla, and the four-piece sounds fully ready to carry on the traditions of bands like Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead, and Poem Rocket on their latest LP. They hew towards the “pop” side of their favorite noisemakers, to be sure–there’s nice melodies and simply effective rhythms clearly marking could-be-hits like “Cellphone” (a toe-tapping petulant post-punk track) and “Heaven” (a gorgeous dream pop song), and it’s baked into the LP’s noisier numbers as well. I don’t mind hearing a band hopping around from playing at distortion-laden punks (most of “Care”) to oh-so-careful avant-garde-rock guitar whisperers (“Dig Me Out”, the rest of “Care”) when they sound like they have an equal appreciation for all of it. That’s because I do too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, People Mover

Hey, folks. It’s the first Pressing Concerns of the week. Thanks for joining us. We’ve got new albums from Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover below, which I think you’ll enjoy.

Charlie Kaplan – A Hat Upon the Bed

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Art rock, folk rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: No More Mistakes

I introduced the blog to New York musician Charlie Kaplan with his 2024 LP Eternal Repeater. In addition to his work running Glamour Gowns Records and playing bass in sophisti-pop group Office Culture, he’s also a heady and accomplished folk-indie-rock singer-songwriter in his own right, and those who enjoyed Eternal Repeater should be overjoyed to learn that Kaplan is back less than a year later with a sprawling fourteen-song, fifty-minute album partially inspired by the 2013 death of his father. Well, maybe “overjoyed” isn’t the word, but A Hat Upon the Bed is an exciting leap forward for the already fairly ambitious musician, as Kaplan and his recognizable group of collaborators (including pianist Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture, bassist Julian Cubillos, guest guitarist Nico Hedley, and Nate Mendelsohn of Market in the engineer’s chair) trust us to keep up with a sneakily grandiose LP.

We’re kind of thrown right into it at the beginning between the stark orchestral folk of the title track, the noisy torrent masking “Halley”, and the five-minute, meandering “Transmission”. “Have a Nice Day”, while still fairly intense, is the first relatively sunny moment on A Hat Upon the Bed, and the six-minute “Is It Gonna Be Alright” is large enough to incorporate some of those moments, too. Stick with Kaplan and you’ll find a couple of strong pop songs hidden in the middle of A Hat Upon the Bed’s morass–the back-to-back “Top of the Tree” and “No More Mistakes” land somewhere between the polished studio pop of Office Culture and Wilco, another studio-wielding band I’ve compared Kaplan to in the past. If A Hat Upon the Bed comes across as a little more “challenging” overall than Eternal Repeater, it’s in an organic way. It’s where the material took Charlie Kaplan and his band, and we’ve come all this way with them. (Bandcamp link)

Aarktica – Ecstatic Lightsongs

Release date: October 3^rd
Record label: HanaqPacha
Genre: Dream pop, slowcore, post-rock, post-punk, experimental
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Trick of the Light

I wrote about Aarktica in 2022, when the group (largely the project of Los Angeles’ Jon DeRosa) released a gigantic double album called We Will Find the Light. It followed a relatively quiet period for Aarktica, but it was far from their first release–they’ve been making records in the realms of post-rock, ambient, and slowcore since 1999. Aarktica has thankfully stayed active in the wake of We Will Find the Light–they released the instrumental album Paeans in 2023, and they’re back with another (loosely-speaking) “rock” album called Ecstatic Lightsongs this month. With the help of cellist Henrik Meierkord, drummer Mike Pride, bassist Lewis Pesacov, and vocalist Britt Warner, Ecstatic Lightsongs is DeRosa’s attempt to make an album inspired by “classic darkwave and art-rock”, naming uncategorizable iconoclasts like Hood, The Durutti Column, and (perhaps most importantly) Talk Talk as touchpoints.

