We’ve already reached the third week (and second full week) of January; 2025 is really starting to come into focus, at least in terms of music. This Monday Pressing Concerns brings us four records that have already come out this year: a compilation cassette from Good Flying Birds, new albums from Moscow Puzzles and CuVa Bimö, and a new EP from All My Friends Are Cats. Look for a normal Thursday Pressing Concerns later this week, as well as…something…on Tuesday, as the blog ramps back up to a “normal” schedule.
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.
Good Flying Birds – Talulah’s Tape
Release date: January 2nd Record label: Rotten Apple Genre: Lo-fi pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: I Care for You
A bunchoffriends of this blog have rung in 2025 by writing or talking about Indianapolis lo-fi indie-jangle-punk pop group Good Flying Birds, and I’m happy to join the committee in sharing Talulah’s Tape with you all. Is there something going on in Indianapolis that I need to know about? As of late, Wishy has started to really take off, the very underappreciated psychedelic guitar pop group Living Dream just announced a new EP, and now there’s the Good Flying Birds. As best as I can tell, all of this started with a YouTube channel called Talulah God uploading a few Good Flying Birds songs (there’s also an impressive Neocities page dedicated to the group) and attracting the attention of Martin Meyer (Rotten Apple and Inscrutable Records), who started the year by releasing two Good Flying Birds-related releases: Talulah’s Tape, which collects “16 tracks recorded at home between 2021-2024”, and Star Charms, a compilation featuring three new Good Flying Birds songs as well as new material from Soup Activists and Answering Machines. They’re both good (shout out Answering Machines’ “Rocks Hit My Window”, probably my favorite song of the year so far), but I’m going to put the spotlight on Talulah’s Tape as it’s just an undeniable collection of excitable, exuberant, weird pop music.
Loosely speaking, Good Flying Birds fit into a new jangle pop movement somewhere alongside acts like the psychedelic freakbeat of The Smashing Times, the lo-fi mod revival of Sharp Pins, and their dreamy, hazier now-labelmates Living Dream. However, Talulah’s Tape is more…frantic than any of those bands. Perhaps appropriately for a band whose name evokes a Guided by Voices song (intentionally or otherwise), there’s a slapdash basement feel to these tracks. The most obvious pop hits on the record (“Down on Me”, “ I Care for You”) sound like the band recorded them as quickly as possible before the jangly inspiration faded, while the more full-on rockers (“Wallace”, “Fall Away”) demonstrate their ability to step on the gas pedal (while still making pure “pop music”) when they want to. Even as there’s a staggeringly high “hit” rate here, Talulah’s Tape is an offbeat and chaotic listen nonetheless; there’s a goofiness that for the most part is kept to brief interlude tracks and between-song transitions (there’s some drum machine false starts and red herrings, some odd dialogue, Mario and Spongebob make appearances, et cetera), but there are a few moments (like the drum machine-heavy flat-psych of “Every Day Is Another”) where Good Flying Birds display an aptitude for incorporating it into their “songs”, too.
I don’t want to overstate any “difficulty”; excellent pop songs are never out of reach throughout Talulah’s Tape, whether it’s those opening jangle pop smashes, the back-of-one’s-hand automatic excellence that is “Eric’s Eyes”, or “Art Rock (Gidget)”, some sneaky brilliance hidden towards the end of the tape. “Art Rock” is one of three songs with the “(Gidget)” tag; I’m not sure who or what Gidget is, but these are definitely some of the strongest moments on the tape. This applies to Talulah’s Tape as a whole, but there’s particularly a freewheeling, carefree approach to guitar pop music that reminds me of early of Montreal (but, like, more jangly and electric) in the “Gidget” part of the cassette. The bright, shiny jangle-psych-pop of “Art Rock” touches Good Flying Birds’ spaceship down with remarkable ease, and the central line of the song (“We can make a video / Or song / And call it art”) lands because of everything else about this band and cassette. (Bandcamp link)
All My Friends Are Cats – Picking Up on the Pattern
Release date: January 7th Record label: Grey Cat Studios Genre: Power pop, pop punk, slacker rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Every Summer
I wrote a little bit about All My Friends Are Cats back in 2023 with the advent of their debut album, The Way I Used to; I called them “vaguely feline-themed pop punk/power pop/slacker rock” and highlighted “Voices”, a song I still like very much. They were a trio at that point, but as of late it seems like bandleader Dave Maupin is going it alone, including on the latest All My Friends Are Cats release, a five-song EP called Picking Up on the Pattern. Even without Maupin’s old backing band, All My Friends Are Cats still sounds familiar–by which I mean that they still sound like they did on The Way I Used to, yes, but also that their sound has a comforting, well-worn feeling to it that reminds me of a more casual, mostly bygone era of slacker-y pop punk/power pop. The more “chill” side of laid-back Midwestern hook-churners like Brat Sounds, Total Downer, Jacky Boy, and Telethon come to mind, and there’s a bit of early Fountains of Wayne in these songs, too. All of it goes together to shade the strongest songwriting I’ve heard from Maupin yet–like the construction on the EP’s cover, Picking Up on the Pattern feels like a transitional work, its songs looking back at bad habits and bad situations, its narrator recognizing that they’re in the past but still lingering on them before moving on.
“I’m picking up on the pattern / That I’d rather be somewhere else at all times,” Maupin sings to open the record on “Somewhere Else”, the closest thing to an upbeat pop punk anthem on the EP. As catchy as “Somewhere Else” is, the mid-tempo pop rock targeted strike of “Every Summer” bests it–the chorus is an excellent loaded gun, but it’s the shit-eating-grin-delivered verses (“This place is just a ghost town, but the views they aren’t as vast / The buildings are much bigger and the tumbleweeds are trash”) that really make the track transcend. Picking Up on the Pattern only gets more insular as it goes on–“Wasted Space” is the emo-tinged track that’s explicitly about moving (“I’ve got these boxes full of shit that would be better off replaced / If they were gone it would hardly affect me”), and the parallels aren’t hard to draw (“Is it a bad thing that every couple years I think / That this is it, this is the new me?”), while “Not Normal” is a sugary, lo-fi guitar pop cry for help (“It’s not normal / To act this way at this age”; well, at least you’re aware, I guess). By the time Maupin proclaims “Oh well, it was just my scenic hell,” in “Double Down”, one hopes that Picking Up on the Pattern helped get something out of the singer-songwriter’s system once and for all. I mean that for Maupin’s own sake–from a listener standpoint, Picking Up on the Pattern is an incredibly rewarding place to be. (Bandcamp link)
Moscow Puzzles – Vast Space of the Interior
Release date: January 10th Record label: Placeholder Genre: Post-rock, math rock, 90s indie rock, post-hardcore, experimental rock Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Highway Apathy
Cicadas Are Sensitive to Parallel Lines, the debut album from Iowa City post-rock duo Moscow Puzzles, was a sleeper hit of 2023 for me. That record was made up of five lengthy instrumental jams built from a barebones foundation (everything on it is played by drummer Tony Andrys and guitarist Tobin Hoover) that recalls basement-friendly post-rock and math rock that flowed from labels like Quarterstick, Touch & Go, and Thrill Jockey at the end of the 20th century. Almost exactly two years later, Andrys and Hoover are back with a brand-new Moscow Puzzles full-length, once again recorded by Luke Tweedy (American Cream Band, Wowza in Kalamazoo, Hayes Noble) at Flat Black Studios in Lone Tree, Iowa and self-released on CD and cassette by the band. In some ways, Vast Space of the Interior picks up right where Cicadas Are Sensitive to Parallel Lines left off, but it distinguishes itself enough to not feel like a full-on retread. Although both records lean entirely on the same guitar-and-drums ingredients, Vast Space of the Interior lives up to its name by sounding a little more ambitious and, indeed, vast. Moscow Puzzles sound ready to expand beyond Midwestern basements, even if they’re not entirely sure where that will lead them.
There’s nothing on Vast Space of the Interior that sounds as accessible (relatively speaking) as Cicadas Are Sensitive to Parallel Lines’ spiky, distorted Unwound tribute “Radix”, but there are moments that are…more succinct than others here. The first two songs on the album are probably the “hits”–the six-minute chug of opening track “Highway Apathy” is Moscow Puzzles at their most purposeful, marching intently and intensely down said freeway, and “Unknown Fixed Object” once again finds the band leaning on heavy, mathy guitar riffs and tough percussion to make a fiery post-rock statement. The rest of Vast Space of the Interior is for the real post-rock heads–about half of it is made up of the three-part “Monumentation”, which builds patiently for seven minutes (Part “I”) before demolishing itself in the two-minute crescendo of Part “II” and the four-minute coda of “III”. And if “Monumentation” is still too commercial for you, I’ve got good news about the final track, the fourteen-minute “Every Tongue Will Confess”. Andrys and Hoover probe and dig around in the noise for most of the track, steadily examining the walls of their sound, and while they do get louder, the song stubbornly veers into ambient nothingness to close the record out. Having done their best to tame it for thirty-some minutes, Moscow Puzzles leave us alone with the Vast Space of the Interior. (Bandcamp link)
CuVa Bimö – CB Radio
Release date: January 3rd Record label: Cuva Groove Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, noise rock, art punk, post-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Post/Wall
CuVa Bimö are a new “Oakland grunge rock” band who kicked off the new year by releasing their debut album, CB Radio. The quartet (started by guitarist/vocalist Pete Vadelnieks and drummer Ricky Cunliffe, quickly rounded out by guitarist/vocalist Sebastian Moeller and bassist Jake Bilich) recorded CB Radio with Kevin O’Connell (of The Strange Ones and Strange Sound), and they sound like a furious force on their first record together. Gruffer and rougher than the majority of bands I write about from the San Francisco area, CuVa Bimö are one part classic Bay Area garage punk, one part dark and distorted post-punk, and one part trashy noise rock (one of the vocalists, I’m not sure which one but I think it’s Vadelnieks, has a nice, deep AmRep/Touch & Go-style of talk-singing which helps a lot in this department). CuVa Bimö manage to pull off both “sloppy” and “tough” on CB Radio, making a strong and substantial first impression as a “punk band” even if their music doesn’t always fit neatly into that box.
The first proper track on CB Radio is “Wasting Time”, a crunchy and swirling alt-rocker that works quite well, even though it doesn’t fully hint at everything else CuVa Bimö have in store for us with the album. “Bad Jacket” one song later is our first taste of CuVa Bimö as a snotty, sneering garage punk group, and is a nice assurance that, even though the band can sound dead serious at times, not everything on CB Radio is so dire, as the band spend most of the song denigrating the titular article of clothing (“I know a few things that are true / That new jacket makes you look like a tool / … / If I’m wearing that, please kick my ass”). “Post/Wall” is yet another side of CuVa Bimö, a more limber, nervous-sounding post-punk version of their sound that also characterizes a lot of the other highlights of the record from the requisite raging at the state of the Bay Area in “Doom Loop” to the melodic punk-influenced “Workhorse”. Moeller is apparently a big Sonic Youth devotee, and the guitar work on CB Radio reflects this, but CuVa Bimö is interesting because it doesn’t feel like they’re trying to sound like Daydream Nation. In fact, there’s a kind of tension coming from the other genres towards which the rest of the members of CuVa Bimö seem to try to be dragging the music (like the aforementioned garage punk) and the guitar squalls. The four of them manage to keep the peace in a nice and explosive way. (Bandcamp link)
It’s the first Pressing Concerns of 2025! This Thursday post has a nice mix of records that have either come out since the beginning of the year or are slated to be released tomorrow (January 10th). We’ve got new albums from Rotundos and zzzahara, a vinyl release of the debut album from TDA (titsdickass), and a collection of demos from Cindy. The December 2024 playlist/round-up went up earlier this week, so check that one out if you didn’t catch it, 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.
Cindy – Saw It All Demos
Release date: January 1st Record label: Paisley Shirt Genre: Lo-fi pop, indie pop, bedroom pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: The Violins
I last wrote about Cindy in 2023 with the release of Why Not Now?, the project’s fourth full-length album, but the San Francisco guitar pop band and its leader, Karina Gill, have hovered over Rosy Overdrive in the year-and-a-half since then–Gill’s other band, Flowertown, released an album last year, and she’s also appeared on records from Tony Jay and Sad Eyed Beatniks in the interim. Cindy has been busy since I last checked in on them, too–last year they put out a six-song EP called Swan Lake on Tough Love that Pitchfork (suddenly paying attention to a vibrant San Francisco-based indie pop movement that they’d ignored up until then) called “the scene’s best statement yet”. I’d disagree with that, but that’s not a knock on Swan Lake so much as an acknowledgement of the steep competition, much of which has come from Cindy and Gill themselves. I include Why Not Now? in that, of course, but now I can also add Saw It All Demos–a collection of bedroom recordings from around the time of Swan Lake that I actually like more than the “proper” record featuring most of these songs–to the conversation as well.
Considering how molasses-slow and minimal most of Cindy’s music is, one might not think that “demos” of their songs would dramatically alter their sound, but there’s a distinctly different feel to this seven-song cassette tape. Five of these tracks are entirely recorded by Gill alone (and in one of the others, “Saw It All”, she’s only accompanied by Flowertown bandmate Mike Ramos on a “cardboard box”), and the lack of a proper band and the introduction of some warm background noise do transform these songs. The proper Cindy albums sound like classic 60s pop songs slowed to a crawl and stripped of excess; as it turns out, it takes some work to make their music sound so deliberate and streamlined. The Saw It All Demos are in comparison looser and more meandering, the guitar chords free to reveal themselves at whatever speed they’d like.
The version of “All Weekend” early on the tape is a little clearer than most of the rest of these recordings, but by the time we’ve reached the particularly foggy stretch comprised of “The Bell”, “Party at the Atelier”, and “Consolation’s Test”, the occasional ringing of a synthetic version of the titular object in the former of those three songs is about the only thing tethering Saw It All Demos to any kind of reference point. Four of these songs ended up on Swan Lake and two of them on a bonus 7” that came with certain pressings of Why Not Now?; the seventh and final track is the only one not to appear anywhere else, and it’s also the only one with a full band on the recording. “The Violins” features Staizsh Rodrigues of Children Maybe Later on drums and Will Smith and Oli Lipton of Now on bass and lead guitar, respectively, and the upbeat (for Cindy) pop rock of the track is certainly in a different realm than the rest of Saw It All Demos. That being said, the song (for which all four players are given a writing credit) wouldn’t really fit on Swan Lake or Why Not Now?, either. I do think the intimacy and immediacy of Saw It All Demos is its greatest overall strength, but I wouldn’t trade the bright tribute to collaboration that ends it for another bedroom demo, either. (Bandcamp link)
Rotundos – Rotundos
Release date: January 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-hardcore, alt-rock, emo-grunge-gaze Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: It Feels Just Right
I’ve been writing a good deal about Chicago quartet Rotundos and their related projects as of late on this blog, but let it never be said that I punished any band for releasing too much good music. They first got my attention almost exactly a year ago with Fragments, an EP that managed to cover everything from art punk and garage rock to post-punk and post-hardcore in just four songs (sliding into my top 25 EPs of 2024 while doing so, too). The band’s vocalist, Jose Israel, put out a solo album last October that similarly felt like a grab-bag affair, even adding a bit of mid-tempo indie rock and jazz-pop into the mix. So of course Rotundos have started off 2025 with a brand new full-length album; the band (Israel, Harrison Campbell, Jacob Padilla-Caldero, and Henry Speer) have put out a lot of material over the past three years, but I believe Rotundos is their first proper album. Rotundos is by far the most cohesive and focused record yet I’ve heard from the band; zeroing in on some of their heavier influences, the quartet set to work hammering out a tight ten-song, twenty-eight minute record of chugging, dour-sounding alt-rock, moody post-hardcore, and emo-grunge-gaze.
Rotundos kicks off with the appropriately-titled “It Feels Just Right”, and the band embrace Hum-style guitar riffs, heavy atmospheres, and post-hardcore angst like it’s the only kind of music they’ve ever made. The emo-flavored alt-rock/pop punk of “My Advice” is just a little bit lighter, but the slicing guitars of “Out of the Way” and the art punk meltdown of “Photo Frame” continue to raise the stakes of the record. The second half of Rotundos kicks off with “Jake’s Song” (presumably this means it’s Padilla-Caldero’s turn up front), and the titular band member helms a vintage 90s emo-punk-sounding track that’s one of the clearest callbacks to previous Rotundos material on the album to my ears. Speaking of previous Rotundos material, there’s also a new version of “Bring Me Back to Life”, which was one of my favorite songs from Israel’s solo album; the jazz-y rock/speedy punk of that song is kind of an odd choice to bring back to life for this album, but it’s a strong track that holds its own against the more substantially-built songs buffering it (the emo-punk explosion “Weightless” and the grunge-gaze closing power ballad “What Ya Say”). I don’t know if Rotundos augers a clear shift towards a defined sound for this band or if we’ll see them continue to hop across various genres, but regardless, Rotundos nailed this specific kind of music on this one. (Bandcamp link)
TDA – Fuck (Vinyl Release)
Release date: January 9th Record label: Insecurity Hits/Dark Side Family Jams Genre: Noise punk, art punk, noise rock, no wave Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: No Way
We’re starting 2025 with a band called titsdickass. Well, they’re also called TDA if you need a shorter and more workplace-appropriate name, but we’ll all know what those letters stand for. Anyway, TDA formed in New York in 2019, and the trio (vocalist/guitarist Julia Pierce, bassist Seth Sosebee, drummer Sick Nick) played a bunch of shows around the city before linking up with engineer Paul Millar and producer Nick Noto to record their debut album, Fuck, in May of 2023. Fuck came out digitally later that year via Noto’s Dark Side Family Jams label, and the six-song LP captures a chaotic, frenetic noise punk group doing exactly we would expect them to do. On Fuck, TDA haphazardly throw together snotty, garage-y New York punk rock, biting no wave, blistering, assaulting noise rock, and a lengthy free jazz/noise/psychedelic rock jam in under a half-hour. Listening to Fuck, I’m not at all surprised somebody wanted to get this thing to a wider audience, and Brooklyn’s Insecurity Hits (Frida Kill, Stem Cham, Jordan/Martin Hell) are the ones who’ve stepped up to put out Fuck on vinyl to ring in the new year.
The first half of Fuck is the “punk” half–the first three songs are under two minutes long, and the longest one (“Cross Me”) is still under three. “No Way” is classic punk rock, marrying dark, gruff Wipers-style verses with a surprisingly catchy, Ramones-like garage punk chorus. “Flames” and “God Awful Place” continue TDA’s noise-punk attack; Pierce’s ear-piercing guitar and furious, frequently sardonic vocals are key to Fuck’s songs, but the rhythm section make themselves heard, too–particularly, Sosebee’s bass takes “God Awful Place” to another level. The bass is also a big part of Side A’s biggest black sheep, “Cross Me”, which introduces some dark, almost-gothic post-punk into the mix–it’s the one moment on Fuck where the band let up just a little bit, with the noisiness reduced to tightly-controlled blasts. Of course, then we’re on to one last punk punch with “GF from Hell”, and then the final seventeen minutes of the album (and the entire second side of the LP) is taken up by the eighteen-minute title track. This behemoth is an improvised psychedelic/jazz/noise piece that’s mostly instrumental (the official lyrics are “fuck! 2x”, but there’s some wordless vocal stuff going on, too). There’s some pounding, there’s some hammering, there’s a bunch of feedback, there’s no shortage of noise. It’s a world away from where we started with “No Way”, but it’s very thrilling to hear TDA blow open the capability at which those initial short bursts hinted. (Bandcamp link 1) (Bandcamp link 2)
zzzahara – Spiral Your Way Out
Release date: January 10th Record label: Lex Genre: Pop rock, indie pop, dream pop, synthpop, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Bluebird
zzzahara is Zahara Jaime, a Los Angeles musician who’s new to me but plays in a couple of bands that are pretty popular–they’re the guitarist in Eyedress and one half of The Simps. As zzzahara, Jaime has done pretty well for themself, too–they’ve put out three albums on Lex Records (also the home of their other projects) in the past three years, with this week’s Spiral Your Way Out following 2023’s Tender and 2022’s Liminal Spaces. It seems like the first couple of zzzahara releases were more low-key, pulling from the 2010s style of Captured Tracks-esque dreamy indie rock and adding some California sunniness to the music; Spiral Your Way Out is the big, shiny, polished coming-out, enlisting a bunch of notable Los Angeles indie rock/pop musicians (prolific producer Jorge Elbrecht, illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzen, and Alex Craig of Big Troubles, among others) to bring the record to fruition. The jangly guitar pop of previous zzzahara releases is still present in Spiral Your Way Out, but there’s also…more, as Jaime and their collaborators hammer out an ambitious LP of huge-sounding but moody pop rock songs.
Oh, also Spiral Your Way Out is a break-up album, which may help explain that whole “moody” thing I mentioned earlier. Maybe song titles like “It Didn’t Mean Nothing, “If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Halfway”, and “Pressure Makes a Diamond” might’ve clued you in anyway, maybe not. That doesn’t mean that the first two of those tracks aren’t excellent, inspired-sounding pop songs, though–the former sets the tone with a jaunty full-band synthpop-rock beat and the latter sports a gorgeous melody in the verses and soaring power pop guitars. The songs on Spiral Your Way Out that hew closest to good old-fashioned guitar pop (the swirling psych-post-punk “Head in a Wheel”, the return of the jangle in “Bluebird”) are probably my favorites, but there’s plenty of charm to stuff like the 90s alt-pop vibes of “Wish You Would Notice (Know This)”, too. There’s certainly no hiding the heartbreak at the heart of these songs, though, and Spiral Your Way Out isn’t able to fully dance and sparkle its way out of it; the moments where zzzahara’s guard drops (like, say, the distortion that adds some appropriate ugliness to “Bruised”, and when Jaime’s voice finds a bitterness not present anywhere else to spit out the Title Fight-referencing, ruse-dispelling bridge to “Ghosts”) are some of the strongest ones. A lot of hands went into realizing Spiral Your Way Out, but nobody’s covering the record up when it doesn’t need to be. (Bandcamp link)
We’re slowly easing our way into 2025 here on Rosy Overdrive. I finished off the lastcouple of Pressing Concerns for 2024 last week and revealed the results of the 2024 Reader’s Poll. We’re still in 2024 today (for the most part), as this Monday brings the December 2024 playlist/wrap-up. There are a few songs from upcoming 2025 albums on here (which will start appearing in Pressing Concerns very soon!), some 2024, and some miscellaneous material. It’s all quality, though.
Dazy, Fuzzy, and Attract Mode all have multiple songs on this playlist.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (BNDCMPR has been acting up; I’ll try to make the playlist on there again in a day or so). 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.
“Dribble Dribble”, Amy O From Mirror, Reflect (2024, Winspear)
I put “Reveal” on a playlist when this album came out, but when I revisited Mirror, Reflect for year-end consideration (it made it, by the way), the one that blew me away was “Dribble Dribble”. It just sounds more brilliant every time I hear it. It’s a duet with Glenn Myers (who’s played with Diane Coffee and Mike Adams at His Honest Weight) and the two of them jump right into a slightly fuzzy, slightly twee mid-fi pop classic. All the verses are in the first half of the song, and the second half is just an endless refrain–first by Amy Oelsner on her own, then with Myers in tow. The drum machine and choppy guitar chords anchor the whole track, setting everything up for the perfect payoff: “Rumble rumble splat splat / Can’t make the earth flat / Wanna melt closer to the center of the collapse / And know that we’ll come back”.
“Easy”, Gold Connections From Fortune (2024, Well Kept Secret)
I’d been waiting for a new Gold Connections album for a while now. As it turns out, bandleader Will Marsh ended up relocating from Virginia (where he started Gold Connections in college with contributions from, among others, Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo) to New Orleans and putting music on the backburner for a few years before finally reemerging with a new backing band and the first new Gold Connections full-length in six years, Fortune. Some of these songs have been kicking around a while (the reason that “Stick Figures” isn’t on this playlist is because I highlighted it when Marsh self-released it on a cassette EP four years ago), but stuff like “Easy” still sounds incredibly fresh. “Easy” opens the record with an anthem that does Gold Connections’ Bandcamp bio (“arena rock for the underground”) proud; Gold Connections channel the grandiosity of classic Killers singles with little more than chugging power chords and light 80s piano touches.
“‘Sure’”, Attract Mode From The Art of Psychic Self-Defense (2024)
Chris McCrea is a Washington, D.C.-based musician who has a simple goal with his current project, Attract Mode: combine classic post-punk and darkwave of the 1980s with 60s pop rock/power pop hooks. From the insistent post-punk basslines to the punk-clip drumming to McCrea’s melancholic vocal melodies, everything about The Art of Psychic Self-Defense is whittled and sharpened down to exactly what they need to be maximally effective. Attract Mode is hardly the only modern indie rock band utilizing post-punk as a vehicle for pop music, but the juxtaposition between McCrea’s deep vocals and grey instrumentation with undeniable hooks is particularly stark. There are no down moments on The Art of Psychic Self-Defense, but the catchy, thrashing garage-post-punk of “‘Sure’” is worth singling out among the whirlwind. Read more about The Art of Psychic Self-Defense here.
“Friend of a Friend”, Cootie Catcher From Shy at First (2025, Cooked Raw)
This song’s been hanging out on a playlist of mine for a while, although I kind of forgot anything about where it came from until finalizing this blog post. Turns out that Cootie Catcher are a twee-pop quartet from Toronto who’ve been around since at least 2021, and their next album is coming out in March of 2025. “Friend of a Friend” will be on the upcoming Shy at First; like the rest of the album, it was engineered and mixed by Rob McLay of Squiggly Lines and Westelaken, but the warm, fluffy indie pop of this song doesn’t quite match either of McLay’s projects. The bubbling synths throughout the song (provided by Sophia Chavez) are a key part of “Friend of a Friend”, as are the frequent comings and goings of the song’s various vocalists (Chavez, Anita Fowl, and Nolan Jakupovski all have vocal credits). I’ll be keeping an eye on this one!
“Lift”, Hunger Anthem From Lift (2024, Cornelius Chapel)
My overall favorite moment on Lift, the latest from Athens power-pop-punk trio Hunger Anthem, is the title track–it doesn’t quite sound like anything else on the (still quite good) record, and the refrain is slowly pieced together rather than mercilessly flogged. “Lift” is a desperate-sounding track, with the guitar chords frantically bashed out; the bass does the melodic heavy lifting, which is the most “pop punk” thing about it. Or maybe it’s the two-person vocal trade-off that slowly takes shape over the course of the track, which only adds to the eventual catharsis. Most records like this don’t have something like “Lift” on them, but thankfully Hunger Anthem either don’t know that or don’t care. Read more about Lift here.
“The Year I Lived in Richmond”, Advance Base From Horrible Occurrences (2024, Run for Cover/Orindal)
On Horrible Occurrences, Advance Base’s Owen Ashworth builds a set of characters and their stories, which largely take place in a fictional town called Richmond. As the title of the record hints at, Horrible Occurrences is dark more often than not–murder, grievous injury, abandonment, and the supernatural are among these “occurrences”. “The Year I Lived in Richmond” opens the album, and it’s one of Horrible Occurrences’ most dramatic moments (telling the tale of a killer on the loose and the woman who put an end to his reign), but Ashworth keeps things hushed and quiet in a way that reflects the stark, endlessly-reverberating qualities of major events in a small town. Ashworth’s lo-fi, low-key minimal electronic pop–which he’s stuck to since his days as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone–is the perfect vessel. Read more about Horrible Occurrences here.
“Memories”, The Sewerheads From Despair Is a Heaven (2024, Tall Texan)
The Sewerheads are a new band made up of several Pittsburgh indie rock/post-punk/garage rock veterans, and their overwhelming first record is a mix of string-heavy electric garage rock tangles, prowling noir-rock, and burnt-out Rust Belt folk-punk (in a Poguesian sense). Despair Is a Heaven has many different modes and alleyways through which to pass, but if you’re looking for something (relatively) accessible, you can start with “Memories”. It’s the closest The Sewerheads get to straight-up “country punk”, with vocalists Shani Banerjee and Eli Kasan dueting over a spaghetti-Midwestern instrumental featuring a cacophony of horns and violins. Read more about Despair Is a Heaven here.
“I Am Ray’s Brain”, Sharna Pax From The Way We Live Now (2024, Zone 4 Media/Wrong Donkey)
I have no fucking clue what this song is about. There’s no shortage of really rich headscratchers on the latest album from Cincinnati college rock/power pop group Sharna Pax (see the mandolin-laden closing track “Infants in Arms” or the noir-rock of “What Makes the World Go Round”), but “I Am Ray’s Brain” really takes the proverbial cake. It’s lethally catchy–lead vocalist Hallie Menkhaus’ performance is really wild, to be sure–and the lyrical mess of anatomical, neurological, and attention-deficient (“Last year we went to Florida, I saw a manatee” / “There’s a sale on shirts at Sears”) is…well, I can’t make much sense of it, myself. It’s like if your local bar band had some sort of rich inner mythology that only they themselves really understand (if even they do). Good stuff.
“Bird Sanctuary”, 22° Halo From Lily of the Valley (2024, Tiny Library)
22° Halo is a band associated with a lot of artists I like–the bandleader, Will Kennedy, has played with 2nd Grade and Ylayali, and members of those projects have in turn contributed to 22° Halo’s records. Their most recent album, Lily of the Valley, landed pretty high on this year’s reader poll, so it seems like a good a time as any to finally check them out–and I’m glad I did, because now I have “Bird Sanctuary” in my life. Lily of the Valley’s opening track is my favorite (although “Cobwebs” and “Orioles at Dusk” are also very good)–it does remind me of the subtle-beauty bedroom pop of Ylayali, but it’s brighter, almost psychedelic in its technicolor glory. Kennedy’s wife Kate Schneider (whose cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment inform much of the album’s subject matter) duets on this track, a key part of a two minute guitar pop song that feels like much more.
“Get Out My Mind”, Dazy From I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found) (2024, Lame-O)
Hey, look, Dazy’s back! I wrote about the three-song IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) EP a month and change ago, and it turns out that it was only the beginning, as another such EP called I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found) showed up in early December. This one’s just as good as IT’S ONLY A SECRET (I included them as a single unit on my Top EPs of 2024 list, since they’re both so short); if anything, the second EP might be even bigger in its ambitions. “Get Out My Mind” is another instant Dazy classic to kick things off–we’ve got alt-dance undercurrents, fuzzed-out guitars, slicing basslines, and a huge chorus. All in about ninety seconds, too.
“Flash Light”, Fuzzy From Fuzzy (1994, Seed)
Fuzzy were a group of no-hit wonders who hailed from Boston and were part of a pop-forward alt-rock movement alongside more famous peers like The Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield, Belly, and even Dinosaur Jr. Bandleader Hilken Mancini released a solid solo album a few months ago, which caused me to step thirty years back in time and give a proper listen to her most well-known band’s debut album. Fuzzy is great (ahem) fuzzy power pop music; just about every song has a strong hook, but nothing tops the swooping, triumphant opening track “Flash Light” in terms of pure, complete energy. Fun fact: according to Wikipedia, Rolling Stone named this song one of the “50 Best Songs of the Nineties”–so I clicked on the link, and it’s right there in the number 50 slot, behind The Offspring and a Britney Spears song that isn’t “…Baby One More Time”. Thank you, Rob Sheffield.
“Friend”, Comfy From Goated & Forboded (2024)
Another album I would’ve loved to have written about before the end of 2024 if I’d only had more time is Comfy’s Goated & Forboded. I kind of covered them, as half the band also play in Big Nobody, whose latest album I did write about, but clearly there’s something happening in the world of Rochester, New York power pop/pop punk, because Goated & Forboded is just as good as the latest LP from their sister band, if not better. We’ll have to settle for appreciating the firecracker of an opening track, “Friend”, in this playlist–it’s catchy enough in its slightly jangly, slightly slacker rock-y opening salvo, but when that huge power pop chorus arrives, “Friend” really lights up.
“Broke Bay”, Snow Caps From Notes (2024, Strange Mono)
The latest album from Philadelphia’s Andrew Keller and their longrunning Snow Caps project recalls offbeat pop rock from several decades past–The Beatles, XTC, The Cleaners from Venus, They Might Be Giants. There’s an Andy Partridge-like “pop music but falling off a melodic cliff” component to Keller’s writing throughout Notes, which is a somewhat mutated version of a lo-fi guitar pop album. The chorus of highlight “Broke Bay” has an “eerie carnival” vibe to it, wobbling and grinning uncertainly as Snow Caps stick the landing nonetheless. Keller’s layered vocals sounds like an entire choir singing modern new wave hymns, which is key to pulling this whole intricate, disconcerting circus thing off. Read more about Notes here.
“Palimpsest”, Schande From Once Around (2024, Daydream Library)
Jen Chochinov (aka Jen Schande) is a thirty-year indie rock veteran at this point; not only has she played in bands like Shove and Boyskout, but she also toured with the Thurston Moore Guitar Ensemble (and when it came time for the first album from her current band, Schande, in twenty years, Moore’s Daydream Library imprint was the one who put it out). Once Around does indeed sound like the work of a band with ties to Sonic Youth, although Schande mostly keep their guitar-forward, rumbling version of noisy indie rock to brief two-to-three-minute bursts. The most obvious example of this in the record’s first half is “Palimpsest”, an excellent version of droning, electric pop music from the get-go featuring sharp indie rock songwriting and just-as-sharp interplay between the band’s three members. Read more about Once Around here.
“Voyager (ad astra)”, Stubai From We Were Here (2024, Wombeyan)
Hey, don’t close the door on 2024 yet, I just heard another good Australian indie rock band for the first time! Coming in under the wire is Stubai, a Sydney-based act who just released their debut album, We Were Here, back in October. There’s a song from Swervedriver’s 99th Dream somewhere in this playlist, and that’s what my favorite song on We Were Here, “Voyager (ad astra)”, reminds me of. There’s certainly shoegaze influences in the sweeping, loud rock instrumental, but there’s a classic guitar pop bent to the track as well, with the wistfully melancholic lead vocals peaking out through the instruments quite prominently and cleanly.
“Runway”, Pulsars From Pulsars (1997/2024, Almo Sounds/Damaged Disco/Tiny Global Productions)
I put “Tunnel Song” on a playlist back when the reissued Pulsars album came out in September, but now that it’s streaming I might as well throw another highlight from the record on here–there’s no shortage of ‘em. I called the Pulsars a “technologically-minded new wave revival duo” in that review; they sing about robots, computers, and aliens in a way that somehow recalls both slacker and geek rock. “Runway” is about the latter of the three–in this one, the song’s extraterrestrial narrators deliver a memorable, spirited kiss-off to all of humanity in one of the record’s most propulsive tracks. “Our rocketship is fixed, so we’ll leave this ball of…” and Trumfio trails off; it’s just about the only punch that “Runway” pulls. Read more about Pulsars here.
“The Butterfly”, Loose Koozies From Passing Through You (2024, Tall Texan)
Passing Through You might’ve taken Loose Koozies four years to put together, but the rollicking Detroit country rock quintet’s follow-up statement is a solid and thorough one. These fourteen songs are impeccably written and presented, sounding polished but loose and automatic but thoughtful. There are a few surprises to be found across the forty-odd minute LP, but for the most part the five Koozies lock in and play their parts to their best abilities, turning in a very smooth journey. My favorite track on the record, “The Butterfly”, is effectively a microcosm of Passing Through You–its foundation is an incredibly solid roots rocker, but there’s also ample space given to some surprising synth accents. Read more about Passing Through You here.
“Villain”, Soft on Crime From Street Hardware (2024, Eats It)
Soft on Crime also sound looser and more streamlined on Street Hardware than they did on the madcap guitar pop extravaganza of last year’s New Suite. All in all, it’s a relatively low-key follow-up album, but the reduction in bells and whistles hasn’t weakened the power of Soft on Crime’s ability to crank out winning power pop; in fact, with some of the group’s more offbeat tendencies largely sidelined, this might be the trio’s smoothest ride yet. “Villain” comes in the second half of the brief record, and even though the stop-start mid-tempo pop song was one of the few tracks that wasn’t released as an advance single for Street Hardware, it might just be my favorite song on the album. Soft on Crime give the central guitar hook plenty of room, and it earns the space. Read more about Street Hardware here.
“Starduster”, Sleepyhead From Starduster (1994, Homestead)
There’s always a playlist-worthy song on every Sleepyhead album I listen to, whether it’s their 2022 return New Alchemy, 1996’s memorably-titled Communist Love Songs, or this one, the thirty-year-old 1994 album Starduster. As one might expect from a band who put out albums on both Slumberland and Homestead, Sleepyhead straddles the line between “indie pop” and “indie rock”, honing in on both sloppiness and poppiness. The title track from Starduster is my favorite track on the album, and it rules–it’s a positively infectious power pop tune, a transcendent song that leaves behind the trappings of “lo-fi indie rock” for two and a half triumphant minutes. Can you believe that there are all kinds of songs like this out there, lying in wait for me or you to (re)discover?
“Yellowhead’s Song”, Willie Dunn From Son of the Sun (2004/2024, Trikont/Light in the Attic)
Thanks to Light in the Attic for making Son of the Sun available digitally twenty years after its initial release (and over forty years after some of these tracks were originally recorded). Although it’s not quite as expansive as 2021’s Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies, the hour-long Son of the Sun is a good a primer as any for the vital discography of the Mi’kmaq-Canadian folk singer Wille Dunn. Part of the strength of Son of the Sun is that we get multiple sides of Dunn on it; some of these recordings are stark guitar-and-vocals folk songs, but others–like “Yellowhead’s Song”–are fully-developed folk-country rockers, with percussion and slide guitar. The extra-band contributions are welcome, but Dunn’s deep but high-flying vocals stand tall right in the middle of the song nonetheless.
“Shovel Song”, Dialup Ghost From May You Live Forever in Cowboy Heaven (2024)
This most recent album from Dialup Ghost is kind of a lot to take in–although I’m not sure what else I could have expect from an LP called May You Live Forever in Cowboy Heaven that dropped on Halloween and was made by a six-piece alt-country group from Nashville. There’s an absurdly long list of influences on the album’s Bandcamp page that includes Ween, Sparklehorse, The Dead Milkmen, Shel Silverstein, Jeffrey Lewis, Beck, and The Presidents of the United States of America, among others–alright, alright, we need to take a step back. Let’s listen to “Shovel Song”, one of the most immediate and accessible things on this record. It’s a breezy folk rock tune for the most part, but there’s also a garish, almost 8-bit-sounding keyboard part courtesy of Jack Holway. Some sharp writing from Russ Finn, too. Good one!
“Alone Tonight”, Skeet From Simple Reality (2024, Efficient Space)
Like 22 Beaches, another band on this playlist, Skeet were also a first-wave British post-punk group with a minimal sound who came and went without ever officially releasing any music. This year, though, Australian label Efficient Space put together the eight-song Simple Reality (one of Rosy Overdrive’s favorite reissues/compilations of 2024!), and it holds up quite well! Skeet were a bit more jammy, but the Young Marble Giants comparison that the collection’s bio makes is pretty accurate. Opening track “Alone Tonight” takes its time getting to the point–it rides its simple rhythm section and some guitar flareups for nearly two minutes before the vocals kick in. There’s no reason to hurry through “Alone Tonight”, though.
“Rocket”, Pet TV From Terrarium (2024, à La Carte)
Eventually I ran out of time to write about new albums from 2024, but Pet TV’s Terrarium is one that I would’ve gotten to if the year had an extra month or so in it. Sometimes a good fuzz-punk slacker-rock album is just a good fuzz-punk slacker-rock album–fans of the Rozwell Kid/Sleeping Bag side of things will find a lot to like on this all-too-brief 25-minute album. The punchy title track is really strong, but the climax to “Rocket” is so good that I had to choose this one for the playlist. It’s a song that really lives up to its name–it starts off fine, sure, but nothing really prepares us for the launching off the song does when it reaches the first refrain. And while we’re somewhat prepared for Pet TV to blow things all sky-high by the time the chorus comes around for the second time, it’s still a knockout.
“Dream”, Dogwood Tales From Sending (2024)
Harrisonburg, Virginia alt-country act Dogwood Tales put out a couple EPs on WarHen Records over the past couple of years; their latest, Sending, is an independent venture, but it’s about as good as 13 Summers and 13 Falls and Rodeo were, too. There’s plenty of low-key folk rock to be found on Sending; my favorite track is one of the quieter moments, a brief two-minute song called “Dream”. Built from little more than gentle but strong vocals and airy folk guitar, “Dream” is a world away from the opening country rock of “Driver’s Side Fantasy” or even the more substantial mid-tempo “Mt. Jackson”, but there’s something about this humble song about dreaming of death while still being very much alive that continues to stick with me.
“Aria”, Glyss From Eternal Return (2025, Candlepin/Pleasure Tapes)
2025 will bring the debut record from Glyss, a Los Angeles-based “slowgaze” band who’ve linked up with Rosy Overdrive favorite Candlepin Records and Pleasure Tapes (Floral Print, Laybrum, Storm Clouds) to put out Eternal Return in late January. As best as I can tell, Glyss is the solo project of Sol Rosenthal, who also makes electronic music as Iris Ipsum–of the two Glyss singles available thus far, “Aria” is my favorite. There are the “ethereal” vocals and the fuzzed-out guitars, sure, but what really makes “Aria” stand out to me is its tough, prominent, somewhat woozy-sounding drumbeat, which gives it a bit of a danceable feel. Maybe that’s Rosenthal’s electronic background coming in–either way, it’s a potent combination and I look forward to hearing more from Glyss.
“Not Moving to Portland”, The Long Winters From So Good at Waiting (Rarities 2000-2017) (2024, Barsuk)
“Not Moving to Portland” has been floating around for a while–I remember watching a video of Long Winters bandleader John Roderick playing the song on his own circa 2012 (with the still-unreleased fourth Long Winters album coming any day now, believe me). It never had a proper released of any kind until this year, when the So Good at Waiting rarities compilation showed up as part of a career-spanning Long Winters reissue series perpetrated by Barsuk. Now that it’s been a while, I can confidently say that “Not Moving to Portland” is one of Roderick/The Long Winters’ best songs–it needs little more than that wildly simple three-chord guitar progression and some nice piano accents to do what their proper records did with a headache-inducing amount of studio fuckery. Nobody wrote songs like this–you really need to be able to put yourself out there to pull off some of these lines which might read as “cringe” out of context.
“Spite As an Act of Affection”, Attract Mode From The Art of Psychic Self-Defense (2024)
Attract Mode’s ability to keep the foot on the gas for so long without sacrificing anything else in their songs is the real hook of their debut album, The Art of Psychic Self-Defense. The noisy but focused “Spite As an Act of Affection” is the second track of the record, and it picks up the thread that the brisk post-punk of opening track “Vanish/Doom” left off. Bandleader Chris McCrea marries agitated verses in the trenches with a soaring, sweeping refrain that keeps the dark party going. I could’ve chosen just about anything from this record, as it’s built on one tight two minute pop song after another, but “Spite As an Act of Affection” (wasn’t that the name of an IDLES album?) has just a little something extra. Read more about The Art of Psychic Self-Defense here.
“Streetlights”, Golden Tiles From The First EP (2024, Antiquated Future)
I’ve been fortunate enough to get acquainted with Portland’s Antiquated Future Records this year, who put out one of the best compilations of 2024 (a career-spanning retrospective from the great Rose Melberg) and one of the best collections of new music (the latest LP from Guidon Bear). Compared to those albums, a six-song debut cassette EP from a “basement indie-rock trio” might seem a little slight, but that’s no reason to dismiss an opening statement as strong as Golden Tiles’ The First EP. The band (led by singer/guitarist Oliver Stafford and featuring Antiquated Future labelhead Joshua James Amberson on bass) certainly sound like a “basement rock” group–the fairly lo-fi sound of the EP might be too much for people whose brains weren’t shaped by music of this kind, but the low-key pop music of highlights like “Streetlights” certainly shine through the distortion.
“Freakshow Train”, Circu5 From Clockwork Tulpa (2025)
We now enter the world of modern-day prog-pop. London’s Steve Tilling is one such practitioner, releasing an album under the name Circu5 back in 2017, but the past few years have found the musician playing a supporting role in a few XTC-related projects (Colin Moulding’s TC&I, Terry Chambers’ EXTC). “Freakshow Train” is the debut single from the long-in-the-making second Circu5 album, and “XTC” is a pretty good reference point for what this song sounds like. As I alluded to earlier, there’s more electric progressive rock to “Freakshow Train” than there is in XTC, but there’s a Partridge/Moulding-esque twisted pop melody sitting pretty right there in the center of the track (it seems notable that Moulding’s son, Lee, is on board as the band’s drummer for Clockwork Tulpa).
Oh, hey, Primordial Void released a compilation of the works of a forgotten college rock/power pop band from Athens, Georgia earlier this year. How come I didn’t hear about this earlier? Well, I’m hearing the first-ever officially-released music from Banned 37 (active between 1983 and 1986) now, and I’m quite into it. The Banned 37 compilation stands up nicely next to classic southern jangly guitar bands like The Windbreakers and The Primitons that have received a retrospective look in recent years, and the record’s bouncy, euphoric opening track “Guns & Cameras” would’ve fit nicely on that Strum & Thrum compilation from 2020 (I actually had to double check and make sure that Banned 37 weren’t on it).
“Dust”, 22 Beaches From Dust: Recordings 1980-1984 (2024, Seated)
22 Beaches were a Scottish post-punk band from Stirling; during their four-year run in the early 1980s, the only songs they ever released were a couple of contributions to some various-artist cassettes. Dust: Recordings 1980-1984 is 22 Beaches’ first-ever album all to themselves, and the eight-song compilation reveals a band who found a home on the more rhythmic, dance-friendly end of the post-punk spectrum. Bits of disco and dub permeate these songs, including the opening title track, my personal favorite song from the album. For over five minutes, 22 Beaches build a mesmerizing, minimal foundation with a sturdy rhythm section and accent the song with commanding vocals, spindly guitars, and occasional interjections of other voices and instruments.
“RJR Nabisco Takeover”, Yuasa-Exide From Information and Culture + Naturally Reoccurring (2024, Round Bale/Ape Sanctuary)
From March 2022 to August of this year, Twin Cities musician Douglas Busson has (by my count) released seventeen full-lengths under the name Yuasa-Exide–and thanks to Round Bale Recordings, you can now purchase the two most recent of these albums together as one cassette. Information and Culture + Naturally Reoccurring is an invigorating collection of lo-fi pop, fuzzy basement indie rock, and a few noisy experiments. Throughout the hour of clanging, distorted underground indie rock, there are plenty of strong pop moments; “RJR Nabisco Takeover” originally appeared on the former of the two albums, and its shining Flying Nun-esque guitar lead cuts through the lo-fi trappings. I wish Yuasa-Exide the best on their impending hostile takeover of Nabisco. Read more about Information and Culture + Naturally Reoccurring here.
“Sports”, Fuzzy From Fuzzy (1994, Seed)
Are the lyrics to “Sports” by Fuzzy kind of silly? Sure (“Something to find out, something to catch / If you can hit it then you’re on the list” / “It surrounds you like a little ball / But forget it, you can’t throw that far”, and many other ways of phrasing the song’s metaphor), but you know what else is kind of silly? Sports. And music, too. It’s all silly. And it doesn’t matter much what Hilken Mancini is singing about what the chorus of “Sports” hits, anyway. It must’ve taken a bunch of restraint for Fuzzy not to throw a bunch of even goofier backing vocals in the spaces in between the lead vocals in that chorus, but filling it with loud, catchy guitars works even better.
“These Times”, Swervedriver From 99th Dream (1998/2024, Zero Hour/Outer Battery)
I revisited the fourth Swervedriver album, 1998’s 99th Dream, since it was reissued at the beginning of 2024 and I figured I was going to want to put it on the best reissues of 2024 list (it made it). This album sounds great and imagines a future for the band beyond the pummeling shoegaze of their earlier albums (even if that future had to wait for a nearly two-decade hiatus after its release before the band returned). “These Times” is an excellent piece of classic British guitar pop (if only there was a more succinct term for such music…), slightly psychedelic and slightly distorted but not enough in either direction to derail the song’s smooth catchiness.
“Bring Me Back 2 Life”, Jose Israel From To Live in Brief Wonder (2024, 7 Songs)
Jose Israel is the lead singer in Chicago art rock/punk quartet Rotundos (who just put out a new album, incidentally), and his most recent solo album, To Live in Brief Wonder, reflects the adventurousness of his band. The record is a brief but electric collection of everything from polished-up indie rock to lo-fi garage punk to experimental, math-y guitar pop, among several other genres. To Live in Brief Wonder may traverse a lot of ground in a short amount of time, but Israel still takes pains to roll out the red carpet with the attention-grabbing, shined-up indie rock of “Bring Me Back 2 Life” at the start of the record (at least, the version I’ve been listening to–it seems like the streaming and Bandcamp versions of the album have different tracklists). Read more about To Live in Brief Wonder here.
“Roadkill”, Possum in My Room From POSSUMGHOST (2024, Sad Marsupial)
Rockaway, New Jersey’s Ted Orbach has recently expanded their solo project Possum in My Room into a full band, and their first album together is October’s POSSUMGHOST. The resultant album is a full-band exploration of a dark Americana, influenced by slowcore and alt-country but without fitting neatly into either of those boxes. Orbach sounds like a biting folk rock singer possessed on some tracks, and smoothly fits on top of polished instrumentals on others. Opening track “Roadkill” is one of the more electric tracks on POSSUMGHOST, but it’s hardly a welcoming opening, as Orbach bitterly unspools a scene of chemicals, carrion, and vices over top of the agitated country-rock dagger of an instrumental. Read more about POSSUMGHOST here.
“I Get Lost”, Dazy From I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found) (2024, Lame-O)
I’m still not entirely sure what James Goodson meant with “IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It)”, but “I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found)” resonated with me pretty much immediately. Have you ever tried to better yourself? Have you ever decided that you were going to do something good for once, god dammit, and you set out on a journey immediately met with labyrinthian bureaucracy, with “helpers” unable to do anything to live up to their names, with a machine that grinds your bones to dust to make a few bucks. Maybe that’s not what Goodson had in mind when he sang “Check some boxes, fill some squares / So obnoxious, no room for errors”, but it works for me. Some solid rave-power-pop either way.
“That’s Reanimation!”, The Chilling Alpine Adventure From The Chilling Alpine Adventure (2024, Golden Arrows)
It’s a long and winding path that’s led us to The Chilling Alpine Adventure, the self-titled debut from a band led by Portland singer-songwriter Jessy Ribordy. It started back in the early 2000s with the rap-rock and electronic-tinged Christian rock group Falling Up, which got further and further from its roots before breaking up in 2016. The Chilling Alpine Adventure, which dropped on the last Friday of 2024, is an intriguing art rock album that is more or less a continuation of where Falling Up eventually ended up from my understanding–“That’s Reanimation!” is the song that’s stuck with me, an undeniably catchy track that’s a little bit emo, a little bit synthpop, a bit “art rock”.
“Moving Song”, Comets Near Me From Atmospheric River (2024, 131)
I keep getting “Cootie Catcher” and “Comets Near Me” confused–but there’s room for more than one twee-folk band whose name starts with “C” on this playlist. Especially when they’ve got songs as good as “Moving Song”, which is Comets Near Me’s entry. It’s actually the B-side from the San Jose duo’s latest single, but I’m giving it the nod over the more traditionally folky A-side “Symptoms & Obligations” because–well, because I like it more! The band’s two members (who are named Kyle and Maria; I don’t have any more information than that) sing “Moving Song” together over a laid-back folk-pop-rock instrumental, leaning on breezy acoustic guitar and an unobtrusive rhythm section. It all just works–it’s honing in on that intangible pop quality of the best “twee” songs.
“Life in the Factory”, Drive-By Truckers From Southern Rock Opera (2001/2024, Soul Dump/Lost Highway/New West)
“Life in the Factory” isn’t my favorite song off Southern Rock Opera. I don’t even think it’d make the top five. But that’s the strength of a massive, career-defining double album; once I’ve worn out “Women Without Whiskey” or “Let There Be Rock” or “Zip City”, there’s always something else to rise from the towering three-guitar assault to sound like the most brilliant thing. “Life in the Factory” is Patterson Hood’s retelling of the Lynyrd Skynyrd story, the one that the Drive-By Truckers dip into and out of all throughout Southern Rock Opera. If they’d put it at the front of the record it’d be one of their most beloved songs, I’m sure, but it’s buried in the back half of the second disc, instead. In context, it becomes one last look back before the last three songs initiate the final comedown. I think people have written books on this record; it deserves it.
The second annual Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll has now been summed, tallied, and assembled! We asked you about your favorite albums, songs, EPs and label of the year, and we got fifty-seven different responses! These ballots included 377 different albums, 394 different songs, 87 different EPs, and 33 different record labels. Just like last year, this year’s results once again demonstrated the excellent taste of Rosy Overdrive readers; I’m looking forward to filling in my personal blind spots with the ones on here I haven’t yet checked out.
Your top choices are revealed below; for more detailed and complete results, here’s a spreadsheet with everything that got at least one vote on it. For albums, your top choice got ten points, second place got nine, et cetera (for songs, it was twelve points for first place); ties were broken via number of ballots something appeared on and number of first-place votes received.
Here’s a playlist of every song that either A) appeared on multiple ballots and/or B) got a first-place vote (Spotify, Tidal).
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. To anyone who participated in this poll, or even if you didn’t, if you shared the blog or even just regularly read it in 2024: thank you very much. On to 2025!
Your Top 50 Albums of the Year:
49. [TIE] This Is Lorelei – Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Double Double Whammy) / Why Bonnie – Wish on the Bone (Fire Talk) / Francis of Delirium – Lighthouse (Dalliance)
48. Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer/City Slang)
47. Nada Surf – Moon Mirror (New West)
46. Beachwood Sparks – Across the River of Stars (Curation/Sludge People)
Alright, here we are on New Year’s Eve, with the last Pressing Concerns of 2024. There literally can’t be another one; it’s the last day of the year! I have to stop! But before we ring in 2025, we’re looking at a pair of reissues that came out late this year from MOVIELAND and W-2, as well as new albums/tapes from Austin Leonard Jones and Unforced Levers. If you missed the other “under the wire” post this week, from yesterday (featuring Assistant, Boyracer, Attract Mode, and Shoplifter), check that one out, too. Stay tuned for the results of the Rosy Overdrive 2024 Reader’s Poll, which should go up later this week.
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.
MOVIELAND – Then & Now
Release date: December 13th Record label: 604 Decades Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz pop, psychedelia Formats: Digital Pull Track: San Francisco
Alan D. Boyd was an Edmonton-born garage rocker bouncing around Canada, eventually settling in Vancouver in 1991. Despite this exciting new genre called “grunge” happening just south in Seattle, Boyd instead was infatuated with the nascent British shoegaze movement, and formed a band with drummer Justin Leigh and bassist John Ounpuu (later replaced by Clancy Denehy and Cam Cunningham after the original rhythm section formed the band Pluto) to try his own hand at it. MOVIELAND put out a couple of well-received cassettes EPs in the early 1990s, but it turns out the ceiling for a Canadian shoegaze band at the time was fairly low and the project petered out with Boyd relocating to England. That should have been the end of the MOVIELAND story, but luckily for them, one of their relatively few fans was Jonathan Simkin, who would go on to be the co-founder and president of powerful Canadian label 604 Records. Recently, 604 has found time in between releasing Carly Rae Jepsen records and keeping post-grunge radio well-stocked with CanCon-approved records to start a reissue imprint, and the first release is a collection of early MOVIELAND recordings called Then & Now. The fifty-four minute compilation (featuring songs from both cassettes and some odds and ends) is a compelling look at a high-flying band who was influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, yes, but played with the sturdy backbone of a North American indie rock group.
The first four songs on Then & Now come from MOVIELAND’s first EP, and clearly the band already had an idea of what kind of music they wanted to make from the get-go. That being said, there’s a good deal of variety here–“Hello” is the wistful, dreamy opening anthem, “Rant” introduces a Madchester-influenced danceable bassline and sneering, fuzzed out instrumentation (and vocals) to the mix, “San Francisco” is the full-on fuzz-pop sugar rush, and “Everything” is the nearly ten-minute epic vapor trail. They hadn’t settled on a single “sound” by their next release, but they did seem to get sharper at their various lanes–“I Relate” feels like a more natural incorporation of psychedelia and alt-dance into their sound, “Cake” is a more aggressive foray into fuzzed-out rock and roll, “(A Sort of) Icarus” shaves the nine minutes of “Everything” down into a clean seven and a half, and so on. The compilation closes with the two songs that Boyd recorded with MOVIELAND’s second and final lineup (including the massive-sounding “She’s a Mountain”, which might’ve been the band’s heaviest and firmest embrace of full-on shoegaze) and a “soft” version of “I Relate” that keeps the psychedelic dance vibes of the louder version and makes it feel a little sleazier and hazier. There are plenty of also-ran first-wave shoegaze groups out there to discover, yes, but I was presently surprised by how much I enjoyed Then & Now from front to back. Good work, 604! (Bandcamp link)
W-2 – Demo Tape (1980)
Release date: December 6th Record label: Vacant Stare Genre: Post-punk, art punk, no wave, garage punk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Dancing on the Head of a Pin
In the mid-1970s, Robin Hall was the vocalist for New York proto-punk/no wave group Jack Ruby. In the early 1980s, Russell Berke played bass for East Village post-punk band Certain General, appearing on the long-running band’s early releases before departing in 1983. In between these two bands, however, the two musicians met up and co-founded a group called W-2, which existed for less than a year and about a “half-dozen shows” between 1979 and 1980. W-2 (who never had a permanent drummer, but did have a bassist known only as Shelby) never made an album, but they did pass around a four-song demo tape to various New York club promoters. Jack Ruby received a reissue series last decade, but the members of W-2 believed their only recordings to be lost until one turned up via a donated archive from Jim Fouratt (the gay rights activist and co-founder of the Danceteria nightclub). With these recordings in hand, W-2 were finally able to release their demo tape via Rob I. Miller’s Vacant Stare Records; in addition to the four original songs, there’s also a rehearsal session recording of a song called “Goodbyes” and an interview between Hall and Miller (who is the former’s nephew, incidentally).
Historical intrigue aside, these recordings sound quite fresh and spirited in 2024. Of the four proper demo recordings (engineered by Steve Rutt at Rutt Video and featuring Bill Bacon on drums), half of them are upbeat art punk/proto punk tunes and the other half veer into the weirder corners of New York no wave. In the former category, “Dancing on the Head of a Pin” and “Soho What” are built on Berke’s messy but showy rock and roll guitarplay, while “Toxic Love” also leans heavily on the guitars but to swampier and (yes) more toxic ends. The final track on the original demo tape, “Sprezzatura”, is perhaps the most “New York” track on the record; it’s a squall of noisy guitar, a firm rhythm section, and muttering sing-spoken vocals from Hall, in a way that puts W-2 squarely on a timeline from The Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth. The seven-minute rehearsal recording of “Goodbyes” (featuring Dougie Bowne on drums) doesn’t sound like any other W-2 song; it’s a seven-minute “funeral march” (Hall credits Browne for adding this new dimension to their sound) recalling the more pensive moments of Lou Reed as the band pay tribute to Hall’s then-recently departed Jack Ruby bandmate George Scott III. The archivist in me is happy that Demo Tape (1980) is out there in the world in and of itself, while the present-day music fan in me is pleased that it sits well alongside the modern-day punk and art rock I write about here. (Bandcamp link)
Austin Leonard Jones – Famous Times
Release date: November 26th Record label: Perpetual Doom Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Bad Will
If an album gets a strong reaction out of you, that’s something worth interrogating, right? Well, I’ve certainly felt some things in my time with Austin Leonard Jones’ latest cassette release, Famous Times. I’ve felt skeeved out. I’ve felt highly uneasy. I’ve felt some lighter emotions, too, but varying shades of “unpleasant” are the vibes that emanate from the most recent release from the prolific alt-country troubadour. The last time I wrote about Jones, it was in the context of his 2022 album, Dead Calm, which used gentle pedal steel and gentler songwriting to evoke a confusing but warm neon-lit peacefulness; on the one hand, it’s hard to believe how different the general feel of Famous Times is, but on the other hand, Jones still sounds more or less the same here. It’s a pretty informal album–barely cracking twenty minutes in length, most of these songs are built off of little more than Jones’ voice and guitar (with occasional piano and percussion), and the majority of them are under two minutes in length, too. Jones recently collaborated with singer-songwriter Nick Flessa for his album The Politics of Personal Destruction, and you can hear more fleshed-out versions of a few of Famous Times’ tracks on that album, but I keep finding myself drawn toward this collection of skeletal sketches.
“It’s the porno, a police procedural / Snail-trailin’ all around the studio,” Jones sings in “Theme from the Dick Gibson Show”–this little acoustic country number might take the “unsettling imagery” sweepstakes, but there’s more to be found in the deceptively jaunty “Nightlife of a Southern Apologist” (“It’s five o’clock forever, my life won’t ever change,” Jones sings over rinky-dink piano) or the burnt-out folk carcass of “What They Did to Marcus Fiesel”. Interspersed between these moments of blackness are tracks that remind me just how strong of a traditional country songwriter Jones can be–specifically, the wavering “This One’s for the Watchers” and the one-long-metaphor “Any Given Sunday” find him tapping into something difficult to pull off successfully. “I’m Gonna Leave” is much in the same vein, saying more in about ninety seconds than most writers accomplish in a whole record, while the swaying “Bad Will” sounds like the clearest descendant of Dead Calm here, its balladry reduced to a quietly earnest vocal, guitar, and occasional piano. Maybe Jones intended to flesh these songs out some more before deciding to let them be, maybe the brevity is the point, but the result is a full album’s worth of ideas contained within songs stubbornly refusing to pad themselves out. (Bandcamp link)
Unforced Levers – Clear
Release date: November 10th Record label: Self-released Genre: Experimental, post-rock, drone, lo-fi, psychedelia, industrial Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Second Sounds
I first wrote about Minneapolis musician Jason Allen Millard last year with the release of The Truth Is Always Changing, his latest solo album, which was an excellent collection of minimalist, lo-fi acoustic folk songs. Millard’s other solo releases and bands have ranged from experimental and deconstructed to punk and rock and roll, and his latest one is a far cry from the folky intimacy of The Truth Is Always Changing. Unforced Levers is a new duo made up of Millard and Rebekah Teague, who came together due to a shared love of experimental rock, jazz, and psychedelic acts (naming Can, Faust, Les Rallizes Denudes, and Milford Graves, among others) and whose debut album (a cassette called Clear) reflects these touchstones. Clear is an instrumental record, and the bandmembers are credited with playing eighteen different instruments (including “wooden flute”, “ocean drum”, and “Sansula thumb piano”) between the two of them. Although some of the acts claimed as inspirations build their music from solid rhythmic foundations, Clear is much more unmoored–these nine compositions drift and wander through the worlds of clamorous, beautiful post-rock and free jazz.
At the very least, Clear starts with a bang–that would be the ninety-second industrial clatter of “Lil Hit”, which sounds more or less like a trash compactor serenaded by mournful wood instruments somewhere underneath the noise. After the relatively tense, minimal-percussion-built “Second Sounds”, Unforced Levers find some “peace” in the middle of the tape between the ambient sounds, string hauntings, and more rhythmic ruckus found in “Third Rain”, “First Mood”, and “Second Mood”. By the end of “Second Mood”, Unforced Levers sound like they’re ready to make some more noise, but “Big Hit” doesn’t quite deliver on the threat of its title, and Clear is content to drift into the minimal, droning pieces “Beret 2” and “Careful Day 2” instead. Clear never sounds completely relaxed, but aside from its opening warning shot, it’s never quite outright hostile either–this experience continues all the way to the finale, “Second Rain”, which is the closest Unforced Levers get to “rock music” (meaning that they sort of sound like an instrumental rock group as the track finally fades away). I don’t write about this kind of music all that often, and I’m not really sure what Millard and Teague are doing, exactly, to make Clear stick with me more than most records of its kind have done, but I’m happy to keep listening to maybe find some clarity. (Bandcamp link)
It is (glances at calendar) New Year’s Eve’s Eve, and we’re still fitting in albums from 2024 in Pressing Concerns before the calendar flips (and we aren’t completely done with this year yet, so stay tuned). This time, we’ve got new albums from Assistant, Boyracer, and Attract Mode, plus the debut EP from Shoplifter. End your 2024 right with some indie pop, power pop, post-punk, and shoegaze!
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.
Assistant – Certain Memories
Release date: November 17th Record label: Laurie/Subjangle Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, jangle pop, singer-songwriter, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: My Phone Began to Ring
Assistant are a Brighton-based indie pop trio (made up of guitarist/vocalists Jonathan Shipley and Peter Simmons, keyboardist/vocalist Anne Sophie Marsh) who formed in 2002 and have released four albums in the last two decades. This year, they’ve signed with Subjangle Records and have been reissuing their discography with the label, culminating in a brand-new fifth Assistant LP called Certain Memories. Assistant have an enjoyably subtle guitar pop sound on their latest album–of the bands they mention as influences, I think that Felt and the quieter end of Yo La Tengo are the most accurate, but if you like any band on the more tired-sounding end of the C86 indie pop spectrum, you’ll appreciate where Assistant are coming from on Certain Memories. Unlike a lot of their influences, though, the overarching theme of Certain Memories is integral to everything about the album–it’s dedicated to Shipley’s mother, Jil, and the album chronicles living with a deteriorating illness in one’s family (either directly via songs like “Song for Jil” and “Jil Is Fading” or slightly more obliquely via “My Phone Began to Ring” and “Before and After You”).
Certain Memories is bookended by a pair of difficult lyrics–the acoustic-led folky indie pop of “My Phone Began to Ring” begins with “They said you couldn’t treat it with anything / And that’s just life, that’s just death”, while the minimal synth/ambient pop finale “A Million Stars” ends the record with “I love you so much / But it feels like you’re a million miles away”. In between this seemingly inevitable journey are songs about despair and hope, songs about the present and songs reminiscing about the past. The trio wind through these tracks with their typical laid-back take on guitar-driven indie pop, taking in every moment with equal weight. Certain Memories is by nature a very revealing album, even as Assistant don’t play up the drama in moments like “Jil Is Fading” (“And the pain is appalling / No amount of warning / Can prepare”) and “Overwhelming” (“Wake up / Got to do it all again / … / Somehow”). The song I keep coming back to is called “Raking Leaves”, though, which contains little explicit signs of the illness at the heart of Certain Memories. The narrator is just raking leaves (“Raking leaves / goes on forever”); over top of a relaxed, slowed-down instrumental, they have time to list every kind of leaf being raked (apple, cherry, beech, lilac, et cetera). “I don’t know what I’m doing it for,” concludes the singer, realizing that they’re just acting out another endlessly repeating task. This is the main strength of Certain Memories to me; it’s a record that captures how the present-tense drudgery continues to go on despite whatever mountains of grief and pain rise in the background. (Bandcamp link)
Boyracer – Seaside Riot
Release date: October 31st Record label: Emotional Response Genre: Power pop, indie pop, twee, lo-fi pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Stale Mate
When we last checked in on Stewart Anderson’s long-running indie pop project Boyracer, it was 2021, the British-originating musician (and head of Emotional Response Records) was in Arizona, and he’d recorded his fourteenth Boyracer album, Assuaged, with a lineup featuring guitarist/vocalist Christina Riley (of Artsick) and longtime multi-instrumentalist Matty Green. Fast forward to this year, and Anderson appears to have traded the desert for the seaside–Seaside, Oregon, to be specific, which is where Boyracer is currently based and is also presumably the namesake for the fifteenth Boyracer album, Seaside Riot. Riley is back for this one, and Anderson has also enlisted a couple different longtime Boyracer collaborators–Chuk Reutter, also of the Bright Lights, and Simon Guild, who first appeared on a Boyracer record in 1992–as well as Mario Hernandez of Kids on a Crime Spree. The quintet cobbled these songs together between their various homes (including, amusingly enough, the Monterey Bay town of Seaside, California), resulting in a joyfully sloppy fifteen-song collection of twee, indie punk, and power pop hits. If you’ve heard either of the two Under the Bridge compilations of ex-Sarah Records artists, you’ve already heard two of these songs, and, as “Larkin” and “Unknown Frequencies” demonstrated in 2022 and earlier this year, respectively, Boyracer’s well of ideas has hardly run dry.
Seaside Riot is perhaps a bit more wide-ranging than Assuaged was, but both records come from the “blow through as many ideas for pop songs as quickly and enthusiastically as possible” school of thought. At the very least, you can always count on Boyracer to put a bunch of hits right up front–between the handclap-laced opener “Salt on My Tongue”, the bouncy, Riley-sung “Stale Mate”, and the bundle of guitar hooks that is “Larkin”, Seaside Riot draws us in as well as any indie pop record could. Boyracer doesn’t “get experimental” in the middle of the record, per se, but we’re given some alternate models of Boyracer songs–“Boosey and Hawkes Childhood” and “Midweek Soulcrusher” are noisier and more cacophonous, “Roads” is a bit quieter, “You Don’t Love Me” features a bit more swagger. Of course, we’re still given perfect guitar pop songs like the agreeably-titled “Graeme Downes” and “Unknown Frequencies” (which I don’t mind hearing again at all, it’s still very good) in the meat of the record. And some of the best pop songs on Seaside Riot benefit from Boyracer mussing them up a bit, too–the lo-fi, slacker attitude they bring to late-record highlight “Sharp Edges” only allows it to shine brighter, while the shrill edges of “Rails” enhance its ample energy, too. The players and locales may change, the years pass by, but Boyracer is still doing Boyracer things. (Bandcamp link)
Attract Mode – The Art of Psychic Self-Defense
Release date: December 6th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, college rock, new wave, power pop, darkwave Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: “Sure”
Chris McCrea is a Washington, D.C.-based musician who has a simple goal with his current project, Attract Mode: combine classic post-punk and darkwave of the 1980s with 60s pop rock/power pop hooks. It’s a mission I can get behind, and regardless of how clean of a synthesis it is of those two tentpoles, The Art of Psychic Self-Defense is certainly a catchy collection of songs. McCrea used to play in the synthpop trio Motion Lines and put out an Attract Mode album (SYZYGY) in 2018, but this appears to be the musician’s first new music of any kind in six years. The Art of Psychic Self-Defense is a brief reintroduction (eight songs in under twenty minutes), but there’s no fluff here–from the insistent post-punk basslines to the punk-clip drumming to McCrea’s melancholic vocal melodies (often helped out by Cinema Hearts’ Caroline Weinroth), everything about this record is whittled and sharpened down to exactly what it needs to be maximally effective. Attract Mode is hardly the only modern indie rock band utilizing post-punk as a vehicle for pop music (see Humdrum’s romantic college rock in Chicago, or the propulsive jangle practiced by Motorists in Canada), but the juxtaposition between McCrea’s deep vocals and grey instrumentation with undeniable hooks is particularly stark.
The Art of Psychic Self-Defense certainly gets off on a “punchy” note–the in-one’s-face bassline of “Vanish/Doom” is the first thing we hear, and it gives way to a brisk post-punk energy jolt that gets the job done in about two minutes, and the noisy but focused “Spite As an Act of Affection” marries verses in the trenches with a soaring, sweeping refrain to keep the dark party going. Although the swooning new wave of “Fade” is just a little brighter and more overtly New Order-y than what preceded it, don’t mistake this for a tonal shift; The Art of Psychic Self-Defense gets right back to it with the swirling, hazy alt-rock-tinged “Absolute Monster”, the catchy, thrashing garage-post-punk of “’Sure’”, and the warped, compacted balladry of “Twitch” (featuring some of the best backing vocals on a record with plenty of solid ones). Just a blink or two and we’re at the eighth and final song on The Art of Psychic Self-Defense, the percussionless “Dreams”. It’s the only “breather” on the album, McCrea crooning over an electric guitar, Weinroth’s harmonies, and some suspended synths. Attract Mode sounds pretty good in “subdued” mode too, but their ability to keep the foot on the gas for so long without sacrificing anything else in these songs is the real hook of The Art of Psychic Self-Defense. (Bandcamp link)
Shoplifter – EP
Release date: November 15th Record label: Self-released Genre: Noise pop, shoegaze, post-punk, garage punk, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Goof Ball
There seem to be a fair amount of bands called “Shoplifter” (or some variation on the word), but the one we’ll be fixing our attention upon today is a trio from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada who have just released their debut EP. The trio of Curtis Lockhart, Cam, and Matt E previously played together in another Victoria group called Numbing, which I only know about thanks to a Swim into the Sound article about a live show they played with Guitar and Pardoner earlier this year. When Lockhart reached out to me about this EP, he referred to Shoplifter as a “shoegaze band”, which is partially true; those two aforementioned bands who shared the bill with them back in May are helpful reference points, particularly the latter. Like Pardoner (and Guitar, to a lesser degree), Shoplifter make a weird, distorted, and oddly catchy kind of music that synthesizes basement 90s indie rock, arty post-punk, and, yes, wall-of-sound shoegaze. It’s a particularly subdued take on these genres, too; compared to the relatively wild attitude of Guitar towards their recordings and Pardoner’s bouts of high energy, the debut Shoplifter record really does sound like it was made by a band with their gaze fixed firmly on their footwear.
Not that EP doesn’t lean into the “rock” side of indie rock when Shoplifter feel like it; opening track “Goof Ball” is a nice ninety-second catchy fuzz-pop tune that sounds like the band wanted to do a Dinosaur Jr. thing but didn’t really commit to seeing it through (but isn’t a half-assed Dinosaur Jr. song a fitting tribute to J. Mascis?). The sturdy and relatively clean post-punk of “HW” is probably just about as “polished” as Shoplifter are going to get–after holding the line nicely for nearly five minutes, they reward themselves by letting “Weaver” lapse into some moments of fuzzed-out feedback in between the “song” parts. The most Pardoner-like moment on the EP is “Cohesive”, a clanging, metallic-sounding piece of garage-egg-punk with some relatively unhinged sing-speaking vocals. Aside from “Goof Ball”, every track on EP is four to five minutes long–one must imagine silent, stoic jam sessions mainly composed of distortion at band practices and gigs like the one I keep leaning on for reference. After showing just a bit of emotion in “Cohesive”, Shoplifter dial it back to close things out via the mid-gaze finality of “Softie”, which rides steady fuzzed-out guitars to the very end of the record. You do kind of have to speak Shoplifter’s language to get the most out of EP, but it’s a promising debut for the fluent. (Bandcamp link)
Today, we’re closing out Rosy Overdrive’s 2024 editorial lists with my favorite reissues and compilations from this year. As this list encompasses a fairly wide range of releases, it is unranked, unlike my Top Albums and Top EPs lists. This isn’t the end of all year-end lists on the site, however: the results of the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll will go up next week (you have until midnight EST tomorrow to get your ballot in if you haven’t already!). Plus, there’ll be one last Pressing Concerns before the New Year.
Here are links to stream this list on various services: Spotify, Tidal. To read about much more music beyond what’s on this list, check out the site directory, and if you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. Thanks again for reading.
American Football – American Football (25th Anniversary)
Release date: October 18th Record label: Polyvinyl Genre: Midwest emo, jazz-rock, math rock, post-rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Hey, have you listened to the American Football album recently? It still sounds very good! It’s hard to believe, but it’s still a very fresh-feeling LP, legions of imitators be damned. Actually sitting down with this one for the purposes of putting this list together, it’s clearer than ever to me that all the bands who’ve attempted to use this record as a blueprint (some of which have ended up with something quite good in their own right, mind you) miss the deft aimlessness, the lost quality to American Football that makes it sound so timeless. It’s, like, barely an emo album, right? Even two and a half decades of newer bands attempting to shift the Emoverton Window in its direction haven’t really changed that. So, yeah, American Football–check ‘em out!
Big Ups – Eighteen Hours of Static
Release date: September 20th Record label: Dead Labour Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock, garage rock, experimental Formats: Vinyl, digital
Big Ups were indisputably key figures in a specific era of 2010s East Coast DIY indie rock/punk. Drummer Brendan Finn, vocalist Joe Galarraga, guitarist Amar Lal, and bassist Carlos Salguero Jr. were already a whirlwind of a band on the twenty-eight minute original version of Eighteen Hours of Static, a live-wire record that slams together meaty noise rock, sinewy, claustrophobic 90s post-hardcore/post-rock, and Black Flag-like self-combusting punk rock. The liner notes for the tenth anniversary reissue, written by Dayna Evans, do (knowingly) contain the phrase “man, you just had to be there”, but even those who came to Big Ups later don’t have to close our eyes and imagine that we’re in Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium to get rocked by Eighteen Hours of Static ten years later. (Read more)
The Cat’s Miaow – Skipping Stones: The Cassette Years ‘92-’93
Release date: May 3rd Record label: World of Echo Genre: Indie pop, dream pop, lo-fi pop, twee Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Another collection of early music from the great Australian indie pop group The Cat’s Miaow? Don’t mind if I do! Two years after the Songs ‘94-’98 compilation pulled from songs from the mid-to-late era of the Melbourne band’s run (and one year after Selected Songs 1997-2003, a compilation from three of the members’ post Cat’s Miaow band, Hydroplane), World of Echo has returned to this fertile soil with Skipping Stones: The Cassette Years ‘92-’93. This may comprise some of The Cat’s Miaow’s earliest recordings, but there are no signs of growing pains on this thirty-three-track, hour-long release; the band’s ability to turn brief, minimal snippets of indie rock into charmed, amber-frozen pop music was apparent from the get-go.
Cloud Nothings – Here and Nowhere Else (10th Anniversary)
Release date: October 2nd Record label: Pure Noise Genre: Post-hardcore, noise rock, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
What’s your favorite Cloud Nothings album? Push comes to shove, I’d probably have to go with 2012’s Attack on Memory, but I’m not going to look at you askance if you ride for Here and Nowhere Else, Dylan Baldi’s seemingly-Sisiphian attempt to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle conditions of their breakthrough album and more or less succeeding. I do my best to not take the humming consistency of the modern version of the band (as seen on this year’s Final Summer) for granted, and listening to Cloud Nothings hammer out the contours of their desperate, pounding pop music as they had to do on Here and Nowhere Else only confirms just how impressive the whole Cloud Nothings “thing” is. Oh, and “I’m Not Part of Me” is maybe the best rock song of the 2010s, so it has that going for it, too.
Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera (Deluxe)
Release date: July 26th Record label: New West Genre: Alt-country, country rock, southern rock Formats: Vinyl
With an appreciative nod towards the Jason Isbell-featuring winning streak on which they’d embark immediately afterwards, Southern Rock Opera is nonetheless my favorite Drive-By Truckers album some twenty-odd years after its initial release. The ugliness, the ambition, the mythology, the lightning-rod writing, and, of course, the rock and roll are all high water marks for what “southern rock” or “alt-country” or “country rock” (pick your flag to wave) can and should be. And for all the band’s understandable seeking to distance themselves from “The Southern Thing” (or more accurately, what “The Southern Thing” became for a certain subset), there’s no shortage of more prescient and nuanced moments (plus there’s “Wallace”, the other end of the spectrum). And even if Southern Rock Opera didn’t hold up in that regard, a cemetery full of songs like “Women Without Whiskey”, “Zip City”, and “72 (This Highway’s Mean)” (and those are just the Cooley ones!) would be a great haunting indeed.
Willie Dunn – Son of the Sun
Release date: August 14th Record label: Light in the Attic Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter Formats: Digital
Light in the Attic’s work resurfacing the catalog of Mi’kmaq folk singer Willie Dunn has been one of the most vital reissue campaigns that anybody’s done thus far this decade, from the career-spanning Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies compilation in 2021 to the streaming availability of his 1970s albums to the crown jewel of this year, a digital reissue of his hour-long 2004 album Son of the Sun. Every newly-available Willie Dunn record confirms that the singer-songwriter was too large of a figure to be captured by a single release, and this album, which contains then-contemporary recordings, decades-old takes from the 1980s, and a couple of live tracks from Berlin, is a huge piece of the puzzle. Whether Dunn is helming sparse, meandering folk diatribes or relatively polished-up country songs, he’s always a commanding voice.
Elf Power – When the Red King Comes
Release date: May 3rd Record label: Orange Twin/Elephant 6 Genre: Psychedelic pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
This year in Elephant 6 and associated acts included the debut of a new project from The Olivia Tremor Control’s Derek Almstead, a deluxe reissue of The Ladybug Transistor’s The Albemarle Sound, and the first new OTC songs in a decade (and, sadly, the last to be released before co-founder Will Cullen Hart passed away in November). I want to focus on the often-underappreciated Elf Power here, whose second album, 1997’s When the Red King Comes, saw a remixed and remastered re-release this year. I’ve come to think of it as one of the great indie rock “transitional” albums, midway between the lo-fi bedroom rock of 1995’s Vainly Clutching at Phantom Limbs and the polished pop-rock of 1999’s A Dream in Sound. Neutral Milk Hotel-esque acoustic adventurousness combines with Apples in Stereo-like 60s-inspired pop songwriting, creating a forty-minute blast of an LP.
Fust – Songs of the Rail
Release date: January 5th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, lo-fi folk, singer-songwriter Formats: Digital
Before North Carolina alt-country band Fust became one of the best practitioners of the genre in the early 2020s, bandleader Aaron Dowdy put out seven EPs (featuring four songs each) on his own in 2017 and 2018. When Fust became more than Dowdy and his computer, Dowdy began writing for a full band and decided to “leave the computer songs alone”, shelving his initial desire to expand these twenty-eight songs beyond their initial, raw forms. After 2023’s Genevieve brought a certain amount of spotlight on the band, however, Fust and Dear Life put together Songs of the Rail, a digital compilation of all seven EPs–nearly 90 minutes of music–in one place. Dowdy’s intimate, lo-fi bedroom pop take on alt-country here results in a blurry picture, with songs running into each other as Fust moves from one sleepy-sounding idea to the next. (Read more)
Heavenly – The Decline and Fall of Heavenly
Release date: February 2nd Record label: Skep Wax Genre: Indie pop, twee, jangle pop, power pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl
After their first two records, 1991’s Vs. Satan and 1992’s Le Jardin de Heavenly, saw vinyl re-pressings in 2022 and 2023, respectively, Skep Wax has moved onto the twee legends’ 1994 album The Decline and Fall of Heavenly this year. Even for a Heavenly album, the proper The Decline and Fall of Heavenly is a short one (about twenty-five minutes), but the band’s momentum hadn’t slowed down a bit on the original eight songs. Although all the Heavenly vinyl reissues have featured bonus tracks drawn from non-album singles released concurrently, this reissue’s extra material is particularly notable. 1993’s “P.U.N.K. Girl” and “Atta Girl” singles and their B-sides both appear on side two of The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, ensuring that those five songs–regarded as some of the best the band ever put to tape–aren’t left out of this reissue series. (Read more)
Hell Trash – SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024
Release date: October 4th Record label: Self-released Genre: Experimental rock, art pop, psych pop, folktronica, synthpop, lo-fi pop Formats: CD, digital
The rollout of Philadelphia-originating, Chicago-based duo (now a quartet) Hell Trash has been decidedly unorthodox. After a two-song single and a live EP, 2024 has brought SMASH HITS! Early Tracks 2021-2024, the most complete picture of Hell Trash thus far. The Hell Trash found here contains bits of the folkiness of their previous releases, but this isn’t even the primary mode of SMASH HITS! (and similarly, the experimental folk-pop of Noah Roth’s solo career and the fuzz rock of their other band, Mt. Worry, aren’t really all that close to these songs, either). It reminds me of a more “folk”-based version of late 90s indie pop, incorporating electronic and psychedelic touches and even some trip hop-esque beats into Rowan Roth’s songwriting. (Read more)
The Long Winters – The Worst You Can Do Is Harm / When I Pretend to Fall / Ultimatum / Putting the Days to Bed / So Good at Waiting (Rarities 2000-2017)
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Barsuk Genre: 2000s indie rock, folk rock, psychedelic pop, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
The Long Winters hovered around the periphery of Pacific Northwest indie and alternative rock music, recording three great albums and plenty of supplemental material in their heyday of the 2000s. This year, Barsuk reissued it all–all three albums plus the Ultimatum EP and a digital rarities compilation called So Good at Waiting. The three records are all distinct from one another–The Worst You Can Do Is Harm is the dark, uncertain post-90s debut, When I Pretend to Fall is the gorgeous orchestrated indie-pop-rock debutante ball, Putting the Days to Bed the streamlined, whittled-down final Hail Mary–but the unintuitive, singular writing of John Roderick connects all of them together. When I Pretend to Fall should’ve been the hit, yes, but it’s also the tip of an iceberg best examined as a whole.
Hannah Marcus –The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004
Release date: April 5th Record label: Bar None Genre: Slowcore, sadcore, folk rock, singer-songwriter, jazzy/noire-y indie rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Digital
New York-originating singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus is a lifelong musician, but it wasn’t until she ended up in the Bay Area in the 1990s that she found the kind of music she’d end up making in her solo career–long, dramatic, drawn-out folk-indie-rock in the vein of American Music Club and Red House Painters (slowcore, or, as the micro-genre is even more specifically referred to, “sadcore”). From 1994 to 2004, Marcus released five albums and an EP recorded in San Francisco and Montreal. Bar None (who handled the American release for a couple of her albums) put together The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004, a career-spanning digital compilation featuring selections from both the Bar None albums and her earlier, still-unavailable-in-full discography (as well as one previously-unreleased track). (Read more)
Mclusky – The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire
Release date: October 4th Record label: Beggars/Too Pure Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, post-hardcore Formats: Vinyl, digital
We all know that 2002’s Mclusky Do Dallas is a masterpiece (write that one down if you don’t), but I will now use my admittedly small platform of this blog to proclaim that the third and (for now, at least) final album from the Welsh/English noise punks is just as good as that one, if not, perhaps, even better. Revisiting The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire twenty years later, it’s remarkable how white-hot and weird it still sounds. As abrasive and mean as Mclusky Do Dallas is, at the very least it makes sense, but The Difference Between Me and You… is a headscratcher. From the irresistible oddness of “She Will Only Bring You Happiness” to the creepy moments of silence of “Slay!” to the noise-punk thrashers that are as noisy and punk-like (and thrashing) as anything else the band put out–it’s all just as overwhelming to visit in 2024.
Rose Melberg – Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023)
Release date: August 2nd Record label: Antiquated Future/Two Plum Press Genre: Twee, indie pop, indie punk, lo-fi indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital
Portland-based Antiquated Future Records has a series of cassettes called “Selected Songs” where they compile music from across an artist’s career in one cassette tape. Indie pop troubadour Rose Melberg, who has a sprawling discography stretched across several projects of varying notoriety, is a great choice for this kind of compilation–and it’s all laid out in one place as Things We Tried to Hide (Selected Songs, 1993-2023). Per the Bandcamp page, the twenty-five-song cassette comes from ten different projects, twenty different records, and a dozen different labels, ranging from Melberg’s most well-known 1990s acts (Tiger Trap, The Softies, Go Sailor) to perhaps more overlooked bands from the 2010s (Knife Pleats, PUPS, Imaginary Pants). There’s more to Rose Melberg than Things We Tried to Hide, true, but if you’re unsure where to start with one of the greatest indie pop artists of all-time, it’s pretty perfect. (Read more)
The Mountain Goats – The Coroner’s Gambit
Release date: June 28th Record label: Merge Genre: Lo-fi indie folk, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
My favorite era of the Mountain Goats is the late 1990s up until 2000–after the super early southern California duo-era recordings, before All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee (slowly but surely) became the earliest mile-markers for most fans of the band. The Coroner’s Gambit is the dark, breathtaking capstone of this era–after an uncharacteristic three year LP absence populated by strong EPs like New Asian Cinema and Isopanisad Radio Hour, John Darnielle returned with a mid-fi indie folk masterpiece that faced death outright, gasping through “Shadow Song” and “Bluejays and Cardinals” and ruminating on the title track and “Elijah”. “Baboon”, “Family Happiness”, and “Jaipur” are angrier and scarier than anything the Mountain Goats had done up until that point, and given the loss of these frayed edges in their music not long afterwards, they haven’t really been reached since, too.
The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice – Moon Colony Bloodbath
Release date: May 31st Record label: Cadmean Dawn Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, digital
There are days when Moon Colony Bloodbath is my favorite “studio-era” Mountain Goats-related release. The sub-twenty minute collaborative with John Vanderslice holds a unique place in both of their discographies, marrying the low-stakes (breezy singer-songwriter-y folk rock, at a time when both John Darnielle and Vanderslice were moving away from it in their respective works) and high-stakes (an absurd prog-level concept about organ-harvesting colonies on the moon, of which the record’s album art only gives us a small taste). It works in no small part due to the fact that both Darnielle and Vanderslice bring way too strong material for a tour-only vinyl EP (which is what it was in 2009); “Surrounded” is a Mountain Goats classic, “Sudden Oak Death” shouldn’t be far behind, and Vanderslice (whose solo material I also love, just to be clear) hasn’t written many more songs greater than “Lucifer Rising”.
Pulsars – Pulsars
Release date: September 13th Record label: Tiny Global Productions/Damaged Disco Genre: Power pop, new wave, alt-rock, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Dave Trumfio is perhaps most well-known as a producer and engineer; as a frontperson and songwriter, however, his most beloved work is with The Pulsars, the 1990s technologically-minded new wave revival duo he led with only his brother Harry on drums. Chewed up and spat out by the post-grunge major label industry, The Pulsars managed to release one album in 1997 before their upstart label folded. However, Pulsars have resurfaced in recent years, with this year bringing a vinyl reissue of Pulsars a quarter-century later. Pulsars doesn’t sound like the late 1990s, but it’s undoubtedly a product of its time in an odd way; The Cars-y new wave/synthpop homage baked into the record’s sound is still laced with some irreverent Chicago 90s power pop/alt-rock. (Read more)
Skeet – Simple Reality
Release date: August 16th Record label: Efficient Space Genre: Post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital
It’s hard to believe that there are still excellent, unknown first-wave British post-punk bands to be unearthed, but that’s exactly what we have with Coventry trio Skeet and the band’s first ever officially-released music, the eight-song Simple Reality collection. Although it took some Australians to help Skeet’s discography see light of day (the prolific Mikey Young mastered it, and Melbourne’s Efficient Space put it out), Simple Reality indeed sounds like it was pulled straight from the minimal end of Britain’s post-punk scene (the Young Marble Giants comparison in the album’s bio is more than warranted, although Skeet were a bit more jammy). Skeet may have been a small part of this era of history (they played “as few as” ten shows and, guitarist Gary Meffen’s stint in early Oi! band Criminal Class aside, none of them went on to greater heights), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t create something strong enough to reverberate far beyond that with Simple Reality.
Strange Magic – Slightest of Hands
Release date: May 3rd Record label: Mama Mañana Genre: Power pop, lo-fi pop, college rock Formats: Cassette, digital
An underappreciated member of the current power pop revival, one can’t say that Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Javier Romero hasn’t been busy as of late. Arising from a self-imposed mission to write, record, and mix one song a week for all of 2022, the following year saw the release of four different albums from his project Strange Magic. Admittedly, these initially slipped by me–but not to worry, as Romero teamed up with Mama Mañana Records to put together a cassette of twenty-two highlights from these albums called Slightest of Hands. There’s a lot to love on this hour-long treasure-trove of a tape–distorted, darkly-clouded guitars, delicately melodic vocals, a charmingly Elvis Costello-esque “toying with power pop” writing style, a southwestern desert-evoking expansiveness, to name a few of the qualities Slightest of Hands reveals over time.
Swervedriver – 99th Dream
Release date: January 19th Record label: Outer Battery Genre: Shoegaze, noise pop, psychedelic pop, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
When we talk about how Swervedriver is the most underrated band of the original wave of shoegaze (“we” being me, yes, but I know that there are others out there), this is usually in the context of their gargantuan 1993 masterpiece Mezcal Head (and, to a lesser degree, its rough-sketch prequel Raise from 1991). But, perhaps just as remarkably, Swervedriver was able to weather the years after the shoegaze explosion subsided in a way that most of their peers weren’t–for a while, at least. The excellent 99th Dream was the band’s fourth album, originally released in 1998, and it links their noisier, revved-up past with the expansive psychedelic pop of the then-present with a remarkable deftness. One must wonder what 99th Dream’s legacy would’ve been if it hadn’t come from the minds of a band who were regarded as second-level on a genre that was yesterday’s news; this comprehensive re-release is an especially gregarious invitation to revisit it nonetheless.
Various Artists – From Far It All Seems Small: A Compilation from Seattle’s Underground
Release date: May 24th Record label: KR Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, power pop, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
There’s been a lot of talk about San Francisco, Philadelphia, even Cincinnati as of late, but a new compilation presents a strong argument that “Seattle, the major hub for indie and alternative rock” isn’t something that should be relegated to Sub Pop retrospectives. From Far It All Seems Small is a collection of fourteen new songs from fourteen Seattle-hailing bands which all pull from a few pleasingly-varied strains of modern indie rock. There’s a bit of the Bay Area’s foggy indie pop to this new “Seattle sound”, but it’s louder, more distorted, and blown-out in classic Washington state fashion. Big pop hooks abound, delivered in everything from shoegaze to fuzzy garage punk to 90s-style indie rock. (Read more)
Various Artists – Tales of a Kitchen Porter: A Tribute to Cleaners from Venus
Release date: September 27th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
Assembled by Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records and featuring fifteen bands’ takes on songs from the Cleaners from Venus discography stretched across two sides of a vinyl record and a “special edition” extra 7″, Tales from a Kitchen Porter attempts to right a cosmic wrong (a deep underappreciation of its tribute subject and the project’s ringleader, Martin Newell). I’ve written extensively about the Bay Area indie pop scene from which many of these bands have originated, so it’s not exactly a huge surprise that I enjoy Tales from a Kitchen Porter front-to-back. It’s also not shocking that, given the amount of Newell in these bands’ DNA, that these covers are largely fairly faithful. That doesn’t mean that the acts don’t put their own unique stamps on them, however–some are dreamier, some are noisier, some are more polished, some are more ramshackle-sounding. (Read more)
Winston Hightower – Winston Hytwr
Release date: May 31st Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital
The Columbus, Ohio-based Winston Hightower has been making lo-fi indie rock since the mid-2010s, sometimes just via uploading songs to his Bandcamp and other times via cassettes and CDRs on small labels. Hightower has never released a vinyl record and is still fairly unknown outside of his local region–two problems that K and Perennial Records sought to fix this year with Winston Hytwr, a vinyl compilation of a dozen Winston Hightower songs selected from across his career thus far. Hightower clearly deserves to be considered as an essential part of Ohio’s modern lo-fi pop scene, but Winston Hytwr paints a picture of a musician who isn’t constrained to power pop and 90s-style indie rock either. Plenty of that is there, of course, but Hightower also incorporates more experimental usage of synths and a bit of offbeat jazz sensibilities, among other influences. (Read more)
Workers Comp – Workers Comp
Release date: May 31st Record label: Ever/Never Genre: Garage rock, fuzz rock, alt-country, lo-fi rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Between 2022 and 2023, three different four-song cassette EPs and a 7” single from power trio Workers Comp (singer/guitarist Joshua Gillis, drummer Ryan McKeever, bassist Luke Reddick) surfaced on the Baltimore-based Gillis’ own label, Glad Fact, all of which displayed a strong grasp of distorted, blustery lo-fi garage rock. Their first long-player is a compilation of this previously-released material, put out through Ever/Never Records with the addition of one new song (“Basic Values”). Taken as a whole, Workers Comp evokes a specifically blown-out, ragged version of Americana and rock and roll practiced by the likes of Omaha’s David Nance (with whom the Nebraska-originating McKeever is associated). Wherever Workers Comp go from here, it seems likely they’ll be fuzz-fried and ramshackle to the end. (Read more)
Hey there, readers! It’s a big holiday week, but Rosy Overdrive is sending you to your various family gatherings and festivities with four more good records in tow. We have a vinyl release of a shelved mid-90s album from John’s Black Dirt, plus new albums from Distant Reader, Jose Israel, and Hunger Anthem for you to check out below. There won’t be a post tomorrow, but there should be something up on the day after Christmas (if I get the reissues/compilations list done by then, it’ll be that; it’ll be a Pressing Concerns if not).
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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll (deadline is this Friday, 12/27)!
John’s Black Dirt – Horrible Moments of Upness (Vinyl Release)
Release date: November 25th Record label: Belligerent/Sullen Teen Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, garage rock, noise rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Bushwacker
If you’re tuned in enough to what’s left of “the indie music press”, you might’ve seen a story from earlier this month about how Conor Oberst told his record label at the time, Wind-Up, not to release the debut album from post-grunge detritus Creed. It’s bad enough that Grass Records (as they were known then, pre-rebrand) inflicted My Own Prison on us in their successful bid for a mainstream rock breakthrough, but it also came at the expense of smaller (and actually good) bands like John’s Black Dirt, who were lost in the shuffle. After releasing Perpetual Optimism Is A Force Multiplier on Grass in 1994, the Minneapolis trio met up with Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann the following year to record a second album called Horrible Moments of Upness, but due to the aforementioned record label shenanigans, it never saw the light of day until a quarter-century after its completion. With help from Steve Albini and Taylor Hales (Paper Mice), John’s Black Dirt transferred the recordings from DAT to digital in 2017, made it available to stream in 2020 and, finally, released it on vinyl last month via Belligerent Records. So, what does what turned out to be the final album from bassist Brett Mizelle (who played in Unrest), drummer Mike Huber (who drums on Mercury Rev’s Yerself Is Steam), and guitarist Seth Mindel (apparently the only one of the three who played in another notable Minneapolis band–Mother’s Day) sound like?
Well, to put it reductively–it sounds like the mid-90s indie rock record that its bargain-bin-friendly album artwork (provided by Matt Franzen) hints at. It’s not as angry as the Archers of Loaf, not as heavy as Arcwelder, not as deconstructed as The Grifters, not as poppy as (later) Unrest–but these are the bands I think of when listening to Horrible Moments of Upness. It’s pure blustery Midwestern basement rock music–even in the wild, wild west of mid-90s alternative rock radio, there wasn’t really room for something as earnestly sloppy as “Bushwacker”, the record’s scene-setting opening track. And that’s probably the most accessible thing on Horrible Moments of Upness! John’s Black Dirt aren’t an outwardly abrasive band on this record, but that just means that Horrible Moments of Upness’ inherent oddness is of a more subtle variety. I’m way too deep down the rabbit hole to engage with an album like this normally; to me, the post-grunge Minutemen punk of “In a Dark Room” and the Quarterstick Records-like “My Heart & the Real World” are potential hit singles. The explosive, ugly “How to Destroy Art” is the fiery rock and roll mission statement, the burnt-out slow swayers “Gimme Some Time” and “Carl C. Reep” gorgeous power ballads. That’s what Horrible Moments of Upness sounds like to me–and who are you going to trust, Rosy Overdrive or Alan and Diana Meltzer? (Bandcamp link)
Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone
Release date: November 8th Record label: Lily Tapes & Discs Genre: Folk, slowcore, singer-songwriter Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Emergency
Emmerich Anklam is a singer-songwriter from northern California–born in Santa Rosa, currently based in Berkeley–who has been making music as Distant Reader since 2017. Sometimes Distant Reader treads into the worlds of ambient and drone music, other times towards a more song-based slowcore and folk sound, but there appear to be threads connecting Anklam’s work–like the intersection of nature, man-made climate change, and the mythological nature of “California”, which Anklam has explored in albums like Six Fires in Northern California, Sea Level, and Home Power. The latter of those three was released on Rochester experimental folk imprint Lily Tapes & Discs (Ylayali, Hour, Michael Cormier-O’Leary), and after a period of self-released records, Place of Words Now Gone marks Distant Reader’s return to their roster. Anklam’s latest is a gorgeous slow-folk record–even though his writing is still linked to California, Place of Words Now Gone does remind me of the quieter side of upstate New York folk rock acts like Another Michael, Ben Seretan, and Blue Ranger, so Lily Tapes & Discs feels like a natural place for this record. Anklam recorded Place of Words Now Gone with multi-instrumentalist Andrew Weathers last year at Wind Tide in Littlefield, Texas, and the two of them balance the intimate, quiet nature of Anklam’s writing with a full sound including pedal steel, saxophone, and field recordings from Weathers.
Lily Tapes & Discs describes Place of Words Now Gone as a “fully-realized narrative suite” that “describes an eerie spell of silence that spreads through a remote community”. In this way, it’s in the same vein as Advance Base’s recent album Horrible Occurrences, which also uses silence and hushed tones to mirror the unspoken darkness of small-town America. Anklam doesn’t clearly unspool an obvious story throughout Place of Words Now Gone; the physical CD comes with a lyric booklet so you can try to piece the events together if you’re so inclined, landing on key lines and depictions like the “suffocating smoke” in “Outpost”, or the ten houses “drifting on planks so close to the shore…where one could feel at home once, but never more” in “Ten Houses” (with the striking sound of seagulls present in the background). Weathers and Anklam do dress these seven songs up with the aforementioned instrumentation, but Place of Words Now Gone is unmistakably a folk album at its core; every track centers Anklam’s voice and lyrics, the ambient instrumental side of Distant Reader used as a (nonetheless potent) way to connect these central pieces. It feels right that I’m writing about this album in the no-man’s-land of late December; this is the kind of album that should be stumbled onto unsuspectingly, only to stick with you long after this initial moment. (Bandcamp link)
Jose Israel – To Live in Brief Wonder
Release date: October 31st Record label: 7Songs Genre: Experimental rock, post-punk, art rock, math rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Bring Me Back 2 Life
At the beginning of this year, I heard an EP called Fragments by Chicago quartet Rotundos. The four-song EP (as seen on Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2024) covered everything from garage rock to post-punk to post-hardcore to pop punk in its brief runtime, and it was more than enough for me to be interested in any future records from the band. The new Rotundos album isn’t out yet (sources tell me it may appear early next year), but in the meantime I was happy to find out that one of the band’s members, Jose Israel, has put together a solo album called To Live in Brief Wonder. The record (whose tracklist appears to be different on streaming services than it is on Bandcamp) reflects the adventurousness seen in Israel’s band–To Live in Brief Wonder is a brief but electric collection of everything from polished-up indie rock to lo-fi garage punk to experimental, math-y guitar pop, among several other genres. Israel clearly has enough talent to pull off this kind of jumping around–there are moments in To Live in Brief Wonder so disparate as to be nearly aurally whiplash-inducing, but it’s not like there’s one “truer” part of Israel’s sound than another. Israel’s decided to put it all out there for us to take in on To Live in Brief Wonder, and it’s a good enough album to command the attention it requires.
To Live in Brief Wonder may traverse a lot of ground in a short amount of time, but Jose Israel still takes pains to roll out the red carpet with the attention-grabbing, shined-up indie rock of “Bring Me Back 2 Life” at the start of the record (at least, the version I’ve been listening to). Not that the next few tracks aren’t catchy in their own ways, too, but they’re more muddied, with “Make Me” exploring a distorted, punk-tinged sound in under two minutes and “Yo Voy Con Ti” tempering its bounciness with some moments of rage. To Live in Brief Wonder really goes off the beaten path towards the middle of the record–“Stars in My Eyes” is part mid-tempo indie rock ballad, part jazz-pop, and “Waiting in the Sitting Room” similarly combines fine-edged rock music with outside influences to intriguing ends. If you’re expecting To Live in Brief Wonder to clear things up as it draws to a close, you’ll be left disappointed, as the album finishes with a sixty-second garage punk ripper (the appropriately-titled “Corto!”), a wild post-hardcore track (“Permanent”), and a brief, quiet jazzy benediction called “I Can’t Tell”. This is To Live in Brief Wonder, and we have to either take it or leave it as is. I’ll take it. (Bandcamp link)
Hunger Anthem – Lift
Release date: December 6th Record label: Cornelius Chapel Genre: Power pop, pop punk, college rock, punk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Lift
Hunger Anthem began in the early 2010s as a solo project for singer/guitarist Brendan Vaganek in Buffalo, New York; Vaganek eventually relocated to Athens, Georgia and added drummer Cameron Kelly and drummer Margo for a tight power trio lineup. Hunger Anthem’s output has been pretty sporadic–a self-titled album in 2011, an EP in 2015, a few scattered singles–but their long-in-the-making second LP, Lift, sounds like the band attempting to make up for lost time. Released via notable southern punk rock label Cornelius Chapel, Lift zips through a dozen tracks that range between a snotty, garage-y flag-waving pop punk sound and the catchy college rock in which Hunger Anthem’s hometown is steeped. Pretty much every ingredient for a classic pop punk record is here–a bunch of hooks, Vaganek’s anthemic bleat of a lead vocal, a firing-on-all-cylinders instrumental trio, Margo’s sparingly-used but expertly-deployed backing vocals. It’s all over in a little over a half-hour, but there’s more than enough on Lift for us to sit with for however long it takes Hunger Anthem to make some more tunes.
Lift starts with nothing less than the “Sun”, a song that begins with a clean electric guitar and eventually congeals into a utilitarian but still potent mid-tempo power pop introduction. Hunger Anthem’s punk side first shows up in the slightly mussed up southern punk of “Remedy” (and then again not long afterwards in the vaguely threatening “Ways”), while the bright, jangly “Patron” warps Hunger Anthem’s sound into a slightly more on-edge sounding version of classic college rock (rivaled only by excellent penultimate track “Pattern” in this regard). I think my favorite version of Hunger Anthem’s sound is when the trio stretch things out and get a bit more ambitious–the first indication of this on Lift is on “Soul of Clay”, which is a far-reaching power-punk-ballad that’s nearly twice as long as anything else on the record up until that point. My overall favorite moment on Lift is the title track, though–it doesn’t quite sound like anything else on the record, and the refrain is slowly pieced together rather than mercilessly flogged. “Lift” is a desperate-sounding track, with the guitar chords frantically bashed out; the bass does the melodic heavy lifting, which is the most “pop punk” thing about it. Or maybe it’s the vocal trade-off between Margo and Vaganek that slowly takes shape over the course of the track, which only adds to the eventual catharsis. Most records like this don’t have something like “Lift” on them, but thankfully Hunger Anthem either don’t know that or don’t care. (Bandcamp link)
Hey there, everyone! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns; usually, I’d be looking at new albums coming out tomorrow in this column, but because there isn’t anything coming out this Friday that I want to write about (that I’ve heard yet, at least), we’re instead looking at some records from November and earlier this month I’ve been meaning to get to: a “lost EP” from Poem Rocket, and new albums from Loose Koozies, Daydream Three, and Dead Senses. It’s been a busy week, so if you missed either Monday’s Pressing Concerns (featuring Mystery Fix, Yussa-Exide, Possum in My Room, and Schande) or Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2024 (which went up Tuesday), 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. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
Poem Rocket – Lend-Lease
Release date: November 15th Record label: Silver Girl Genre: Art rock, post-rock, post-punk, noise rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Depth Charge
Poem Rocket are a New York indie rock band that formed in the 1990s, and they do indeed sound like a New York indie rock band from the 1990s. Husband and wife duo Michael Peters (vocals/guitar) and Sandra Gardner (vocals/bass) co-founded the band in 1992, eventually adding guitarist Mike Knowlton (who has recently started making music as Unlettered) and drummer Peter Gordon, both previously of the band Gapeseed, in the late 90s. The bulk of the band’s output (two albums and two EPs) came out between 1995 and 2000, with 2007’s double album Invasion! being the only new Poem Rocket material since that point. This year brought an unexpected Poem Rocket resurgence, however–new live shows, talk of new material in 2025, and the unearthing of Lend-Lease, the band’s “lost EP”. These four songs were recorded in 1999 but shelved until last month, when Silver Girl Records (Dewey Defeats Truman, The Summer Hits, Spare Snare) put the record out on vinyl. Lend-Lease is a portrait of a band tapping into a long line of New York art rock groups from Sonic Youth to Live Skull to Blonde Redhead, but it’s also a document of a group in its own prime and speaking a unique, self-cultivated language.
Lend-Lease is a sprawling record–it takes twenty-six minutes to wind its way through these four songs. The music of Poem Rocket is a bit hard to describe; it’s almost easier to say what they don’t sound like on Lend-Lease. They aren’t low-end-worshipping Unsane-ish cavemen noise rock, nor are they clear-cut Sonic Youth distortion/fuzz architects–and they’re not comparable to any of the main “post-rock” bands either. Poem Rocket’s version of rock music is deliberately moving, fully-sketched out but not overwhelming, and lengthy without being “jammy” or drone-y. Lend-Lease is a marvel of well-orchestrated indie rock made with a utilitarian toolkit–every surprising acoustic bit, every piano accent, every confident step taken forward by the electric guitars feels like the result of much deliberation and mapping. The first half of the EP is Poem Rocket at their purest, with “Depth Charge” and “Vera Shore” both largely digging into the soil of post-punk and experimental rock steadily and skillfully. On the flipside of Lend-Lease, it’s time for some relative extremes: the acoustic guitar that grounds “Black Freighter Contraband” helps Poem Rocket hold back just enough to pull off the folk and blues phantoms injected into the track, while eight-minute closing track “A.R.P. (Air Raid Protection)” is Poem Rocket at their most urgent, indeed sounding like an air raid siren for parts of the song. This only applies to parts of “A.R.P.”, though, not all of it–like the rest of Lend-Lease, Poem Rocket are running a marathon, not a sprint. (Bandcamp link)
Loose Koozies – Passing Through You
Release date: December 6th Record label: Tall Texan Genre: Country rock, alt-country Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: The Butterfly
California label Tall Texan’s underappreciated discography as of late has included everything from Houston alt-country to Bay Area jangle pop to Pittsburgh post-punk; the imprint got its foot in the door in the world of Michigan indie rock by releasing a 7” from Idle Ray last year, and they’ve reaffirmed their commitment to the Mitten this year by putting out Passing Through You, the second LP from Detroit quintet Loose Koozies. Guitarist/vocalist/songwriter E.M. Allen, pedal steel guitarist Pete Ballard, bassist Erin Davis, drummer Nick German, and guitarist Audrey Moran are a group of Michigan ringers (German’s played in the band Don’t with Interior Geometry’s Jared Sparkes, Davis in Failed Flowers with Fred Thomas and Anna Burch) who came together to make rollicking country rock in the late 2010s, with a string of singles culminating in their debut, 2020’s Feel a Bit Free. Passing Through You might’ve taken four more years to materialize, but Loose Koozies’ follow-up statement is a solid and thorough one; these fourteen songs are impeccably written and presented, sounding polished but loose and automatic but thoughtful. There are a few surprises to be found across the forty-odd minute LP, but for the most part the five Koozies lock in and play their parts to their best abilities, turning in a very smooth journey.
Even on Passing Through You’s quietest moments, the songs still bear the mark of a five-piece band–and, by the same token, even Loose Koozies at their most “rock” is a bit more reserved and clever than your Replacements-level alt-country group. “Haworthia” opens the curtains on the record with the platonic ideal of mid-tempo country-infused rock music, while the bass-forward rock and roll of “Stuntman” (“I’m a stuntman / Give me something stupid to do and I’ll do it for you”) gets the train rolling and the charming duet between Allen and Kelly Jean Caldwell in “I Won’t Be Leaving Here (Unless It’s With You)” is accented by Moran’s guitar leads. A record as substantial as Passing Through You can be broken up into several distinct sections–there’s a laid-back stretch after the opening gunshot, followed by a resurgence in the run from “Highways Gone” to “Wobbly Wheel”. This time around, though, the rousing country rock of the band flirts with new ideas in the former track’s almost psychedelic embrace of kraut-y rhythms and with the surprising synth accents found in the song immediately after it, “The Butterfly”. There’s plenty more to absorb and dissect throughout Passing Through You; thankfully Loose Koozies have built up the record in a way that welcomes us back to the well as many times as we need to do so. (Bandcamp link)
Daydream Three – Stop Making Noise
Release date: November 8th Record label: Self-released Genre: Fuzz rock, noise rock, garage rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Death Makes Fun of Us
Sicilian musician Enzo Pepi has played in local groups Twig Infection, The Pepiband, and Carmelo Amenta’s band, and at the end of last decade he started a solo project called Daydream Three. Stop Making Noise is the third Daydream Three album (following 2019’s Daydream and 2021’s The Lazy Revolution), and it was recorded live by Carlo Barbagallo at the Arsonica concert hall in Syracuse, with the goal being to capture the sound of the Daydream Three live band (Pepi, bassist Alessandro Formica, and drummer Vincenzo Arisco) as accurately as possible. Both the ironic album title and the (presumably less ironic) name of the band paint an accurate picture of what Daydream Three sound like at their most plugged-in–a loud, fuzzed-out indie rock group in the vain of the more straightforward side of Sonic Youth, Crazy Horse, and other groups who favor blunt, stoic, and noisy rock music. Even with the setup favoring maximum rock and roll, however, Stop Making Noise has plenty of subtler moments, and Pepi’s performance as a frontperson (a particularly European mix of blasé, nostalgic, sarcastic, and nihilistic) is as key to the feel of the album as the buzzing six-strings.
Stop Making Noise opens with “Death Makes Fun of Us”, which is a quite fitting introduction to Daydream Three–it’s loud, it’s catchy, Pepi sounds like he’s shrugging in his vocals, and the lyrics will probably make you feel bad. It’s hardly the only real rocker on the record–Stop Making Noise is full of lumbering walls of sound, from the twitching “We Are Not Guilty” to the windswept “Flow” to the almost-glam “Mad Dog” to the big riff of “You Can’t Deceive Me Anymore”. Daydream Three are so committed to seeing out this side of their music that the exceptions stick out even more strongly; for one, the decision to put the half-asleep, acoustic guitar-led “Meat Sauce” second in the album’s sequence is a bold one (ah, a Sicilian band with a song called “Meat Sauce”; can’t make this stuff up). There’s a bit of fuzz in mid-record highlight “Only Sweet Words”, but it’s in the service of a cavernous, subdued mid-tempo slowcore-influenced song that shows a lot more restraint than Daydream Three bother with elsewhere on the album. And then of course there’s “You Have No Control”, the album’s closing dirge, which ends Stop Making Noise with that cheery message about life. Let’s, uh, turn the amplifiers back up rather than dwell on that for too long, shall we? (Bandcamp link)
Dead Senses – DREAMLESS
Release date: November 1st Record label: Record Heads Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: That’s Amoré
There’s no mistaking it; Dead Senses are a noise rock band. Bassist/vocalist Michael Siciliano, guitarist Sal Lorenzana, and drummer Scott Werren have all played in “punk, hardcore, metal, noise rock, and power violence bands in LA, Chicago, and Pittsburgh” before meeting in the former of those three cities to form Dead Senses in 2022 and getting to work by putting out two demo EPs and a full-length (via Already Dead Tapes) over the next year and a half. Their second album is called DREAMLESS, and while the trio may have wide-ranging musical backgrounds, they’re locked in on that classic noise rock sound for the entirety of the nineteen-minute LP. Sure, they mention all the right names in their biography–Chat Pile, The Jesus Lizard, Pissed Jeans–but it takes more than that to make something vital-sounding in this subgenre. DREAMLESS is pulverizing, angry, and hopeless–Siciliano, Lorenzana, and Werren all seem to be on the same dismal page with regards to this sound. Siciliano is a classic rant-yeller, and the rhythm section is just as rock-solid as one could possibly want in a noise rock record–there’s nothing fancy to be found on DREAMLESS, of course.
Dead Senses make the inspired decision to open up DREAMLESS by beating us all into submission with “Writhe”–Siciliano wields the titular word like a giant club, both commanding us to do what it suggests and describing what the band themselves do throughout the song. The drain-circling gives way to the unhinged “Fake”, a more limber rocker featuring a particularly wild Siciliano vocal (“So wipe those tears away / We’re fake / And no one cares!” is Dead Senses’ positive message this time around). The electric, hot-to-the-touch garage punk instrumental of “That’s Amoré” is oddly catchy, but rest assured that Siciliano’s “That’s love!” is delivered with the bluntest sarcasm. The gray fireworks simply don’t stop as DREAMLESS roars into its second half–the noisy flare-ups in the title track are a nice touch, and Dead Senses practically sum up their entire record with the pointed noise-punk of “It Just Gets Worse” (Siciliano oscillating between raging against the titular fact and dejectedly accepting it). I wouldn’t call Dead Senses a “neat” band, but they wrap up their business in clean fashion–all eight songs on the record are between a minute and a half and three minutes, and the LP itself is done in under twenty. Dead Senses respect the mercy rule, even if the world they depict in their music decidedly doesn’t. (Bandcamp link)
Hot on the heels of Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2024 last week, the next year-end list on the blog gives the little guy some attention. And by “little guy”, I mean EPs, obviously. This is the EP list. Putting together 100 LPs is the most time-consuming part of the year-end list season for me, so I’m probably most “proud of” that list, but the EP list might be my favorite one to do for the blog, because it typically results in highlighting the smallest and least-praised acts of any of RO’s lists.
Here are links to the EPs on this list that are on streaming services: Spotify, Tidal. Look for a Best Compilations/Reissues of 2024 list and a couple more Pressing Concerns before the year’s out. To read about much more music beyond what’s on this list, check out the site directory, and if you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. Thank you for reading, and, last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
25. Mei Semones – Kabutomushi
Release date: April 5th Record label: Bayonet Genre: Jazz-pop, indie pop, bossa nova, orchestral pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
I hadn’t been familiar with Mei Semones before hearing Kabutomushi, but the Michigan-originating, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter has been putting out singles and EPs for a couple of years and seems to have gotten a bit of buzz despite no full-length albums as of yet. It’s hard not to like her after hearing her latest five-song EP, however–Kabutomushi offers up superb indie pop music with bits of jazz, J-pop, bossa nova, folk, indie rock, and orchestral pop. It’s certainly “pop music from somebody who studied guitar at Berklee”, but the writing of Semones (who sings in both English and Japanese) is simply too warm and vibrant to fall into the potential pitfalls that come with such a designation.
24. Fold Paper – 4TO
Release date: July 12th Record label: Royal Mountain Genre: Math rock, post-punk, noise rock Formats: Digital
Recorded by Electrical Audio’s Greg Norman and mastered by Stuck’s Greg Obis, 4TO finds Winnipeg’s Fold Paper declaring themselves to be part of the burgeoning scene of noisy North American post-punk and math rock made up of bands like Pardoner and their tourmates Pile. Although 4TO only has four tracks, each of them stretches past four minutes, and they all contain intriguing and kinetic moments of inspired experimental rock music, ensuring that it’s a memorable first statement from Fold Paper. 4TO does a lot in its brief runtime (from hypnotic instrumental math rock to fiery garage rock to blunt-object post-punk), hinting at several exciting directions in which Fold Paper could expand themselves from here. (Read more)
23. Rotundos – Fragments
Release date: January 12th Record label: Self-released Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, art punk Formats: Digital
Chicago group Rotundos have been pretty active as of late (not to mention a recent solo album from one of their members, Jose Israel), but I’m going all the way back to January for their four-song EP Fragments. Fragments introduces the band in a brief but quite variable package–it covers art punk, garage rock, post-punk, and maybe even a bit of mathy post-hardcore, all in under a dozen minutes. It’s hard to get a handle on Rotundos here; one minute, they’re firing off the ragged power poppy-punk rock of “Maybe”, another one and they’re plowing through the furious garage punk of “I’m on the Run from Your Heart”. It’s certainly exciting to try and figure them out on Fragments, though.
22. Dazy – IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) / I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found)
Release date: October 25th/December 5th Record label: Lame-O Genre: Power pop, fuzz rock, fuzz pop, pop punk, alt-dance, Madchester Formats: Digital
I have no problem combining these two Dazy EPs, since they’re still only fifteen minutes long (and thus shorter than several other entries on this list) when taken together. Brief three-song EPs were important in the early days of James Goodson’s one-man fuzzy-power-pop project, and he’s returned to the format for the most substantial new Dazy music since 2022’s OUTOFBODY and its companion EP OTHERBODY. The trick that Dazy pulls on IT’S ONLY A SECRET (If You Repeat It) and I GET LOST (When I Try to Get Found) is remarkable–it’s a clear sonic evolution, leaning more than ever on electronic and dance music, but it still only sounds like Dazy. (Read more – IT’S ONLY A SECRET)
21. Citric Dummies – Trapped in a Parking Garage
Release date: August 9th Record label: Feel It/Saalepower 2 Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, hardcore punk Formats: Vinyl, digital
“I’m driving a piece of shit, because I’m a piece of shit”. “Look out world, I’m eating Arby’s”. And, of course, “I’m trapped in a parking garage”. These are but a few of the Citric Dummies’ proclamations on Trapped in a Parking Garage. Just a few months after the Minneapolis trio bravely took on their hometown heroes in Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass, the Wesley Willises of Midwestern garage punk returned with a four-song 7” assault that continues their steamrolling balance of raw rock aggression and an irreverent, charmingly goofy side. There’s hardly a shortage of hardcore and garage-infused punk bands across these United States at the moment, but few are doing it with as much personality as the Citric Dummies.
20. Various – CYLS Split Series #5
Release date: November 22nd Record label: Count Your Lucky Stars Genre: Power pop, pop punk, emo, alt-rock, indie pop, slowcore Formats: Vinyl, digital
Nearly a decade after the fourth entry in their split 7” series, key fourth-wave emo label Count Your Lucky Stars Records is experiencing a renaissance of its own, with both new bands and familiar faces releasing great music on the label over the past few years. It seemed like a perfect time to renew the series, and label head Keith Latinen didn’t have to look far to find worthy contributors. The four bands on CYLS Split Series #5 have all released great albums on Count Your Lucky Stars within the past two years and change, and the exclusive tracks they bring to this EP are all just-as-strong entries into these acts’ relative discographies. Regardless of one’s previous relationship (or lack thereof) with Camp Trash, Expert Timing, Mt. Oriander, and Thank You, I’m Sorry, this is a great place to begin familiarizing one’s self with them. (Read more)
19. Podcasts – Supreme Auctions
Release date: September 13th Record label: Omegn Plateproduksjon Genre: Jangle pop, post-punk, power pop Formats: Digital
The first Podcasts release since their 2023 self-titled debut LP is a brief but welcome EP called Supreme Auctions, which zips through “3.5 songs” in about eight minutes. It’s the Oslo quartet at their most laconic yet–nothing on this EP is longer than three minutes, and the first song (an instrumental introduction that I’ll assume is the “.5” track) comes in at under a minute. More than just the song lengths, though, Supreme Auctions contains some of the band’s most unvarnished pop songwriting yet–the odd, tricky detours in Podcasts’ jangly power pop haven’t vanished exactly, but with little time to spare, they’re kept more towards the margins, giving these tracks a bit more runway with which to take off. (Read more)
18. Tulpa – Dismantler
Release date: February 7th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, power pop, dream pop Formats: Cassette, digital
Leeds’ Tulpa have already played shows with some bands I like (Lightheaded, 2nd Grade), so I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that the band’s debut EP, Dismantler, is right up my alley. It’s a very strong indie pop record of several stripes–the polished side of Tulpa is up front via the slick power pop group of the title track and the punchy twee-punk of “Danse Macabre”, while the other four tracks on Dismantler show off Tulpa’s ability to make noisier, more mussed-up guitar pop music. Tulpa deploy distortion expertly (see “Hellbound” and “Echo Maker”) but they aren’t wedded to it, leading to a pleasingly varied first statement.
17. Surrealistic Pillhead – Surrealistic Pillhead
Release date: May 8th Record label: Future Shock Genre: Garage rock, art punk, garage punk Formats: Cassette, digital
Surrealistic Pillhead are a new band from Philadelphia featuring a few notable musicians (guitarist Ian Corrigan plays in Star Party, bassist Hart Seely in Sheer Mag), and their debut EP is out via legendary Cincinnati garage rock imprint Future Shock. Surrealistic Pillhead is a fairly hard-to-categorize rock record–there’s a garage rock and punk attitude, yes, and “Angora Branch” is snotty enough for the entire four-song EP, but there’s power pop, classic rock, and a bit of glam in EP’s more accessible moments (like my favorite track, “It’s Over”). Right up until the wild synths wiggle throughout closing track “Sense of Things”, one gets the sense that Surrealistic Pillhead are already pretty good at several different things, and I’d certainly be interested in hearing more from them.
16. Rip Van Winkle – The Grand Rapids
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Splendid Research Genre: Post-punk, experimental rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
I liked the one Guided by Voices album that came out this year (June’s Strut of Kings), but my favorite Robert Pollard release of 2024 was the debut from his new Rip Van Winkle side project. For those of us who believe Pollard is always at his most brilliant with a little bit of unpredictability and weirdness thrown into the mix, The Grand Rapids EP is a breath of fresh air, a throwback to early Guided by Voices grab-bag EPs where huge pop songs sit side by side with clanging basement post-punk. The triumphant lo-fi “The Metal Clip That Goes Over” and the acoustic fragment of “Storage” have to share space with the freaky instrumental “Images from a Dead Planet” and the raving “He Did the Clock”, and everything feels all the more vital for it.
15. The Gabys – The Gabys
Release date: September 6th Record label: Fruits & Flowers Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, lo-fi pop, slowcore Formats: Vinyl, digital
Though they may be across the globe in Britain, The Gabys fit very well among the quieter side of the current guitar pop revival happening in the San Francisco Bay Area–if that’s your speed, you will find The Gabys’ ability to make timeless-sounding, wistful indie pop songs from the most basic of ingredients quite impressive as well. The Gabys has a few hallmarks–simple chord progressions delivered with as much feeling as possible, wispy, gazing-out-the-window dream pop-style vocals, unobtrusive drum machines, classic rock and roll slowed to a crawl. It’s an EP that’s gotten the art of giving us exactly what’s needed and nothing more down pat. (Read more)
14. Honeypuppy – Nymphet
Release date: January 24th Record label: Indecent Artistry Genre: Indie pop, twee, fuzz rock, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital
Honeypuppy are a new group from Athens, Georgia featuring four-fifths of the lo-fi indie rock group Telemarket. Nymphet is our first glimpse of Honeypuppy, and they seem more like straight shooters than Telemarket–bandleader Josie Callahan is an excellent pop songwriter, as all of these songs boast big hooks. And yet, Honeypuppy still find time to break out some noisy, speedy, guitar-freakout indie rock in their opening statement, almost certainly benefiting from the quartet’s previous experience playing together. Nymphet is always a pop record, whether it’s via girl-group-on-Kill Rock Stars vibes, subtle toe-tappers, or laid-back sunny flower-garden pop. (Read more)
13. Apollo Ghosts – Amethyst
Release date: February 23rd Record label: You’ve Changed Genre: Jangle pop, guitar pop, power pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Apollo Ghosts are a Vancouver-based college rock/jangle pop quartet who I was surprised to learn have been around since at least the late 2000s. I’d seen some raving about the group (guitarist/vocalist Adrian Teacher, bassist Amanda Panda, guitarist Hasan Li, and drummer Dustin Bromley) around the time of the 2022 double album Pink Tiger–it passed me by, but I caught February’s Amethyst, and it hooked me. On the seven-song record, Apollo Ghosts fall somewhere in between fellow Canadian guitar poppers Kiwi Jr. (the sardonic, Pavement-fluent side) and Ducks Ltd. (the casual, flowing melodic side); sometimes Teacher comes off as more serious, sometimes fairly goofy, but regardless of that, Amethyst is always on some fully-developed, all-in New Zealand-style guitar pop.
12. Fast Execution – Menses Music
Release date: August 8th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Punk rock, pop punk, fuzz rock, riot grrl Formats: Vinyl, digital
From the title on down, it’s not hard to gather that Oakland’s Fast Execution are drawing from classic riot grrl on Menses Music, although the punk trio’s debut release is firmly on the more polished and tuneful side of the subgenre; their brief but memorable first impression is made to the tune of garage rock, power pop, and West Coast pop punk. As a frontperson, Alex Velasquez does indeed pull off riot-punk sloganeering, but for a record whose press bio says it was inspired by “ire” (at the male-dominated nature of rock music) and “hatred” (of “patriarchal machinations in rock music/modern society at large”), she displays range beyond the anger one would expect across the sub-fifteen minute EP. (Read more)
11. Dagwood – Pollyanna Visions
Release date: September 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop, slacker rock, pop punk Formats: CD, cassette, VHS, digital
After a decade of home recording their sharp, hooky alt-rock, power pop, and punk, New Haven’s Dagwood decided it was time to make a record in a proper studio. None other than go-to indie punk engineer Justin Pizzofferato was enlisted for the task, and the band traversed up to his Easthampton studio, Sonelab, to record the six-song Pollyanna Visions EP. Perhaps a tinge more laid-back than last year’s Everything Turned Out Alright, Dagwood on the whole lose little of their charm in a formal recording setting and continue to deliver hook-heavy, punk-influenced power pop effortlessly. I thought home-recorded Dagwood sounded just fine, but if the studio helped continue the band’s hot streak, then I’m all for it. (Read more)
10. Slake/Thirst – Hunting Dust
Release date: March 2nd Record label: Self-released Genre: 90s indie rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Digital
Slake/Thirst made a joke about “beat[ing] the ‘sounds like Pavement’ allegations” upon sending their debut EP, Hunting Dust, to me, and while that band is definitely an ingredient in Hunting Dust (vocalist Bobby Cardos does sound a bit like Stephen Malkmus, yes) as well as several of their contemporaries, it impresses me just how confident Slake/Thirst are in their explorations of 90s-inspired indie rock. The Brooklyn trio microgenre-hop across the 22-minute EP, stretching their sound into the cosmos and truncating it for quick hitting, but they find melody in just about everything they do. Slake/Thirst really sound like they’ve hit on something already–I even wish the long songs went on a bit longer here. (Read more)
9. Loto – A Year in Review
Release date: January 12th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, bedroom pop, folk rock Formats: Digital
A Year in Review is a four-song EP that came out at the beginning of this year and, according to Loto’s Lautaro Akira Martinez-Satoh, sums up their 2023 (“It sucked”). Despite such a dour point of origin, A Year in Review is a quite beautiful record, even as a close reading of Loto’s lyrics reveal images of torment, despair, and pain among their lo-fi but full-sounding pop music. Loto pull together a small but substantial collection of music that’s surprising and all-over-the-place but quite accessible when it wants to be–about half of it is lo-fi and folk/rock based, while the other half leans a bit more into experimental music and “art pop”. As good as A Year in Review is, I do still hope that Loto had a better 2024. (Read more)
8. Mealworm – Mealworm
Release date: February 9th Record label: Mealworm Genre: Singer-songwriter, indie pop, bedroom pop, folk Formats: Digital
I’ve heard a decent amount of Portland-based singer-songwriter Colleen Dow’s solo material and their main band, Thank You, I’m Sorry, but the debut EP from their latest project Mealworm is the best thing front-to-back that I’ve heard from them yet. The Mealworm EP is brief–three songs, less than nine minutes–but it’s a heavy listen as Dow immerses themself fully in writing about people formerly in their life who’ve since passed away. Dow sounds lucid and clear moving through the jaunty pop and bedroom folk rock of “Stick n Poke” and “Meal Plans”, respectively, while the dramatic, synth-colored “Takeout Receipts” is the one track where the haziness of Dow’s remembrances starts to be reflected in the music.
7. ME REX – Smilodon
Release date: May 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, folktronica(?) Formats: Digital
After releasing a rare proper full-length last year, 2024 saw ME REX make a triumph return to their preferred format–the four-song EP. The digital-only, self-released Smilodon feels like ME REX’s conscious attempt at a “lower-key” release–only, the songs didn’t seem to get the memo. If you’ve enjoyed the London trio’s unique sound on previous records–smartly-written indie folk rock in the vein of the Mountain Goats or Frightened Rabbit but with a wholehearted embrace of synths and sparkling pop music–you will find plenty to enjoy on Smilodon, an EP that does everything you’d want a ME REX record to do in ten minutes and change. (Read more)
6. Sailor Down – Maybe We Should Call It a Night
Release date: August 16th Record label: Relief Map Genre: Midwest emo, indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital
Chloe Deeley began Sailor Down as a solo bedroom folk project, and its second EP is its first as a proper quartet. On Maybe We Should Call It a Night, Sailor Down already have a distinct sound down as a unit on the record; its six songs pull together 90s Midwest emo, no-frills indie rock, and the more melancholic sides of twee and indie pop for a nostalgic, accessible, but hardly surface-level record. Maybe We Should Call It a Night is disproportionately full of memorable lyrics and lines for a small release; the writing in these songs feels drawn from imagined conversations and late-night pacing sessions, which makes the realizations and punchlines feel stumbled-upon and thus land even harder. (Read more)
5. Friends of Cesar Romero – Last Summer a Year from Now
Release date: June 13th Record label: Doomed Babe Genre: Power pop, garage rock, pop punk Formats: Digital
South Dakota’s J. Waylon Porcupine once again had a busy year releasing strong power pop and garage rock as Friends of Cesar Romero–the two song “More Like Norman Fucking Mailer” single deserves a mention, but Porcupine’s most substantial release of 2024 was the five-song, nine-minute Last Summer a Year from Now EP. Last Summer a Year from Now is Friends of Cesar Romero in the lightning round, with only one track breaking the two-minute mark, but every song on here is a reminder that this is one of the most consistently strong power pop projects going. It’s hook after hook after hook here, with even the token punk track (“Kinetic Threat”) getting its fair share in.
4. Mt. Worry – Die Happy
Release date: February 2nd Record label: Mountain of Worry Genre: Shoegaze, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, noise pop Formats: Digital
Philadelphia-originating fuzz rock supergroup Mt. Worry have an impressive pedigree, but last year’s debut EP A Mountain of Fucking Worry developed a sound distinct from the members’ various other projects, one that fits in well with their city of origin’s shoegaze/noise pop scene. Now with its members evenly split between Philly and Chicago, Mt. Worry are thankfully still going strong, with Die Happy arriving almost exactly a year after their first EP. Die Happy is brief–it’s ten-minutes long, and features only four songs–but it’s incredibly strong nonetheless, retaining the loose, “anything goes” energy of the debut but while also feeling like the work of a more cohesive unit. Explosive power pop, lumbering fuzz rock, and mutant, heavily-distorted bedroom pop all work in tandem with each other here. (Read more)
3. Mister Data – Missing the Metaphor
Release date: September 13th Record label: Little Lifeforms Genre: Folk rock, power pop, indie pop Formats: CD, digital
Mister Data’s latest, a five-song EP called Missing the Metaphor, is a pretty big departure for the Houston group. Much of this can be chalked up to some major lineup changes since last year’s Pleasure in a Fast Void, including dropping down to a trio from a quintet. Missing the Metaphor is the sound of a band soldiering forward nonetheless, finding a new sound that emphasizes the songwriting and lyricism–and in the process, creating their strongest work yet. Intentionally or otherwise, Missing the Metaphor’s writing touches on stumbling forward uncertainly but bravely, dealing with the agony and ecstasy in trying to live for something–anything–bigger than one’s self. Missing the Metaphor is remarkable in its unflinching, cohesive cosmic ugliness, reaching for interstellar utopianism but still suffering from the indignity of life on Earth nonetheless. (Read more)
2. Mopar Stars – Burning Question
Release date: May 3rd Record label: Furo Bungy Genre: Power pop, fuzz rock, alt-rock Formats: Digital
One of my favorite under-the-radar debut EPs of last year was Mopar Stars’ Shoot the Moon, an awesome record of fuzzed-out Philadelphia power pop helmed by Nao Demand (who also plays in Poison Ruïn and Zorn). Despite Demand’s other musical concerns, Mopar Stars (also featuring Bill Magger and Evan Campbell) is back a year later with Burning Question, a six-song EP every bit as catchy and smooth as their first one. The opening title track and “Severed Head” are two of the best power pop songs you’ll hear this year easily, and that’s not to diminish the rest of Burning Question either–the cranked-up rock and roll of the middle two tracks and the more sprawling final two songs ensure that we’re given Mopar Stars’ strongest single statement yet.
1. Wavers – Wavers
Release date: May 21st Record label: Musical Fanzine Genre: 90s indie rock, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Wavers are a new Pacific Northwest quartet who proudly declare their love of Discount, J Church, and Versus on their Bandcamp page (with “any of the emo stuff that NUMERO GROUP has reissued” helpfully added on for those of you who aren’t familiar with those could’ve-been-canonical-indie-rock groups). Their first release is a self-titled cassette EP, which finds Wavers sketching out their sound–a little bit of emo, some 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie pop, and even a bit of punk attitude in between the cracks–in under ten minutes. There’s no cover or shelter of any kind on such a short release–every moment of the EP counts, and Wavers deliver nothing less than five massive, economical indie rock songs in it. I’ve got a very good feeling about this band–get on the Wavers train early with me right now, and thank me later. (Read more)
Rosy Overdrive 