Pressing Concerns: Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, Marshy, Seances

The second Pressing Concerns of the week brings us four excellent under-the-radar selections: new albums from Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, and Seances, and a new EP from Marshy. If you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen), check that one out here.

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.

Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour – World to Rights

Release date: March 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, singer-songwriter, twee, folk rock, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Pat’s Uninteresting Tours

Glasgow singer-songwriter Andrew Paterson returned to making music after a fairly long absence last year with Virtual Virgins, the debut album from his new solo project Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour. Paterson established himself as an indie pop storyteller with Virtual Virgins–armed with a British sense of humor, jangly and folky guitar pop foundations, and “conversational, heavily-Scottish-accented vocals” (as I called them then), I found a lot to enjoy in his rambling, character-driven stories. Paterson’s second act continues at a steady clip with World to Rights, the second Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour album in as many years. Befitting the dramatic title, World to Rights sets its aim a bit higher, a more conscious attempt to weave the interpersonal, political, and ecological together with breezy folk rock and C86-inspired pop music. The bright, memorable narratives of Virtual Virgins are still here, don’t get me wrong; there’s just more clear connecting threads. The question that World to Rights suggests–at first in its opening title track, and again and again in later material–is that, now that we all know the world is all wrong in innumerable ways, how do we then proceed with that in mind?

Paterson says that World to Rights contains “perhaps has more raw and honest” writing than his last record, although that doesn’t mean we should take him literally in these songs. The spiel of the overzealous leftist narrator of the opening track is supposed to be ribbing, although it’s an affectionate (and, I think, sympathetic) portrait, and I’m sure there’s a good deal of Paterson in the staunch union-man father figure of “Please Don’t Vote Conservative”. Climate change is a surprisingly frequent topic on World to Rights–in addition to “World to Rights”, Paterson tackles it with various degrees of irony and sardonicism in “Breaking the Ice” (a waltz in which the narrator sadly lists off various weather-related cliches and aphorisms that won’t work anymore in the near future) and “Join the Dots” (whose narrator takes a break from moaning about the struggles of being wealthy to declare of his gigantic footprint: “Don’t just look at me / Because everybody else was doing it”). The politics of World to Rights aren’t particularly subtle (not that that makes something like, say, the wistful ballad “Cost of Living” any less effective); the part that requires a bit of the thinking muscle is connecting it to songs like “The Other Side of Love”, “Pat’s Uninteresting Tours”, and “The Act of Levitating”, which explore pursuits other than raging at the state of the world. I don’t think Paterson is talking about escapism here–in fact, these songs are about how everything from disintegrating romantic relationships to cellar-dwelling football teams can elicit real hurt and emotion. It’s more about diversifying one’s life, keeping in one’s back pocket the ability to make connections with other human beings as well as between capitalism, colonialism, and global warming (Who knows? They might even be related). (Bandcamp link)

Bliss? – Pass Yr Pain Along

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, garage rock, jangle punk, mod revival
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Living Well

A bunch of punk musicians making power pop? Well, that’s one way to get my attention. Today we have a brand new band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana called Bliss? and their debut album called Pass Yr Pain Along. Guitarist/vocalist Josh Higdon, bassist Hunter Kiser, and drummer Robert DeMouy formed Bliss? last year after playing in a bunch of local punk groups (Self-Checkout Renaissance, Not My Real Job, Meadowhead) due to a mutual appreciation for “REM, power pop, and all varieties of jangly 80s college rock”. Released via a new Baton Rouge imprint called Psychic Spice Tapes, Pass Yr Pain Along is indeed a full exploration of the strains of guitar pop formative to the band–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.

Ten songs. Thirty-five minutes. Most tracks landing between three and four minutes. This may be their first rodeo together, but Bliss? already have this kind of thing down pat on Pass Yr Pain Along. Everything is just right in the opening track, “Raft Song”, which captivates us with a tough rock and roll backbone cradling a basket of melodies, and “Living Well” is the classic short, punchy, giant-hook-featuring single in slot number two. “Murmurs” has more than a bit of Costello new wave in its DNA (with the stop-start power chords and basslines, it also reminds me of another point of comparison for Pass Yr Pain Along, Chisel and Ted Leo). At their zippiest (like on, say, “Bulwark”), Bliss? come off as a more openly jangle pop/college rock-indebted version of 90s melodic punk groups like Jawbreaker, although they’re not too streamlined to let “Leave the Lamp On” sprawl or to take “Heard v Hurt” into a stranger, more post-punk direction. The biggest oddball on Pass Yr Pain Along is probably penultimate track “Serotonin Syndrome” (there’s a bit of Paisley here, as the band turn their jangle into a five-minute piece of psychedelic guitar pop), but there are excellent rockers on either side of it to keep us grounded. There’s a lot of great guitar music still being put to tape, and one of this year’s best examples thus far comes straight from a Louisiana basement. (Bandcamp link)

Marshy – Light Business

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Marsh Slope
Genre: Dreamy indie rock, emo-y indie rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Line of Best Fit

The world needs small indie rock bands making EPs of catchy, electric indie rock. I get the feeling that something very bad would happen to the universe if we ever ran out of them. Say what you will about New York City, but the Big Apple is at the very least helping us out on the supply side with these bands. Marshy is the latest one–I can’t tell you a whole lot about them, but I can say that they put out two singles last year before graduating to a full-on EP this year, that they appear to be made up of Gab Grieco, Max Steinbach, Emma Todd, and James Vees, and that they’ve spent the year or so since they formed playing shows with bands like Still Submarine, Dagwood, and Dogwood Gap that would also qualify for the description I gave in the opening paragraph of this review. All of this brings us to Light Business, the first-ever Marshy EP, self-released by the band digitally and featuring four songs and thirteen-minutes of pure, uncut Marshy–making it the band’s biggest (and only, singles excepted) statement yet. There’s bits of power pop, dreamy/jangly indie pop, shoegaze-adjacent fuzz rock, and maybe just the smallest bit of emo on Light Business–most importantly, though, it’s a collection of songs displaying that Marshy’s collaborative take on writing and playing just seems to work.

“Line of Best Fit” opens the EP and is my favorite on the record by a fair amount–I thought of just highlighting it on a playlist and calling it a day, but the other songs kept growing on me too, so here we are. Still, “Line of Best Fit” is clearly Light Business’ “hit”–ascending, triumphant power pop chords, sweeping, expertly-wielded distortion, and unbothered vocals melodies will all do that. “2 Birds” is the one that comes closest–it’s not quite as “all-in” as “Line of Best Fit”, but it’s Marshy’s cleanest, most polished foray into jangly guitar-led indie pop, and the quartet pulls it off with a no-nonsense skill which makes them sound developed beyond their relative infancy. The other half of Light Business is the heavier and less-immediate half, but Marshy have something going in these tracks, too–“Lemon Verbena / Breathe” is more downcast, fuzzed-out dreamy indie rock for the majority of its length, and the end of that song is the closest the band gets to actual shoegaze on the EP. “Lucked Out” is the finale, sending the EP off with chugging, gas-pedal-floored alternative rock that alternates between “fast and intense” and “slowed-down just enough to get a couple of hits in”. The planet is safe for just a little bit longer. (Bandcamp link)

Seances – Power Is a Phantom

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Triple Eye Industries
Genre: New wave, post-punk, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Crimes

Seances are a new project from a longtime Milwaukee indie rock and punk veteran, Eric Arsnow. Over the years, he’s played in bands like garage rockers Devils Teeth and “Dungeons & Dragons-inspired” stoner rock supergroup Fight Dice, but in the back of his mind he had a desire to make an album in line with the post-punk and new wave that he grew up on (and continued to love as an adult). Seeing The Chameleons live in 2023 finally spurred him on, and Arsnow quickly began writing New Order/The Cure-esque gothic/new wave pop songs on his bass guitar. These ideas congealed into a full-on nine-song debut LP called Power Is a Phantom, largely played and recorded by Arsnow himself (Jason Kartz contributes guitar to about half of these songs, and a couple of guest vocalists receive the only other outside credits). Power Is a Phantom does sound like the work of somebody who’s cut their teeth in garage and punk bands, but it is very much “new wave”, edge or no. Arsnow’s melodic, Peter Hook-inspired bass playing and deep, gothic vocals are the defining features of Power Is a Phantom, although the euphoric guitars, synth accents, and propulsive programmed drums all help Seances achieve the sound for which they’re reaching as well.

Arsnow nods a bit towards “Melt with You” in opening track “Crimes”, and while the song as a whole is a bit more synth/goth-pop than Modern English’s guitar pop sole hit, it’s a good reference point for understanding Power Is a Phantom’s pop aims. “Forgiveness” ups the speed and the post-punk influence, but there’s still a brightness in between the choppy guitars and soaring solos, while “Fade” is Seances’ clearest foray into darkwave. “Armour” is perhaps the most openly bright song on Power Is a Phantom–Arsnow finds a little more melody in his vocals than he had previously, and the bass guitar is afforded space to really reach New Order heights (the swooning synths help, too). On the other end of the spectrum, “Fathom” descends into loud, angry basement post-punk/garage rock, and “Hours” investigates the dark and dubby corners of early post-punk with its frantic, frightened guitar-led sound. Seances end their first statement by finding more transcendence in synths and bright new wave signifiers, though–between the dramatic synthpop odyssey of “Surface” and the subdued dream pop of closing track “Fire”, Power Is a Phantom strains to escape the basement rock from which it spawned. A bold step in Arsnow’s music career, it’s nonetheless an incredibly successful one. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, Mantarochen

On this Monday in April, Pressing Concerns has returned to bring you the latest in indie pop, post-rock, ambient jazz, post-punk, and twee music: new albums from Cootie Catcher, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen, and a new EP from Penny Loafer, featured below.

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

Cootie Catcher – Shy at First

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Cooked Raw
Genre: Indie pop, twee, electronica, bedroom pop, experimental pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Friend of a Friend

Vocalist/bassist Anita Fowl and vocalist/guitarist Nolan Jakupovski started the Toronto band Cootie Catcher earlier this decade, soon welcoming in vocalist/synth player/“DJ Scratches” contributor Sophia Chavez and releasing a couple of EPs, an LP, and a “remixes +b sides” album. The band’s sophomore album, Shy at First, seems like a step up for the group in a couple of different ways–for one, it’s the first with drummer Joseph Shemoun, and it’s also the first one recorded by an outside engineer (Rob McLay of Squiggly Lines and Westelaken, partially at his Sun Bear studio). I first heard the quartet last year via “Friend of a Friend”, Shy at First’s lead single, and was immediately hooked; the band call it “power pop”, I used descriptors like “twee-pop” and “fluffy indie pop” when describing it. As one might expect from a band with a “DJ scratcher” enlisted, “Friend of a Friend” has a foot in the world of electronic music, largely due to the wobbly, wavering synths that Chavez injects over top of the more traditional (albeit keyboard-led) indie pop instrumental. This balancing act is continued on the rest of 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.

I still think “Friend of a Friend” is my favorite Cootie Catcher song, but fans of that song’s indie pop smarts will still find plenty of music on Shy at First that earns its place at the table. The title track is even more “twee” than “Friend of a Friend” is–it’s a brilliant piece of bashful, uncertain pop music (both in instrumental construction and subject matter) with some really pleasing vocal trade-offs (I don’t know who’s singing what; everyone but Shemoun is credited with vocals on the album). Some of the other Rosy Overdrive-certified hit singles on Shy at First include “Words Mean Less” (with its boisterous slacker rock vocals and bubbling synths, it sounds like a rough Kiwi Jr. song), “If It’s in Vogue” (a bright, lazy lo-fi jangly pop tune), and “Diary” (perhaps the most rocking song on the album, albeit in an exuberant Sharp Pins/Friko kind of way). “Do Forever” is also quite catchy, and its shuffling beat is helpful in bridging the gap between these kinds of songs and the electronica moments. It’s very “late 90s alt-pop” in how there’s that kind of post-pop electronic psychedelia but also a genuine guitar solo (I swear I saw somebody compare this band to Beck and it’s driving me crazy not being able to figure out who it was, please reach out if that was you so I can credit you). To be clear, stuff like “Musical Chairs” and “Acrostic Poem” and “Galleria” are all still “pop songs”, they just go about it in hazier fashion. I still feel like I understand Cootie Catcher, at least. (Bandcamp link)

Penny Loafer – Daily Deal

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Indecent Artistry
Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Fridge

Penny Loafer is a new indie rock band formed by two Athens, Georgia grocery store co-workers, vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Emma Barnes and drummer Seth Parker. They started making music after they discovered they had a “shared affinity” for 90s indie rock, and shortly after releasing their first song (“Lynx”) in late 2024, they enlisted multi-instrumentalist Iain Cooke and went to record their debut EP at Athens’ The Eye with producer Adam Wayton. Wayton is putting out Daily Deal on his own label, Indecent Artistry, and he also plays on the record–I’d previously been familiar with Wayton thanks to his work fronting the scuzzy, fuzzy indie rockers Telemarket and contributing to twee pop group Honeypuppy, and it turns out that Penny Loafer are right in the multi-hyphenate’s wheelhouse. The five songs of Daily Deal are crawling, mid-tempo 90s alternative rock in the vein of Penny Loafer’s heroes, The Breeders–not quite as chaotic as Telemarket or as polished as Honeypuppy, Barnes and Parker instead display an aptitude for unflappable, chugging, fuzzed-out (and, oddly enough, largely grocery-themed) pop music on their first EP. The guitars are ambush predators, Barnes’ voice is stoic but hardly wallflower-esque, and the songs are catchy in an incidental, shrugging 90s kind of way.

Daily Deal floats into focus with “Backyard”; an alien synth and a lazy guitar riff are the first things we hear, and Barnes’ first words are “Rice Crispy cereal brains / Started a serious fire”. The lyrics to “Backyard” are glimpses into a dark American South in between moments of shambolic indie rock (“Someone’s in the backyard / I am gonna shoot their head off / Don’t know who your neighbors are / They’re probably dumb and ugly”). “Fridge” is a little more upbeat (I guess that’s the word for it); it starts with a live-wire guitar part that’d make the Deal Sisters proud, and, like many great Deal songs, it never fully punctures the tension that’s present from the first second. “Orange Peel” is yet another part of Penny Loafer’s completely unsettling breakfast (“I hate the orange / I eat the peel,” begins Barnes), and the hook is built from some actually pretty pleasing guitar soloing. The sneaky “Nothing at All” has some of the best melodic vocal work on Daily Deal, but closing track “Ugly” is Penny Loafer at their most cryptic. The music floats along uncertainly while Barnes sings “I want you, I” over and over again–the only other words to the song are “I want you to myself” and “Wanting you to be my ugly”, the latter of which is obscured under fuzz. Daily Deal is a curious debut–you can trace the influences, but there’s still plenty of mystery to Penny Loafer. (Bandcamp link)

Takuro Okada – The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Ambient, post-rock, jazz
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Shadow

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that I’ve written about a U.S.-released compilation album from a Japanese musician who’d mostly had their music released solely in their home country up until that point. Compared to the explosive punk/art rock of Ging Nang Boyz, however, the music of Tokyo’s Takuro Okada is in a completely different universe. Okada got his start in the 2010s indie rock group Mori Wa Ikiteiru, but he’s been pursuing a solo career over the better part of the last decade that’s dabbled in jazz, ambient, and experimental electronic music. The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is Okada’s first album with Temporal Drift (Les Rallizes Dénudés, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Coffin Prick), a Los Angeles-based label who’s been working to make a lot of Japanese records available in the United States in recent years. The goal of The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line is to showcase Okada himself–though he’s collaborated with notable names like Carlos Niño, Nels Cline, and Jim O’Rourke in the past, these recordings are almost entirely by Okada alone. Some of these tracks appear to have been released in earlier forms on Bandcamp, while others may have only recently been unearthed from Okada’s “expansive archive of recorded material”.

The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line may not have been initially conceived as a standalone album, and the different styles Okada tries on throughout the 48-minute album reflect this, but it’s an engrossing collection nonetheless. It begins on a minimal but friendly note between the sparse ambient opening track “Following Morning” and the barebones jazz construction of “The Room”. “Shadow” is the first song with vocals on the album, and it’s a genuine pop song–sure, it’s stretched out to six minutes and its folkiness is undercut with jazz instrumentation, but that’s not enough to dampen its shine. Things get more challenging as The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line goes on–the electronic clattering or “Mizu” and the sustained, gentle drone of “Mirror” are brief detours, but the sound collage of “Reflections / Entering #2” is a nice six minutes in length. Starting with “Evening Song”, jazz-pop begins to creep back into Okada’s compositions, although in bits and pieces–the guitar in “Evening Song”, the woozy horns of “Taco Beach”, the string-laden sigh of “Ohme”, and the upright bass in the blues-inspired “Howlin’ Dog”. The title track sends The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line out with a complete instrumental jazz guitar song–it’s more immediate than a lot of the songs before it, but it’s all part and parcel of getting a grip on Takuro Okada. (Bandcamp link)

Mantarochen – Cut My Brainhair

Release date: February 15th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, synthpunk, darkwave
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Steamy Nights

Leipzig post-punk trio Mantarcohen first appeared in Pressing Concerns last year when I wrote about their six-song mini-album/EP In the Badgers Cave, their debut for It’s Eleven Records (Ambulanz, Fotokiller, Distant Relatives) and second record overall. A brief and promising collection of lo-fi drum machine-led darkwave, post-punk, and synth-punk, In the Badgers Cave got the group (Diana, Sebi and Tom) on my radar, and Mantarochen are back less than a year later with a new cassette called Cut My Brainhair that picks up where their last record left off. Featuring eight songs (well, seven and an intro track) in eighteen minutes, it’s barely longer than In the Badgers Cave–and while I wouldn’t really call it an EP, it functions nicely as a sequel to the band’s previous one. Dark and gothic but minimal and catchy, Mantarcohen’s take on post-punk remains quite compelling throughout Cut My Brainhair. The bass is front-and-center, the guitar lines frantic but satisfying, the synths intermittent but always welcome, and the vocals understated but plenty capable for what the rest of the band are doing here. Mantarochen are skilled at tension and dread–they only rarely release the darkness they bottle up throughout Cut My Brainhair, but it’s fascinating no matter what they’re doing with it.

The introduction to Cut My Brainhair, “Delta”, is a bit of echoing piano drone that segues quite cleanly into “Not a Rabbit”, which has a brisk drum machine beat but is otherwise a restrained, atmospheric mood-setter of a first statement. “Steamy Nights” is just a little busier but keeps the thickening tension coming, as does the particularly gothic “Shadow” (although the vocals are the most inventive that they have been on the record up until this point). “Count the Dust” is probably the most “garage rock” moment on Cut My Brainhair–the dour vocals and prominent bassline keep it squarely in Mantarochen’s wheelhouse, but that guitar is Feel It Records-worthy. “Count the Dust” doesn’t turn out to be a harbinger of a louder, more rocking second half, however–“Pull Me” is one of the oddest things on Cut My Brainhair, synths and jangly guitars colliding in an almost psychedelic, dubby haze, while the minimal synthpop “Sometimes” is Mantarochen at their most streamlined. Things pick up just a bit for the album’s final track, “Desert”, but the steadily-rolling post-punk instrumental is content to stay in its lane right up until its conclusion, landing the smooth ride that is Cut My Brainhair. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, Kicking Bird

We’ve rounded the bend to April, and the first Friday of the new month is upon us. Out tomorrow, April 4th, the albums of today’s Pressing Concerns (from (T-T)b, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Coffin Prick, and Kicking Bird) bring to us the promise of spring. Or something like that. In other news, the March 2025 Playlist/Round-Up went up on Tuesday, and there was a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, and Shapes Like People) to check out if you haven’t yet, 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.

EDIT/NOTE: The Coffin Prick album got pushed back to May and nobody told me! Sorry! Check back in a month!

(T-T)b – Beautiful Extension Cord

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Fuzz rock, synthpop, power pop, chiptune, slacker rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Semantics of Yet

Way back in 2021, I heard an EP called Suporma by a band from Boston that called themselves (T-T)b. It’s a great slacker rock record, despite the fact that the group (bandleader JM Dussault, drummer Nick Dussault, and bassist Jake Cardinal, the latter two of which also play in Really Great) prominently incorporated chiptune and video game soundtrack instrumentation into the record’s five songs. It’s hard to dabble in that kind of stuff without it overtaking the rest of your music, but (T-T)b utilized it as an accent, the way one might use synths or horns. I’ve been patiently awaiting a follow-up to Suporma ever since, and it’s finally here in the form of Beautiful Extension Cord, the band’s second album and first new music of any kind in four years. (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–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 Dussault’s plain but capable vocals, there’s somehow a cosmic element to (T-T)b’s indie rock; it reminds me a bit of LVL UP, or even their labelmates Bedbug.

The first thing we hear on Beautiful Extension Cord is a sparkling 8-bit introduction, but the guitars kick in and overpower opening song “Julian” at about the ten second mark. These guitars are a key feature of Beautiful Extension Cord’s opening salvo, but even the six-strings have their spotlight stolen from them by Dussault’s opening lyrics to early highlight “Dither”: “I met God / And he was a little dog / A horror film professor / Cradled in his arms”. The whole first section is unstoppable: by “Bug on the Ceiling”, (T-T)b have almost fully been converted into a vintage fuzz rock band (but the chiptune sound stubbornly refuses to fade entirely). Beautiful Extension Cord opens up a bit in the midsection, having gotten the great big first act out of the way–the dream-chiptune-pop interlude “Sophie” and the laid-back bummer pop of “The Kick” are the closest thing we get to a “breather”. Album centerpiece “Semantics of Yet” starts out in much the same way, but it rises to a huge alt-rock refrain, Speedy Oritz’s Sadie Dupuis joining Dussault to meditate on the wavering evoked by the adverb in the title. Beautiful Extension Cord as a whole is a sweeping but uncertain-sounding album, right up until closing track “I’m Always Holding You Back”. (T-T)b toy with bringing the chiptune more prominently into the mix, and Dussault sings the chilly title line against a propulsive, light-feeling instrumental. I’m not sure if the Beautiful Extension Cord of the album title is supposed to evoke “power” or “connectivity”, but (T-T)b imbue their latest album with the right combination of it to keep the lights on. (Bandcamp link)

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Phantom Limb
Genre: Experimental rap, noise rap, folk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Everyone I Love Is Depressed

Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are a pair of Baltimore rappers who’ve been active in their city’s music scene since the beginning of this decade–the former I’d previously encountered on Jacober’s album from a few years ago (albeit as a bassist and guitarist rather than rapper), while the latter is new to me. Ennals and Infinity Knives (AKA Tariq Ravelomanana) have also been making records as a duo pretty much the entire time they’ve been around–first came Rhino XXL in 2020, King Cobra followed in 2022, and now there’s a third Knives/Ennals collaboration called A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears. Apparently the duo have gained a reputation for experimental and political rap over their first couple of records, and A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears isn’t going to disabuse anybody of these notions. On every account, though, Infinity Knives and Ennals spend time out of these boxes–not everything reads as explicitly political, for one, and there’s also moments that sound genuinely fun and pop-friendly (and even “rap” is too small of a box to constrain the duo on this record, as there are two straight-up folk songs on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, among other excursions).

Oh, right, “experimental” and “political”. Starting your record with a song like “The Iron Wall” will get you labeled as such. For the latter, Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals go absolutely scorched-Earth on both American fascism and Israeli genocide (as they point out in the provocative but true opening bars, though, they’re only returning fire), and for the former, the track has a really compelling, up-close sound to it that the duo credit co-engineer Frances “FRANKI3” Malvaiz (who also sings on a few songs) for helping them achieve. The casual “Live at the Chinese Buffet” is admittedly weird too, but the seven-minute title track is where things really go off the rails–the majority of the song is straight-up traditionalist, hymn-like folk music, and then it finishes with a massive Swans-like noise rock drone (and they do something similar to the first part again later on the record, except they let the Sparklehorse/Neutral Milk Hotel/folk John Dwyer-esque “Two Headed Buffalo” exit quietly after seven minutes). A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears was initially supposed to be an EP, and I do wonder if it began as a chance for Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals to try out a bunch of ideas–like having Vladneva Volodkevich sing a vintage, crackling R&B/jazz crooner in Russian (that’d be “Trevoga”) or interpolating one of Ravelomanana’s favorite songs for an intense, dire-sounding rap number (“Sometimes, Papi Chulo”, which uses a bit of a song from cult folk musician Dan Hanrahan), or rolling out an awesome groove of a funk-hop track about, of course, suicide (“Everyone I Love Is Depressed”). It’s an album because there are too many ideas and too much to say on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, though–if there’s anything readily apparent about this album, it’s that. (Bandcamp link)

Coffin Prick – Loose Enchantment

Release date: May 16th
Record label: Temporal Drift
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, dance punk, electronic, dub
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Follow You Where You’re Talking

Ryan Weinstein has been playing in bands for nearly three decades now, spending time in groups like The Heatseekers, Cavity, and The Cairo Gang as he moved across the United States from Florida to Chicago to Los Angeles, where he lives today. One of his many bands was a short-lived garage punk group called Coffin Pricks–they may have broken up in 2012 without releasing more than a three song single, but Weinstein revived the name (now singular) when he started up a solo(ish) career a couple of years ago. Coffin Prick has been putting out records at a steady clip as of late–an full-length and EP in 2023, a remix LP in 2024, and, now, eleven brand-new Coffin Prick songs in the form of an album called Loose Enchantment. Far from the punk rock of the Pricks, Weinstein has pushed beyond the boundaries of “rock music” entirely as Coffin Prick–and while Loose Enchantment is no different, I’d dare say that it’s the project’s most accessible record yet. Receiving help from members of Tuxedomoon, Tortoise, and LA Takedown (among others), Weinstein’s latest release 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 is going with all of this, but “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. Weinstein then gives us woozy, chattering synth-rock in “Shortly Forgotten Pleasure” and the dreamy, minimal, electronic gliding of the title track. We’ve only just begun the Loose Enchantment journey, however–buttressed by two brief interlude-like tracks, the six-minute “Work” is something of the record’s centerpiece, taking Weinstein’s noise rock/garage rock past and shading a prowling no wave/post-punk piece of aural dread with it. It’s tempting to say that Loose Enchantment gets stranger as it goes along, but who’s to say that the second-half dance numbers (“Soap” and “Spy vs Spy”) are any less woozy and bizarre than the first-half ones? There’s a beautiful ballad somewhere in “Window in Your Eye”, although Coffin Prick are completely unmoored by this point in the record, and six-minute closing track “Western Folly: Floating Love – Drying Off In The Rain – How Seconds Work” follows this to its logical conclusion of straight-up noise/sound collage. There’s plenty to grab onto immediately in Loose Enchantment, but the record also sees to it that we get the complete Coffin Prick experience before it’s all said and done. (Bandcamp link)

Kicking Bird – 11 Short Fictions

Release date: April 4th
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Power pop, fuzz pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)

I first heard of Kicking Bird, Wilmington, North Carolina’s premiere surf-pop quintet, thanks to their debut album, 2023’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. That’s a really fun album, a nice collection of Pixies-inspired fuzz-power pop (and it also put their label, Fort Lowell, on my radar–and I’ve written about a bunch of good records that they’ve put out since then). Almost exactly two years later, Kicking Bird are back with a sophomore LP, and 11 Short Fictions largely picks up where the band (vocalist/guitarist Shaun Paul, vocalist/keyboardist Shaylah Paul, guitarist Robin Cooksley, drummer Greg Blair, and bassist Tom Michels) left off. The pop music of 11 Short Fictions feels perhaps more ambitious than its predecessor–at this point, Kicking Bird are starting to remind me of power pop bands who give off a bit of “collective” energy like The New Pornographers or even the poppier side of The Apples in Stereo. The occasional Black Francis bite to Shaun Paul’s vocals and moments of kicked up fuzz rock are still here, part of a vivid tapestry also including a bit of twee, glam rock, and southern college rock, among other detours.

“We drove down to the boathouse / In a car she took from her uncle / She swore she’d never been there before / But she found that key like she had been there before,” Shaun sings in single “Cinnamon”, a wild garage rock and roll song that Kicking Bird pull off without invalidating their friendlier moments. I have no idea how these songs relate to themselves (“Facts and false memories. Hypocrisies, admissions and denials. Stories,” the band says about the record; “She kinda tasted like cinnamon / I probably tasted like Indica,” goes another memorable line in “Cinnamon”). The pop songs are huge and just as desperate-sounding as the loudest rockers–“Where’d You Get Those Pants” rips, “Verdun” struts–and while Shaylah Paul’s vocals are a lot less “unhinged” than Shaun’s, songs like “What Did You Expect (With Such a Beautiful Wife)” and “Good Lighting” certainly don’t bring the party to a halt merely by being just a bit more even-keeled (the explosive guitar work in the latter song doesn’t hurt, either). Shaylah’s “Too Much Talking” is the one true “ballad” on the album–it’s a waltz, and even here Kicking Bird can’t help but slipping a little feedback into the song before they return to sum up 11 Short Fictions with three more guitar-showcase rockers. Here’s hoping Kicking Bird can keep this high level of energy up for just a little bit longer–impressively, 11 Short Fictions shows no signs of slowing down. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

New Playlist: March 2025

The March 2025 playlist is here! It’s been a very good month for new music from my vantage point, and I’m excited to share a bunch of it with you below. I’d like to borrow a phrase from all the publicists who email me and call this playlist “my most personal one to date” (that sounds like an April Fool’s joke but it’s not really).

Silo’s Choice, Fust, The Tubs, and Telethon all have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece). If you’re looking for who’ve put out the best albums of the year so far, this is a big hint right here.

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

“Trilogy of Terror”, Combos for Dogs
From Athletic Achievement (2025)

Ahh, I love this song. Combos for Dogs’ Athletic Achievement is a nice little power pop EP–it’s the first record from a new band made up of two long-time friends (Mike Stallmeyer & Andy Feldman), and I probably could’ve told you they were from New Jersey even if the Bandcamp page didn’t say so. There’s a suburban earnestness to the writing (both in the pop hooks/delivery and in the lyrics) that feels extremely Fountains of Wayne, and while that’s all well and good, you have to have the songs to back that kind of thing up, and Combos for Dogs’ first record indicates that they’ve got something going between the two of them. Half the EP (two songs, yes) could’ve been on this playlist, but I’m going with the jangle pop targeted strike of “Trilogy of Terror” over the mid-tempo power pop “Ra Ra! Resentment” by a hair. It’s two minutes long, it’s incredibly simple, and every second of it is just golden. 

“Experimental Hugs”, Kinski
From Stumbledown Terrace (2025, Comedy Minus One)

The latest album from longrunning Seattle experimental post-rock band Kinski is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. They’ve pared down to a power trio for the first time in over twenty years, and the remaining three walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll with the best of ‘em. Stumbledown Terrace starts with a handful of brilliant songs that are nonetheless on the more “difficult” side of things, but then we get to “Experimental Hugs”, which is (ironically) the most conventional track on the album by far. It’s a catchy two-minute hook-y rock and roller that kind of sounds like the Foo Fighters (but, you know, better)–and then it’s back to the epic guitar journeys for Kinski. Read more about Stumbledown Terrace here.

“Pl*net F*tness”, Pacing
(2025, Asian Man)

About two weeks ago, I realized that I had a dead person’s credit card in my wallet. Back when she was alive, her husband gave it to me to go buy food for everyone hanging out at the hospital and I guess I forgot to give it back. What do you do with a dead person’s credit card? This is kind of what the song “Pl*net F*tness” by the band Pacing is about. It’s the first song from the upcoming second Pacing album, following up their excellent 2023 LP with the long title and a “mini-album” that came out at the beginning of this year. The full development from a Katie McTeague anti-folk solo project to a full-on punk/power pop/whatever rock band is on full display here (thanks to longtime member Ben Krock on guitar, Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar on bass and production, and Joe Sherman on the drums), but McTeague’s writing still shines against the louder backdrop.

“Planet Fitness makes you cancel your membership in person even if you’re dead,” McTeague sings in the–well, it’s not really a “chorus” because it only happens once. It’s under two minutes long and it feels shorter because of the lack of almost any repetition–even though it’s the lead single for an upcoming album, it feels like McTeague just wanted to get through the song and its revisitation of the mundane tasks surrounding a family member and onetime Planet Fitness patron’s death (her father, in this instance). The song’s music video, featuring McTeague as a zombie and Krock as Death himself, is good fun–the context, which I didn’t entirely appreciate the first time I saw it, supercharges it, but, watching what she and her band make out of it in the video, I also believe McTeague when she said the song “has been in my life for so long that what it means to me has changed over time” upon its release.

“Pl*net F*tness” has been worked over, but I suspect that any and all tinkering done to it over the years was just to pass the time until McTeague got to the right place–musically, personally, artistically, whatever–to pull something like “Pl*net F*tness” off. It’s a perfect Pacing song, about weird rules and awkwardness and profundity found therein and feeling like maybe the cashier got your Ch*rches Ch*cken order wrong but just walking off because Jesus Christ I’m not about to contest that on a good day and it’s also about how nobody in the ICU says you have to leave when visiting hours are over but when you walk down to the first floor at 4 A.M. nobody’s there except for one security guard and he’s like “you do know that the building is closed, right?” and you just kind of stand there and wonder what on Earth he expects me to do with that information, I’m inside the building and trying to leave it–let’s revisit this in a couple of years I guess.

“2005”, Silo’s Choice
From Liberals (2025, Obscure Pharaoh)

Chicago’s Jon Massey has been on a hot streak with his various bands as of late, and he’s started 2025 off with a bang in the form of Liberals, a strong offering from his solo project Silo’s Choice. Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–there’s a bunch of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock and a renewal of vows with concise pop music on here, and it’s exciting. I don’t think there’s anybody else out there other than Massey who could write a song like the whirlwind neoconservative bildungsroman of “2005” (“It’s 2005 / And we’ve only been in Iraq for a year in a half,” Massey situates us). It has to be heard to be believed, I’d say. Read more about Liberals here.

“Gateleg”, Fust
From Big Ugly (2025, Dear Life)

I love this Fust album. I really do. Big surprise, I know–I’d written about literally everything the band had released up until Big Ugly, and while I didn’t formally Pressing Concerns this one, I promise you that it’s just as good as Genevieve and Evil Joy, if not better. At this point, I’m ready to declare Aaron Dowdy’s group 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). 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 scenes of corner stores and cinderblock-propped-up cars in “Gateleg” 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. 

“Madison”, Smoking Popes
From Lovely Stuff (2025, Anxious & Angry)

Over thirty years removed from their debut album, the finest pop punk band to ever come out of McHenry County, Illinois still has gas in the tank. Lovely Stuff is the eighth Smoking Popes album and the first one since 2018–even though I don’t love every song on it, I love how it sounds, a group of seasoned professionals just tearing into these tracks and letting the hooks speak for themselves. “Madison” is a good summation of what to expect on Lovely Stuff–there’s some nice pop punk guitar leads that go on for exactly as long as they’re supposed to, some self-deprecation and desperation delivered stoically from the singular Josh Caterer, forward-pushing drums, and big, big guitar chords. There’s a whole album of stuff like this coming out soon! (Bookmark “Fox River Dream” and “Never Gonna Break”, too). 

“Träume”, Spinnen
From Warmes Licht (2025, Alien Transistor)

Taking their name from the German word for spider, Spinnen are a Munich-based bass and drums duo made up of a couple of veterans of the “muggy, experimental” side of their home city’s music scene. Warmes Licht, their debut album, manages to be both “experimental” and “rock”–we get noisy, clanging art-punk bass/drum ragers right next to soft, almost ambient organs and synth pieces, as well as moments that don’t fit neatly onto either end of that spectrum. Warmes Licht’s opening track, “Träume”, works way better as an awesome opening pop statement than it has any right to–between the reaching-for-the-sky bass chords and the just-as-enthusiastic vocals, Spinnen pull off the perfect mix of skronky post-punk and power pop. Read more about Warmes Licht here.

“Narcissist”, The Tubs
From Cotton Crown (2025, Trouble in Mind)

This Tubs album, huh? 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–they’re one of the few bands that regularly get lauded outside of our bubble, and I can’t even be hipstery about it 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, and there is something undeniably perverse about twisting some working-through-it words about a complex kind of grief (“Jane says you’re a narcissist  / Well I wanna see / You should do it to me  / You should do it to me”) into bright, sparkling guitar pop.

“Sourgum”, Olivia’s World
From Greedy & Gorgeous (2025, Little Lunch/Lost Sound Tapes)

I wouldn’t expect anything less than indie pop with an instrumental heft and a clear personality from Olivia’s World, and the Australian band’s long-awaited debut album, Greedy & Gorgeous, delivers. Bandleader Alice Rezende remains a striking frontperson, thoughtful and occasionally less-than-clear but never guarded in her writing, and the band are tougher and more unified than ever before, with the Pacific Northwestern looseness of their past work augmented by a hard-charging, Dinosaur Jr. fuzz rock streak that remains constant throughout the album. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “Sourgum”, the most full-on eighteen-wheeler rock and roller on the album. It rules, of course. Read more about Greedy & Gorgeous here.

“Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)”, Telethon
From Suburban Electric (2025, Halloween)

Ever since Swim Out the Breakers (my favorite album of 2021), the sixth Telethon LP has been at the top of my “most anticipated albums” lists, and after a few years of being in the works, the Wisconsin band just went ahead and surprise-released Suburban Electric last month. It certainly sounds like a Telethon album–but 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. It’s a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, of course, and part of that is how it stealthily builds up to the last, best, and catchiest song on the album, the frantic “Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)”. Putting your most crowd-pleasing song dead last on the album? Nobody’s doing it like Telethon. Read more about Suburban Electric here.

“Beautiful Stranger”, George Children
From Kitchen Sink Drama (2025, Dandy Boy)

Featuring just a plainly-strummed acoustic guitar and frontperson Jordan Chipman’s vocals for the most part, George Children’s latest cassette EP moves through five songs in nine minutes. Melancholic but still quite pop-friendly, Kitchen Sink Drama makes for an all-around strong stop-gap release in between larger records. The album’s opening track, “Beautiful Stranger”, is the record’s “hit” to my ears–not that the rest of the EP isn’t also catchy, but Chipman stumbles onto a timeless pop song for ninety seconds, synthesizing acoustic Dunedin sound pop, lo-fi LVL UP/early Trace Mountains, and Chipman favorite Bill Fox superbly. Read more about Kitchen Sink Drama here.

“Crowded Streets”, Exploding Flowers
From Watermelon/Peacock (2025, Meritorio/Leather Jacket)

Hailing from ground zero of the 1980s “Paisley Underground” movement, Los Angeles’ Exploding Flowers do evoke the loose, psychedelic side of this strain of American jangly college rock. Sometimes hazy, sometimes bright and vibrant, their latest LP, Watermelon/Peacock, is a compelling and generous Americana record arising from one of the country’s largest population centers. Watermelon/Peacock offers up everything from hook-fest power pop to pure psychedelia to throwback San Francisco garage rock to 60s-style keys and organs throughout its fourteen tracks and forty-odd minutes; the “hits” are as good as anything from the “vintage” power pop cellar, and peppy opening track “Crowded Streets” definitely qualifies. Read more about Watermelon/Peacock here.

“Ride to Robert’s”, Jason Isbell
From Foxes in the Snow (2025, Southeastern)

I have a Jason Isbell story that’s probably still too sad for me to share on the blog right now. Suffice it to say that the man’s music is inescapable in my life and it’s a great testament to it that I can still listen to it and love it for what it is. Foxes in the Snow is a tough one, the “divorce album” that the singer-songwriter 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. “Ride to Robert’s” is one of the brighter moments on Foxes in the Snow–it can’t shake the melancholy that hovers over the entire album, but it’s a moment of hope, resting its laurels via Tennessee in the growing season, country music in Nashville bars, and perhaps Isbell’s current romantic relationship (“I’m still running, but I’m not alone” and “I ain’t lost yet, so much to lose”).

“IWLYG”, Star 99
From Gaman (2025, Lauren)

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. A subtle middle ground opens up on Gaman in songs like “IWLYG”; the energy and hooks are still there, but Star 99 add a jangly, Teenage Fanclub-esque wrinkle to their songwriting. Read more about Gaman here.

“Out Comes Crazy”, In Bedrooms
(2025, Pure Chance)

Did somebody order power pop from Guam? It gives me great pleasure to report that there seems to be a real music scene happening on the Pacific island and United States colony–before this month, I only knew it as Rosa Bordallo’s country of origin, but recently a Guam resident and musician named Christian Sumalpong reached out to me about their label Pure Chance Records and their latest signing, In Bedrooms (and also to inform me that Star 99’s Thomas Calvo is also originally from Guam and once played in a hardcore band with Sumalpong). “Out Comes Crazy”, In Bedrooms’ latest single, is guitar pop candy–if you’re into bands like Snow Ellet, Camp Trash, and (yes) Star 99 that merge power pop sensibilities with 2000s-style emo-pop touches (there’s a lovely, buzzy emo-synth hook here), then they’re the Guam band for you.

“Funny Way of Showing It”, Lone Striker
From Lone Striker (2025, Hidden Bay/Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)

Lo-fi power pop artiste Tom Brown (Teenage Tom Petties, Rural France) made the self-titled debut Lone Striker album at home utilizing “wobbly doo-wop samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds” as well as his typical indie rock instrumentation. It seems like a huge departure for him, but there’s still plenty of excellent guitar-driven (or, at least, co-driven) pop music here. Brown may be primarily drawing from psychedelic and atmospheric-pop 90s indie groups like Sparklehorse and Mercury Rev, but Lone Striker works because he’s able to speak the same fuzzy, half-remembered, mid-century Americana language that those bands also spoke (somehow, despite being British), and actually elucidates a core tenet of his other projects in doing so. My favorite track, “Funny Way of Showing It”, is as sugary and theatrical as anything off of Hotbox Daydreams (even if, slowed down and relying on chimes and pianos, it also kind of sounds like Christmas music). Read more about Lone Striker here.

“The Van Pelt Parties”, Patterson Hood featuring Wednesday
From Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams (2025, ATO)

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the second Drive-By Truckers singer-songwriter (current or former) to appear on this playlist with a solo album (note to self: put this behind the Jason Isbell song when I’m sequencing this). Unlike Isbell, though, Patterson Hood isn’t opposed to getting some help in realizing his latest statement, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams–Lydia Loveless, Waxahatchee, and Wednesday all guest on this one. A weird and insular album, I’ve nonetheless gone with the most “classic Drive-By Truckers country rock and roll” song for this playlist–what can I say, Hood still knows how to do it for me. I have to imagine that it was a blast for professed Drive-By Truckers superfans Wednesday to back Hood up for “The Van Pelt Parties”, an intriguing, historical, and country-rocking track that loads up on spiked punch and pedal steel guitars.

“Higher and Drier”, Will Stratton
From Points of Origin (2025, Ruination/Bella Union)

Singer-songwriter Will Stratton has called Beacon, New York home for over a decade, but he was born in a town outside of Sacramento, and his eighth album is a journey back to his Golden State of origin. Points of Origin is a record that attempts to grapple with the climate change-induced “natural” disasters for which California has become ground zero, although Stratton’s take on it is a character-led one. My favorite song on Points of Origin is the self-contained tapestry of “Higher and Drier”–several of Stratton’s collaborators are credited on it, but they stay on the periphery, letting the singer-songwriter unspool his story of an ex-artist turned real estate salesman selling beautiful, doomed mountain/beachfront houses. In addition to being engrossing as a story, “Higher and Drier” is an excellent showcase of Stratton’s musical gifts–he snakes his way through delicate 2000s “indie folk”-style verses and surprisingly grafts a campfire-song chorus to it. Read more about Points of Origin here.

“On My Own”, Private Lives
From Salt of the Earth (2025, Feel It)

Private Lives make it all sound so easy on their sophomore album, Salt of the Earth; in under thirty minutes, the Montreal quartet bowl strike after strike down the lanes of power pop, garage rock, proto-punk, and indie pop. These ten songs sound ramshackle but precise at the same time, stubbornly insisting that they need no more than a power trio rock-and-roll setup and a powerhouse vocalist to work–and they’re right! Private Lives come out swinging with a bunch of roaring, ripping, rock-and-rollers, and they lean even harder on the gas pedal in the B-side; see “On My Own”, a revved-up girl group power popper hidden in the back half that’s probably my favorite thing on the whole album. Read more about Salt of the Earth here.

“Fourth Street”, Dutch Interior
From Moneyball (2025, Fat Possum)

“Fourth Street” is something of a self-mythologizing song–its title refers to the place where Dutch Interior’s first album was made (“an apartment where three of the band members lived and three others still do”). That’s all well and good, but “Fourth Street” isn’t on this playlist because I knew any of that in advance, it’s on here because it’s a really smooth, really pleasing version of Americana and alt-country-tinged electric indie rock that hooked me just about immediately. There’s no shortage of bands making music that sounds like Moneyball these days, but “Fourth Street” cuts to the chase–a strong and simple guitar riff kicks the track off, and Dutch Interior make the rest of the song work by giving plenty of attention to its foundation rather than just trying to coast on a vibe (if you build it, the vibe will come, after all).

“Interstate Runner”, Disaster Kid
From Rare Bird (2025, Semicircle)

Disaster Kid have a sound that fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene, but there’s a delicate side to bandleader Seamus Kreitzer’s writing that gives their latest EP, Rare Bird, a unique spin. I hear bits of John K. Samson, Noah Roth, and Buddie in these songs, plus a good deal of not only Kreitzer’s stated influence of Slaughter Beach, Dog but other Lame-O power pop groups like Hurry and Big Nothing, too. There are some interesting sensitive and strange moments to Rare Bird, but the aforementioned “power pop” influences are the dominant strain in opening track “Interstate Runner”, which is a beautiful roots rock heart-on-sleeve first statement. Read more about Rare Bird here.

“The New Design”, Mirrored Daughters
From Mirrored Daughters (2025, Fika)

The members of Mirrored Daughters have backgrounds in various shades of indie folk, pop, and electronic music, but their first record flows together with remarkable ease. Inspired by Greater London’s Epping Forest (where it was partially recorded), Mirrored Daughters is delicately ornate, with strings, horns, and woodwinds sprawling out slowly but confidently. Bright acoustic guitars and lead vocalist Marlody’s voice ensure that it isn’t wrong to call Mirrored Daughters a pop album, but neither do Mirrored Daughters shortchange the more experimental side of their music. “The New Design” is an early highlight, and its warm clarinet accents drag Mirrored Daughters into full-on chamber folk territory (well, maybe “drag” is the wrong word; it’s more like “gently float”, much like the rest of the LP’s attitude towards things). Read more about Mirrored Daughters here.

“Grave Digger”, evan.zuri
(2025, Candlepin)

“Grave Digger” is evan.zuri’s debut single, but the Boise-based musician has already opened for everyone from Wishy to Tanukichan to Supercrush (it pays to be a regularly-gigging musician in a smaller but still tourable city, I suppose). After a demo tape earlier this year, Evan Zurilgen’s solo project has linked up with the great Candlepin Records for his first proper recording, “Grave Digger”, a really great blast of fuzzed-out alt-rock that has the musician firmly on my radar. There’s a dour grunginess to the instrumental, but it’s still quite kinetic, and Zurilgen’s vocals are secretly very strong and full-throated. “Grave Digger” kind of sounds like early Damien Jurado fronting Dinosaur Jr., if that makes any sense. And, of course, “I’m not saying you’re a grave digger” is a great line.

“Captain Palisade”, Jetstream Pony
From Bowerbirds and Blue Things (2025, Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets)

Jetstream Pony have been around since the late 2010s, but the members of the Brighton quartet have a much longer history in indie pop, playing in the bands Aberdeen, Trembling Blue Stars, The Wedding Present, Turbocat, The Dentists, and more between the five of them. Although their latest album is clearly the work of longtime indie musicians, it’s a bit rougher-around-the-edges than a lot of their peers at this stage–not quite Boyracer-level pop punk, Bowerbirds and Blue Things nonetheless has a loose, basement indie rock feel to its approach to guitar pop music (that, to be clear, doesn’t stop it from being wildly catchy over and over again). Huge late-record gem “Captain Palisade” keeps Bowerbirds and Blue Things’ momentum going strong into its second half–It’s not exactly surprising that Jetstream Pony are quite good at what they do at this point, but that’s no reason to take them for granted. Read more about Bowerbirds and Blue Things here.

“Here We Go Crazy”, Bob Mould
From Here We Go Crazy (2025, Granary/BMG)

“Airplanes in formation, there’s a conflict in the sky / Modern constellation choosing who can live and die”. Jesus Christ, Bob. The indie rock legend (BMG designation for his latest solo album notwithstanding) is back with his first record in five years, and while the title track to Here We Go Crazy hints at the politically-tapped-in fury of 2020’s Blue Hearts, it’s not as clear of a sequel as that. Dark but incredibly catchy, “Here We Go Crazy” isn’t quite Black Sheets of Rain territory, but it’s Mould meeting the moment with a song that’s heavy in multiple senses of the word. I didn’t realize how much I wanted Mould to make another solo album until I heard this song, but it’s good to have him back.

“Fair Enough”, The Tubs
From Cotton Crown (2025, Trouble in Mind)

It’s not lost on me that both of the Tubs songs on this playlist contain lines about Owen Williams being “sick of” something. “Sick” is a word that bounces around my head listening to Cotton Crown, and it definitely applies to the opening of “Fair Enough”. Williams sings “Know I’ve been an asshole, baby / Know I’ve been such a pain / Girl, I can hear you talking / I don’t hear what you say” in a sickly sweet way, a curdling that reads as “sarcastic” but is in fact drawn from the similarly British activity of “reveling in one’s own misery”. Like all of the other great moments in Cotton Crown, though, all of these funhouse mirror distractions fade into the background when The Tubs get to the brilliant, massive chorus. Like, you know, grief, it’s all rearranging deck chairs and petty squabbles while the actual thing that matters lurks in the background, ready to take over at any moment.

“My Old Man”, Spring Onion
From Seated Figure (2025, Anything Bagel)

This playlist can’t shake the spectre of death for whatever reason. I put this lovely song by Spring Onion, the solo project of Remember Sports’ Catherine Dwyer, onto this playlist, only to stumble upon an essay about the death of her father that begat Seated Figure upon researching it. That certainly gives a lot more context to “My Old Man”, probably my favorite song on the album, a song with very few and mostly quite cryptic lyrics (aside from “We don’t need no piece of paper / I love you now and I love you later”, a very nice sentiment but one I’m currently struggling with for various personal reasons). The essay is partially about Dwyer’s father’s love of Costco, which is coincidentally one of the last places where we were able to experience some normalcy on a Thursday before things took a hard and sudden turn for the worse on Friday. This new wave-y bedroom pop/folk song is not about Costco, I don’t think.

“Consolation Prize”, Transistors
From Everything Will Never Happen Again (2025, Melted Ice Cream)

“In your eyes I’m a consolation prize / Runner up and second best”. Aw, man, that’s a tough break, Transistors. Your song still sounds great, though! They’re a trio hailing from Rangiora, New Zealand, active in the 2010s and recently resurrected to record an album called Everything Will Never Happen Again with Joe Sampson of Salad Boys. If you enjoyed the frantic, garagey take on Kiwi guitar pop from Best Bets’ album last year, you’ll want to give Transistors a listen–and if you’re on the fence, “Consolation Prize” is an exuberant, aggrieved, loud power pop anthem that sums up the best of Transistors in under two minutes. 

“Libretto”, Throwing Muses
From Moonlight Concessions (2025, Fire)

Hey, there’s a new Throwing Muses album out! Their first in five years, too. However much you think you appreciate Throwing Muses and Kristin Hersh, it’s probably not enough. And that goes for me, too–I have to be in a certain mood to appreciate the band’s distinct tense and tight version of rock music, but it sounds like nothing else when it hits. And “Libretto”, my favorite song on Moonlight Concessions, certainly hits. It’s an acoustic track with string accompaniment, harkening back to Hersh’s excellent first solo album, Hips and Makers, but there’s that dreadful Throwing Muses edge to it that isn’t present on a lot of that record. I need to listen to Moonlight Concessions as a whole some more, but this one’s already sticking with me.

“Bad Guys”, The Unfit
From Disconnected (2025, Share It Music)

The latest record from Pacific Northwest group The Unfit is a collection of previously-released singles and EPs, but it hardly sounds like rehashed leftovers. Disconnected is fiery and alive, following in a grand lineage of Seattle punk bands wielding a combination of wild, sardonic vocals and huge guitars to explosive ends. Too limber (and, let’s be real, not nearly self-serious enough) for the blunt-object post-punk/noise rock revival, but too heavy and hardcore-indebted for “egg punk”, Disconnected is ten songs and twenty-five minutes of The Unfit beating their own personal sweet spot to a pulp. The first song on the compilation, “Bad Guys”, is a dispatch from a dark reality of heartily encouraged violence and warfare; “I smell blood / I kinda want blood / A little bit of blood never hurt anyone” howls vocalist Jake Knuth, a worrying train of thought if there ever was one. Read more about Disconnected here.

“DTMWTD”, LP Gavin
From Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc. (2025, Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)

LP Gavin is a London-based artist who combines the off-the-cuff pop brilliance of 90s American basement indie rock with classic British guitar pop songwriting, and his electric, wide-ranging first LP actually lives up to an album biography that cites both Ovlov and Robert Wyatt as influences. Beyond the moments of actual “fuzz rock”, Trials, Tribulations… is marked by a psychedelic, distorted haze that hovers over even the album’s more gentle moments; Gavin’s low-key British vocals mumble and stumble through these bright and inventive instrumentals, only sometimes the main character in his own show. “DTMWTD” (that’s “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”) is some satisfying fuzzy rock and roll, offering up some swagger that might be the most immediate moment on the record (not that a British guy mumbling about someone being “fuckin’ rude” over fuzzed-out guitars is all that conventional). Read more about Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc. here.

“Goat House Blues”, Fust
From Big Ugly (2025, Dear Life)

“’Cause when you’re gone they can say that it was all your doing / It was your disaster / And they may even say everything got better after / But they’ll learn fast that being free it ain’t half as rewarding”. Even compared to the rest of Big Ugly (“Southern mountain rock, Southern lit, made and dedicated to the inextricable entity of land and people, to visions of community and utopia and testament to erosion,” writes Dan Wriggins of Friendship in reference to the album), “Goat House Blues” is a real cypher. The album-wide theme of work is present on the periphery of this one, but “Goat House Blues” is about escape and “freedom”, whatever that could possibly mean in the context of a land as far-off and foreign to the rest of us as Lincoln County, West Virginia. Aaron Dowdy may sound like he’s kicking back and putting his arms behind his head when he sings “Come on in, we’re loafing”, but he’s not.

“Make You Feel Better”, Inland Years
From Keep Your Eyes on the Road (2025, BSDJ)

Keep Your Eyes on the Road is thirteen songs of hissing, lo-fi, folk-ish guitar pop music from a hardcore/screamo/metalcore veteran delivered in seventeen minutes. Inland Years has garnered comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Cleaners from Venus in recent years, but between Ryan Daniels’ low-key but emotional vocals and the acoustic skeletons from which most of the songs are built, it reminds me more than anything of Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh. Daniels is a hazy frontperson, the songs come in and out of focus, and the tape is over before you know it but not without nailing a lot of excellent lo-fi pop. In under sixty seconds, “Make You Feel Better” establishes itself as one of Keep Your Eyes on the Road’s best moments–it’s bright, unvarnished jangle/power pop. Read more about Keep Your Eyes on the Road here.

“Gum”, Vegtable
From Through the Motions (2025)

It turns out that I just needed some slowcore from Singapore to set me right. The entirety of the debut album from Singaporean trio Vegtable (“no e between the g and t”, per their Bandcamp page) is great, but I keep getting stuck on Through the Motions’ opening track, “Gum”. The delicate and shimmery side of 1990s indie rock is alive and well in “Gum”–I hear bits of Bedhead, Codeine, and Seam in this one, any of those band’s louder sides sanded down to a gentle river of meandering guitar leads and whispered but melodic vocals. There’s some interesting synth parts as “Gum” swoons to its ascending bridge, but it grounds itself and returns to the modest guitars that make it strong as it sees itself out.

“Tumbleweeding”, Telethon
From Suburban Electric (2025, Halloween)

Every song on Suburban Electric is a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on Telethon’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me). Suburban Electric could be Kevin Tulley’s bid for “best lyricist in indie punk rock whatever currently going”, not in a “heartache-inducing one-liners to write on your spiral-ring notebook” way but in a “how the hell does he fully step into the worlds of his characters in an opaque but charismatic way over and over again like that?” way. Telethon surprise musically on Suburban Electric, too–the group set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers. In the power-pop-punk rush of “Tumbleweeding”, Telethon seemingly break free from some of the record’s more heady trappings, but a closer inspection of this hit-the-ground-running banger reveals much of these hallmarks of Suburban Electric hiding in the hooks, too. Read more about Suburban Electric here.

“Empire Anthems”, Chaepter
From Empire Anthems (2025, Pleasure Tapes)

Oh boy, Chaepter’s back already! The Chicago art rock/post-punk/fuzz-gaze-whatever freak put out an interesting and tricky album called Naked Era on Candlepin last year, and he’s more or less picked up where he left off on this year’s Pleasure Tapes-released Empire Anthems EP. Much more frantic, paranoid, and post-punk-indebted than the majority of his nu-gaze/space rock/grunge revival peers, the title track to Empire Anthems is perhaps the greatest distillation of Chaepter’s whole thing in a single song yet (although he does need nearly six minutes to get it all off his chest). “Empire Anthems” reminds me a bit of bands like Pardoner who try to merge the more exploratory side of 90s indie rock with pop music–and while Chaepter is a little less concise here, there’s definitely a strong anchor that keeps “Empire Anthems” plowing forward anyway.

“Pick Me Up #2”, Silo’s Choice
From Liberals (2025, Obscure Pharaoh)

The one true indulgence of Jon Massey’s folk side on Liberals is “Pick Me Up #2”, which might be the best moment on the entire thing. Massey turns everything over in his head in the Starbucks inside the Target on Halsted, waiting out inclement weather: “I’m never far from walking out between the cars / With a snowball in my hand, spinning, spinning,” he remarks over confidently but delicately-picked acoustic guitars in the refrain of this one. The music conveys the general sense of what Massey is on about here–as for the specifics, we’ll have to file that away to come back to. Read more about Liberals here.

“Flies”, Dick Texas
From All That Fall (2025, Tortilla Flat/Life Like Tapes)

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 frontperson Valerie Salerno is the steady center with vocals that murmur along with the music’s psychedelic haze. Paisley Underground and post-punk collide with more traditional country and folk music–but even so, none of this quite compares us to the out-of-nowhere closing track “Flies”, an electronic-fried krautrock/psych rock creation that ends All That Fall on a smoking high note. The fog that surrounds All That Fall doesn’t clear on “Flies”, exactly, but the shapes we can just barely make out are clearly moving faster. Read more about All That Fall here.

“Why Is It So Hard to Say Goodbye?”, Vundabar
From Surgery and Pleasure (2025, Loma Vista)

Why indeed, Vundabar.

Pressing Concerns: Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, Shapes Like People

The first Pressing Concerns of the week is also the last one of the month (that’s just how time works, sometimes). This Monday edition collects a few albums from earlier in March and one from February: we’ve got new LPs from Miscellaneous Owl, Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts, Yuasa-Exide, and Shapes Like People below.

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

Miscellaneous Owl – The Cloud Chamber

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, indie folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tender and Laughing

Thank goodness for February. The shortest month of the year doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, but it’s “National Album Writing Month”, an excuse that Madison, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Huan-Hua Chye has used to make a record as Miscellaneous Owl for several years now. Miscellaneous Owl LPs have shown up in early March since 2019, and last year’s edition, You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow, was one of my favorites of 2024–it serves as a perfect introduction for Chye’s mix of jangly/twee indie pop, acoustic folk, and offbeat, wide-ranging lyricism. This year’s Miscellaneous Owlbum is called The Cloud Chamber, and Chye promises something “folkier, quieter, and dreamier” this time around, as well as “1000% more theremin” than on her last record. While the exact specifics of this description are up for debate (aside from the theremin one–that’s pretty cut and dried), 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 its 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.

One of these friendlier moments is the opening one–the first song on The Cloud Chamber is a quiet, beautiful, synth-friendly indie pop song called “Tender and Laughing”, and while it never stops being “tender”, the chorus is a genuinely chaotic sensory overload that’s kind of surprising to hear from Miscellaneous Owl. The other “hit” on The Cloud Chamber is a burbling, bubbling pure synthpop number called “Oh Sister”–if this record had a physical release (which it could–heads up to the small label tycoons who read this blog), this would be the kickoff to Side Two. In between and after these bright mile-markers are the songs that give The Cloud Chamber its overall feel–but, while they do create a unified sound, they don’t suffer from being too similar, as they range from mid-tempo, downcast but electric indie rock (“You & i are Earth (1661)”, “The Invisible City”), straight-up acoustic folk tracks (“The Wounded Moon”, “Mercury”), and “other” (“The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known”, an odd one that’s almost into prog-psych-folk territory).  These Miscellaneous Owl albums always feel very deliberate on a song-by-song basis; despite the album-centric creation, every song feels meant to stand on its own. It’s true well into the second half of The Cloud Chamber, where “In Clover” is as musically gripping as either of the songs I labeled as hits (but the lyrics, a very blunt, very effective recounting of the life of Etta James, preclude it from this category). A decidedly different beast than her last album, The Cloud Chamber is still a strong example of a talented songwriting picking up her theremin and getting to work. (Bandcamp link)

Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts – Travelers Rest

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Roots rock, folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Home

Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson is a doctor, and he practices his doctorate in music composition by teaching music theory at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and by making Americana/folk rock in his spare time as Dr. Kevin Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts. Holm-Hudson debuted The Adjuncts with an album in 2021, and since then the group (featuring his son Toby Holm-Hudson on bass, fellow professor Dr. Jim Gleason on guitar, and David “Chappy” Chapman on the drums) have been making music pretty consistently, including a Christmas album called I Need More Sleighbell last year. With the exception of the aforementioned Christmas record, The Adjuncts tend to favor making long-winded LPs, and their latest album, Travelers Rest, is no exception–sprawling across fourteen songs and reaching nearly an hour, Holm-Hudson takes us on an extensive journey across the United States and its forgotten corners. Hotel breakfast bars, boarded-up former family homes, Fourth of July picnics, and cell-service-deprived stretches of highway populate Travelers Rest, an album that samples classic country, roots rock, soft rock, and jangly power pop but always seeks to serve Holm-Hudson’s narratives. PhD aside, Holm-Hudson’s thoughtful, unassuming, conversational style helps Travelers Rest feel like an engrossing yarn rather than an intimidating manifesto.

Travelers Rest kind of reminds me of the more approachable and folky side of classic Shrimper Records acts like Franklin Bruno and Refrigerator, but with a more openly middle American bent. Holm-Hudson starts Travelers Rest with an unsatisfied wanderlust, covering miles of open road on the opening country-western curtain-raiser “What the Heart Wants”, and “Hotel Breakfast Lounge” breaks out the rock-and-roll piano for a Beach Boys-y tribute to the titular “highway hunger games”. Plenty of the rest of Travelers Rest has an attitude (like “Trashville”, as in “I’m getting out of”), but the big wide empty space of the country gives way to a bit of reflection starting with the jangly “Melancholy Man”, and continues into character studies like “Last of the Local Legends” (“Missed his shot at the big time, now he plays in a corner bar”) and “Home”, the album’s gorgeous centerpiece, which spends six minutes sketching the rise and fall of an early twentieth-century family’s residence. The thoughtfulness of Travelers Rest continues through the joyful “Hello Old Friend” (which, as upbeat as it is, recognizes the finite number of opportunities for interpersonal connection as the years fly by) and “Picnic”, which pokes at the edges of one of America’s greatest myths. More or less the entire final four songs on Travelers Rest feel like a goodbye or a conclusion of some kind, with Holm-Hudson & The Adjuncts trying on different parting messages on for size. We all only get one final statement, but that’s all the more reason to turn the possibilities over in one’s head while we’re still on the road. (Bandcamp link)

Yuasa-Exide – Hyper at the Gates of Dawn

Release date: March 4th
Record label: Ape Sanctuary/Floating Skull
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Computer Strike

I introduced the readers of Rosy Overdrive to Minnesota lo-fi rock project Yuasa-Exide last December by writing about the Information and Culture + Naturally Reoccurring cassette tape, which was also my first brush with the music of Douglas Busson (and the revolving door of musicians who contribute to his records, as well). The tape (which compiled two previously-released full-length digital albums, one on each side) may have new to me, but it was actually just a snapshot of Busson’s output–I believe that Hyper at the Gates of Dawn, the first Yuasa-Exide album of 2025, is the project’s eighteenth since 2022. Somebody with this freakish mid-to-late Robert Pollard-level of productivity would seem to invite the “creating playlists and mixtapes of highlights” approach, but, as I wrote when talking about last year’s tape, there’s also a good deal of value in taking in a Yuasa-Exide album as a whole, and I feel the same way about Hyper at the Gates of Dawn. To continue the Bob Pollard comparison, this one reminds me of those 1990s Guided by Voices EPs–there’s an obvious “hit” or two stitched together by stranger and more abrasive material, but that doesn’t mean that the “album tracks” aren’t fun no-fi garage rock trips, too.

“Computer Strike” is the one on Hyper at the Gates of Dawn–if you’ve only got time for one, that’s the biggest fuzz-pop gold strike. Busson doesn’t start the record with it, but he deigns to put it in the first half, and it’s gripping from the classic pop-song chord progression and classically-submerged-sounding vocals onward. The song that actually opens Hyper at the Gates of Dawn, “Marjorie”, is still pretty catchy in its own right too, a slightly retro-tinged, laid-back garage rock tune that’s charming in the way Yuasa-Exide knows how to be. In the second half of the album, the biggest pop tracks include the slightly-more-polished “Beatles All the Way Down” and “Closed Circuit”, which is a resuscitated track from an “outtakes and demos” collection from last year (it’s really hard to believe that Busson released seventeen “proper” Yuasa-Exide albums before getting around to finalizing this one; it rocks). In between these moments, we’ve got stuff like the fuzzed-out loitering of “Pasted/Save International Ticket”, the druggy acoustic ballad “Love Without Cause”, the instrumental leisurely stroll  of “TV Guided”, and “Spit” (which I can only describe as “loud”). All of these songs have their moments, but none of them are ones you would put on an album if you were trying to emphasize the “pop” side of “bedroom pop”. Needless to say, that’s not what Douglas Busson is attempting; he’s making Yuasa-Exide albums, and we’re lucky to be reliably receiving them. (Bandcamp link)

Shapes Like People – Ticking Haze

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Jangleshop
Genre: Jangle pop, dream pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Ambition Is Your Friend

Shapes Like People may be a new band, but the husband-and-wife duo is co-led by a longtime musician in Carl Mann. The biography for Shapes Like People’s debut album Ticking Haze casually mentions that Mann co-wrote a song with Kylie Minogue around the year 2000 (it appears that he co-wrote several, in fact, and also played guitar in her band for a while), although readers of this blog may be more likely to know him for his work leading Maidstone, England-originating indie pop group The Shop Window, who’ve put out three albums this decade. Clearly Mann is on a roll as of late, as The Shop Window has proved to be insufficient for his songwriting on its own–he’s started a new project, Shapes Like People, with his wife Kat (a New Zealand native) on lead vocals. Interestingly enough, Carl began writing the material with pitching to Minogue again in mind, but he liked Kat’s vocals (intended to be guide vocals at first) enough that we instead get Ticking Haze, an album recorded entirely by the two of them (Kat singing, Carl playing the instruments and providing backing vocals). 

The duo approached Ticking Haze with dream pop both classic and modern in mind (they name The Sundays, Mazzy Star, Weyes Blood, and Alvvays as inspirations, among others), but Carl’s jangly indie pop tendencies shine through across these dozen songs. The first song on the record is called “Ambition Is Your Friend”, and while it’s one of the simpler songs on the album (it’s solid jangle pop all the way down), its title does hint at what to expect with Ticking Haze: it’s about as long as you’d want a single LP to be (45 minutes), and at its busiest it melds 60s pop-esque orchestration with 80s-style atmospherics and grandness. Shapes Like People float through the different sides of their music in a way that can let a song like “Weathering” go from a simple acoustic folk beginning to a whirring synthpop track so subtly that you might not even realize it. I’ve found myself gravitating towards the more straightforward guitar pop songs on Ticking Haze, especially at first–like “Don’t Hear Your Footsteps”, in which Kat really gets to take the center stage, or “Head Spun”, which showcases the vocal chemistry between the two of them. Still, there’s something to the odder corners like the Cocteau Twins-like goth-wave of “Fireworks”, even if it’s not fully explored in the same way that the “jangly guitars” side of dream pop is on this record. Seems like there’s enough juice here for more Shapes Like People material–maybe there’ll even be some leftovers for Kylie Minogue, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

The Bulletin Board: April 2025

What’s going on for you in terms of music next month? Are you planning on going to any shows? Playing one? Going on tour? Where? I’m inviting people to share this in the comment section.

To get us started, I’ve collected as many tour dates from bands I’ve previously written about as I could find on social media and other websites, roughly sorted by region for you below. This is in no way comprehensive, so please, if you know of (or are) an act I’ve written about with a show coming up, drop that in the comments too!

Northeastern U.S. and Canada:

Rick Rude, Lost Film, Snake Lips, and Gum Parker at The Apohadion, Portland (ME), April 12th

Lonesome Joan at The Green Room, Somerville (MA) (with Ruune and Jordon Wiley), April 6th

Megan from Work at Deep Cuts, Medford (MA) (with Impossible Dog and Pregame Rituals), April 7th

The Michael Character at Deep Cuts, Medford (MA) (with Cheap City, Battlemode, and MK Naomi), April 12th

Teen Driver at The Voo, Turners Falls (MA) (with Hardcard, Grammerhorn, and Wren), April 12th

Prism Shores at P’tit Ours, Montreal (with Absolute Losers and Bracelet), April 24th

Private Lives at Vertigo, Hamilton (ON) (with Ruby Doom, Cult Crime, and Loud Hands), April 5th

Market at Threes Brewing, Brooklyn (with Bergman & Bloustein), April 6th

Tomato Flower at Alphaville, Brooklyn, April 17th

Golden Apples and Rick Rude at Alphaville, Brooklyn (with Gobbin Jr and Anna Altman), April 19th

Grass Jaw and Anna McClellan at Angry Mom Records, Ithaca (NY) (with Three Holes), April 26th

Feeling Figures at Milkie’s, Buffalo, April 1st

Ther at Abyssinia, Philadelphia (with Ava Mirzadegan and Thanya Iyer), April 19th

Sadurn at Mr. Smalls, Millvale (PA), April 13th

Downhaul at Quarry House Tavern, Silver Spring (MD), April 5th

Smirk at Center for Arts at the Armory, Somerville (MA) (with Prison Affair), April 29th

Ida and Tsunami in Philadelphia and New York, March 28th to March 29th

Fust in Silver Spring (MD), Philadelphia, Medford (MA), Manchester (VT), Brooklyn, Hudson (NY), and Pittsburgh (with Lindsay Reamer in Philadelphia, with Dead Gowns in Medford, Manchester, and Hudson), April 1st to April 8th

Babe Report in Pittsburgh, Reading (PA), Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, Portsmouth (NH), Burlington (VT), Montreal, and Toronto (with Maneka in Philadelphia, Lady Pills in Boston, and Prewn in Burlington), April 2nd to April 11th

Naked Giants in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, April 4th to April 11th

(T-T)b in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Rochester (NY), April 4th to April 19th

Dazy, Liquid Mike, and Graham Hunt in Toronto, Montreal, Brooklyn, Medford (MA), Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Pittsburgh, April 4th to April 11th

FACS in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Queens, Medford (MA), Montreal, and Toronto, April 7th to April 12th

Vundabar in Pittsburgh, Allentown, Jersey City, and Woodstock, April 8th to April 12th

Good Flying Birds in Philadelphia, New York, and Buffalo, April 9th to April 11th

Remember Sports and Anna McClellan in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, April 14th to April 17th

Lee Bains III in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Catskill (NY), New York, Arlington (VT), Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, April 15th to April 24th

Cheekface and Pacing in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, April 23rd to April 25th

Ekko Astral in Boston, Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia (opening for Bartees Strange), April 23rd to April 27th

Will Stratton in Troy (NY), Greenfield (MA), Providence, Boston, and Rockland (MA) (with Adeline Hotel; with Convinced Friend in Providence), April 23rd to April 27th

Niis in Troy (NY), Cambridge (MA), Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Washington DC (with Pollyanna), April 27th to May 3rd

Southern U.S.:

Tucker Riggleman at Art Party, Morgantown (WV), April 4th

Mr. Husband at Get Tight Lounge, Richmond (with Wilson Springs Hotel and Nathan Xander), April 5th

Power Pants at Fuzzy Cactus, Richmond (with Shrudd, Lion Country Ferrari, and Frank and the Slight Incline), April 12th

Downhaul in Raleigh, Greenville (SC), Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlottesville, March 28th to April 6th

Fust in Athens (GA), Richmond, Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville, Carrboro (NC), Chattanooga, Greenwood (MS), Birmingham, and Charlotte (with Styrofoam Winos in Louisville, Carrboro, Knoxville, and Nashville), March 28th to April 26th

Patterson Hood and Lydia Loveless in Birmingham, Nashville, and Louisville, March 28th to April 5th

The Dumpies, Night Court, and Faulty Cognitions in Austin, Houston, McAllen (TX), and San Antonio, April 3rd to April 6th

Hour and Friendship in Durham, Asheville, and Columbia (SC) (with The Smashing Times and Linda Smith in Durham), April 5th to April 7th

Cheekface and Pacing in Oklahoma City, Dallas, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, Nashville, Asheville, Carrboro (NC), and Richmond, April 7th to April 21st

Lee Bains III in Athens (GA), Campobello (SC), Charleston (WV), Morgantown (WV), Richmond, and Greensboro, April 11th to April 26th

Naked Giants in Charlotte, Asheville, Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, and Austin, April 12th to April 19th

Ekko Astral in Durham, Nashville, and Atlanta (opening for Bartees Strange), April 29th to May 2nd

Midwestern U.S.:

Six Flags Guy at Spacebar, Columbus (with Valleyview, NEIL, and Wax Teeth), April 3rd

Ekko Astral at Lucky Wolf, Paw Paw (MI) (with Edging and Marty Gray), April 4th

Ekko Astral at Canopy Club, Urbana (IL) (opening for Mannequin Pussy), April 3rd

Spread Joy at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Artificial Go and Clickbait), April 4th

Edie McKenna at The Empty Bottle, Chicago (with Lola Kirke and Zack Zucker), April 8th

Ganser at The Empty Bottle, Chicago (with No Men and NÜDE), April 11th

Cusp and Prathloons at The Empty Bottle, Chicago (with Pictoria Vark), April 13th

Exedo at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Lost Legion and Bleakness), April 13th

Charm School at Subterranean, Chicago, April 13th

Rotundos at Beat Kitchen, Chicago (with Heart to Gold, Otis VCR, and Latter), April 13th

Truth or Consequences New Mexico at Beat Kitchen, Chicago (with Scam Likely and Background Character), April 17th

Rotundos at The Empty Bottle, Chicago (with Yada Yada and Upnow!), April 21st (free)

Mint Mile at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Regal Machines and Light Coma), April 25th

Robbie Fulks at Space, Evanston (IL), April 25th and April 26th

Toadvine at The Hideout, Chicago (with Cactus Lee), April 27th

Neal Markowski at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Contorno and Jordan Martins), April 27th

Disaster Kid at Cactus Club, Milwaukee (with Well + Good, Health Club, and Royal Mill), April 27th

Miscellaneous Owl at Crucible, Madison (with Jeffrey Lewis and Grasping Straws), March 30th

Citric Dummies at Leona’s, Eau Claire (WI) (with Heather the Jerk and American Muscle), March 29th

Feeling Figures, Yuasa-Exide, and Answering Machines at Cloudland, Minneapolis (with Bermuda Squares), April 4th

Abi Ooze at Eagles No. 34, Minneapolis (with Tha Retail Simps, Judy and the Jerks, Neo Neos, Artificial Go, 208, and Panel), April 5th

Babe Report in Dekalb (IL), St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Grand Rapids (with Hennen (mem. Shady Bug) in St. Louis, March 28th to April 1st and April 12th

Patterson Hood and Lydia Loveless in Indianapolis, Chicago, Evanston (IL), and St. Louis, March 30th to April 4th

Naked Giants in Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Toronto, March 31st to April 4th

Baths in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Kansas City, March 31st to April 4th

Downhaul in Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, April 1st to April 4th

Ryan Davis in Carbondale (IL), Kansas City, Lawrence (KS), Omaha, Minneapolis, Eau Claire (WI), Madison, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis (with Simon Joyner in Omaha), April 1st to April 9th

Feeling Figures in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Green Bay (with Tyvek in Detroit, with Glyders in Chicago), April 1st to April 6th

Vundabar in Omaha, St. Louis, Evanston (IL), Columbus, and Pittsburgh (with Yot Club), April 2nd to April 8th

Graham Hunt and Dazy in Lakewood (OH), Detroit, and Pittsburgh (with Liquid Mike in Pittsburgh), April 2nd to April 11th

Ida and Tsunami in Ferndale (MI) and Chicago, April 4th to April 5th

FACS in Milwaukee, Madison, Grand Rapids, and Chicago, April 4th to April 17th

Mud Whale in Indianapolis, Kalamazoo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Lansing, April 4th to April 20th

Good Flying Birds in Indianapolis, Columbus, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Fort Wayne (IN), April 7th to April 13th

Fust in Chicago, Minneapolis, Northfield (MN), Davenport, Bloomington (IN), and St. Louis (with Merce Lemon at all shows except St. Louis), April 9th to April 15th

Sadurn in Columbus, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, April 9th to April 13th

(T-T)b in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Indianapolis, April 12th to April 16th

Nikki Minerva in Madison, Minneapolis, Duluth, Lincoln (NE), Milwaukee, and Chicago, April 12th to April 29th

Prize Horse in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Lawrence (KS) (with Static Dress and Soul Blind), April 21st to April 27th

Niis in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Cleveland, April 24th to April 26th

West Coast/Western U.S.:

Shoplifter at Green Auto, Vancouver (BC) (with La Lune, Piss, and Chlorine Time Machine), April 4th

Shoplifter at Capital Ballroom, Victoria (BC) (with Hillsboro, La Lune, and This Is the Glasshouse), April 6th

Model Shop at Blue Moon, Seattle (with Caper Clowns and The Pop Cycle), April 11th

Fluung at Add-a-Ball, Seattle (with Waltzerr and Letterbomb), April 12th

Vista House at Merch Market, Portland (OR) (with Sea Caves, Gretta Seabird, and Olivia Lyon), April 17th

The Goods and The 1981 at Little Hill Lounge, El Cerrito (CA) (with Soft Jaw), April 1st

Brown Dog at Ivy Room, Albany (CA) (with Towhead and Dirt), April 11th

Aluminum at Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco (with Lucid Express and Letting Up Despite Great Faults), April 13th

Still Ruins and Rhymies at Makeout Room, San Francisco (with Loner Statue), April 26th

Diners at Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles (with Watercolor Paintings, Cave Babies, Talking Kind, and Heartworms), April 5th (free)

Major Awards at Redwood Bar, Los Angeles (with Jangus Kangus, Mirror Figure, and Orange Mayfield), April 10th

Dummy in Salt Lake City, Boise (Treefort), Anacortes, Seattle, Portland (OR), Eugene (OR), San Francisco, Pioneertown (CA), Tucson, Phoenix, McAllen (TX), Austin, Denton, Oklahoma City, Lawrence, Denver, Albuquerque, and Mexico City (Pitchfork), March 28th to May 3rd

Naked Giants in Denver, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Ana, and San Francisco, March 29th and April 22nd to April 26th

Cheekface and Pacing in San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma City, April 3rd to April 7th

Baths in Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Seattle, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, April 5th to April 20th

Niis in San Francisco, Portland (OR), Seattle, Boise, and Denver, April 16th to April 22nd

Box Elder in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Fullerton (CA), San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Eureka (CA), Eugene, Portland (OR), Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Missoula, April 17th to May 3rd

Ida and Tsunami in Seattle, Portland (OR), San Francisco, and Los Angeles, April 18th to April 25th

Prize Horse in Denver and Salt Lake City (with Static Dress and Soul Blind), April 29th to April 30th

United Kingdom and Ireland:

Schande at The Carousel, Nottingham (with Airport Dad, Ideal Host, and Vom Vorton), April 13th

The Declining Winter at The Cube, Bristol (with Pefkin and Coims), April 26th

Ex-Void in Bristol, London, Salford, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Sheffield, April 12th to April 17th

Europe:

EggS in France (Rennes, Nantes, Tours, Bordeaux, Arthez De Bearn, Toulouse, Marseille, Toulon, Lyon, Volvic, and Colmar), April 16th to April 26th

TH Da Freak in Spain (Sabinanigo, Malaga, Ubeda, Tolosa, Oviedo, and Santander), April 4th to April 12th

Radical Kitten in Saint-Amand-Roche-Savine, Geneve, Lyon, Freiburg, Nuremberg, Chemnitz, Wroclaw, Gdynia, Szczecin, Berlin, Hannover, Utrecht, Bruxelles, Amiens, and Paris, April 17th to May 4th

Pressing Concerns: Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, Bagdad, Niis

The third and final Pressing Concerns of this week is full of great new music coming out this Friday (March 28th); specifically, we’ve got new albums from Jetstream Pony, Stuart Pearce, and Niis. And, if that’s not enough, we also have an EP from Bagdad that’s coming out today (March 27th). Get excited, and be sure to check out earlier Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies) and Tuesday (featuring Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, and Theydevil) if you’ve yet to do so.

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.

Jetstream Pony – Bowerbirds and Blue Things

Release date: March 28st
Record label: Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets
Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Captain Palisade

Oh, I finally get to talk about a Jetstream Pony album in Pressing Concerns! Specifically, an album entirely by Jetstream Pony, as they’ve twice appeared on compilations I’ve covered in this column–the 2022 Skep Wax collection Under the Bridge and its sequel two years later. Those albums collected new music from veterans of the 90s twee/indie pop scene who were associated with the legendary Sarah Records, and this Brighton-based group does indeed have this type of lineage: vocalist/percussionist Beth Arzy was in Aberdeen and Trembling Blue Stars, guitarist/vocalist Shaun Charman played in The Wedding Present, Turbocat and The Popguns, bassist Kerry Boettcher also played in Turbocat, and guitarist Mark Matthews was in The Dentists. Since the late 2010s, Jetstream Pony (rounded out by Tom Levesley on drums) have put out two EPs and a full-length in 2020–Bowerbirds and Blue Things is their first new record in four years, discounting their Under the Bridge appearances. Although their latest album is clearly the work of longtime indie musicians, it’s a bit rougher-around-the-edges than a lot of their peers at this stage–not quite Boyracer-level pop punk, Bowerbirds and Blue Things nonetheless has a loose, basement indie rock feel to its approach to guitar pop music (that, to be clear, doesn’t stop it from being wildly catchy over and over again).

Bowerbirds and Blue Things opens with the bright jangly power pop of “Sit and Wonder”, in which Jetstream Pony manages to sound laid-back and like they’re pulling out all the stops to make a pop anthem at the same time. It’s an automatic kind of pop music–between Arzy’s unflagging vocals and the steady, propulsive instrumentation it kind of reminds me of The High Water Marks or even the more overtly-Hilarie Sidney-influenced moments of The Apples in Stereo. “The Relativity of Wrong” in the record’s fourth slot taps the brakes on the sugary guitar pop by beginning with a dark bass riff and Arzy shifting to a “spoken-word” approach–it’s a bit of an outlier, but it underscores that there’s a very strong and well-oiled band underneath the hood of all of these songs. The rest of the record loses not a bit of steam whether Jetstream Pony seem to be going all-out in power pop form (like the huge late-record gem “Captain Palisade” or the Charman-sung “Only If You Want To”) or if they’re delving into dream pop, new wave, and even a bit of psychedelia (check out “3am” and especially “Bad Common Earth Connection”–hell, even the melodic bundle that is “Bonanza 2 Tango Sierra” starts with a lengthy New Order-style instrumental introduction). It’s not exactly surprising that Jetstream Pony are quite good at what they do at this point, but that’s no reason to take them for granted–especially when they’ve got something as strong as Bowerbirds and Blue Things on their hands. (Bandcamp link)

Stuart Pearce – All This Vast Overproduction

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Fuck No; I Jangle

I wrote about Red Sport International, the debut album from Nottingham post-punk band Stuart Pearce, back when it came out in 2023. I noted the hot streak that their record label (Safe Suburban Home) was on at the time, compared them to The Fall a couple of times, and acknowledged the football and left-wing political references–all in a day’s work. After a stopgap EP called Nuclear Football last year, the second Stuart Pearce album is upon us; it’s called All This Vast Overproduction, and it was heralded by a single called “The Bosses Are Stealing Your Days!” whose album art featured a group of men playing the game that we call “soccer” over in the States for whatever reason. Stuart Pearce are back, alright. The Bandcamp page for this album boasts that it features “the introduction of new sonic textures in the form of acoustic and twelve-string guitars, pianos and vocal harmonies” (presumably the album title is a necessary ego check), and while I won’t deny the presence of these elements, All This Vast Overproduction is still a spittle-radiating British noise rock record that will be quite enjoyable for fans of Mclusky and, yes, the Mark E. Smith/Granny Bongo Band. 

In some ways, All This Vast Overproduction is a heavier album than Red Sport International–of the fifteen tracks on the album, a good portion of them are all-in, full-gas rock and roll explosions, whirlwinds of garage rock and punk that are sure to scare anyone who picked up the album based off the strength of Safe Suburban Home’s indie pop-laden roster. All This Vast Overproduction rolls out the blood-red carpet with a cadre of songs that can either be categorized as a “sprint” (like the admittedly-quite-sparkling but still furious opening track “Easy Now” and revolutionary single “Rope”) or a “stomp” (the post-punk scrapping of “Rule O’Threes” and “Ex-IRA Voice-Actor”, plus the glammy death march of “Würmhole”). At some point in the second half All This Vast Overproduction, Stuart Pearce seem to all of a sudden remember that whole “artistic growth” thing they mentioned earlier and quickly bash out “Fuck No; I Jangle”–Teenage Fanclub they are not, but the weird sleaziness that takes over the track after their initial attempt to write jangle pop is pretty enjoyable on its own terms. The weird prog-garage excursion of “This Infinite Hotel” is less catchy but more fully-developed, and I don’t even mind that they nicked the verse melody from Guided by Voices’ “Not Behind the Fighter Jet” for closing track “Dances w/ Starships” because it seems fitting to go out on a boozy pop high note. Not bad for an overproduced sophomore album. (Bandcamp link)

Bagdad – They Don’t Know

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Rite Field
Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Somewhere, Nowhere

There are a ton of new bands out there these days who make a dark version of indie rock pulling from the worlds of slowcore and grunge (with or without the increasingly meaningless descriptor “shoegaze” attached). Learning of the debut EP from another one might not move the needle for some, but I suspect the fact that Bagdad hail from Poland is a key part of why their first record already puts them above much of their competition in terms of quality. Started in Wrocław in 2023 by “school friends” Franciszek Drobiński (guitar, vocals) and Wojciech Stach (bass) and rounded out by drummer Jakub Gadamski, they’ve linked up with similarly-new Texan imprint Rite Field Records (Some Fear, Shunkan, The Walls You’ve Built) for their first record, a five-song CD EP called They Don’t Know. A world away from wall-of-sound shoegaze textures, They Don’t Know is an open-air collection of sprawling, electric indie rock that, at twenty-six minutes, flirts with “full-length” status. Electric guitar-based slowcore bands like Duster and Idaho are mentioned as influences, although it’s hard to narrow things down any cleaner than “any electric 90s indie rock band that’s far enough away from punk rock” as to what Bagdad sound like here.

“Grunge” is also a fairly useless descriptor for They Don’t Know–don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the influence goes into these five songs, but it mostly manifests itself in the dour, Kurt Cobain-like vocals of opening track “Valley of Dry Bones” and some scattered downtuned guitar riffs. “Valley of Dry Bones” is probably the darkest moment of They Don’t Know–after putting the bleakness up front, Bagdad take a bit of weight off their shoulders and sound a bit lighter on the record’s most upbeat moment, “Somewhere, Nowhere”, a gorgeous fuzz-pop song that kind of sounds like the midpoint between Idaho and Dinosaur Jr. “Knight Errant Block” adds a Bedhead-like “waiting, anticipating” vibe to the instrumental, although Bagdad do actually release the tension towards the end of the song, and “Ash Pan Nocturne” marries a languid melodic lead guitar to a noirish, probing rhythm section. Nearly a third of the EP is taken up by the closing track, the seven-minute finale of “Heartland”, but Bagdad’s grand send-off hardly feels excessive. It takes the trio a couple of minutes of tuneful but subtle indie rock to work up to the soaring, buzzing electric guitars that peek out of the clouds, but even this extra dimension of guitarwork swirls and floats casually after its initial dramatic arrival on the scene. It’s just indie rock, I guess, and Poland’s got some great new practitioners of it. (Bandcamp link)

Niis – Niis World

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, post-hardore, grunge
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Low Life

Sometimes, what we all need is a noisy and angry punk rock band from southern California. Enter Niis, the latest signee to queer-centric label Get Better Records (Cowboy Boy, Old City, Bacchae) and whose latest record, Niis World, certainly does the trick. After steadily releasing singles since 2020 and putting out an EP called Must Be… in 2022, Niis World is the band’s first full-length album, and the quartet (vocalist Emily “Mimi” Sando-Brown, guitarist Ryan McGuffin, bassist Isabella de Vroede, and drummer Jonathan Salvo) make the most of the larger platform with a collection of ten tracks of punch-packing rock music. Presentation-wise, it’d be tempting to label them as descendants of the riot grrrl movement that began further up the West Coast (early single “Fuck You Boy”, an anti-misogyny anthem, helps with that), but Niis World is a heavier and grungier version of punk music, one that reminds me of modern alt-rock-influenced bands like Rid of Me and Low Dose and one that also carries a palpable hardcore energy with it (Sando-Brown’s vocals are key in this regard). Early punk rock, Discord Records post-hardcore, and good old fashioned hard rock all feature in Niis World, channeled into a dynamic but blunt-force twenty-six-minute assault.

Niis (who pronounce their name like “nice”, by the way) may have refined their sound a bit from those early singles, but that certainly doesn’t mean “toned things down”. Niis World is a more disciplined explosion, but it’s still an explosion–take opening track “Low Life”, which balances cold, calculating shredding on the guitars with Sando-Brown’s vocals, which lie in wait for the perfect moment to go from “on-edge” to “scorched Earth”. A good portion of Niis World is made up of two-minutes-and-change rippers that dart between smooth, almost post-punk propulsion and noisy punk freak-outs. More often than not, Sando-Brown will veer from being the friendliest aspect of a given song to being the wildest, with the rest of Niis serving as the fiery, unflagging counterbalance to her dynamism. The instrumentalists of Niis get their moments in the limelight too, though, don’t worry–the opening guitar riff to “Tyrant” is classic punk rock that sticks out to me, and they pull off “tougher” and “more durable” in late-record workouts like “Driveaway” (Niis at their swerving post-punk best) and “New Pig” (a scorching one about…well, you can figure that out). It’s comforting to catch glimpses of the targets of Niis’ ire and know that there’s good reason behind them, but mostly I’m just enjoying the white-hot rage of Niis World. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dave Scanlon, Ging Nang Boyz, Disaster Kid, Theydevil

For the second Pressing Concerns of the week, we have a new album from Dave Scanlon, a new EP from Disaster Kid, a retrospective compilation from Ging Nang Boyz, and a reissue of Theydevil‘s debut record. This is a nice and varied one! Also, if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, and Film Studies), check it out here.

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.

Dave Scanlon – Greenland Shark

Release date: February 25th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Experimental folk, post-rock, ambient
Formats: Digital (streaming)
Pull Track: Reproduction

I’ve written about a couple of albums from Dave Scanlon in Pressing Concerns before–loosely speaking, 2021’s Pink in each, bright blue, bright green and 2023’s Taste Like Labor are “folk” albums, although they both contain traces of ambient, experimental, and electronic music (which Scanlon also explores in a full band setting as part of the quartet JOBS). Scanlon’s latest album is intriguing both in its subject matter and its release format–for the former, Greenland Shark is about the titular North Atlantic/Arctic animal “and [his] obsession with it”, and for the latter, the album is only available to listen to via greenlandshark.tv, a website designed specifically for it (as far as I can tell, you can’t download it, but there are lyrics, credits, and a bibliography up there in addition to the music). Shannon Fields, who produced and contributed instruments to the last Scanlon album, reprises his role on Greenland Shark (although his musical contributions are limited to “signal processing” on one song here), and Erica Eso’s Weston Minissali recorded the LP, but this is largely the work of Scanlon on his own. Greenland Shark is perhaps a bit more “experimental” than Scanlon’s previous solo work, but the hallmarks of the singer-songwriter–pensive, Phil Elverum-esque talk-singing over subtle but often unpredictable music–remain intact in this journey to a thousand meters below the Arctic surface.

“If I were to age at one-sixth the rate / If I were to move at a slow rate / Would my relationship to this objective unit of time change proportionally?” Scanlon asks in “Slow Tapes”, a question that gets to the heart of why the Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is fascinating both to him and many others. Estimated to be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth, the shark can live up to age 600 (“There will be roughly five generations of my family before you are pregnant,” Scanlon observes in “Thoughts”), dwelling far away from humanity scavenging and hunting for a lifespan that is difficult for us to conceptualize. Studying other forms of life on this planet does lead us to the questions like the one Scanlon poses in “Slow Tapes”–perhaps a less extreme example, but I’ve found that people are fascinated by the idea that snakes (like the Greenland shark) can go months without eating at all and stay perfectly healthy, and it does make us think about our relationships to food, to time, to rest. I’ve found myself thinking of Greenland Shark as a radical work as of late–on a literal level, fascism seeks to destroy the Indigenous knowledge, research funding, academic institutions, and scientific principles that provide us with all we know about this animal (and that’s not even getting into what’s going on with the island that gives the shark its name at present). But, even more so, Greenland Shark is anti-fascist in its fascination with the unknown, of a world where us humans are far from centered, and in its openness to the idea that we, as a species, are far from “solved”–that the richness of these last (relatively) untouched reaches of our planet and their inhabitants resides not in extraction-capitalism, but in meeting what’s there on its own terms and learning from it. (Greenlandshark.tv)

Ging Nang Boyz – Blew Blue

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Punk rock, art punk, art rock, prog-pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Juventus

Tokyo musician Mineta Kazunobu formed Ging Nang Boyz in the early 2000s, and while they’re not exactly the most well-known East Asian punk rock band in North America or Europe, they’ve remained quite popular in their home country of Japan over the years. They’ve put out a half-dozen albums and countless singles in the past two decades, but their output has almost entirely been exclusive to Japan–until this year, their only American release had been an EP in 2007 via San Jose label Phat ‘n’ Phunky (Dogbreth, Diners, Shinobu). Their first Stateside record in eighteen years is a compilation album that continues the Ging Nang Boyz’s Bay Area associations–this time, they’ve teamed up with Lauren Records to release Blew Blue, and the LP is accompanied by a West Coast tour with Shinobu. Ging Nang Boyz are pretty consistently referred to as a “punk band”, but it’s apparent from Blew Blue that the California definition of “punk” isn’t sufficient here–for one, this album spans seven songs in forty-four minutes, which we just don’t do over here in the U.S. of A. Kazunobu is certainly a compelling punk frontperson when the moment calls for it, but Ging Nang Boyz are just as likely to dip into the realms of heady, fuzzy art rock, psychedelia, pop balladry, and noise rock over songs that stretch past the seven-minute mark on several occasions. 

It’s strange to refer to a seven-minute song as “clearly the most punk rock moment on the album”, but that’s exactly what opening track “Juventus” is–Ging Nang Boyz don’t match the track’s intense, all-in energy pound for pound anywhere else on Blew Blue, although there are individual moments (such as the finale of the ten-minute “The Shining” and parts of the dramatic pop punk of “Boi Meets Girrrl”, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was used as an anime theme song) that get there. For the most part, Ging Nang Boyz use their “best-of” record as a chance to showcase the band’s range–like via the aforementioned “The Shining”, a piano-led pop song for its first five minutes and a blistering, shrieking rock breakdown for its second five. “Amen, Semen and Mary Chain” doesn’t quite sound like the band that its title (puzzlingly) evokes, but it does reach back towards that era of “alternative music”, with bits of guitar-led dream pop, shoegaze, and Paisley Underground in its gorgeous instrumental. There’s one new song on Blew Blue, and it’s a five-minute track called “Nikaisen” that merges soft rock and synthpop with extensive guitar soloing and ragged vocals from Kazunobu. Ging Nang Boyz stick “Nikaisen” at the midpoint of Blew Blue, dropping it right in the middle of their twenty-plus-year music career–and it makes as much sense as anything else on this album. (Bandcamp link)

Disaster Kid – Rare Bird

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Semicircle
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Interstate Runner

Disaster Kid is a very “Chicago” project–the band’s frontperson, Seamus Kreitzer, works at the Windy City’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and the quartet (also made up of bassist Mason Stahl, drummer Connor Criswell, and guitarist/pedal steel player Max Berg) have a sound that fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene alongside groups like Dogs at Large, Flamingo Rodeo, and Orillia. They’re new to me, but Disaster Kid have been around for a while now–Kreitzer put out an album on his own as Disaster Kid in 2018, and the band released the LP Gutterball in 2020. Aside from a few non-album singles, the six-song Rare Bird EP is the group’s first record since then, and the first one featuring Berg, who seems to have replaced original guitarist Andrew Tereick. There must not be any bad blood, though, as Tereick recorded and produced Rare Bird at a “mutual friend’s” cabin in northern Wisconsin, and it certainly sounds great. All those previously-mentioned Chicago alt-country groups come to mind (as well as their godfather, Wilco), but there’s a delicate side to Kreitzer’s writing that gives the EP a unique spin–I hear bits of John K. Samson, Noah Roth, and Buddie, plus a good deal of not only Kreitzer’s stated influence of Slaughter Beach, Dog but other Lame-O power pop groups like Hurry and Big Nothing, too.

Let it not be said that Kreitzer doesn’t put himself out there as a writer. Rare Bird is clearly a record in which its frontperson put a lot of thought into the lyrics and isn’t afraid to show it–any EP prominently featuring the line “Don’t apologize so much for nurturing an unknown beauty,” has to fall into this category to some degree. That lyric is from the title track, a head-spinning sung-spoken folk-country-pop song where Kreitzer sounds like Jake Ewald trying to be Dan Wriggins–and though he sort of lampshades himself in the following line, the rest of “Rare Birds” is just as ambitious. It wouldn’t really work if Disaster Kid didn’t nail the “polished but not stiff, rocking but not distracting” vibe of the instrumental, and Rare Bird as a whole is as good as it is because of the strong reading the group give to Kreitzer’s words and melodies. Opening track “Interstate Runner” is a beautiful power pop/roots rock heart-on-sleeve first statement, and Disaster Kid nearly best it not long afterward with “Temples”; while on the other hand, “Don’t Wait Up for Me” and “Wine/Weapon” explore sprawling, intimate folk-country balladry with just as much style. Disaster Kid do everything in their power to make Rare Bird a treat to listen to, and Kreitzer takes it from there. (Bandcamp link)

Theydevil – Maybe You’ll Find Me (Reissue)

Release date: March 5th
Record label: Devil Town Tapes
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Get Embarrassed!

A little under two years ago, a West Philadelphia musician named Hughes Bonilla released their debut album under the name Theydevil, a twenty-minute collection called Maybe You’ll Find Me. Bonilla recorded the album alone at home from 2019 to 2022, developing an intimate “bedroom pop” sound entirely based around minimal electronic pop (“It’s just me, my keyboard and my laptop until the day I die”, they write regarding the record); per Bonilla, this avenue of exploration was partially due to feeling removed from their city’s notorious indie rock scene. Regardless of how Bonilla arrived at Maybe You’ll Find Me, there’s something to their songwriting and craft here, enough so that British cassette label Devil Town Tapes (Greg Mendez, Conor Lynch, Bedtime Khal) picked it up to give it its first-ever physical release (a cassette featuring a physical-only bonus track). Though these dozen songs did initially come about a few years after the 2010s “bedroom pop” boom, Bonilla captures the highs of the genre on Maybe You’ll Find Me, a record made of brief, streamlined snippets of synthpop combined with its creator’s earnest, personal lyrics (it’s something of “a coming of age album”, Bonilla notes).

Pretty much everything on Maybe You’ll Find Me hovers around the two-minute mark, and a couple of tracks don’t even really reach that. The individual songs on the tape bleed into each other–some might be brighter and more synth-polished than others, some lean more heavy into the drum machine beats, but the whole thing comes off as one half-remembered late-night oversharing session (or maybe just “sharing” session–Bonilla still sounds like they’re keeping a few things close to the vest at various points here). The moments on Maybe You’ll Find Me that end up sticking out among Bonilla’s delicate vocals and computer-spun pop instrumentals are the ones where the lyrics jump out and grab me–I’m not sure if the line about the northeast being “where folks would rather die than say excuse me,” is even a good one or not, but it’s certainly memorable, and “I guess fuck your opinion / I am my own boyfriend” in “Missed Connections” lands with a thud (complimentary). Things start to get clearer after a while, with more such moments eventually revealing themselves–Bonilla starts “Get Embarrassed!” by singing “I wanna feel the way a Blue Nile song sounds” and injecting just a bit of soft sophisti-pop into the track, and the confused still life of “Creature of Habit” is really beautiful if you take in all the imagery at once. That’s the best way to approach Maybe You’ll Find Me as a whole, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Dick Texas, Private Lives, George Children, Film Studies

Hello everyone! For the first Pressing Concerns of the week, we’ve got new albums from Dick Texas, Private Lives, and Film Studies, and a new EP from George Children. You’re gonna love these! I can tell!

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.

Dick Texas – All That Fall

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Life Like/Tortilla Flat
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, post-rock, slowcore, art rock, folk rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Flies

Valerie Salerno has been a fixture in the realm of Michigan indie rock for a while now–in the late 2010s, she played in the Grand Rapids noise rock/post-punk group Sojii, and she began Dick Texas as a solo project around the end of last decade. In between 2019 and now, Salerno moved to Detroit, released a couple of songs as Dick Texas, and eventually formed a full band (drummer Willy Kipps, bassist Adis Kaltak, and guitarist Jack McKay) to play the songs live. 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. A lot of Mitten State hands were on deck for its release–in addition to the players, Shadow Show’s Kate Derringer and Ape Not Kill Ape’s Cam Frank co-engineered it, and Fred Thomas’ Life Like Tapes co-released it. 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 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.

All That Fall starts on an incredibly high note with “Long Dirt Driveway”, a six-minute dispatch of slowcore and post-rock from the American Midwest. The languid opening instrumental becomes a swirling dust storm over the song’s first two minutes, but once it’s died down we’re left to continue along the winding path with Salerno and Dick Texas to the tune of slightly psychedelic folk rock. All That Fall kind of sounds like reversed-engineered country music, like if you tried to gather up all the second/third-hand country influences on psych/Paisley Underground/alt-rock groups like Mazzy Star, The Breeders, and Spacemen 3 and tried to recreate the original thing out of them. Sometimes, Salerno’s post-punk background peeks through a little more, like in “Slow Down Friend”–it’s her most standout vocal performance, and there’s just a little bit of desert-goth in the music, too. “I Wanna Be Like Jesus” and “Last January” might be the clearest proof that Dick Texas can do straight-up country and folk (respectively), but neither track is without its quirks, and the grainy “Mars” (featuring Indira Edwards’ viola) once again takes the roots to the cosmos. Even so, none of this quite compares us to the out-of-nowhere closing track “Flies”, an electronic-fried krautrock/psych rock creation that ends All That Fall on just as high of a note as it begins. The fog that surrounds All That Fall doesn’t clear on “Flies”, exactly, but the shapes we can just barely make out are clearly moving faster. (Bandcamp link)

Private Lives – Salt of the Earth

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: On My Own

Garage rock quartet Private Lives formed at the beginning of the decade from a handful of other Montreal groups, and the band has snugly fit on Feel It Records’ roster via their 2022 self-titled debut EP and 2023’s Hit Record. Vocalist Jackie Blenkarn, guitarist Chance Hutchison, bassist Josh Herlihey, and drummer Drew Demers are back a little under two years later with Salt of the Earth, Private Lives’ sophomore album (and, given that a lot of Hit Record was made up of songs from their first EP, their first full-length collection of all-new material). Private Lives make it all sound so easy on Salt of the Earth; in under thirty minutes, the quartet bowl strike after strike down the lanes of power pop, garage rock, proto-punk, and indie pop. These ten songs sound ramshackle but precise at the same time, stubbornly insisting that they need no more than a power trio rock-and-roll setup and a powerhouse vocalist to work–and they’re right! It’s not like Private Lives are the first band to make sugary, loud power pop-garage rock (they’re in good company on Feel It between CLASS, The Cowboys, and Romero, for three), but Blenkarn is the group’s secret weapon, consistently delivering a strong, possessed performance evoking everything from riot grrrl to twee-pop to 60s pop rock over the band’s tuneful racket.

We join Private Lives as they kick the record off with “Dealer’s Choice”, a song that rides a post-punk-worthy bassline into a sunset of garage rock-pop harmonies and surging guitars. “Feel Like Anything” and “Disconnected” are timeless-sounding rockers, leaving us behind in their wakes to ponder how they accomplish so much with such recognizable tools–it’s not until album centerpiece “Time” that it feels like Private Lives let up on the immediate assault just a bit. For three minutes, “Time” finds Private Lives shifting gears just slightly to pull off plodding, offbeat British Invasion and 60s psychedelic pop (“Time is a merry-go-round” indeed, Private Lives), but the roaring, ripping, rock-and-rollers kick back up immediately with “I Get Around”. In fact, the second half of Salt of the Earth leans even harder on the gas pedal than the A-side does–“Psychic Beat” has a tough, pounding, and prominent backbone, “On My Own” is a revved-up girl group power popper, “Be Your Girl” takes on an early punk attitude with a Private Lives-level hook pursuit, and the closing title track makes up for a slightly less brisk tempo with a slightly blues-punk-tinged heaviness. There’s even a complete changeup in “Salt of the Earth”, with Private Lives surprising us all with an acoustic-guitar-led folk-pop-rock finale–for the most part, Private Lives aren’t trying to shock us, but they certainly don’t sound complacent on Salt of the Earth either. (Bandcamp link)

George Children – Kitchen Sink Drama

Release date: February 20th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Lo-fi folk, lo-fi pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Beautiful Stranger

Raise your hand if your favorite Guided by Voices album is Tonics & Twisted Chasers. It’s not the prolific band’s most famous record–in fact, of their 1990s albums, it’s their least-known by a sizeable margin–but I bet there’s an outsized number of people who live and die by it due to its unique sound. Originally a fanclub-only release, Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the sound of just two people–Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout–making lo-fi, casual, frequently acoustic guitar pop together, resulting in a singularly off-the-cuff looseness. I have reason to suspect that Inland Empire band George Children are quite fond of Tonics & Twisted Chasers. Jordan Chipman is the leader of George Children, and while there are other members of the band (they appear to be a quartet in the photo on their Bandcamp page, and Manny Trujillo and Ely Martinez are credited on bass and drums respectively on their past releases), it wouldn’t surprise me if Kitchen Sink Drama, the project’s latest EP, is all Chipman. Featuring just a plainly-strummed acoustic guitar and Chipman’s vocals for the most part, George Children’s latest cassette EP moves through five songs (four originals and a cover) in nine minutes. Melancholic but still quite pop-friendly, Kitchen Sink Drama makes for an all-around strong stop-gap release (they’re planning on putting out an LP on Dandy Boy Records later this year or early next).