Compared to We Will Find the Light, in which slow folk songs were (more or less) cleanly separated by ambient pieces, Ecstatic Lightsongs is a more holistic mix of folk, rock, post-rock, and ambient music. The record’s first two songs are both overwhelming pieces of slowcore/art rock, and while “Why Say Anything?” and “Ecstatic Light Transmission” can be described as folk and ambient music respectively, the cavernous acoustic sound of the former and the twinkling instrumental melodies of the latter muddy the waters just a little further. The slightly psychedelic swirl of the bleary-eyed orchestral folk rock “Laughing in the Rain” is a beautiful closer, although the “bonus track”–an Aarktica-fied version of The Chameleons’ “Second Skin”–works as a coda as well. There’s a weight to all of Ecstatic Lightsongs, but not one that makes it a chore to pick up. (Bandcamp link)

Friendship Commanders – BEAR

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Magnetic Eye
Genre: Hard rock, stoner rock, noise rock, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dripping Silver

Buick Audra and Jerry Roe are plenty busy on their own (the former with a genre-spanning solo career, the latter as a prolific session drummer), but the work the Nashville duo do together as Friendship Commanders is for what they’re best-known (or it ought to be if it isn’t). The duo have evolved from a scrappy, punk-influenced alt-rock group to a heavy and melodic stoner/sludge rock band (something underscored by a recent remixed re-release of their 2018 sophomore album, BILL). Audra’s writing tends towards the opaque and vague, real emotions but without obvious receipts to their origins–this contrasts with her quite visceral and specific quotes about what inspired her lyrics on BEAR, the latest Friendship Commanders album. It’s effectively a furious concept album about women who devote themselves to upholding patriarchal societal norms at the expense of their own gender and a vow by Audra not to be “one of them”. It’s a heavy and complex subject that permeates some really great rock music from opening track “Keeping Score” (“I’m not seventeen anymore, but I’m keeping score” is, I imagine, a dispatch from a life of witnessing the kinds of actions that inspired BEAR) to closing song “Dead & Discarded Girls”, which is about as evocative as Friendship Commanders get. It’s something to reflect on and an antidote to the all-pervasive black-and-white mentality we’d all do well to challenge, but, just as importantly, it rocks. (Bandcamp link)

People Mover – Cane Trash

Release date: September 12^th
Record label: Little Lunch
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: James St

We’ve got some good news: they’re still making good indie pop down in Australia. People Mover are a trio from Brisbane made up of siblings Lu Sergiacomi (vocals/guitar) and Dan Sergiacomi (drums) along with “good mate” Billy McCulloch on bass; their first release was a three-song self-titled 7” back in 2021 on Little Lunch Records (Olivia’s World, Soft Covers, Pretty in Pink), and four years later we get Cane Trash, their first LP. Little Lunch refers to the album’s sound as “nonchalant Australian indie-punk”, which is accurate enough that I’m reprinting here; Lu’s vocals are droll but melodic, the instrumentals are capable, barebones, and just a little roughed-up, and the songwriting is subtle but sneakily quite strong. They’re not as “twee” as some of Little Lunch’s other bands, instead adding a garage-y propulsion to their music that reminds me of acts like The Small Intestines and The Courtneys (whom People Mover mention as an influence). Opening track “James St” is People Mover at their cleanest and most buttoned-up, but there’s plenty of “pop” in the sloppier, fuzzier material that follows it. Occasional slapdash vibes aside, though, I never believe that People Mover don’t know what they’re doing on Cane Trash. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Telephone Numbers, Guitar, Giant Day, Massage

It’s time for Pressing Concerns of the week number three! We’ve got brand-new albums from The Telephone Numbers, Guitar, Giant Day, and Massage for you to peruse below. Mark my words, this one’s going down as a classic. Also, if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new ones from Kilkenny Cats, Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island, and on Tuesday it was Ambulanz, Creative Writing, Time Thief, and Nape Neck), check those out, too.

The Telephone Numbers – Scarecrow II

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Telephone Numbers Theme

The San Francisco Bay Area is full of interesting, distinct singer-songwriters at the moment–Yea-Ming Chen, Michael Ramos, and Glenn Donaldson all come to me right off the dome–but The Telephone Numbers’ Thomas Rubenstein is remarkable in how he manages to carve out his own signature style while giving so much of himself over to the towering jangle pop, college rock, and power pop that’s shaped the entire scene around him. Andy Pastalaniec and Rob I. Miller have done it to some degree, but Rubenstein has been the king of it since 2021’s breakthrough LP The Ballad of Doug. The one-off singles and compilation appearances in the intervening four years have only increased my anticipation for Scarecrow II, the second Telephone Numbers LP and the first one for Slumberland Records. A lot of familiar faces have popped up on Telephone Numbers recordings over the years–Scarecrow II is no exception, but it’s worth noting that the band are now a solid quartet featuring Rubenstein’s longtime collaborator Charlie Ertola (The Love-Birds) on bass, mercenary Phil Lantz (Neutrals, The 1981, Chime School) on drums, and Umbrellas co-leader Morgan Stanley on guitar and vocals.

Scarecrow II may be The Telephone Numbers’ coming-out party, but the quartet sound pretty unhurried as they take the stage for the big show. “Goodbye Rock n Roll” is a minimal first statement, allowing us to take in Rubenstein’s striking, Scott Miller-esque vocals and a simple, brilliant jangle before lead single “Be Right Down” sweeps us all away. The mid-record ballad “Falling Dream” injects a bit of Tommy Keene into Rubenstein’s performance, and it gives way to a keyboard-infused rave-up called “Pulling Punchlines” (judging by the album credits, that one’s been in Rubenstein’s arsenal for a long time now). The beautiful music industry disillusionment anthem “This Job Is Killing Me”, originally the B-side to the 2023 “Weird Sisters” single, is re-recorded here, slowed down and given strings to draw out the titular expiration even more dramatically. The Telephone Numbers save one of their best tricks for the penultimate slot, giving Stanley the lead to sing “Telephone Numbers Theme”, a triumphant indie-power-pop track that’s every bit good enough to be the group’s theme song. Stanley’s voice is pretty far removed from Rubenstein’s vocals, but the trick of Scarecrow II, like all the Telephone Numbers numbers before it, is that it hangs together. (Bandcamp link)

Guitar – We’re Headed to the Lake

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, fuzz pop, garage rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: A+ for the Rotting Team

Three Guitar records, three reinventions. And We’re Headed to the Lake might be the one that finally gets Portland musician Saia Kuli the notoriety he’s been due for a hot minute. The sophomore Guitar LP ditches both the lo-fi post-punk of the 2022 self-titled EP and the shoegaze-infused noise-fuzz assault of 2024’s Casting Spells on Turtlehead and embraces clarity and pop songwriting like never before. All of a sudden, Kuli and some familiar collaborators (drummer Nikhil Wadhwa and vocalist Jontajshae Smith) are making exquisite 90s-influenced indie rock that reminds me quite a bit of Guided by Voices, Pavement, and (maybe because I just saw them live) Silkworm.

These elements were there in Guitar’s earlier, more chaotic material, but it’s still a shock to the system when We’re Headed to the Lake opens with tinny but otherwise clearly-delivered Robert Pollard-level guitar pop in “A+ for the Rotting Team” (and if the instrumental veers into a weird ditch at one point–well, it’s not like Guided by Voices never did that, either). The Smith-sung “Chance to Win” is legit dreamy jangle-rock, and songs like “Cornerland”, “Every Day Without Fail”, and “A Toast to Tovarishch” may have some garage-punk roughness around the edges, but they’re clearly pop music. Almost as if to reassure us that Guitar is still a bizarre project at its core, We’re Headed to the Lake closes on a song that’s as melodically beautiful as it is headscratching (“The Chicks Just Showed Up”) and a multi-part rocker called “Counting on a Blowout”. If we’re lucky enough to see Guitar pick up some steam in 2025, it’ll be due to the same Saia Kuli instincts that got them to We’re Headed to the Lake in the first place. (Bandcamp link)

Giant Day – Alarm

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Elephant 6
Genre: Art rock, art pop, psychedelia, synth-rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Out of Hand

Derek Almstead and Emily Growden are a pair of longtime Elephant 6 musicians who, upon leaving Athens for rural Pennsylvania and becoming “caretakers of a family farm”, started up a new project called Giant Day. The debut Giant Day album, last year’s Glass Narcissus, sported a “dense electronic, post-punk, and futuristic synth-rock” sound (as I said at the time) that wasn’t totally out of line with, say, the darker side of The Olivia Tremor Control (in which Almstead has played), but was still fairly distinct from the majority of “Elephant 6 bands”. Merely a year later, Giant Day are back with Alarm, a sophomore album that doubles down on dark synth-based indie rock music with copious electronic elements.

The pop moments are there, albeit often in unusual ways–“Out of Hand” kicks off the album with a jangly, college rock-style guitar riff, but the song that follows is a much more nervous post-punk creation. Almstead references Cocteau Twins as an inspiration for “Golden Times”, an influence I hear throughout the record (aside from the aforementioned song, perhaps most obviously in “Back to the Corner”). The funk-post-punk of “Devil Dog” and the minimal synthpop “Spite 28” are a little brighter, although the inspired groove-based instrumentals undergirding nearly all of Alarm help bridge the lighter and darker moments. Giant Day may not be plugging in and churning out “classic Elephant 6 music”, but they’re pushing boundaries decades after the label’s most canonical works, which seems even more appropriate. (Elephant 6 link)

Massage – Coaster

Release date: October 10^th
Record label: Mt.St.Mtn./Bobo Integral/Prefect
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: No North Star

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the Los Angeles indie pop quintet Massage–specifically, the year 2021, in which they put out both an LP and an EP (though they did reissue their debut album, 2018’s Oh Boy, in 2022). They fit right into the current West Coast jangle pop revival (that impressive lineup of labels teaming together to put out Coaster should give that away), but Massage have gotten there by doing their own thing, one that pulls together pastoral folk rock, New Order-influenced melodicism, and plenty of “college rock”. On their third LP, Coaster, it’s apparent that the group (vocalist/guitarists Alex Naidus and Andrew Romano, vocalist/keyboardist Gabrielle Ferrer, bassist David Rager, and drummer Natalie de Almeida) have yet to miss a beat–Massage deliberately unfold their jangle pop flag on sprawling opener “No North Star” only to veer right into the synths and Peter Hook basslines of “Daffy Duck”. There are bands who’ll spend their entire career trying to nail the Teenage Fanclub guitar pop sound as neatly as Massage do on “Hang on to That Feeling”–and it’s not even one of my favorite tracks on Coaster. Not that it really matters–I’m equally likely to be impressed by the simple jangle of “Psychic”, the “big music” vibes of “Fading Out”, or the melancholy melodies of “We’re Existential” on any listen. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Ambulanz, Creative Writing, Time Thief, Nape Neck

The day is Tuesday. That means it’s time for the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring new albums from Ambulanz, Creative Writing, and Nape Neck, plus the debut EP from Time Thief. Check ’em out below, and if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Kilkenny Cats, Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island), peep that here.

Ambulanz – III

Release date: September 26^th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Flowers

Call an Ambulanz! But not for me. Well, maybe for me after all–I first heard this Leipzig quartet in late 2023 thanks for their sophomore album II, and their spirited version of garage punk (“quite hooky, although it retains a post-punk edge…‘synthpunk’ but with a fairly guitar-forward sound…loose and unhinged on occasion, but never ‘sloppy’”, I said at the time) quickly made them my favorite act on upstart east Germany post-punk label It’s Eleven. The third Ambulanz album is called (of course) III, and the five-song album (half of which is taken up by a ten-minute closing track) picks up right where the band left off.

“Joy” and “Flowers” both come right out of the gate with catchy, kinetic, somewhat unpredictable post-punk/garage punk hybrid creations, and “Number” and “Repetition”–despite both leaning towards the darker ends of Ambulanz’s sound–still keep the immediately-hitting momentum going strong. Which leads us to the prog-punk epic (at least, by Ambulanz standards) “Slime”: four minutes of classic Ambulanz punk ripping, a few minutes of ambient scraping, and then surfy garage punk once again bubbles up into the mix (and fades in and out until closing time). The strange detours are a nice compliment to the main appeal of Ambulanz for me, and I don’t mind them tweaking their formula like this if they bring the right amount of energy to it. (Bandcamp link)

Creative Writing – Baby Did This

Release date: October 3^rd
Record label: Meritorio
Genre: College rock, jangle pop, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Memory Light

Meritorio Records’ latest guitar pop procurement is a quartet from western Massachusetts made up of a bunch of indie rock veterans. Wes Nelson, Patrick Battleship, Jeffrey Morkeski, and Jedediah Smith have played in groups like Huevos II, Luxor Rentals, Sore Eros, Jeanines, and Estrogen Highs between the four of them, and Creative Writing is a chance for Nelson and Battleship to co-helm a group. Their debut album, Baby Did This, follows an EP called True 90s that came out in January, and continues a strong start that owes as much to the psychedelic and more classic rock-focused sides of “college rock” as the light and jangly ones. Fans of bands like The Vulgar Boatmen and fellow New Englanders Miracle Legion (not to mention the Paisley Underground) will find plenty to enjoy on Baby Did This, which starts with a four-minute meandering introduction called “I Love You” and continues into jangle pop hits like “Hallway” and “Sister” with a casual indifference. The haze attached to songs like “Can’t Thank You Enough” and “Glass Days” doesn’t diminish their pop appeal, though–it’s only when the clouds part for sunny power pop like “Memory Light” that Creative Writing’s greyscale streak appears in hindsight. And then you’re ready for the seven-minute psychedelic-Paisley-fog pop song called “Rain” that closes out Baby Did This. (Bandcamp link)

Time Thief – Time Thief

Release date: September 12^th
Record label: Musical Fanzine/Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Mean Girls

Time Thief are a new band from Providence, Rhode Island made up of two familiar faces in Zoë Wyner and James Walsh. The latter previously played in the band Dump Him and currently runs Musical Fanzine Records (most recently seen releasing an album and an EP from the excellent Olympia group Wavers), while the former was in Halfsour and currently has a solo project named Zowy (and, apparently, was briefly in Dump Him with Walsh). The first Time Thief release is a self-titled 10” record and cassette tape that introduces an even-keeled duo with a clear, wide-ranging love of lo-fi indie rock and pop music. Over the course of fourteen minutes, Time Thief masters melancholic but wired Pacific Northwestern indie rock like that of their aforementioned labelmates (“Mean Girls”), unabashed jangly indie pop (“A Brief History of Ordinary Letdowns”), slightly psychedelic, 60s-ish folk-rock (“Baby Boy”), and choppy, bass-led, post-punk-influenced indie pop (“Field of Depth”). Compared to the most recent Zowy EP, Time Thief has a nice, full-band sound, but the instrumentals (recorded entirely by Wyner and Walsh themselves) are hardly overly polished or showy. The main draw of Time Thief is something a little trickier to pinpoint, but palpable nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)

Nape Neck – The Shallowest End

Release date: September 19^th
Record label: Dot Dash/OCCII, Amsterdam/Red Wig
Genre: Noise rock, art punk, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The Floor of the Forest

2025 appears to be the year of Nape Neck. The Leeds-based trio have been around for a few years, but this March saw the release of a self-titled LP compiling the group’s entire recorded output up until that point, June saw a live cassette called Live at Sonic Protest Festival 2023, and now September has brought The Shallowest End, the band’s first “proper” full-length studio album. A metallic, drilling art punk/noise rock band I was all too happy to compare to The Ex when I wrote about Nape Neck, the trio (bassist Claire Adams, drummer Kathy Gray, and guitarist Bobby Glew) haven’t slowed down a bit on The Shallowest End, a ten-song torrent of noisy, communal, and ferocious rock and roll music. The three instrumentalists of Nape Neck (they share lead vocal duties) remain equally important to the band’s sound–it’s a primal, active-listening endeavor where somebody is always taking command of something. The energy level of The Shallowest End is at a constant high, with pummeling rhythms, scratchy guitar attacks, and vocals that range from “sneer” to “dread” never flagging. 2025 won’t be the only year of Nape Neck if they’re able to keep this up. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: