Pressing Concerns: Lunchbox, The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, Avery Friedman

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records that shall be released tomorrow, April 18th. We’ve got a deluxe reissue of Lunchbox‘s “lost” album Evolver as well as brand-new albums from The Convenience, Gentle Leader XIV, and Avery Friedman below. If you missed Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray) or Tuesday’s (featuring Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entres Vouz, and hairpin), check those out, too.

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

Lunchbox – Evolver (Reissue)

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Satellite

If your first experience with the band Lunchbox was last year’s bright, fresh-sounding indie pop collection Pop and Circumstance, it’d be understandable if you surmised that the Oakland group was part of the current wave of new Bay Area guitar pop groups. Closer inspection to that LP reveals a time-honed skill, however, and indeed the band’s founding duo of Donna McKean and Tim Brown have been making music together for over three decades. Evolver came near the end of the band’s initial run–after putting out music fairly regularly in the second half of the 1990s, Evolver and the mini-album Summer’s Over (both initially released in 2002) were the group’s last releases before a silence of over a decade. Evolver, inspired by Brown’s time in Berlin a few years earlier, general dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the then-current Bay Area indie pop scene, and the technology found in the basement studio in which they were living, was something of Lunchbox’s swan song, a difficult-to-replicate statement that stood as the band’s final one until they were ready to re-emerge years later. Referred to by the band as a “lost album”, their current label Slumberland has not only made Evolver available again, but they’ve also “raided the band’s vaults” to add three bonus tracks to all editions of the album, as well as a vinyl-only fourth side of “beats, loops, interludes and puzzling aural ephemera” on the double LP version.

There’s a certain reverence for Lunchbox from modern pop bands like Perennial, and listening to Evolver makes it all the more clear that they’ve had an impact in a way that goes beyond surface-level measurements of their popularity. If you’ve only heard Pop and Circumstance, there are moments on Evolver that are genuinely shocking, but not in an unfamiliar way–I can think of plenty of newer bands, from Dummy to Outer World to Tomato Flower, that are tapping into this unique mix of 60s pop music and uninhibited experimental electronic music. Elephant 6 and Stereolab are some contemporaries that come to mind, although they’re so wide-ranging that they’re not particularly useful descriptors of this album on their own–the bright, trumpet-laden opening title track is very Apples in Stereo, the gliding “Letter from Overend” is the sort of bossa nova-flecked indie rock that reminds me of Stereolab or Yo La Tengo, and the hissing lo-fi guitar pop of “Temperature Is a Constant” and “Satellite” capture a Guided by Voices kind of thing. Aside from the fourth side of the physical 2LP, Evolver is still almost entirely a pop album, although it’s not really one for indie pop purists–sticking the six-minute backmasked psychedelic trip of “Particle Wave” second in the running order will see to that, and everything from the electronic touches of “Tone Poem” to the ambient instrumental choices of “.09”, “.12”, and “Sleeping Is Not Dreaming” (a post-new-wave epic in its own right) back this up. The strong pop statements and the subversions are both incredibly inspired, not sounding like polar opposites but as different stops on the Evolver road. (Bandcamp link)

The Convenience – Like Cartoon Vampires

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Winspear
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Dub Vultures

Few people know this, but you can actually make post-punk in the year 2025 without trying to be as anxious as Kele Okereke or as spiteful as Mark E. Smith. You can actually sound cool while doing it! This is the less-traveled path–the Spoon path, more recently the Cola path, and now we can add the New Orleans duo The Convenience to this list, too. Nick Corson and Duncan Troast have been The Convenience for a while now–their first EP came out back in 2018, and they put out their debut album, the 80s-inspired synthpop/art pop collection Accelerator, in 2021. Like Cartoon Vampires, the second Convenience LP, is a pretty big departure–the duo have spent the last few years playing in indie pop group Video Age, and perhaps they no longer need their “main” band to be an outlet for their lighter side, too. Like Cartoon Vampires is a headfirst dive into the world of “art rock”–snappy rhythms, splattered guitars, and strange psychedelic detours characterize the album. Like Cartoon Vampires is grey in comparison to Troast and Corson’s other recent output, but for a post-punk album it’s bright, shiny, and colorful. The Convenience consider Like Cartoon Vampires a “return to their roots”, an album reflecting the music that Corson and Troast initially bonded over, but it sounds to me like they’ve been able to take parts of Accelerator and Video Age (at the very least, a certain attitude) and apply it here, too.

“I Got Exactly What I Wanted” is a bold opening track–The Convenience decided to go for “chugging” and “moody” in atmosphere, as if the shift to feedback-aided post-punk wasn’t a clear enough indication of where Like Cartoon Vampires is headed. The Convenience deliver it with an ice-cold precision, though, and when they let some more light poke through in the garage rock-indebted “Target Offer” and the clattering, groovy art punk of “Dub Vultures”, it’s a clean a transition as possible (these songs remind me of another great Southern post-punk band, Balkans). There are moments on Like Cartoon Vampires that sound like a soft rock-conscious band wrote them, although The Convenience largely restrict these to the shorter songs and interludes like “Opportunity” and “Rats”. For the most part, though, The Convenience just want to rock–and they give us track after track of it, from the underground speed-racing “That’s Why I Never Became a Dancer” to the rubber-band-jangle-punk of “2022” (fans of NE-HI and Dehd, take note) to the rockabilly rave-up of “Western Pepsi Cola Town” (alright, so there’s one song that sounds like The Fall on here). The Convenience wrap it all up neatly with a ten-minute noise/drone-rock track called “Fake the Feeling”, beginning as a slightly warped post-punk song before letting the feedback overtake everything. What’s more fun than that? (Bandcamp link)

Gentle Leader XIV – Joke in the Shadow

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, industrial, dream pop, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Pig Dream

The latest signee to the vaunted garage rock label Feel It Records is a band that’s new to me, but one whose members have been at it for a while now. Maria Jenkins (vocals/synth), Jeffrey Tucholski (guitar), and Matt Hallaran (vocals/bass/synth) split their time between Cincinnati and Cleveland now, but they originated in Chicago in the early 2010s, playing in bands like Hollows, Running, and Glass Traps. Gentle Leader XIV’s first album, Channels (featuring original bass player Lisa McDuffie) came out in 2018 on Windy City imprint Moniker Records (Dan Melchior, ONO, The Hecks), and they hadn’t released anything in the seven years since, so you’d be forgiven if you thought Gentle Leader XIV had petered out at some point, but they’re back in a new state with a new, Ohio-based label to put out a sophomore album entitled Joke in the Shadow. A post-punk record with prominent synthesizer, Joke in the Shadow doesn’t really fall under the purview of garage-y, Feel It-core “synthpunk”, nor is it polished new wave-y synthpop–it’s an interesting, difficult-to-grasp rock record made by a group of musicians who’ve probably heard it all and need to push things a little further to be truly excited about their craft.

The ten songs of Joke in the Shadow stretch past the forty minute mark, and each one takes exactly as much time as it needs to build the world that Gentle Leader XIV want it to house. Opening track “Pig Dream” is a beautiful but slow-moving ballad, a showcase for Jenkins’ vocals even as it feels like an unlikely choice to open an album like this one. Things get a bit busier with “Fawning” and “Serve the End”–still somewhat difficult, these statues are shaped by synthpop, new wave, industrial, and gothic rock music. The six-minute centerpiece “The Door” trudges along across a minimal synth beat and drum machines, a pop song that hardly feels like pop at all, and the second half of Joke in the Shadow features plenty of songs matching this description as well (like the minimal, floating dreamy synthpop of the title track, or the icy electronica of “Reverser”). The two final songs on Joke in the Shadow are both overloaded in their own way–“Bomb Pop” rides a marching drum machine beat and squealing guitars into oblivion, while “Consequences” dribbles its own mechanical percussion into a finale that becomes a wall of distorted noise. Joke in the Shadow isn’t going to be for everyone, sure, but it’s for Gentle Leader XIV and the people who think like them. (Bandcamp link)

Avery Friedman – New Thing

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Audio Antihero
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, emo-y indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Photo Booth

We’ve got some more folky indie rock from Brooklyn on our hands! I get records that match this description emailed to me every day, so you can rest assured that I wouldn’t be writing about this one if it wasn’t a clear standout from that pack. New Thing, the debut album from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Avery Friedman, is indeed a strong and promising collection of music that’s a little emo, a little folky, and a little “arty” from someone who’s openly calling acts like Big Thief and Squirrel Flower influences and who’s played shows with the likes of Dead Gowns and h. pruz. I think that New Thing works so well because of how direct and electric it sounds–music like this often falls into the realm of “bedroom folk”, but Friedman and her collaborators give it a strong, confident, full band delivery. These collaborators–James Chrisman of Sister. and Ciao Malz on guitar and engineering, Felix Walworth of the sorely-missed Told Slant on drums, Ryan Cox on bass–deserve credit for how this album ended up, but, importantly, Friedman’s singing and playing at the center of it all are forceful enough not to get buried beneath them.

New Thing isn’t full-on “slowcore” and it’s certainly not “post-rock”, but fans of that kind of music will appreciate Friedman’s patient take on indie rock here. At eight tracks and under a half hour in length, New Thing doesn’t overstay its welcome, but in its brief time with us it stretches itself out and explores the edges a bit. Opening track “Into” is two minutes of slow-moving electric guitar and mumbled vocals, bleeding seamlessly into the deliberate, emo-y rock of the title track. “Flowers Fell” is subdued but highly charged between the lines, a quality shared by much of New Thing, particularly the slow-building “Finger Painting” and the quiet distortion of “Somewhere to Go”. Single “Photo Booth” is a surprise, incorporating synths and coming off a bit more openly “pop” than the rest of the record (although Friedman does quietly seethe and pine in the vocals in a way that connects it to the more…elemental rest of the album). New Thing starts to fade with “Biking Standing” and continues into the acoustic-led closing track “Nervous”–Friedman finally lets some air out after winding through the majority of the album, breathing a little more after turning down the tension from “suffocating” to merely “ambient”. There’s still a lot going on in these final two songs, to be clear–they’ll be there for us once we’ve gotten a handle on what came before them. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley, Impulsive Hearts, Entrez Vous, hairpin

It’s the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring a delightfully wide-ranging lineup! We’ve got a new LP from Entrez Vous, a split/collaborative EP between Léna Bartels and Nico Hedley, a remastered version of Impulsive Hearts‘ debut album, and an EP from hairpin. If you missed yesterday’s blog post, featuring B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, and Gamma Ray, 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.

Léna Bartels & Nico Hedley – It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Rock for Sale
Genre: Experimental folk, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: New Year Song

Nico Hedley has been hovering around the periphery of Rosy Overdrive for a while now. He’s involved with the “artist-run collective/label” Whatever’s Clever (Flat Mary Road, Dave Scanlon, Keen Dreams) and, either as a producer or instrumentalist, has contributed to albums from Ben Seretan, The Bird Calls, and Charlie Kaplan (as well as playing with many more acts that have appeared on this blog before at some point). Despite all this, I’d yet to write about Hedley’s solo work in Pressing Concerns until now–well, sort of. It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is a split/collaborative EP between Hedley and another New York-based singer-songwriter, Léna Bartels, who may not have quite as many Rosy Overdrive-adjacent credits as Hedley but has still been busy in her own right between guesting on Izzy Oram Brown’s latest record, playing shows with acts like Will Stratton, Trace Mountains, and Field Guides, and releasing a solo album. Hedley gets two songs on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, Bartels gets another two, and they take on the final song on the EP together. As one might expect from Hedley’s associates, the EP is more or less “folk” music, shaded by both delicate, piano-heavy pop music and an experimental streak–the two co-leaders have different takes on this kind of music, but they’re operating in similar areas and are able to share space quite effortlessly. 

Bartel’s songs are a bit more outwardly “intimate” than the rest of It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year–the biography for the record, written by Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson, references early Cat Power, and I think this is an accurate comparison. “January Is the Loneliest Month” is a bedroom folk song with a bit of woodwind accompaniment and “Nothing Can Stop You” is an uncertain but quite capable piano ballad, but both kind of feel like a peek into somebody working on their art alone. Hedley’s “New Year Song” is, instrumentally speaking, even simpler than either of Bartel’s songs, but it has a bright, acoustic friendliness that makes it the warmest and most intentional-feeling thing on the EP. Most of the experimentation on It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year is bundled up in “Equations of Motion”, a droning post-rock track from Hedley aided by the only outside contributor on the EP, Carmen Quill on double bass. The closing title track does float off into ambient nothingness, but that’s after five minutes of a very charming lo-fi drum machine-led pop song song by the both of them together. “Don’t be afraid of the future when / What we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working out,” sing Hedley and Bartels as one–while the lyrics to “It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year” aren’t as rosy as the music suggests, the forward glance of the title (and final) line sounds like a mantra with legs.  (Bandcamp link)

Impulsive Hearts – Sorry in the Summer (Remastered)

Release date: March 28th
Record label: Cavity Search
Genre: Power pop, dream pop, fuzz rock, indie pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Sve Yrself

Chicago indie rock quartet Impulsive Hearts have been around for a decade now, although they’ve largely flown under the radar–since 2014, they’ve released three albums (averaging about one every four years) and a handful of EPs, most recently linking up with Portland, Oregon label Cavity Search Records for their third album, last year’s Fit 4 the Apocalypse. Cavity Search is also helping out the band (led by singer-songwriter Danielle Sines and also featuring Max Cohen, Rachael Farinella, and Adele Nicholas) with their latest release, a remastered version of their 2016 debut album, Sorry in the Summer. Over the past ten years, the Windy City has seen Beach Bunny blow up to unthinkable levels, Ratboys and Dehd become reliable critical darlings, and Friko recently ascend from the underground circuit to notoriety. This shined-up revisitation of older material from a lesser-known Chicago artist seems to ask the question: why not Impulsive Hearts? Sorry in the Summer is certainly compelling enough in 2025–nine years later, it comes off as the missing link between the early 2010s buzzy, fuzzy indie-surf-pop wave and the earnest, “confessional/bedroom pop” era of indie rock that would dominate the latter half of the decade. Even more importantly, though, the songs are there–Impulsive Hearts don’t beat you over the head with them, but this is an excellent pop record upon a closer look.

Sines and her backing band are probably too Midwestern to make a straight-ahead surf-rock-and-roll record–it seems like Chicago bands always are. Sines’ vocals are frequently buried in this remastered version of Sorry in the Summer, but they don’t fade into the background so much as take their place as an equal partner with the fuzzy guitar-led instrumentation. It’s actually quite impressive how big Impulsive Hearts are able to make themselves sound on “I Wannabe Gone” and “MDB”, both of which are maximal pop songs with what sounds like everything from horns to woodwinds mixed into the walls of sound (and despite this, the bass guitar–of all the possibilities–is the most prominent instrument a fair amount of the time). I know I already mentioned Friko, but Sorry in the Summer really does have this sort of “guitar pop via controlled-intensity” attitude that reminds me of the Friko album from last year; “Sve Yrself” might start off with Beach Boys-esque “woo-ooh”ing, but it’s way too desperate to see the pastiche through without going off the deep end. As Impulsive Hearts move into the second half of Sorry in the Summer, some of the obvious hooks fade (some of them; “Wasp” and “DWM” are still on this side of the record, mind you) but the intensity remains, right up to the five-minute frantic dream pop finale of “YKILY”. One last subtle epic for anyone who’s still hanging with Impulsive Hearts. (Bandcamp link)

Entrez Vous – Antenna Legs Hear Everything

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Too Vague

Kelly Reidy is a physics professor, podcast host, and singer-songwriter currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Clark Blomquist is a Tobacco State musical gun-for-hire, having lent his talents to everyone from Spider Bags to the Dan Melcior Band to The Kingsbury Manx over the years. Together, they are Entrez Vous, a guitar pop duo who debuted with a self-titled album in 2023. The collaboration has remained fruitful, as Entrez Vous are back a little under two years later with Antenna Legs Hear Everything, fourteen tracks of garage rock-mussed-up power pop (or, if you prefer, garage rock with power pop hidden in the center) in twenty-seven minutes. Reidy sings and plays guitar, Blomquist handles the other instrumentation, and they’re both credited as writing these songs–like I said, this is a strong partnership already, as Reidy is more than capable of stepping into the garage-y underground indie rock world that Blomquist has been inhabiting for two decades and helming an entire collection of this material. Antenna Legs Hear Everything kind of reminds me of Shredded Sun, another newish band from longtime rockers who put garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop in a blender to make something equally confusing and friendly (but always exciting).

Most of the songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are quite short, and it’s a credit to Entrez Vous that they rarely feel this way since there’s so much going on in each of them. That’s Blomquist’s touch, I suppose, but Reidy is just as impressive in how she cuts through the (occasionally) noisy bluster and keeps these songs’ eyes on the pop prizes. The kind-of-fuzzy opening “Too Vague” is just a little psychedelic, just a little Southern, just a little Elephant 6, and much more than just a little compelling–all in under two minutes. A lot of the most immediate songs on Antenna Legs Hear Everything are right up front, like the exuberant power pop of “Dream City, 1963”, the alt-country shuffle of “Troublesome Love”, and the mid-tempo slacker pop of “I Had This Vision”. There’s still a lot of fun to be had later on in the album, though–the post-punk/garage rock sprint of “Palm Springs”, the glam-jangle-stomp of “Art of Canova”, and the muddled noir-pop of “Lbs. of Roses” are under ninety seconds apiece and together make one of the most enjoyable stretches of the entire record. Buried among the rubble that Entrez Vous knock down is stuff like the waltzing ballad “Trap Door”, the gothic, synth-touched “Silky”, and the psychedelic folk closing track “Get Out of the Sauna”. It’s probably unnecessary for them to put so much into these songs, but it’s all very generous, too–everybody say “thank you, Entrez Vous”. (Bandcamp link)

hairpin – Modern Day Living

Release date: April 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Punk rock, power pop, pop punk, fuzz rock, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Okay Thru There

Hairpin are a band from the South Coast of England, started by frontperson Adam Edwards and eventually growing to a four-piece encompassing Perry Sears, Sam Marsh and Callan Milward. The first hairpin release is a five-song EP called Modern Day Living that offers the first glimpse of what the band mean when they call their music “post-hardcore through a power pop lens”; as it turns out, it means loud, noisy, and catchy rock and roll music for the most part. Modern Day Living (which was recorded at Community Noise Recording Co. and features guest musicians Jack Kenny on drums and Roberto Cappellina on backing vocals) has moments that feel in line with the American-centered wave of “hardcore guys making power pop” like Militarie Gun and Public Opinion, although there’s also a British garage-y punk side to it that recalls both the Mclusky expanded universe and the ever-present threat of the Kingdom’s “post-punk revival”. Hairpin sound great here, their instrumentals dynamic and with plenty of low-end, and Edwards’ vocals are just emotional enough to sit atop the grey walls of noise and sound like they belong there.

Opening track “Okay Thru There” kicks down the door with the most overtly “punk” moment on the EP–hairpin really do find the midpoint between antisocial basement indie rock and power pop here, as there’s an incredibly huge chorus with “woo-ooh” backing vocals and giant guitar chords, but it’s also just a bit of distortion removed from being a Pardoner fuzz-punk anthem. There’s no rest for the hairpin, though–“Curtain Call” starts with a prowling, bass-led instrumental that reminds me a bit of Meat Wave and launches into a garage-y post-punk workout of a track, and “Wiped” is the atmospheric guitar-splatter mid-record exploration. Punk rock returns for “Shake It”, the song that gets the closest to really earning that “RIYL Hot Snakes” tag–it’s the quick-out-of-the-gate beginning combined with a nice, big riff in the chorus that does it. Edwards is always hovering on the edge as a vocalist, but “Shake It” features the most “unleashed” singing on the album; at the same time, though, hairpin are able to rein both the vocals and music in for a carefully-orchestrated finale in “Self Portrait”. It’s the one song that rivals “Okay Thru There” in pure catchiness, but it’s a lot less straightforward of a journey to get there–there’s some big wall-of-fuzz guitars at the beginning, and a restraint-heavy first half leads to guitar heroics and one last fiery Edwards performance before the EP comes to a close. So, you’re in, right?  (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: B. Hamilton, Truth or Consequences New Mexico, Rhymies, Gamma Ray

This week kicks off with a Pressing Concerns containing four brand-new records! New albums from B. Hamilton and Gamma Ray, plus new EPs from Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Rhymies! Great! Music!

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.

B. Hamilton – B. Hamilton

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, psychedelic rock, post-punk, AOR
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Back in the Line

You know that it’s serious when a band breaks out the self-titled album well into their career. And Oakland, California’s B. Hamilton have had ample opportunity to title a record B. Hamilton before now–they first came onto my radar last year when they released an EP called The Freest Speech Ever Attempted Without Disintegrating and frontperson Ryan Christopher Parks released a solo EP called Billy Goat Acres and Other Words I Know How to Spell that he admits “sounds like a B. Hamilton record”. These were just the latest in a long string of B. Hamilton and related releases, though–three EPs in 2023, an album in 2021, records on Bandcamp dating all the way back to 2009. The band–at that point, Parks, drummer Raj Kumar Ojha (Once and Future Band), and founding bassist Andrew Macy–began working on B. Hamilton a few years ago, only for Macy to exit the band in 2022 and leaving the others to soldier on as a duo. The resultant record was completed with the help of keyboardist Joel Robinow, Nelson Ny-Devereaux on woodwinds, and vocalist Grace Coleman, and it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve heard as of late. A strange, meandering forty-eight minute experience, B. Hamilton is sometimes floating, unmoored post-rock, sometimes groovy, swinging classic rock–it’s something in between those two. Departure rock music?

That’s perhaps an appropriate term for B. Hamilton, a record that Parks openly states is about grief–he mentions his father’s death from brain cancer, his city’s fatal Ghost Ship warehouse fire, and the general pallor that COVID-19 was casting on everything at the time as inspiration. It’s a “difficult” record–it’s too scattered to really be “stubborn”, but there’s a standoffishness that comes with opening an album with snippets like “I’ve Been Outside, It’s Alright” and “Something We Can Start Up and Shutdown” and the muddled electronica of “On a Different Day”. “Back in the Line” is the first “rock song” on B. Hamilton, and it’s a smooth 70s-style AOR rock and roller that comes completely out of nowhere–this becomes a theme of this record as it progresses. B. Hamilton meander through stuff like “Sunny Day” and “Leningrad on Merritt”, abruptly congealing for rockers like “Good Foot” and “Release the Hounds” before falling apart again. The blues-tinted groove of “Good Foot” in particular is an effective addition to the album–there are bands who make their entire career out of music like this, undoubtedly losing some of its power through overutilization, but it’s more honest (and, subsequently, more in touch with the genre’s roots) coming as something more than a cheap shortcut here. Things start to blur more than ever in the back end of B. Hamilton–the reason this album is so long is because of the lengthy rock explorations of “Byzantine and Hemlock” and “Downey”–but closing track “Wherever I Go” is the clearest thing on the entire album. It’s a celebration commemorating the end of B. Hamilton and the continuation of something else entirely. (Bandcamp link)

Truth or Consequences New Mexico – This Time of Year

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Worry
Genre: Alt-country, power pop, fuzzy indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Between GA

Truth or Consequences New Mexico are not, to be clear, from New Mexico; presumably, the Windy City quartet took their name after the memorably-christened Southwestern town because “Chicago” was already taken. The band originated at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston (actually, I don’t think anyone’s claimed that one as a band name), where the band’s co-leaders Cora Pancoast and Jack Parker co-DJed at the college’s station, WNUR. Bassist Ben Goldenberg and drummer Carys Uribe have since rounded out the band, and they self-released a self-titled debut EP in early 2023. For their second EP, they’ve linked up with Chicago tape label Worry Records (Snow Ellet, Rust Ring, Stimmerman), and the five songs of This Time of Year are worthy of a larger spotlight. Following in the long-standing tradition of Chicago groups equally indebted to roots rock and alt-country as they are to indie rock and emo, Truth or Consequences New Mexico sound loud but crystal-clear on This Time of Year. It’s an electric record, but neither Pancoast nor Parker hide their vocals behind fuzz, evoking both often-twangy bands from the actual South (Downhaul, Cicala, Real Companion) and Chicago peers like Ratboys and Disaster Kid.

The big, earnest-to-the-point-of-emo opening track “Between GA” is probably a good litmus test as to whether or not Truth or Consequences New Mexico are going to be up your alley. Parker is on vocals here, and the delivery is the “twangiest” thing on This Time of Year–they’re really straining their voice to live up to the surging country rock instrumental, and I will go ahead and say that they land it. “Honey, We’re in Hell” might not be quite as hollerable as the song it has to follow, but the thorny, fuzzy indie-country-rock instrumental more than makes up for it (and Parker is still doing quite a lot through the static anyway). “Standing Still” is Pancoast’s first lead vocal turn on the EP, and it’s the “restrained” one–instrumentally, it’s still sharp as a tack, just slowed ever-so-slightly to a mid-tempo alt-country march that nonetheless hits. Pancoast gets her own rocker with “Seed of Doubt”–slightly more “in-control”-sounding than her counterpart, Truth or Consequences New Mexico still work their way up to “runaway train” territory by the end of the emotional-outburst rock and roll anthem. Every song on This Time of Year is really teased-out and polished, so it feels appropriate that “The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics” closes the EP. Pancoast leads Truth or Consequences New Mexico through an intricate mix of laid-back but skilled guitarwork, tender balladry, and soaring, swooning crescendos. The four of them stick the landing like an alien landing a spaceship in…somewhere, I’m not sure where. (Bandcamp link)

Rhymies – I Dream Watching

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Synthpop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Crashing Lead

Perhaps you’ve heard Bay Area musician Lauren Matsui through her work as the vocalist and guitarist of San Francisco shoegaze band Seablite (both of whose albums have appeared on this blog), or, more recently, as the bassist in jangle pop group Neutrals. She should have a solo project, right? Well, the good news is that that’s what Rhymies is–Matsui debuted it last year by contributing a cover of “Gamma Ray Blue” to Dandy Boy Records’ star-studded tribute to The Cleaners from Venus, and the project’s first collection of original music has now arrived (also via Dandy Boy) in the form of a four-song EP called I Dream Watching. Taking a break from the world of loud and/or guitar-led pop music, Rhymies instead finds Matsui pursuing indie pop with the help of “an assortment of Korgs, Rolands and Yamahas”. This tribute to early 80s synthpop and the electronic side of dream pop was written, arranged, and recorded entirely by Matsui herself “on her living room floor”; mixing from Rick Altieri (Blue Ocean, Above Me) and mastering from Mikey Young are the only outside hands to touch the record.

A lot of four-song debut EPs feel like teasers for something larger and more ambitious coming down the line, and while I certainly wouldn’t put it past Rhymies to eclipse I Dream Watching in the near future, these songs make a strong and self-contained record entirely on their own. Spanning thirteen minutes, every track on I Dream Watching is a landscape of synths and melodic sounds built with the intensity of a shoegaze musician. Even though it doesn’t have the same overwhelming wall-of-tuneful-sound quality that Seablite has, I can nevertheless can imagine Matsui hard at work on the living room floor layering and subbing out various analog synth options as she built these songs up. As polished as the synth-led instrumental beds are on I Dream Watching, Rhymies also affords Matsui the opportunity to emphasize her vocals more clearly than with Seablite–they’re full of whispery, subtle melodies, qualities that help her blend in with shoegaze songs just as she’s able to stick out in Rhymies’ more spacious material like the title track and “Bal Masque”. “Crashing Lead” is probably the most overt 80s homage on the EP, arpeggiated synths prominently sitting in the middle of a song that sounds right out a collection of vintage synthpop hits (even as her vocals are much more “dream pop”). All of I Dream Watching is similarly refreshing and inspired, though, the work of somebody grabbing tools from the past to open new doors for herself. (Bandcamp link)

Gamma Ray – Gamma Ray

Release date: April 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, power pop, post-punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Deep End

A Midwestern garage punk band called Gamma Ray, eh? This’ll probably be good. This self-described “snot rock” group has members based in both Columbus and Chicago, and Gamma Ray is Gamma Ray’s debut full-length album following a cassette EP called Bury Me First in 2023. I get the sense that Gamma Ray are marching to the beat of their own drum, although they’re also happy to take part in the Ohio music scene, enlisting the prolific Cincinnati engineer John Hoffman (Vacation, ADD/C, Charm School) to record their debut album and opening for acts like John Spencer and Poison Ruïn when they roll through the Buckeye State. I don’t know much if anything about the members of Gamma Ray, but I don’t feel like I need to have too much background to get Gamma Ray, a twenty-four minute fuzz rock record self-released by the band on a Sunday. They’re a tuneful bunch on their first LP–their ramshackle indie rock pretty much always lands on a winning hook in these ten songs, placing themselves in the lineage of loud but catchy groups from Dinosaur Jr. to Pardoner to Ex Pilots. There are punk songs here that “rip” and songs that find a nice guitar hammock to lie in, but pop music is the common denominator here.

Opening track “Deep End” is lo-fi fuzz rock party music–somewhere alongside the “power pop/slacker rock” axis, Gamma Ray’s first statement is that of a band who isn’t afraid to pull out all the stops underneath the distorted guitars. The tuneful noisiness of “Stalling” and “Teethin’” give way to the post-punk rumbling of “Don’t Wait”, the first real indication of just how far Gamma Ray’s range can extend–and while the sprawling guitars threaten to let the punchiness of Gamma Ray slip out of our grasp, the power-pop-punk “Don’t Know What to Do” yanks us right back in with a Ramones-Husker-Du loud pop song. As short as Gamma Ray is for a full album, Gamma Ray don’t come off like they’re short-changing us–there are ten songs here and they’re all fully-developed rockers, with the second-half 90s indie rock-bait tunes (“Inside Out”, “Just Like You”, “Crawling Down”) continuing the group’s hot streak and the other tracks (the crunchy garage rock of “Used to It” and the just-a-little-bit delicate fuzz pop closing track “See”) providing just-as-worthwhile respites. Provided that you like stuff that rocks, Gamma Ray makes it pretty easy to get on board with Gamma Ray. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Gum Parker, Fantasy of a Broken Heart, Sunny Intervals, Bedridden

In the Thursday Pressing Concerns, we have the good fortune of looking at four exciting records that you’ll be able to hear tomorrow, April 11th: new albums from Gum Parker, Sunny Intervals, and Bedridden, plus a new EP from Fantasy of a Broken Heart. Should you need to catch up with what the blog covered earlier this week, here are links to Monday’s blog post (featuring Cootie Catcher, Penny Loafer, Takuro Okada, and Mantarochen) and Tuesday’s post (featuring Pat’s Alternative Bus Tour, Bliss?, Marshy, and Seances).

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.

Gum Parker – The Brakes

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Not Breaking Rocks

The Portland, Maine indie rock supergroup Lemon Pitch only lasted for two albums, but that’s not getting Galen Richmond down. Richmond (who also plays in Teenage Tom Petties and runs one of the labels most frequently appearing in Pressing Concerns, Repeating Cloud Records) quickly enlisted Lemon Pitch drummer Jeff Hamm as well as newcomers Kate Sullivan-Jones on bass and co-lead vocals and Jason Unterreiner on lead guitar, and Gum Parker was formed. Richmond no longer has to share songwriting duties with Brock Ginther and Alex Merrill, but I still hear a bit of the former’s manic punk-pop and the latter’s sickly-sweet guitar pop smile in The Brakes, the debut Gum Parker album. If you already know Lemon Pitch and/or Midwestern Medicine, Ginther’s other band, then that’s roughly what Gum Parker sound like, but if you don’t then they’re sneakily difficult to define. Richmond’s a 90s indie rock devotee with (presumably) plenty of Archers of Loaf, Guided by Voices, and Silkworm albums in his collection, but with Gum Parker he comes off as much more interested in simply making loud pop music than trying to directly emulate his influences. It’s “power pop” without that genre’s defining reverence, “pop punk” without a trace of what that term traditionally evokes, “slacker rock” made by someone with the perpetual nervousness.

The biography for The Brakes notes that Gum Parker is Richmond’s first band in his twenty-five year music career where he’s the sole primary songwriter, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t benefit from quite a bit of help. Bradford Krieger recorded the LP and contributed keyboard to it and deserves credit for how good it sounds–always emphasizing the vocals but without obscuring the raucous band behind them. All of the band helped in “shaping the final…arrangements” of these tracks, and I know that Sullivan-Jones at least contributed some lyrics (not to mention her lead vocals, which add a touch of variety to the record while still being in line with Richmond’s enough to fit his writing). A speedy album, The Brakes zips through a few classic pop songs in its first half–the Archers-nodding, Superchunk-evoking opening anthem “Two Subarus” and the catty guitar pop drama of “Not Breaking Rocks” are my favorites, but “Only Boxes” has some of the best lyrics (“For a fortnight and a half / I stood right in the forklift’s path / And when I finally let it pass it was only boxes”). Gum Parker do not slow down in the second half of The Brakes (obviously), but we get some development–between Sullivan-Jones’ operatic vocals and the fuzzed-out guitars in overdrive, “Crocodile” feels like the most ambitious rocker on the album (still a great pop hook in that one), while the diss-ballad “Silver Medalist” is a nice surprise and penultimate track “Thumbtacks” is some sneaky brilliance. It all ends with one last (relatively) blistering rave-up called “Bird in the Furnace”, in which Richmond boisterously proclaims “I wanna walk out of the movie / Throw my keys down in a grate” in the chorus. Gum Parker muster up some real defiance here, but probably only because it seems like the most fun thing for them to be. (Bandcamp link)

Fantasy of a Broken Heart – Chaos Practitioner

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Dots Per Inch
Genre: Prog-pop, art pop, experimental rock, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Passion Clouds

It can be hard for some people (not me) to keep all these various Water from Your Eyes-associated bands straight, but I’m here to tell you that Fantasy of a Broken Heart is well worth your time. Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo have been touring members in Water from Your Eyes for a while now, and they’ve recently completed the full live band version of Nate Amos’ project This Is Lorelei. 2024’s Feats of Engineering, the first Fantasy of a Broken Heart album, was pieced together over a few years by Wollowitz and Nardo while on tour and in between other musical duties, and it’s an exciting and chaotic collection of inventive proggy pop music. The next Fantasy of a Broken Heart release didn’t take nearly as long to materialize–the six-song, nineteen-minute Chaos Practitioner EP arrives only a few months later. Chaos Practitioner is also a patchwork record, partially recorded by Nick Noneman in Los Angeles, partially made in Brooklyn and Mexico City, and featuring a few guests. The collaborative nature is probably the biggest difference between this EP and Feats of Engineering (which was recorded mostly by the main duo)–there are some prominent outside contributions on Chaos Practitioner, but additional hands don’t end up tipping Fantasy of a Broken Heart any further towards either “weird” or “pop”.

“Passion Clouds” is Fantasy of a Broken Heart at their most accessible–somehow, Nardo and Wollowitz make the song sound both incredibly streamlined (in a way that reminds me of bedroom-era This Is Lorelei) and like it’s indebted to post-prog 80s synth-rock stuff. “Have a Nice Time Life” is another hefty pop song, a dizzy and fuzzy piece of indie pop that also features the first obvious cameo on the EP, a rap-like guest verse from Jackson Katz of Brutus VIII (it kind of reminds me of Landowner–it’s probably the least congruent part of Chaos Practitioner, but I like it). Nick Rattigan of Current Joys’ vocals on “Road Song” are less attention-grabbing, but it’s not like he derails the smooth folky synthpop ride at all, and it’s a nice breather after “Star Inside the Earth”, which is Fantasy of a Broken Heart bouncing off the walls in a deconstructed sugar rush. “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways” is the big finale, and it’s built like it, both in terms of the instrumental (which stretches the EP’s suave prog-pop across five minutes, pulling a bit from all the songs before it) and lyrically (Fantasy of a Broken Heart are rarely the clearest messengers, so it’s notable that the dissolving romance portrayed in the song is unavoidable from the writing). “We confront the demon in mysterious ways / I’m at a loss right now, I’m gonna push you away,” sings Wollowitz, and later “At the end of the day, you’re a chode / You’re a shadow on the side of the road”. Mysterious ways indeed. (Bandcamp link)

Sunny Intervals – Swept Away

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, soft rock, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, folk rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I’ve Been Looking Over My Shoulder for Too Long

The artist behind Sunny Intervals may be a bit under the radar, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been at this whole “indie pop” thing for a while now. In the mid-2000s up until 2012, Andy Hudson was the songwriter and co-leader of the London quintet Pocketbooks, who seemingly were right in the middle of the era’s British indie pop scene (Wikipedia claims that they played shows with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Art Brut, and Camera Obscura, among others). Hudson started Sunny Intervals, a solo project, sometime around Pocketbooks’ dissolution, and for a while they were releasing records fairly frequently–Rooftops in 2012, Step into Spring in 2014, Sunrise in 2016. After the latter of those three came an eight-year gap, however–I don’t know where Hudson went in that time, nor do I know why he decided to come back this year, but Swept Away is welcome all the same. The Sunny Intervals comeback record is a delicately beautiful LP of quiet indie folk, soft rock, chamber pop, and good old-fashioned indie pop. Swept Away is friendly and familiar-sounding, evoking modern Belle & Sebastian-influenced acts like Grand Drifter, Peel Dream Magazine, and Trevor Sloan as well as the more “mature”-sounding indie pop veterans on Skep Wax Records.

Sunny Intervals pull a neat trick on Swept Away–these ten songs sound relaxed, unhurried, and content, but, at almost exactly half an hour in length, there’s not a wasted moment among the tasteful acoustic guitars and minimal but brisk percussion. Between the uptempo but laid-back opening track “Waiting for Sunshine” (featuring a couple of motor-mouth-delivery moments from Hudson that don’t harsh the vibe at all) and the gorgeous 60s-style piano pop blossoming of “I’ve Been Looking Over My Shoulder for Too Long”, Swept Away is about as forward as this kind of music can be–and while the pensive ballad of “In the Blink of an Eye” slows down the high-flying momentum just a little bit, Hudson doesn’t ever stop trying to impress with heavy-duty fluffy pop songs (see “Lost and Found” and “One Last Day of the Holidays”, which pick up the pace as Swept Away forges into its second half). There’s an electronic/synthpop undercurrent to the entire album, but “Synchronised” is the moment where it really comes to forefront–it’s an interesting creation, a chamber folk tune with a dance beat lurching over top of it sleepily. The record wraps things up with a full-on piano sendoff in “Draw the Curtains”, and its simplicity reflects not a lack of ideas from its creator but a brief respite after a full exploration of them. (Bandcamp link)

Bedridden – Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, space rock, grunge, fuzz rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Chainsaw

New Orleans-originating, Brooklyn-based band Bedridden first got onto my radar at the beginning of 2023 with their Julia’s War debut EP, Amateur Heartthrob, which was also the group’s first proper record after a 2022 demo tape. Vocalist/guitarist Jack Riley started the band in NOLA with a different lineup, but before he moved to New York he enlisted a couple of other Louisiana residents, drummer Nick Pedroza and bassist Sebastian Duzian, to make the journey with him. Amateur Heartthrob was a compelling mix of space rock, the heavier side of 90s alternative rock, and a bit of shoegaze, all of which are still very apparent on the first full-length album from the group (who recently added guitarist Wesley Wolffe after recording their latest record). Moths Strapped to Eachother’s [sic] Backs has plenty of nice and large Hum-inspired guitar riffs and Pumpkins-level pummeling alt-rock rhythms, but there’s just enough of an expansion in Bedridden’s sound to encompass some interesting melodic guitarwork and other pop instincts beyond the outward assault. Like the band’s debut EP, it was recorded by Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who does an admirable job at honing in on some of Bedridden’s more unique impulses without taking away from their sheer might.

Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs opens with some really strong Hum-worship with “Gummy”, but there’s also some transfixing guitars happening in the song’s second half that set the tone for what to listen intently for throughout the record. The stop-start alt-rock of “Etch” accomplishes something similar, while “Chainsaw” bursts the “Bedridden sound” right open with a ripping noise-punk melodic explosion–the band say it’s inspired by The Lemonheads, and while I don’t really hear that, it does kind of remind me of bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots who are plumbing the more pop-friendly depths of shoegaze and fuzz rock. The midsection of Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs walks a similar tightrope, but it’s the ending of the LP where Bedridden’s less-obvious influences begin truly winning out. In particular, “Uno” and “Ring Size” are really where the band indulge in post-punk, college rock, and new wave excursions–the former is wistful, jangly 1980s indie rock punched up with heavy guitars, while the latter is more of a straight-up Frankensteined combination of punchy alt-rock and jangle pop. It seems fitting that Moths Strapped to Eachother’s Backs ends with a jerky, grungy instrumental trying to break bread with a ringing, jangling guitar line–it’s the cleanest example of what Bedridden are trying to do on this album, but hardly the only successful one. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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