The secret weapon on Kitchen Sink Drama’s first two tracks, “Beautiful Stranger” and “Lucille”, appears to be tambourine (and by “secret weapon”, I mean “just about the only other instrument on the tracks”). The former of those two songs is the record’s “hit” to my ears–not that the rest of the EP isn’t also catchy, but Chipman stumbles onto a timeless pop song for ninety seconds in “Beautiful Stranger”, synthesizing acoustic Dunedin sound pop, lo-fi LVL UP/early Trace Mountains, and Chipman favorite Bill Fox superbly. “Paranoid Sweetness” is the first downcast song on Kitchen Sink Drama–armed with a nice little melodic guitar line overdub, this one reminds me the most of Tobin Sprout, specifically his “Awful Bliss” in its gorgeous but vaguely sad balladry. “Today Is Empty” continues George Children’s downer streak, another minor-key, acoustic, depressing ode that nonetheless has something to it. Chipman ties it all together with the last song on the EP, a pretty faithful cover of none other than Guided by Voices and their “Key Losers”, maybe the best song from Tonics & Twisted Chasers (and if you ever hear me say the same thing about “Ha Ha Man” or “Dayton, Ohio – 19 Something and 5”–no, you didn’t). It’s a triumphant bummer, which pretty much sums up Kitchen Sink Drama’s whole deal. (Bandcamp link)

Film Studies – Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Bear Claw & Bug Spray
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, bedroom pop, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sick Trick

Film Studies (not to be confused with the California shoegaze band Film School, or the Maine dream pop band Field Studies, or the British chamber pop band Modern Studies) is the solo project of a Connecticut musician named Thomas Higgins. The first Film Studies album, Everything Is Right in Its Place, came out last year, and Higgins has kept full steam ahead with a new LP called Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks less than twelve months later. Higgins says that “about half” of his newest album originated from Dave Benton of Trace Mountains’ songwriting workshop (regular readers will remember that Film Studies isn’t the first record to appear on the blog with the same genesis), and the album’s tongue-in-cheek title comes from Higgins’ attempt to the describe the sound of his music to other people–both of these facts are helpful in understanding from where Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks is coming. Greyscale but undeniably “pop rocks”, Film Studies’ latest album evokes 2010s Bandcamp-core bedroom pop like early Trace Mountains and another band Higgins mentions as an inspiration, Hovvdy–much of the record sounds a little lost in a drum machine-aided haze, although it remains devoted to the kind of music conjured up by its title in brief, pop-sized bursts.

At its most animated, Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks is more electric and just straight-up louder than the depressedelic folk of his closest-sounding influences; opening track “Sick Trick” is the clearest and best example, not quite on the level of LVL UP but “indie rock” first and foremost. “Take Your Time” and “Sweet Time” are a couple more electric-forward highlights, although the latter one starts to delve into the acoustic/folk-y sound that describes the majority of the rest of Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks. “Doom”, which comes right after the (relatively) triumphant opening track, is one end of the spectrum, a tired-sounding, aimless thing that captures the uncertainty and confusion Higgins hints at in the lyrics. It’s not always so stark–Film Studies’ bread and butter is somewhere in between, with songs like “Cold Brew” and “Undone” landing somewhere in the lo-fi pop comfort zone between the warm vocals, simple guitar melodies, and steady drum machine backdrops. Although there are a few straight-up acoustic tracks (“Yer a Wizard” and “Days”), the subtle touches Higgins lays onto the more fully-developed songs do add to them (like the nice little guitar lines on “Undone”, which make all the difference), suggesting there’s more to Film Studies than meets the eye (not that Higgins sounds like one to maintain eye contact on Lo Fi Indie Pop Rocks). (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Sharp Pins, Exploding Flowers, Motorbike, Ed Kuepper & Jim White

Third Pressing Concerns of the week! The “albums coming out tomorrow” edition! It’s the expanded vinyl release of the Sharp Pins album from last year, new LPs from Exploding Flowers and Motorbike, and a collaborative record from Ed Kuepper and Jim White. In addition, check out the Pressing Concerns from Monday (featuring Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, and LP Gavin) and the one from Tuesday (Party’z, Earth Ball, Inland Years, and Fotokiller).

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.

Sharp Pins – Radio DDR (Vinyl Release)

Release date: March 21st
Record label: K/Perennial/Hallogallo
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, college rock, mod
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: When You Know

So here I am, writing about an album that was on Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 best-of list here in 2025. Seems kind of like yesterday’s news, right? Well, Sharp Pins and Kai Slater aren’t household names yet, so there’s still plenty of reason to talk about their music–and I’ll personally take any excuse to talk about Sharp Pins in Pressing Concerns (which I surprisingly hadn’t gotten to do before now). Aside from his work in noise rock group Lifeguard, lo-fi pop group Dwaal Troupe, and releasing zines and cassettes under the Hallogallo banner, Slater has made two excellent jangle pop records as Sharp Pins in as many years. Both have received staggered releases–first as self-released tapes, then later pressed to vinyl with the help of another label. Tall Texan took 2023’s Turtle Rock, and late last year K and Perennial Records announced a partnership with Sharp Pins beginning with a vinyl release of last year’s Radio DDR featuring three bonus tracks. Although I certainly enjoyed Radio DDR (again, year-end list placement and everything) when it first came out, I’ve found myself appreciating it even more after revisiting it for the vinyl release. At the time, I noted that it refined and polished the noisier sides of Turtle Rock, but looking closer reveals a ton of sharp songwriting under the sheen as well.

On the whole, Radio DDR is more jangly and power pop-py than Slater’s debut as Sharp Pins, the work of somebody who’s been deep in the mod revival mines in recent years. “Classic” Guided by Voices-era tuneful blasts of noise and Slater’s timeless, always-melodic vocals are two key features of the album, and while it may be Sharp Pins’ most “traditional” work yet, it’s much too enthusiastic and earnest to become tiring. Any record that features power pop gold like “Every Time I Hear”, “Lorelei”, and “If I Ever Was Lonely” clearly has something special going on in it, and though I’d certainly enjoy it if Radio DDR bashed out a dozen similarly-minded rockers, Slater also shows a genuine interest in exploring the quieter, folkier side of bedroom pop here, too. Slater’s vision is wide enough to encompass stuff like “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”, “Sycophant”, and “Chasing Stars”, in which Slater displays enough confidence in their acoustic, pensive power to tap the breaks on the jangly electric guitars (and is right to do so). On the other end of the spectrum, “When You Know” and “Is It Better” are Sharp Pins at their most fuzzed-out (although still just as tuneful), and they’re no less at home on Radio DDR than anything else. The record’s bonus tracks do feel like “bonus tracks”–not the most immediate or interconnected group of songs, but welcome nonetheless. “I Can’t Stop” is a just-so-slightly off-center take on psychedelic guitar pop and is probably the “hit” of the trio if there is one, but “With a Girl Like Mine” adds a Byrds-y folksiness to the quiet side of Sharp Pins admirably. Alright, I’ve done all I can to get Radio DDR on your radar–where to next, Sharp Pins? (Bandcamp link)

Exploding Flowers – Watermelon/Peacock

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Meritorio/Leather Jacket
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psychedelic pop, Paisley Underground
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Across a Sea

At first glance, Los Angeles quartet Exploding Flowers seem to fit in with the current robust wave of new West Coast jangle pop/power pop bands, but the group’s story is a lot longer and more complex than this. The band’s frontperson, Sharif Dumani, has been involved in the Los Angeles punk/post-punk scene since the 1990s, and he’s played with everyone from Alice Bag to Silver Apples to Nikki Sudden. The first Exploding Flowers album came out in 2011, although it took the group (also featuring Josh Mancell, Happy Tsugawa-Banta, and Mark Sogomian) nearly a decade to follow it up with 2020’s Stumbling Blocks (Dumani seems to remain busy three decades into his career as a musician). Another half-decade later, labels like Meritorio have been spending the last few years chronicling a bunch of new bands drawing from the same sources as the Exploding Flowers, so it’s natural that the two would hook up for the third Exploding Flowers album, Watermelon/Peacock. Hailing from ground zero of the 1980s “Paisley Underground” movement, Exploding Flowers do evoke the loose, psychedelic side of this strain of American jangly college rock. Sometimes hazy, sometimes bright and vibrant, Watermelon/Peacock is a compelling and generous Americana record arising from one of the country’s largest population centers.

Watermelon/Peacock offers up everything from hook-fest power pop to pure psychedelia to throwback San Francisco garage rock to 60s-style keys and organs throughout its fourteen tracks and forty-odd minutes. The “hits” are as good as anything from the “vintage” power pop cellar, with peppy opening track “Crowded Streets”, the tambourine-bait “Life of a Timeline”, and the overgrown jangle of “(No Arms Around) the Isolationist” all qualifying. Somewhere just a bit removed from this side of Exploding Flowers are tracks like “We’re Flying Half as High”, “Across a Sea”, and “The Grass Grows On”, which take the compelling pop mastery to subtler (and, in the case of the latter of the three, more rhythmic and post-punky) places. This kind of music doesn’t always place a large emphasis on the lyrics, but there are threads to follow throughout Watermelon/Peacock–the record’s somewhat moody centerpiece is called “American Strife, American Life”, and closing track “Across a Sea” is explicitly about Dumani’s family history as immigrants (from Lebanon to Costa Rica and eventually the United States). There’s a darkness and (as Dumani acknowledges) cruelty in the story of “Across a Sea”–but, importantly, it’s a story that also encompasses the makeup of Exploding Flowers themselves and the vibrant music they’ve been able to make together for more than a decade. “Across a Sea” closing out Watermelon/Peacock is an inspired sequencing decision, but even without the context it’s an excellent summation of the pop music Exploding Flowers explore for the entirety of their latest LP. (Bandcamp link)

Motorbike – Kick It Over

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Scrap Heap

Oh, we’ve got some nice and loud Cincinnati garage rock for you today. Something of a supergroup of Feel It Records-associated artists, the quintet Motorbike is led by Welsh expat Jamie Morrison on vocals and rounded out by two members of The Drin (Dylan McCartney on drums and Dakota Carlyle, also of Corker, on guitar), bassist Jerome Westerkamp (Vacation, Good Looking Son), and guitarist Philip Valois. Motorbike arrived in 2023 with a self-titled debut album that was twenty-six ferocious minutes of fuzzed-out rock and roll, and they’re back two years later with an LP that won’t disappoint anyone who enjoyed Motorbike (or the garage-punk side of Feel It Records’ roster in general, for that matter). Kick It Over was recorded “between busy schedules over a six month period”, but while the band may have had to build it piecemeal as they kept up with their various other projects, Motorbike LP2 picks up the thread of their debut quite easily. It’s a little heavier and less pop-forward than Motorbike, but it’s a natural, gradual progression–they’re still operating in the same worlds of Motor City garage rock, riff-centric classic rock, and basement punk.

Helping the vintage feel of Kick It Over is the fact that Motorbike line up their alternate-universe hit singles at the beginning of the LP’s tracklist. “Scrap Heap” is just about a perfect opening statement–machine-gun power chords introduce a scuzzy, sleazy 70s-style hard rock ripper that does everything it has to do (and more, really) in under two minutes. “Currency” is the other half of this opening statement, a slightly different beast but still a beast–it’s got a little bit of Dead Moon graveyard-garage in it, and it’s also just about one Farfisa organ away from 60s garage rock/proto-punk. If you’re looking for Motorbike pushing against their bite-sized fuzz-rock constraints, this does exist on Kick It Over–after a few more automatic rock-and-rollers, I’d say this side of them starts around “Western Front” (a kind of glammy mid-LP stomper) and continues into the weirdest song on the record, centerpiece “Gears Never Dry” (in which Motorbike turn their full strength towards making loud but hazy psychedelic distortion). “Quite Nice” comes out the other side of that cyclone (ahem) quite nicely, but the cowpunk garage rocker does extended to nearly four minutes, and Motorbike does have to take one final strange detour (the–I think–Polish fuzz punk of “Nie Wrócimy”) before landing beautifully with two final crowd-pleasing garage rock attacks. Maybe Motorbike plays with their food a little bit on this record, but there’s no question that they do, in fact, kick it over. (Bandcamp link)

Ed Kuepper & Jim White – After the Flood

Release date: March 21st
Record label: 12XU/Remote Control
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Swing for the Crime

Ed Kueper and Jim White are a pair of Australian alternative/indie rock music giants–the former was the co-founding songwriter and guitarist of legendary punk band The Saints and has put out over fifty albums between his various groups and solo work, while the latter is one of the Dirty Three (Melbourne’s premiere instrumental post-rock group) and has drummed for everyone from Nina Nastasia to Simon Joyner to Bonnie “Prince” Billy (and, as of late, he’s been globetrotting as part of supergroup The Hard Quartet). Despite both musicians’ productivity and a mutual respect dating back to a bill they shared in the “mid-90s”, the duo had never collaborated before the pandemic stranded White (who’d moved to the United States some time before) in Australia. The duo started playing together–first in private, then in concert when lockdowns eased up, and in 2023 they went to Melbourne’s Sound Park Studio to make an album representative of these performances. After the Flood (named after the deadly Australian floods that occurred a year before the album was recorded) pulls material from all across Kuepper’s career–there’s one Saints song, three from his next band, The Laughing Clowns, and four are from his solo LPs.

As Kuepper’s rather larger oeuvre is mostly a personal blind spot, After the Flood is all new material to me, but even people familiar with his most acclaimed records will probably find plenty of new-to-them songs between the selections from his 21st century solo albums and the songs from the mostly-out-of-print Laughing Clowns. These tracks aren’t in any chronological order–the newest one, 2015’s “The Ruins”, is first, followed by two mid-80s Laughing Clowns tracks–underscoring the new terrain Kuepper has unlocked with White in tow. If I had to describe this album (and I do), I’d refer to it as “long, winding, electric desert folk rock”–Kuepper wanders both in his guitar playing and his vocals, letting the songs build and sprawl with White’s drums as a grounding force. For his part, White maintains his communicative, distinct style of drumming while still form-fitting to Kuepper’s compositions–he rumbles and thunders in blunt-force rockers like “Swing for the Crime” and “The Crying Dance”, adds a (mostly) subtler touch to quieter journeys like “Year of the Bloated Goat” and “Demolition”, and gets in line behind the relatively “pop” reading of “The 16 Days”. It took a long time for the songs, musicians, and circumstances to all come together on After the Flood, but it sounds like it all happened at the right time and pace. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: