Pressing Concerns: Party’z, Earth Ball, Inland Years, Fotokiller

Second Pressing Concerns of the week! A new album from Party’z, a tape from Inland Years, a live record from Earth Ball, and a reissue of an album from Fotokiller. Also, there was a Pressing Concerns yesterday featuring Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, and LP Gavin.

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.

Party’z – Afterparties

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Storm Chasers LTD/Friend Club
Genre: Fuzz rock, punk, alt-rock, garage rock, emo-rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Night Ride

Back near the beginning of 2022, a new band from Chicago called Party’z made their debut with a four-song self-titled EP. At the time, Party’z was a quartet led by Kittyhawk/Joie De Vivre’s Mark Jaeschke and also featuring bassist Clare Teeling, keyboardist Delia Hornik, and drummer Andy Hendricks, and despite Jaeschke’s (and the other members’) background in notable fourth-wave emo bands, the Party’z EP was a full-bodied embrace of lo-fi, amp-cranked, fuzzy power pop. Party’z eventually received a vinyl release through Storm Chasers LTD, who are also co-issuing Afterparties, the band’s debut album. Three years later, the band have added two new guitarists in Danny Radovanovic and Johnny Fabrizio–but despite the extra six-string firepower, Party’z actually backs off of the noisy distortion-fest of their debut EP and shoot for something more layered and (relatively) mellow. Mentioning names like The Cure and The Pains of Being Pure of Heart as inspirations, Jaeschke is still making loud garage-y indie rock on Afterparties, but it’s shot through with classic indie pop and even a bit of new wave melancholy–the result isn’t unlike a certain other Chicago band who famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) attempted to merge these disparate worlds (I’m talking about The Smashing Pumpkins, if that wasn’t clear).

The fuzzed-out basement rock of “Titled” opens Afterparties by consciously calling back to their previous release, but it’s the full-band might and the clear Jaeschke vocals that the song offers up as it reaches its climax that most prepare us for what Party’z has planned for the rest of their debut LP. “The Last Garage on Planet Earth” also looks toward the past (it’s supposedly about defunct venue Gnarnia and 2010s Chicago DIY music more broadly), but the huge-sounding, anthemic rock and roll sound that Party’z embrace on the song is totally new territory for them. Afterparties contains at least one other straight-up rocker with the strength to rival “The Last Garage on Planet Earth” in the pissed-off, Siamese Dream-esque “Dust Settles Grey”, but some of the best moments on the record are the more subtle ones. “Night Ride” and “All Old Songs” are both first half-highlights and they’re the best of both worlds for Party’z– sweeping alt-rock undeniably in their DNA, but with sincere, almost shy indie pop cores that actually aren’t all that removed from what modern Slumberland bands like The Laughing Chimes are doing. Both of those songs eventually balloon to thundering conclusions, but “Save Grace” and “The Only One” in the record’s second half hold just a bit back (and the latter, with its bold synth touches, is a unique late-album highlight). Party’z last foray into something new is five-minute closing track “Only When We Speak”, which injects some weary, Keith Latinen-y emo-rock into the persevering instrumental. One imagines that it’s refreshing for the members of Party’z to try their hand it something different, and Afterparties feels stronger for it. (Bandcamp link)

Earth Ball – Actual Earth Music – Volumes 1 & 2

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Upset the Rhythm
Genre: Free jazz, noise, experimental rock, noise rock, improvisational
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Live at the Fox Cabaret

Hailing from the forgotten city of Nanaimo, British Columbia, the experimental/improvisational band Earth Ball was formed by John Brennan, Isabel Ford and Jeremy Van Wyck sometime around the beginning of this decade, and they later added Kellan McLaughlin and Liam Murphy to make a clean quartet. Earth Ball releases have come at a steady clip since 2021, and they linked up with London label Upset the Rhythm last year for the LP It’s Yours–and, all the while, gaining a reputation for wild live shows where the band attacks noise rock and free jazz with their improvised chops. Their newest release for Upset the Rhythm is called Actual Earth Music – Volumes 1 & 2, and it brings all this together–it’s a full-on live album, with each side of vinyl capturing an Earth Ball set from the past two years. Side A is from The Fox Cabaret in Vancouver on August 4, 2023 (the band were opening for noise legends Wolf Eyes), and the flipside is a show the following year at London’s famed Café OTO with two renowned experimental musicians (Chris Corsano on drums and Steve Beresford on piano) sitting in. The first two volumes of Actual Earth Music are distinct beasts, but they both capture a group that manages to hang together despite being fully set loose on stage.

Admittedly, I’m not as well-versed in music that’s as far out there as this–it reminds me of noise/jazz-rock bands like Sunwatchers and Writhing Squares, but blown up and stretched-out into two twenty-minute, towering blocks. The Fox Cabaret side is the more “rock” side to my ears–not that we’re listening to Boston or anything, but for the most part Earth Ball take the form of a thundering, booming noise rock band on this first volume. There are a few stretches with vocals–they’re a real curiosity, and far from an afterthought, but they’re also not exactly the main draw here. Perhaps the squealing horns are the main character of Volume 1–at the very least, they’re the most consistent noisemaker on top of the rhythms. The Café OTO is even more “out there”–we can thank Beresford for that, as his unbridled piano playing (the bio for the album mentions a moment where he was “scraping children’s toys along the strings”) takes this recording to strange and uncharted territory almost immediately. Volume 2 never becomes the full-on squall of noise that Volume 1 consistently is–scurrying pianos, jabbing strings, piercing horns, robotic vocals, and limping percussion all drop in and out for twenty minutes in an unsettling, unsatisfying orchestra. It seems like it’d be even harder to coordinate something like this second volume, but I doubt Earth Ball think of it in those terms. (Bandcamp link)

Inland Years – Keep Your Eyes on the Road

Release date: February 14th
Record label: BSDJ
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, lo-fi indie folk
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Make You Feel Better

Ryan Daniels is a musician who played in a few hardcore/screamo/metalcore groups in Massachusetts in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Hassan I Sabbah, The Fall of Leningrad, The Red Chord), but the now-Brooklyn-based artist has made lo-fi indie rock/pop on his own under various aliases (his own name, Double Entendre, Inland Years) for a while now. The oldest Daniels release on Bandcamp is from 2004, but Inland Years really came into focus in 2023–Keep Your Eyes on the Road is the fourth Inland Years record since the beginning of that year. Released on cassette via Tokyo label BSDJ and recorded and played entirely by Daniels himself, Keep Your Eyes on the Road is thirteen songs of hissing, lo-fi, folk-ish guitar pop music delivered in seventeen minutes. It seems like Inland Years has garnered comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Cleaners from Venus in recent years, and those (particularly the former) aren’t wrong, but between Daniels’ low-key but emotional vocals and the acoustic skeletons from which most of the songs are built, it reminds me more than anything of Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh (and honestly there’s a little bit of J. Mascis in here, too). Daniels is a hazy frontperson, the songs come in and out of focus, and the tape is over before you know it but not without nailing a lot of excellent lo-fi pop.

According to Daniels, Inland Years’ home-recording setup is “cassette 4-tracks, a digital capture and one microphone setup”–it’s certainly lo-fi, and parts of it are a headache to try to listen to on a car stereo, but Keep Your Eyes on the Road still delivers pop music unencumbered. At its catchiest, Keep Your Eyes on the Road really does feel like a power pop album, if a somewhat bashful one–“Better Off on My Own” kicks things off with a gorgeous melody that sees itself out in under sixty seconds, “Alone” is a somewhat noisy, somewhat folky, somewhat 60s-pop bedroom creation, and “Make You Better”, “What I Always Said”, and “Put Me Down” are a surprising second-half trio of unvarnished jangle pop. Inland Years really earns the “90s basement indie rock” comparison when Daniels deviates from this script, though–either by getting a little more intimate with quiet strummers like “When Is the Right Time” and “What Can You Do” or upping the noise with messiness like “Fools Paradise”. These diversions help situate us in the realm of a lo-fi indie rock alchemist, although they (like the rest of the record) are brief–Inland Years does indeed keep its eyes on the road. (Bandcamp link)

Fotokiller – Eerie Nostalgia (Reissue)

Release date: February 7th
Record label: It’s Eleven
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, new wave, goth, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Control

Eerie Nostalgia, the debut album from Berlin post-punk trio Fotokiller, is less than two years old–but it already has an extensive release history. Following a demo cassette in 2021, Eerie Nostalgia was originally released on vinyl and digitally by order05records in 2023, then on cassette via Colossus Tapes the next year. This year, Fotokiller linked up with It’s Eleven Records (Ambulanz, Mantarochen, Distant Relatives), and the first order of business for the new partnership was getting Eerie Nostalgia back in print on vinyl (the “limited-edition” order05 run had been sold out for a while now), and now that I’ve heard the album I can see why. Like all the It’s Eleven-associated bands I’ve heard, Fotokiller make music where “post-punk” and “garage rock” intersect, but they’re a lot less dark and noisy than most of their roster. The trio (made up of guitarist/vocalist Sofy, drummer Kitty, and bassist/synth player Damon) are a good reminder that The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees could write killer pop songs in addition to their canonical goth-rock work, and though they cite Joy Division explicitly as an influence, there’s plenty of New Order in Eerie Nostalgia, too. 

Like a good post-punk band, pretty much everything on Eerie Nostalgia is being led by Damon’s bass, but it’s also very likely to be the melodic centerpiece on any given song here, as well. Fotokiller sound fairly laid-back overall on their first album, so it’s probably not hard for the low-end to take the reins away from these songs, anyway–Sofy’s vocals are confident but not overbearing, content to let these songs speak for themselves without the drama-queen overselling you’ll get with this kind of music on occasion. “Control” and “Stop the World” open Eerie Nostalgia by being just about as “casual” as post-punk/garage rock could possibly be, all driving bass and unhurried melodic guitar accents that bleed into each other. “Confidence Killed” is a bit more heavy-duty in its execution, and there’s darker hues in the distant-sounding “Sea of Thoughts” and the fairly tense closing track “Echoes”, but these aren’t huge departures, and they come among tracks like “Isolation” and “Asleep” that continue Fotokiller’s propensity for hook-first post-punk and new wave at full speed. It’s really a seamless first statement for a punk rock band, and now that Fotokiller have linked up with a label that’ll keep it in stock, hopefully we’ll hear where they’ll go from here soon. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Telethon, The Unfit, Quinine, LP Gavin

First Pressing Concerns of the week! New albums from Telethon and LP Gavin, a compilation album of singles and EPs from The Unfit, and a new EP from Quinine.

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.

Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Halloween
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)

Telethon are from Wisconsin. They describe their music as “powerpoppunkrock for the modern kids”, and their latest album as “11 different character studies delivered via rock & roll”. Their last album was named after an Everclear lyric and was my favorite album of 2021 (and, between you and me, my second favorite of the decade so far). They have a keyboardist who goes by the name “Gene Jacket”. Nobody else is doing it like Telethon. Ever since Swim Out the Breakers, the sixth Telethon LP has been at the top of my “most anticipated albums” lists, and after a few years of being in the works, they just went ahead and surprise-released Suburban Electric earlier this month. It certainly sounds like a Telethon album, even though it also sounds like a conscious attempt not to repeat the sprawling, overstuffed, guest musician-heavy Swim Out Past the Breakers. There are still a few auxiliary performers here (Justin Mullens on trumpet and French horn, Rima Fand on violin and viola, Peter Hess on saxophone and clarinet), but Telethon proper (Jacket, lead vocalist Kevin Tulley, bassist Alex “DeepSoundz” Meylink, drummer Erik “Drum” Atwell, and guitarist Jack “Psycho J” Sibilski) are the unambiguous vocal point of Suburban Electric. If it’s possible for Telethon’s blend of maximalist power pop, Midwestern workhorse pop punk, and dashes of ska and emo to ever be “streamlined”, Suburban Electric is it.

Suburban Electric is still a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, though. As Telethon cut out the brief “snippet”-type tracks of Swim Out Past the Breakers, every song on this album becomes a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on the album’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me). Suburban Electric could be Tulley’s bid for “best lyricist in indie punk rock whatever currently going”, not in a “heartache-inducing one-liners to write on your spiral-ring notebook” way but in a “how the hell does he fully step into the worlds of his characters in an opaque but charismatic way over and over again like that?” way. Telethon surprise musically on Suburban Electric, too–with the “hook-a-second” record set by Swim Out Past the Breakers unlikely to be bested any time soon, Telethon instead set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers like “I Believe in Slime” and “Lloyd” and genre excursions like the cabaret/ska-pop “The Pen” and the disco-pop-touched “I Think I’ve Seen Enough”. Of course, the power-pop-punk rush of “Tumbleweeding” and the frantic final track “Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)” are both as catchy as anything on Swim Out Past the Breakers (putting your catchiest and most crowd-pleasing song dead last on the album? Again, nobody’s doing it like Telethon), and while “Checker Drive Revisited” is necessarily more subdued than the song from the previous LP to which it nods, it lives up to the lofty connection. I suspect I’ll be coming back to Suburban Electric quite a bit this year–Telethon took a different route this time, but no corners were cut here. (Bandcamp link)

The Unfit – Disconnected

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Share It Music
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bad Guys

Who doesn’t love a good noise punk band from the Pacific Northwest? Let me introduce you to a Seattle-originating quartet called The Unfit if you’ve yet to make their acquaintance. The band was formed back in 2012 by four Emerald City rock veterans–vocalist/bassist Jake Knuth, guitarists Michael Lee and T.J. Johnson, and drummer Tyler Johnson–and their roots go back even further, as half of them played in the group Subminute: Radio in the late 1990s and three-fourths of them were in Lila in the early 2000s. Apparently spread thin geographically these days, The Unfit has a fairly irregular release schedule–it took until 2020 for a self-titled debut to show up, and their second LP, Disconnected, isn’t even a proper “album”, instead serving as a collection of the two EPs, one single, and one compilation track they’ve released this decade thus far. Disconnected is fiery and alive nonetheless, following in a grand lineage of Seattle punk bands wielding a combination of wild, sardonic vocals and huge guitars to explosive ends. Too limber (and, let’s be real, not nearly self-serious enough) for the blunt-object post-punk/noise rock revival, but too heavy and hardcore-indebted for “egg punk”, Disconnected is ten songs and twenty-five minutes of The Unfit beating their own personal sweet spot to a pulp.

They might sound like it initially, but listening to Disconnected reveals that The Unfit are anything but nihilists. The first song on the compilation, “Bad Guys”, is a dispatch from a dark reality of heartily encouraged violence and warfare (“I smell blood / I kinda want blood / A little bit of blood never hurt anyone”), but the very next song, “Gatekeepers”, is an explicit rejecting of fighting for fighting’s sake when we’ve got bigger fish to fry (“I know you like to fight / I know you think you’re right / But when you point at your neighbor / The gatekeepers are laughing”). The Unfit are more than just hardcore sloganeers, though–the ballistic “Who’s in Charge?” and (especially) the jokingly self-serious “Condemned” (“You may sleep like a baby / You may die like a king / But I’ll know where I stood / And that counts for something, right? / …Right?”) keep their heaviness light. The Unfit may not be Devo-core, but they share a distaste and healthy fear of the technocratic future–the title track to Disconnected is a searing centerpiece, repeating its mantra (“I think there was a time / Before everyone everywhere / Had to know about everything / Everything all the time”) like a prisoner of war trying to remember their past life (in a way, it makes a twisted sense that their most popular song is their Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack contribution, “To the Fullest”). If “Disconnected” wasn’t enough, “The Big Machine” drives the point home: “It’s broken / So throw that shit out, right?”. (Bandcamp link)

Quinine – World Tattoo

Release date: February 11th
Record label: Cherub Dream
Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, fuzz rock, space rock, grunge
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: He’s Fine

“The world is pretty messed up. These songs are all kind of just about that.” So says the Bandcamp page for World Tattoo, the latest release from a quintet from Sacramento called Quinine. It may be the group’s first EP for Bay Area shoegaze/fuzz pop imprint Cherub Dream Records, but they’ve already strongly entangled themselves with the label–they released a split single with Welcome Strawberry on it last year, and two of the band’s members (guitarist Cole Apperson and bassist Jacob Waite) are in Cherub Dream band Blous3. Aside from a 2023 demo tape and the aforementioned split single, World Tattoo is the first Quinine record, and the band (also made up of guitarist/vocalist Taylor Kohl, guitarist Zack Bissell, and drummer Wyatt Cermak) showcase an aptitude for Hum-like space rock, grungey, shoegaze-informed alt-rock, and even bits of pieces of noise rock and post-hardcore in these four songs. There are some clear hallmarks to Quinine’s sound–Kohl’s monotone, slightly-buried vocals, fuzzed-out guitars, just general greyscale vibes–but these four tracks are all pretty different from one another when you look beyond the band’s stubborn devotion to basement indie rock anonymity.

“He’s Fine”, the opening track, is the rhythm section workout–Waite and Cermak are on fire throughout this one, doing their best to provide a platform for the band’s three guitarists to play around in Sonic Youth land. The title track follows, and it’s the one with “the riffs”; there’s a nice, squealing truckstop guitar part right in the center of it, making it the one song that really does evoke Hum and the heavier side of the alt-rock/grunge/shoegaze revival thing of which Quinine are on the periphery. The biggest “what the?” moment on World Tattoo has to be the eerie synths (I assume?) that open up “Waste of Time”, which Quinine then follow up with pounding drums and hypnotized vocals in a move straight out of the gothic-era Swans playbook. “Waste of Time” gets more recognizably “fuzzed-out basement rock” as it goes on, but it never totally abandons its haunted undercurrent, buzzing right along until Quinine bow out with the shortest song on the album (and, unless they changed any song titles, the one repeat from their demo tape), “Why Even”. Kohl is finally buried under an avalanche of guitars in this one; not all of the song is pure shoegaze, but when the squall kicks in, it’s a category 5. Similarly, not everyone necessarily is looking for another band like Quinine in their lives, but if you’re open to them, they’re doing as much as they can on World Tattoo. (Bandcamp link)

LP Gavin – Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Reprieves, Etc.

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud
Genre: Lo-fi pop, slacker pop, fuzz pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: DTMWTD

A month or so ago, Safe Suburban Home Records released Old Master, an album by Publicity Department, a semi-solo slacker rock project from a London lo-fi pop musician named Sean Brook. The similarities between Old Master and the Safe Suburban Home record that immediately followed it–the debut album from a musician known only as LP Gavin–were apparent to me even before I found out that Brook is actually Gavin’s primary (and, I think, sole) collaborator on Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc.. Like Publicity Department, LP Gavin is a London-based artist who combines the off-the-cuff pop brilliance of 90s American basement indie rock with classic British guitar pop songwriting, although the differences between Gavin’s music and that of his associate become pretty apparent when we get beyond the surface level. Compared to Brook’s lethargic, almost folk-rock leanings, Gavin is much more electric and wide-ranging (perhaps because, unlike Brook with his group Brunch, Gavin doesn’t have a “band” to explore louder material), actually living up to an album biography that cites both Ovlov and Robert Wyatt as influences. Beyond the moments of actual “fuzz rock”, though, Trials, Tribulations… is marked by a psychedelic, distorted haze that hovers over even the album’s more gentle moments; Gavin’s low-key British vocals mumble and stumble through these bright and inventive instrumentals, only sometimes the main character in his own show.

Opening track “Launderette Euphoria” is a warm addition to a time-worn indie rock tradition–pop music from New Zealand as interpreted by noisy American bands, kind-of-loopy vocals on the soft end of the spectrum and the guitars (both soaring, revved-up melodic leads and steady, chunky, fuzzy power chords) creating a gradient all their own, too. “DTMWTD” (that’s “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”) does the opening track one better with some straight-up, satisfying fuzzy rock and roll, but Trials, Tribulations… only gets weirder and weirder as it goes on. The midsection of the album is very easy to get lost in–between the plodding-along “Yes Yes”, the mid-tempo fuzzed-out “Man with the Keys”, and the late-night folky haze of “Casino”, Trials, Tribulations… becomes an indie rock train derailing. LP Gavin has a couple more strong pop songs up his sleeve towards the end of the album with the bar-piano mutation of “No Inferno” and the fuzz-pop singalong “(Excluded from) The Banquet of Life”, but both tracks maintain Gavin’s buried wooziness nonetheless. When LP Gavin close Trials, Tribulations… with the whisper-quiet acoustic song “Drawing Board”, it feels less like a stylistic choice and more like the necessary exhausted conclusion to an exhaustive debut record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, Dead Bandit

We’ve got four great albums coming out tomorrow, March 14th, in the Thursday Pressing Concerns: new LPs from Bambara, Lone Striker, Olivia’s World, and Dead Bandit. Check them out below, and if you missed this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s Pressing Concerns featured Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen, and Tuesday’s featured ODDLY, The Sprouts, Celebrity, and Mirrored Daughters), 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.

Bambara – Birthmarks

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Bella Union/Wharf Cat
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Letters from Sing Sing

I don’t even really know where to begin with this one, but it’s good enough to be on the blog, so I have to start somewhere. I’ve always been vaguely aware of Bambara as one of those modern “dark post-punk” revival bands for a while now, but I’ve received a crash course on them thanks to Birthmarks, the group’s fifth album. It turns out that the New York-based trio have been around for longer than I realized (2007, but playing together under different names for even longer) and are originally from Athens, Georgia. Two-thirds of the band are brothers (vocalist/guitarist Reid and drummer Blaze Bateh, with William Brookshire rounding out the trio), and their sound is gothic, “arty”, and influenced by Nick Cave and Swans–putting them closer to Iceage and Protomartyr than, say, IDLES and Viagra Boys. Another key part of Bambara is Reid Bateh’s high-concept, “literary” writing, storytelling delivered in a croaking, hypnotic baritone, a feature that’s only gotten more pronounced as Bambara has gotten longer in the tooth. This brings us to their first album in five years and first for Bella Union, Birthmarks, partially recorded by Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton in England and then further developed by the band in Brooklyn. Birthmarks is an ambitious album in more ways than one, the trio augmenting their post-punk sound with atmospheric electronica, psychedelia, even a bit of hip hop production to keep up with Reid’s convoluted writing. 

I don’t exactly have a handle on the story of Birthmarks at the moment, but that’s not a problem. These songs aren’t chronological (of course they aren’t), but there are recurring characters and motifs, allusions to murder and evil and recurring references to photography, snakes, Christianity, and rural America, among other signposts. I want to be clear that Bambara do not sound like The Hold Steady, but if you read that description and thought of a more post-punk Hold Steady (which is Lifter Puller, I guess), then you’re not alone. Birthmarks is always intimate, but it sort of starts out at its most uncomfortably close–Bambara put all their blood, sweat, and semen into stuff like opening track “Hiss”, Afghan Whigs style, and the fruits of their expanded musical palette (I do, in fact, hear the dream pop and trip hop influences in that one and another early one, “Face of Love”) help Bambara land these tracks, too. Bambara zoom out a bit thematically as Birthmarks goes on, but the music doesn’t follow any clear trajectory; post-punk seethers like “Letters from Sing Sing” and “Pray to Me” sit alongside cavernous art rock material like “Because You Asked” and “Smoke”. It all feels very precarious; Bambara are holding up something almost too big for any indie rock band here, and there are moments when the cracks in the grandiosity show–like guest vocalist Madeline Johnston (of Midwife) making an aside as the character Elena about someone’s jacket left at her house at the end of the spoken-word voicemail “Elena’s Dream”. These wobbles and glimpses don’t make the inferno of closing track “Loretta” any less all-consuming, though. (Bandcamp link)

Lone Striker – Lone Striker

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Safe Suburban Home/Repeating Cloud/Hidden Bay
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, power pop, folk pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Funny Way of Showing It

We talk about Tom Brown a lot on Rosy Overdrive. His sometimes-solo-project, sometime-five-piece band Teenage Tom Petties has become a fixture of Pressing Concerns in recent years, and Rural France, his slightly longer-in-the-tooth duo with Rob Fawkes, has made some appearances on the blog as well. And now there’s Lone Striker, which begs the question: what could Brown possibly need a third alias for? Well, while Teenage Tom Petties and Rural France both worship at the altars of lo-fi power pop, college rock, and jangly indie pop, Lone Striker is an attempt by Brown to do something markedly different. The self-titled debut Lone Striker album is apparently five years in the making, recorded almost entirely by Brown at home utilizing “wobbly doo-wop samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds” as well as his typical indie rock instrumentation. It sounds like a huge departure, right? Well, yes and no. There are no boxroom bangers on Lone Striker, no, but there’s still plenty of excellent guitar-driven (or, at least, co-driven) pop music here. Brown may be primarily drawing from psychedelic and atmospheric-pop 90s indie groups like Sparklehorse and Mercury Rev, but Lone Striker works because he’s able to speak the same fuzzy, half-remembered, mid-century Americana language that those bands also spoke (somehow, despite being British), and actually elucidates a core tenet of his other projects in doing so.

A good deal of the songs on Lone Striker I could imagine as Teenage Tom Petties tracks if they were sped up and given a lot less of a…tired reading. The hook to “Blip One” may be a sample of a blue-moon croon, but the rest of the song is vintage Tom Brown, the perky “Cursed Like Roy” is a little bit of a mid-record pick-me-up, and “Funny Way of Showing It” is as sugary and theatrical as anything off of Hotbox Daydreams (even if, slowed down and relying on chimes and pianos, it also kind of sounds like Christmas music). Meditating on the lilting pop music of Lone Striker has only reaffirmed my belief that the strength of the Teenage Tom Petties comes from Brown’s uncanny knack for bridging the gap between British folk-pop music and the Americana canon, and Lone Striker is merely a continuation of the project from a different angle. Thematically, stuff like “Never Blown a Kiss”, “Cling”, and “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever” are universal-language type things, the kind of lovelorn, heart-on-sleeve lyrics that evoke vocal jazz, early country music, or ancient folk songs–depending on whichever was most formative to the listener. Still, though, there are plenty of moments exclusive to Lone Striker that we just wouldn’t have gotten with Brown’s other projects–the little country flourishes of “Hurry Up, You’re Taking Forever”, that sample in “Never Blown a Kiss”, pretty much the entirety of the self-immolation acoustic brush-pile of “Pinocchio”. Lone Striker is just as much a great pop album as any of Tom Brown’s others, even if it does at times have a funny way of showing it. (Bandcamp link)

Olivia’s World – Greedy & Gorgeous

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Little Lunch/Lost Sound Tapes
Genre: Noise pop, twee, fuzz rock, indie punk
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sourgum

Greedy & Gorgeous has been a long time coming. Olivia’s World’s Tuff 2B Tender was a favorite in the early days of the blog–it was one of my favorite EPs of 2021, serving as an incredibly strong introduction to the fuzzed-out twee-punk of the Australian (and, for a while, Canadian) group. Now based in Sydney, bandleader Alice Rezende and longtime bassist Joe Saxby recruited guitarist Jordan Rodger and drummer Daan Steffens to help put together the first Olivia’s World album (and first new music of any kind in four years), Greedy & Gorgeous. I wouldn’t expect anything less than indie pop with an instrumental heft and a clear personality from Olivia’s World, and Greedy & Gorgeous delivers–Rezende remains a striking frontperson, thoughtful and occasionally less-than-clear but never guarded in her writing. The band are tougher and more unified than ever before; the pop hooks of Tuff 2B Tender are still here, but the Pacific Northwestern looseness is augmented by a hard-charging, Dinosaur Jr. fuzz rock streak that remains constant throughout the album. Sometimes Olivia’s World will come out swinging, other times they’ll turn on a dime from bouncy, offbeat guitar pop to the big finish, but Greedy & Gorgeous keeps finding its way back there.

Greedy & Gorgeous is a weird record, but Alice Rezende is probably weird, and the way that Olivia’s World make some odd choices while still holding onto “pop music” feels pretty authentic. “Porcupine Girl” is a modern twee classic–it has a childlike, dreamlike quality to it, sort of like a nursery rhyme set to wobbly electric guitar, and it serves as an extended introduction to the world of Greedy & Gorgeous. It’s time to grow up in “Baby Bathwater”–but it’s not the pop rock blooming that we’d expect, instead settling into a somewhat angry mid-tempo track that does indeed get pretty loud in the refrain. The K Records/Raincoats pop of “Healthy & Wealthy” is probably the catchiest thing on the album up to that point, kicking off Greedy & Gorgeous’ golden era that continues with the wonky, post-punk twee pop journey of “Empresário”, the slacker rock-new wave hybrid “Chemlab”, and “Sourgum”, the most full-on eighteen-wheeler rock and roller on the album (it rules, of course). Rezende is all over the place on Greedy & Gorgeous; for every explosion like “Weird Guy” (in which she asks “Can you stop / being a weird guy?”) there’s something less cathartic, like the pacing of “Healthy & Wealthy” (“Are you TV-ready? / I’m not TV-ready”) or the only “soft” song on the record, closing track “Beauty Bar”. In the latter, Rezende asks “Am I just a peasant here?” and mutters about giving off some “awkward vibes”. We’re in Olivia’s World, though, where such scattered thoughts make for excellent fodder for gorgeous, sparkling indie pop. (Bandcamp link)

Dead Bandit – Dead Bandit

Release date: March 14th
Record label: Quindi
Genre: Post-rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Half Smoked Cigarette

The instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl have been making music together as Dead Bandit since the dawn of this decade–their debut, From the Basement, came out back in 2021, and I first heard them thanks to their sophomore album, 2024’s Memory Thirteen. Memory Thirteen was a satisfying collection of wide-open, guitar-led post-rock that evoked the vastness of Canada (the band’s homeland, and where Schimpl is still based) while incorporating just a bit of the ambient rock of Swan’s adopted city of Chicago. The third Dead Bandit album, self-titled this time around, doesn’t mess with Swan and Schimpl’s winning formula, although there are differences between this one and Memory Thirteen that I’ve picked up on. Dead Bandit sound a little busier, buzzier, and more electronic this time around–there’s still a lot of empty space on Dead Bandit, of course, but there’s a greater interest in letting prominent beats plod across the landscape. An LP with sixteen songs, Dead Bandit ends up offering a surprisingly large amount of variations on post-rock, ambient, post-punk, electronic, and dub–these short, discrete songs still evoke something greater than their parts when taken as a whole, though.

Early highlights like “Weeds” and “Half Smoked Cigarette” are essentially instrumental indie rock songs, but Dead Bandit isn’t content to stay in this space–more dubby (“Glass”) and ambient (“Milk”) songs coexist right next to them. Dead Bandit find themselves somewhere in between for a lot of this album–take “Pink”, for example, which starts out with a typical rock band set up but doesn’t stay overly committed to it, dipping in and out of focus for three minutes. The folkier side of Dead Bandit isn’t as prevalent on this record, but “Up to Your Waist” is an excellent acoustic-driven exploration that captures this version of post-rock strongly enough for the entirety of the album. Late-record moments like “Spidery Ways” and “Koyo” continue to push Dead Bandit forward–the former is made up of showy (for Dead Bandit, at least) guitars, sounding a bit jazzy and a smidge more overtly Chicago, while the latter embraces the mechanical nature of the drum machine at its core to offer up a grey, rhythmic march. Whether it’s with synthesizers, basslines, guitar lines, or just some kind of strange rumbling sensation whose origins I’m not sure of, Dead Bandit spend their third album practicing different ways to say the same grey story. It’s one worth paying attention to. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: ODDLY, The Sprouts, Celebrity, Mirrored Daughters

Welcome to the Tuesday Pressing Concerns, which is a bit of an odds-and-ends post collecting some records from January and February I’d been meaning to get to for a while now. We’ve got new albums from ODDLY and Mirrored Daughters and new EPs from The Sprouts and Celebrity! Also, if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen), check that one 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.

ODDLY – Swerve

Release date: February 12th
Record label: Damnably
Genre: 90s indie rock, noise rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Nautilus

I first heard Kyoto indie rock group ODDLY via their 2021 record Odd Man Out–technically it was the trio’s second EP, but given that it was largely made up of the same songs of their first one, 2019’s Loaded, it was basically an expanded version of their debut release. My favorite song on Odd Man Out was “Concrete Jungle”, a really cool jangly dream pop rocker, but other moments on Odd Man Out hinted at a darker and noisier sound; Naoko Yutani (vocals/guitar), Tomoyuki Watanabe (vocals/guitar), and Keita Kishimoto (vocals/drums) have taken their first real chance to show how they’ve evolved since their first recordings to further explore this end of their music. Once again released via East Asian indie rock chronicler Damnably (o’summer vacation, Say Sue Me, Hazy Sour Cherry), Swerve is ODDLY’s long-awaited first LP, and it’s a leveling-up moment for the trio (plus guest musicians Kentaro Kikuchi on bass and Takanori Ito on guitar). The trio pursue a tangled indie rock sound on this record’s busiest moments, a torrent that will likely please fans of Sonic Youth (Damnably, associated with plenty of lesser-heralded corners of 1990s American indie rock, makes a Seam comparison instead).

As for ODDLY themselves, they say they’re influenced by everything from the bedroom pop of Fazerdaze to the modern alt-rock of Wolf Alice–and Swerve does sound like the work of a band who love noisy indie rock and pop hooks in equal measure. It’s all pulled together in this LP–you get both sides of ODDLY from the very beginning, and while one end of their sound wins out in some of these songs, the other side of the coin is never far. “Nautilus” is a friendly-enough opener, a bit of noisy, catchy rock and roll that then plows into the harsher post-punk pummeling of “Alligator”. “Lozenges” is the first song on Swerve that dips back into the catchy dream pop energy of “Concrete Jungle”, and “Zero” impressively takes that attitude and musses it up a bit with some distorted alt-rock. Whichever member(s) of ODDLY that are singing lead vocals in “Easy Mark”, “Artificial”, and “Ride” help these tracks come out on the dirtier (or Dirty-er) end of the record, although the latter song in particular has a sleazy, classic rock/almost power pop catchiness to it. ODDLY re-record one of their old songs towards the end of the record (“Ruh Ruh”) and ramp up the post-punk noisiness, but dream pop ODDLY returns in full force in the record’s last two tracks, “(In) Mates” and “Rent for Mark”. The former song at least has a driving indie rock rhythm section for most of its length, but the last song veers into acoustic “Fade into You” territory for most of its five minutes. Of course, “Rent for Mark” ends with a blistering, cacophonous guitar solo–one last Swerve. (Bandcamp link)

The Sprouts – One Room to Another

Release date: January 31st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, folk pop, jangle pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sometimes

I know it’s probably hard to keep all of these Australian indie pop bands straight these days, but The Sprouts are a name you ought to make a note of in your spiral ring. They’re the project of Rob Remedios, who also plays in The Small Intestines, and they’re rounded out by Innez Tulloch, Tom Marinelli, and Matthew Ford. Their debut release was a 2023 cassette called Eat Your Greens on Ford’s record label, Tenth Court, and it’s a nice collection of vibed-out guitar pop music, sometimes folkier and more casual than the full-band excursions of The Small Intestines, sometimes with a garage-y edge to it, but always catchy. I didn’t get around to writing about Eat Your Greens in Pressing Concerns, but there’s a new Sprouts record out, a self-released five-song EP called One Room to Another which promises “15 minutes of music. On 15 tapes. 15 dollars each” (which have already sold out by the time I’ve gotten to writing about this. Sorry for failing you, readers!). Unlike Eat Your Greens, One Room to Another is more or less a Remedios solo release–Marinelli plays on one song, The Small Intestines’ Matthew Liveriadis is on a track, and Remedios’ parents sing on a song, but that’s it.

Even compared to the comfortable soft launch of Eat Your Greens, One Room to Another is an incredibly laid-back piece of Aussie lo-fi pop rock. The arrangements are simple, the instrumentation is utilitarian, the fidelity “good enough”. “Sometimes” being in the EP’s first slot has a lot to do with that feeling–it’s the longest song on the record at a mean three minutes, and it’s largely made up of Remedios stumbling through some simple acoustic chords with a nice little guitar lead overdubbed upon it. It’s a brilliant song, maybe my favorite on the record, but it’s also far from the snappiest piece of lo-fi pop rock. You’ll get that soon enough, though, if you’re patient–“Black Leather Jacket” (the Marinelli one) is shambling but purposeful, “Up There for Thinking” has a little bit of Chris Knox opaque franticness to it, and the electric guitar-led “Demons” (hello, Liveriadis) is…well, it’s got an electric guitar in it! Just as soon as it began, One Room to Another is wrapping up with “Pash” (which confused me until I learned that it’s a cover of a 90s Aussie pop hit by Kate Ceberano–oh, those Australians!) and “I’m Feeling Good”.  That latter song is the one with the Remedios Family Singers–classic pop style, they answer their son’s lead vocals (“I’m feeling good (He’s feeling good!) / When we’re together (When you’re together!)”). I take back what I said earlier–it’s not really a solo record at all. (Bandcamp link)

Celebrity – Automatic Changer

Release date: February 5th
Record label: Mach Nine
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, punk rock, alt-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Wildflower

Celebrity appear to be something of an under-the-radar punk supergroup. Vocalist/guitarist Kevin Kiley plays in the bands Militarie Gun and LURK, and the quartet is rounded out by Knuckle Puck’s Kevin Maida (who’s also Kiley’s LURK bandmate) on guitar, Chris Mills of Harms Way and Inclination on bass, and Drew Brown of Weekend Nachos and Hate Force on drums. These bands form an extreme spectrum, ranging from hardcore punk to powerviolence to metal, but Celebrity is pretty far removed from that kind of music (as you can probably surmise by the fact that they’re on Rosy Overdrive). Following a self-titled three-song EP in 2022, the four songs of Automatic Changer dropped unannounced and with little fanfare at the beginning of February, showcasing the work of an exciting, polished, and pretty catchy post-punk band. Kiley’s vocals, while impressive in their own right, aren’t the primary hook-drivers of Automatic Changer–it’s an always-pressing-forward rhythm section and guitars that do their best to fill in the gaps. The album bio references Sonic Youth and Television, although it’s more greyscale and quietly intense than those bands; likewise, it’s somewhat close to the realm of new wave and even goth-indebted punk bands like Home Front and Schedule 1, but without much more than a hint of those acts’ melodrama.

All four songs on Automatic Changer are winners, but “Wildflower” is pretty clearly the (should’ve-been) single; it’s a hard-charging rock-and-roll epic marked by waterfalling guitars, that always-on rhythm section, and Kiley’s most emotive vocals on the entire EP (although it should be telling that they don’t even kick in until over a minute into the track and it’s hardly even noticeable with what the six-strings are doing up until that point). The post-punk party continues on with “New Touch”, the shortest song on Automatic Changer (the rhythm section even drops out for a second at the bridge; this is Celebrity at their “punchiest”). By the second half of Automatic Changer, Kiley isn’t even really singing anymore, instead becoming a rhythmically-speaking rambler as Celebrity move into the dark, bass-led (like, even more bass-led than before) “DSY” (it’s louder and more “rock band”, but it kind of reminds me of R.J.F., Ross Farrar from Ceremony’s post-punk solo project). Celebrity actually indulge in a bit of atmospherics in the final song on the record–“Heads on Fire” starts with a minute of ambient noise, but when the trumpet-blast guitars kick in, the quartet get back to business as usual for four more minutes. The members of Celebrity clearly have a knack for this kind of music, so hopefully they’ll find some more time in their busy schedules to continue this train of thought. (Bandcamp link)

Mirrored Daughters – Mirrored Daughters

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Fika Recordings
Genre: Chamber folk, folk rock, ambient
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: The New Design

Mirrored Daughters are a collaboration between members of three notable British acts: vocalist Marlody (who released a solo album on Skep Wax in 2023), The Leaf Library (whose drummer Lewis Young initially kickstarted the project and later brought in bandmate Matt Ashton), and Firestations (whose guitarist/vocalist Mike Cranny also contributes). Together with cellist Hannah Reeves, the five of them have combined to create an album of “lo-fi folk-pop and explorative woodland meditations” that is their self-titled debut LP. The members of Mirrored Daughters have backgrounds in various shades of indie folk, pop, and electronic music, but their first record flows together with remarkable ease. Inspired by Greater London’s Epping Forest (where it was partially recorded), Mirrored Daughters is delicately ornate, with strings, horns, and woodwinds (in addition to Reeves’ cello, Young plays violin and Cranny plays saxophone and clarinet) sprawling out slowly but confidently. Bright acoustic guitars and Marlody’s voice ensure that it isn’t wrong to call Mirrored Daughters a pop album, but neither do Mirrored Daughters shortchange the more experimental side of their music; the instrumental, ambient, nature-sound pieces are integrated smoothly alongside the folk songs.

The sounds of bells, birds, and analog synths greet us in opening instrumental “Mirror Descend”, and not even Cranny’s smooth saxophone contributions detract from the ancient, natural feeling that the track evokes. Mirrored Daughters don’t stay there, though–the next song is called “City Song”, and it begins the band’s journey to the tune of string-laden folk music (“Leave the sound / And your heavy head behind,” sings Marlody). “The New Design” and its warm clarinet accents drag Mirrored Daughters into full-on chamber folk territory (well, maybe “drag” is the wrong word; it’s more like “gently float”). Much of the rest of Mirrored Daughters is in the instrumental vein of “Mirror Descend”, although the meditations of “The Ambresbury Daughter”, “Something Hollow”, and “Decrowned” are given olive branches via some of the proper “folk” songs, such as the slightly haunted, wintry dream-folk of “Unreturning Sun”. That song meets the eerier parts of Mirrored Daughters halfway, and while the soft, Belle & Sebastian-like chamber pop of “An Open Door” and “Waiting at the Water” don’t do so quite as much, the band still give them readings that are subdued enough that it doesn’t feel like it would disturb the forest. Right up until the opener’s mirror-image closing track “Mirror Ascend”, Mirrored Daughters sound like they’re drifting and stepping carefully through something much larger than them. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, Spinnen

Hey there, everyone! We’re back with a fun Monday Pressing Concerns, featuring new albums from Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen. Some really good stuff down below! Let’s get to it!

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.

Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Indie pop, sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 2005

It’s a great time to be a fan of the music of Jon Massey. The Cincinnati-originating, Chicago-based art rock/indie pop/soft rock/folk musician has been making music as Silo’s Choice since the beginning of the 2010s, but his various projects have found him on a hot streak as of late–his duo with Mike Fox, Coventry, released an excellent LP in 2023, and last year brought a superb album from his long-running Cincinnati band Upstairs and a choice Silo’s Choice record, too. Massey plans to release “several more” Silo’s Choice records this year, but he’s started 2025 off with a bang in the form of Liberals. Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–Massey mentions The Left Banke, early Destroyer, and Belle & Sebastian as touchpoints for this one, and he’s kind of right. At its most animated, Liberals has the same kind of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock that I heard a good deal in the Coventry album, and even the slower numbers on this album display a renewal of vows with concise pop music. Massey is evasive about the “political” implications of the album’s admittedly provocative title, and if he’s trying to say that he’s merely up to his typical Silo’s Choice shenanigans here with that, then I’d agree. It’s there in bits and pieces, sometimes all at once in a rush and sometimes glimpsed through a reflection in the melted Chicago snow and salt.

There are so many good songs on Liberals. The piano-led baroque pop of “The Acceptance World” is a refined Massey classic, an opening statement fueled by coffee and lodging borrowed from acquaintances (“They ask if I don’t want the Ottoman instead / And I say ‘no’, that empire’s long gone”), and I don’t think there’s anybody else out there who could write a song like the whirlwind neoconservative bildungsroman of “2005” (“It’s 2005 / And we’ve only been in Iraq for a year in a half,” Massey situates us). If that’s too heady–well, “City of First Dates” doesn’t totally solve that problem, but it’s something new, Massey putting on his best game show host face and pulling together maximal pop rock and even a bit of disco moves as he sketches out a song that does indeed live up to its title (“Is this fun? Do you like me?” Massey asks us over and over and over again in the refrain). Liberals’ default mode of polished piano pop doesn’t come even close to getting stale, sailing us through the quiet “Please Please Please Do Not Refuse Me Service”, the fretting “Laughter Through Headphones”, and a cheerfully-skipping, war-torn piece of cotton candy called “Comfortable Kid” (“Back when we still got a shock even seeing a gun / Now we see them a lot”). The one true indulgence of Massey’s folk side is “Pick Me Up #2”, which might be the best moment on the entire thing. Massey turns everything over in his head in the Starbucks inside the Target on Halsted, waiting out inclement weather: “I’m never far from walking out between the cars / With a snowball in my hand, spinning, spinning,” he remarks over confidently but delicately-picked acoustic guitars in the refrain of this one. The music conveys the general sense of what Massey is on about here–as for the specifics, we’ll have to file that away to come back to. (Bandcamp link)

Kinski – Stumbledown Terrace

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Experimental Hugs

Kinski are an experimental post-rock band from Seattle, forming at the tail end of the 1990s and spending this century steadily releasing albums on storied indie rock labels like Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. Stumbledown Terrace is the group’s tenth album, their first in nearly seven years, and their first for Comedy Minus One, the New Jersey imprint that’s been something of a haven for longtime indie rock veterans in recent years (Silkworm, Eleventh Dream Day, Deep Tunnel Project). Stumbledown Terrace is also the first Kinski album since the departure of Matthew Reid Schwartz, the multi-instrumentalist who joined the band shortly after they formed in 1999, paring them down to a power trio (guitarist Chris Martin, bassist Lucy Atkinson, and drummer Barrett Wilke). Clearly this hasn’t slowed Kinski down, though–their latest LP, recorded by Tim Green at Louder Studios in Grass Valley, California, is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. On Stumbledown Terrace, Kinski walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll like the best of their influences and peers like Sonic Youth, Trans Am, and Oneida (with whom they’re currently touring). It has a live feel to it, certainly–and this applies to the moments in between the most kinetic ones, too.

Stumbledown Terrace is made up of seven songs of varying lengths, volumes, and adherence to “rock” music structure–Kinski’s task is to make all of these puzzle pieces fit, and they do so in the most automatic manner possible. The first impression we get of Stumbledown Terrace is “Do You Like Long Hair”, a steadily-unfurling eight-minute instrumental centerpiece that sets a wildly high bar, and “Gang of 3”, while also being an instrumental, prefers to prowl about rather than try to leap even higher. It’s more than fifteen minutes into the LP before the vocals show up–whoever’s singing in the title track is barely holding their own against the dark torrent of noisy indie rock, a relatively small but still very welcome wrinkle to the album. “Stumbledown Terrace” is, of course, followed by “Experimental Hugs”, which is (ironically) the most conventional track on the album by far, a catchy two-minute hook-y rock and roller that kind of sounds like the Foo Fighters (but, you know, better). And, of course, we have another eight-minute epic coming up in the second half of Stumbledown Terrace with “Slovenian Fighting Jacket”–but, rather than work its way up to the crescendo like “Do You Like Long Hair” does, it meanders for six minutes before blasting off out of nowhere in the final two. The four-minute acoustic-led “Her Absence Feels Like a Presence” is the closing comedown–perhaps it would have been impressive to keep up the fiery rockers all the way to the finish line, but who do Kinski have to impress? (Bandcamp link)

Humilitarian – Intra

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 3206

Last year, I heard an album called Please Stay Off the Statue by a Philadelphia band called Comprador; it’s a really adventurous and omnivorous rock record, bits of glam and prog-pop and power pop and grunge thrown in a very well-executed blender. Charlie D’Ardenne, Comprador’s bandleader, has apparently taken to playing guitar in a different band, Humilitarian–they’re a quintet, with D’Ardenne joining original members Kira Cappello (vocals/lyrics), Brendan Clarke (guitar), Eli Glovas-Kurtz (drums), and Tucker Pendleton (bass) when their previous second guitarist, Noah Ward, moved to Texas. Although Humilitarian has been around since 2019, D’Ardenne’s on-record debut for them is also the band’s first full-length album–Intra has been in the works for a while now. Although Humiltarian are pretty different from Comprador, one key similarity is that Intra matches D’Ardenne’s project in terms of sheer ambitious energy. They’re somewhat hard to categorize–I think “emo-y indie rock” is more or less acceptable, “Big Rock Music” more confusing but also more accurate. Every song on Intra sounds warehouse-vast; Cappello’s voice is the biggest and most dangerous weapon, while the guitars perform a just-as-essential function by zigzagging around to fill the cavernous space around their frontperson.

Intra is a sprawling record–its nine tracks come in at over forty-five minutes in total, meaning that Humilitarian really take their time moving through them. Not every song is quite as obvious about it at as opening track “Your Arms Again”, which spends a minute on a boulder-rolling guitar introduction before ramping up into the explosive alt-rocker that’s a bit more in line with what we can expect from the rest of Intra. With Cappello at the helm, Humiltarian do their best to sculpt a new, dynamic-indie-rock type of torch song–they do kind of end up living up to their band name in this department, if more in a “humbling” than “embarrassing” way. The work that Clarke and D’Ardenne do is impressive to me, too–they take their Midwest-emo-inspired shimmery leads and more classic rock hero moments and make U2-like heart-wringing “anthemic rock” music out of them, although the band change things up when the moment calls for it, too. Around the mid-section of Intra, “I’m Not Dreaming”, “Steal”, and “3206” start mixing in a bit more post-punk/art punk stopping and starting and syncopation–in particular, the relatively brief, harmonic-heavy “3206” is maybe the most exciting two minutes on the album. Intra feels very labored-over, like the work of a bunch of talented musicians taking their time to fully sketch out the various paths these songs take. There are a lot of ideas in Intra, but the pieces blend together as part of the hard-hitting whole of Humilitarian.  (Bandcamp link)

Spinnen – Warmes Licht

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Alien Transistor
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Träume

Taking their name from the German word for spider, Spinnen are a Munich-based bass and drums duo made up of a couple of veterans of the “muggy, experimental” side of their home city’s music scene in Sophie Neudecker and Veronica “Katta” Burnuthian. After playing in a bunch of bands separately over the years (Soft Violet, Friends of Gas, Bombo, The Living Object), Warmes Licht (“warm light”) is their first record together, brought to us by The Notwist’s label Alien Transistor. The twenty-six minute LP manages to be both “experimental” and “rock”–we get noisy, clanging art-punk bass/drum ragers right next to soft, almost ambient organs and synth pieces, as well as moments that don’t fit neatly onto either end of that spectrum. I’m not sure who’s singing (I’m guessing both, but I can’t tell them apart), but the vocals are key in keeping Warmes Licht fun and (yes) light amidst the chaos. I can hear the riot grrrl influence on the duo in the vocals, which are shouted and chanted with just as much enthusiasm as Spinnen have for making a racket. Burnuthian’s bass provides a lot of the melodic heft, too–although she never neglects low-end duty, either.

Warmes Licht’s opening track, “Träume”, works way better as an awesome opening pop statement than it has any right to–between the reaching-for-the-sky bass chords and the just-as-enthusiastic vocals, Spinnen pull off the perfect mix of skronky post-punk and power pop. “Wirken” comes right after “Träume”, and it rocks too–but instead of trying to repeat themselves, Spinnen go a different route on this instrumental and follow an exciting groove where it leads them for two minutes. If there were any rails at any point on Warmes Licht, Spinnen start to go off of them around the five-minute percussion-led “Moment”, which stacks organ and intermittent bass riffs over top of Burnuthian’s kit before descending into an icy, haunting synth-shaded finale–and then this derailing enters “straight-up confusing” territory with a three-minute meandering carnival organ-type piece called “Warm”. Those looking for clarity in Warmes Licht’s second half (first of all, have you tried looking anywhere else?) won’t get it–“Geister” is the cheerleader-punk-noise-pop tack a la “Träume”, except even more abrasive this time, and the two-minute “Ermüdend” would be Spinnen’s entry into the angry post-punk sweepstakes if they cared to add some more instruments to it. “Mäuse” ends the album with a big old trash pile of noise rock–setting everything on fire is one way to make a bunch of warm light, I suppose. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, Taxidermists

Hello, all! We’re putting a cap on this week by looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 7th: new LPs from Star 99, Will Stratton, Frog Eyes, and Taxidermists. We also had a Monday Pressing Concerns this week (featuring Sorrows, Saoirse Dream, Samuel Aaron and Noah Roth, and The Illness), and the February 2025 playlist/round-up went up on Tuesday, so check those out too if you haven’t yet.

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.

Star 99 – Gaman

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: IWLYG

A couple years ago, I heard Bitch Unlimited, the debut album from a San Jose quartet called Star 99. “Just about every second of it is crammed with hooks,” I said a month after its release, and those hooks only sounded better and better throughout the rest of 2023 until, all of a sudden, it was my second-favorite album of that entire year. Needless to say, I was keen to hear more from the band (vocalist/guitarist Saoirse Alesandro, vocalist/guitarist Thomas Calvo, bassist Chris Gough, and drummer Jeremy Romero), and a year and a half after Bitch Unlimited, we’ve gotten a sophomore Star 99 album called Gaman, bringing with it a fifth bandmember (guitarist/keyboardist Aidan Delaney) and a more wide-ranging sound. I’d be despondent if Star 99 completely abandoned the sugary power-pop-punk (evoking bands like golden-era Charly Bliss, Remember Sports, and Chumped) that they’d mastered on their last album, and thankfully Gaman is not a reinvention so much as an expansion. Star 99 has once again put together a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (twenty-five minutes, actually shorter this time around) collection of sock-knocking-off pop songs, with Calvo and Alesandro both getting to deliver knockout punches. They’ve merely diversified the way that they go about landing these blows, is all.

Gaman starts with a flex or two–“Kill”, the opening track, is a fizzy power pop avalanche that does everything the best songs on Bitch Unlimited did in two whirlwind minutes, and the strategically-deployed power chords of “Simulator” make the Calvo-led track just as catchy in a sneaky way. A subtle middle ground opens up on Gaman as the record goes on, exemplified by songs like “IWLYG” and “Emails”; the energy and hooks are still there, but Star 99 take a page from the books of slightly-older bands like Big Nothing and Dogbreth and add a jangly, Teenage Fanclub-esque wrinkle to their songwriting. These songs aren’t going to be a bridge too far to anyone (I’d think)–but Star 99 have a few more obvious departures to offer up on Gaman, too. “Brother”, stuck right in the middle of the first half of the record, is unavoidable, and the way that it turns Star 99’s power pop on its head to make something this delicate-sounding is remarkable (the lyrics, which take a trip into the past to sketch a family portrait of sorts, may have something to do with that). The beat-driven bedroom pop of “Gray Wall” is even weirder, but the sweet, intertwining vocals of Alesandro and Calvo ensure that it’s more than just a curious experiment. “Brother” seems to connect with the final two songs on the record, “Esta” and the title track–the heavier, emo-tinged anger of the former song is completely new territory for Star 99, but Calvo and the band pull it off, and “Gaman” is completely acoustic and ends with a link back to “Kill”. The sort of exhausted, overflowing acoustic finality with which Alesandro ends the album isn’t necessarily what I expected the final statement from Star 99’s second record to be, but that’s a good thing. (Bandcamp link)

Will Stratton – Points of Origin

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Ruination/Bella Union
Genre: Folk, alt-country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Higher and Drier

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be from California. Singer-songwriter Will Stratton has called Beacon, New York home for over a decade and grew up “all over the greater Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic”, but he was born in a town outside of Sacramento, and his eighth album is a journey back to his state of origin. I was surprised to learn that Points of Origin is actually Stratton’s first album for Ruination Record Co., as I already associate him with the New York (city and upstate) folk rock world of Ruination acts like Blue Ranger and Adeline Hotel (as well as adjacent acts like Jodi, Wild Pink, and Ben Seretan). Members of several of these acts contribute to Points of Origin (as well as longtime contemporary Christian music guitarist Phil Keaggy, interestingly enough, among many others), but this album is entirely owned by Stratton and his storytelling. Like an underappreciated LP from last year, Distant Reader’s Place of Words Now Gone, Points of Origin is a record that attempts to grapple with the climate change-induced “natural” disasters for which the Golden State has become ground zero, although Stratton’s take on it is a character-led one. “Dense” and “novelistic”, the aforementioned Seretan calls it in his biography for the album, but while the storylines may require some lyrical analysis to follow, the shifting and disintegration happening ambiently (or, in some cases, quite actively) in the background is quite clear through the smoke.

Points of Origin is a very rich text, and there are a few different threads I could choose to tug at here, but one thing I found appreciating about the record is the central role that inmates and prisons play in it. It makes a lot of sense–“criminals” are frequently the ones blamed for the raging California wildfires as a way of obscuring larger trends (which, as “Centinela” drives home, remains insufficient even when “correct” in a sense) but they’re also on the front lines of fighting these infernos (like in “Jesusita”, whose narrator “separat[es] fire from fuel” with chainsaws and axes), and these jails are where many victims of fires and mudslides inevitably end up. My favorite song on Points of Origin is the self-contained tapestry of “Higher and Drier”–several of Stratton’s collaborators are credited on it, but they stay on the periphery, letting the singer-songwriter unspool his story of an ex-artist turned real estate salesman selling beautiful, doomed mountain/beachfront houses (a different kind of criminal breaking-bad balladry than what I discussed previously, I suppose). In addition to being engrossing as a story, “Higher and Drier” is an excellent showcase of Stratton’s musical gifts–he snakes his way through delicate 2000s “indie folk”-style verses and surprisingly grafts a campfire-song chorus to it. Staring down the barrel of a California-sized sample of the ecosystem collapse that awaits many more of us, Stratton instead looks closer and offers a way to meet an overwhelming certainty: one story at a time. (Bandcamp link)

Frog Eyes – The Open Up

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Paper Bag
Genre: Art rock, garage rock, psychedelic rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)

Who here remembers Frog Eyes? I remember them a little bit. They didn’t end up as the biggest band of the Canadian 2000s indie rock explosion, but they’ve done alright for themselves, as the band (always featuring guitarist/vocalist Carey Mercer and drummer Melanie Campbell, along with a rotating cast that as of lately has included keyboardist Shyla Seller and bassist Ryan Beattie) are now on their tenth LP since 2002. The Vancouver Island-originating band had a sound more or less in line with the weirder end of their Canadian peers–Mercer was in a supergroup called Swan Lake with Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug, and both Krug and former Wolf Parade guitarist Dante DeCaro played in Frog Eyes at one point, to give you a sense of what I mean–but this kind of big-picture indie rock is hard to reduce down in such a way. With that in mind, it’s best to just take in The Open Up (their second album since they reformed in 2022 after breaking up for a whole four years) as its own thing. Twenty years into their career, Frog Eyes sound surprisingly upbeat and energetic on their latest album, which offers up a bunch of offbeat but hooky garage rock/pop tunes with a handful of more drawn-out Frog Eyes moments hidden in the B-side. 

Mercer is still a classically bizarre indie rock vocalist and lyricist, but Frog Eyes have no issue shaping themselves sleekly and naturally around their frontperson. In The Open Up’s opening track, “Television, a Ghost in My Head”, Frog Eyes channel classic garage rock, post-punk, and the brighter side of Oneida for a whirlwind of a first statement, even though Mercer still finds a way to work the phrase “I shan’t be long” into the lyrics. “E-E-Y-O-R-E (That’s Me!)” is a positively bouncy song that’s much more in line with the exclamation point than the titular children’s character, and there are a few more quick-tempoed pop-rock tracks that find Mercer chewing on the titular phrase in “I’m a Little at a Loss” and “Put a Little Light on the Wretch That Is Me”. The final five songs on The Open Up almost feel like they’re from a different album–Frog Eyes transition hard into five-minute song lengths, wandering instrumentals, and much fewer obvious “hooks”. Stick with them, though, and you’ll see the same group within the more mystical second half–the wobbly, almost Crazy Horse-like “I See the Same Things”, the dramatic, brisk-drumbeat-featuring “Chin Up”, and the seven-minute progressive pop epic “Trash Crab” all end up being album highlights. Frog Eyes sound like a group that still knows how to excite themselves on The Open Up, and that’s good news for all of us. (Bandcamp link)

Taxidermists – 20247

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Danger Collective
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Grow Up

You may not know Taxidermists, but the Massachusetts-based duo has been part of the New England indie rock scene since the late 2000s. Guitarist/vocalist Cooper B. Handy and drummer Salvadore McNamara started putting out music at the beginning of the 2010s together, self-released, self-recorded, and at a prolific pace, but the duo slowed in the latter half of that decade and came to a halt entirely after 2019’s Feeding Tube-released TAX (although Handy has been busy with his solo project, LUCY). Last year, however, the duo signed with Danger Collective and released an EP called KO, and the first Taxidermists LP in a half-decade has followed less than a year later in 20247. Recorded entirely in McNamara’s garage last winter (with most songs coming together in a “single night”), 20247 is a humble but strong reminder of the power of home-recorded indie rock. Both the informal quality of the recordings and the simple duo set-up (guitarist Avery W S appears on two songs, the only outside contribution) keep 20247 squarely in the realm of “lo-fi” music; the draw is Taxidermists enthusiastically ripping through a dozen superb Handy-penned pop songs in under half an hour.

Taxidermists are stripped-down enough to be a blank page; I can imagine the turn-of-the-2010s “shitgaze” movement, 2010s Bandcamp “bedroom pop”, and the current wave of “GBV-gaze” bands all claiming them–and who wouldn’t want to have 20247 as part of their scene? The dexterity of Taxidermists is key to making something with 20247’s limited palette remain interesting and captivating nonetheless–the stumbling folky exploration of “Sweet Guilt” is a surprising opening track, but they barrel into the garage-y pop punk of “Grow Up” with ease, and they just as easily wander back into the wilderness with “2099”. The full-on basement rockers (“Grow Up”, “Gone Away”, “Does the Wind Know”) are no-nonsense bangers, almost like a 90s indie rock-influenced basement version of the Ramones, but they’re only a piece of 20247’s brief but substantial tapestry. On the more “complicated” end of the spectrum, songs like “Service Disservice”, “Needles to Say”, and “Good Job Done” all try to cram a bunch of sonic surprises and left-turns in their 2-and-change-minute runtimes; those of us who appreciate Robert Pollard’s ability to write a pop song that seems just a bit out of reach will enjoy these mini-epics. The last “proper” song on 20247 is maybe the fluffiest guitar pop song on the record, “Let the Music Save Them”. Like the more streamlined moments of Ethan Oliva (Ex Pilots, Gaadge), “Let the Music Save Them” is a pop success armed with little more than a winning melody and attitude, both attributes that Taxidermists have in spades on 20247. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

New Playlist: February 2025

It’s the February 2025 playlist! The year is in full swing, and this playlist reflects it, as it’s almost entirely culled from the new year. You’ll recognize a lot of these songs from Pressing Concerns, but there’s plenty of material that’d be new to even the most regular readers as well.

Jordan Krimston and Cheekface have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece).

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal, BNDCMPR. Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

“Fool”, Outro
From Broken Promise (2025, Repeating Cloud)

Northampton, Massachusetts quartet Outro have an excellent sound, somewhere between “Paisley Underground” and “Electrical Audio”, and the band’s most recent EP Broken Promise is a nice, succinct summation of their whole deal. Broken Promise is worth checking out for its opening track, “Fool”, alone–it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year so far, easily. It’s impossibly cool-sounding, sometimes like a chill explosion and other times like running water. Everything is positioned perfectly, from the roaring opening guitar riff to the rat-a-tat drums to the split-second bass spotlight to the rolling melodic guitars that eventually take over the track to Josh Levy and Adam Zucker’s harmonies in the brief refrain. Read more about Broken Promise here.

“Horseshoe”, Hooky & Winter
From Water Season (2025, Julia’s War)

Philadelphia duo Hooky and New York-based musician Samira Winter are two notable modern shoegaze/noise pop/dream pop acts that, as it turns out, are fans of each other–a mutual respect that eventually led to the brief four-song collaborative release Water Season. I don’t really make a distinction between “single” and “EP” for records with more than two songs these days, but if we’re doing that, Water Season (though billed as the latter) has a strong case for the former, too–there’s one obvious “hit” in the first slot, and three stranger experiments following it. “Horseshoe”, the hypothetical A-side, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s two minutes of jangly dream pop bubblegum, warped guitar lines, and sneakily huge vocals that all make it sound like a mussed-up, more electronic-influenced version of the best Sundays and Cranberries singles. Read more about Water Season here.

“Art House”, Cheekface
From Middle Spoon (2025)

Cheekface the big-chorus power pop slingers are back in a big way on their latest album Middle Spoon, as much as they were on 2022’s Too Much to Ask, if not more so. I had to cut a bunch of good ones to not make this playlist “oops, all Cheekface”, but I’m happy this one made the final draft. “Art House” might be a roundabout way of acknowledging that Cheekface, “cool” post-punk/art punk/power pop influences aside, are never going to be thought of as an “art house” band. Vocalist and notorious sing-speaker Greg Katz actually sings really well in the chorus, emoting like an emo-pop frontperson on the “sticky arthouse floor”, and if the central metaphor of the song is a little convoluted (“You are a grey and grainy scene / You are not big on dialogue / And I can only turn you on / If I want to get confused”), well, that fits with the theme. Read more about Middle Spoon here.

“Word Is a Four Letter Fuck”, ManDate
From Cloud Cover (2025, Cruisin)

The Seattle quartet ManDate just released their second album and first in ten years, and Cloud Cover is a wild rock and roll listen, jumping from garage rock to classic 90s Albini-ish indie rock to sprawling Pacific Northwest rock to even a twelve-minute post-rock piece. I heard of ManDate due to already being a fan of Clyde Peterson, so I guess it’s not that surprising that my favorite song on Cloud Cover is the one that most reminds me of Peterson’s other band Your Heart Breaks. “Word Is a Four Letter Fuck” is a incredibly catchy piece of slightly fuzzed-up indie pop, a song that has this kind of worldstruck Americana that marks a lot of Peterson’s writing (“How do molecules find their way together? / So that we can have ice cream and experimental records”). The rest of Cloud Cover doesn’t really sound like “Word Is a Four Letter Fuck”, but it sounds like a lot of other music I like, so I’ll be returning to it just as soon as I wear out this song on repeat.

“I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore”, The Bird Calls
From Melody Trail (2025, Ruination)

The latest album from the prolific Sam Sodomsky’s project The Bird Calls was assembled entirely by Ryan Weiner (of the band Tiny Hazard) and Sodomsky himself, and while these songs certainly sound like they were written and sung by the same artist who made the last couple of Bird Calls albums, the duo give Melody Trail a more polished pop reading compared to the project’s more typical embrace of acoustic-led folk rock. Sometimes Sodomsky and Weiner embrace full-on 80s synthpop trappings on Melody Trail, while other times they settle on a more subtle “sophisti-pop”-indebted style; my favorite song on the album, “I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore”, is decidedly the former, a shined-up neon-lit country-western bar sign that sounds like Sodomsky and Weiner tried to rebuild The Bird Calls from the ground-up with new wave and synthpop. Read more about Melody Trail here.

“Side Ponytail”, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
From Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010 (2025, Slumberland)

Perfect Right Now is a compilation of early singles, EPs, and compilation tracks from the first three years of legendary fuzz-pop group The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Almost all of these ten songs initially came about either before or concurrently with their 2009 self-titled debut, and, as it turns out, there was an incredibly strong companion LP of noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee, and fuzz rock out there this whole time. About half of Perfect Right Now’s songs qualify as “rippers”, and none of them disappoint; my favorite song from this side of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on the compilation is “Side Ponytail”, which is two minutes of nonstop hooks, fuzzed out to perfection. It’s a twee song on steroids; it’s 2009, and it’s forever. Read more about Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010 here.

“Castle Cloud”, Jordan Krimston
From Count It All Joy (2025, DHCR)

I haven’t written about Jordan Krimston’s solo material on Rosy Overdrive before, but the San Diego-based musician has popped up here and there on material from Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon and Oso Oso (for whom he’s currently the touring drummer), among others. The prolific musician has kept up a steady solo career in addition to instrumental and recording work, and his most recent album, Count It All Joy, is a blast. As one might expect from an Oso Osociate, it’s roughly in the realm of “emo/pop punk/power pop”, although that doesn’t quite capture the adventurous, ambitious pop music contained herein. “Castle Cloud” just barely beat out “Mtn. Decoy” for this slot–the latter earns a Drain Gang reference on the album’s Bandcamp page, while this song is a curious music-lab creation combining weird math rock-y drums with chirping synths and Krimston’s bright emo-pop vocals. Good stuff.

“The Bullet B4 the Sound”, Califone
From The Villager’s Companion (2025, Jealous Butcher)

As the name implies, The Villager’s Companion is linked to Califone’s 2023 album The Villagers, recorded around the same time and augmented by a couple of covers that have been previously released over the past few years. Bandleader Tim Rutili referred to these songs as “misfit toys” when the album was announced, but The Villager’s Companion is just further confirmation that the longrunning Chicago indie-blues-art-folk-rock band thrives in a less formal environment. My favorite song on this record is “The Bullet B4 the Sound”, which is a bit of all of the band’s sides–Califone float purposefully but languidly in the ether on the verses, but come together all of a sudden to pull off a beautifully damaged chorus that’s on the level of Rutili career highs like “Gauze” from his previous band, Red Red Meat. Read more about The Villager’s Companion here.

“Catherine Never Broke Again”, Saoirse Dream
From Saoirse Dream (2025, Lauren)

Saoirse Dream’s self-titled debut album for Lauren Records is a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy, and the garish manipulations that I personally associate with hyperpop. Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music–take, for instance, excellent single “Catherine Never Broken Again”. It’s two minutes of high-flying, high-stakes mundanity, with Catherine Egbert plowing through a hyperpop anthem about…well, it’s about a bit of everything (and, incidentally, if I was trying to explain to someone how transmisogyny is just misogyny, I don’t think I could come up with anything more succinct than “I still get catcalled in jeans and a T-shirt / When I wear high heels, still get misgendered”). Read more about Saoirse Dream here.

“Next Door Hell”, Midwestern Medicine
From Ripped Headline (2025, Website)

If you’re looking for the motormouth-featuring, galloping-percussion-led side of Maine indie-garage-rock band Midwestern Medicine, you’ll get it throughout Ripped Headline, an EP entirely made up of two-to-three minute “rockers”. “Next Door Hell” (which bandleader Brock Ginther says would be the single “if [he] was doing that kind of thing”) deserves a special mention in this regard–there’s a bunch of really cool sections mashed together here, from the post-punk-garage verses to the lurching-upwards pre-chorus to the sneering refrain that gives the song its title to the…post-chorus? (Whatever you call the part that goes “They’ve got a draft of my unauthorized biography / It’s big enough that I’ll get crushed if it gets dropped on me”) which is actually probably the best part. Read more about Ripped Headline here.

“Free Association”, Friendship
From Caveman Wakes Up (2025, Merge)

Damn, I love Friendship. Bands like them are probably the reason why I turned into the kind of person that runs a music blog. Caveman Wakes Up is the Philadelphia alt-country supergroup’s fifth album, and the second in their four-piece/Merge Records era–it’ll be out in May, but “Free Association” will keep us company for now. The biography for this album mentions Talk Talk, an exciting place for Friendship to take their famed “ambient country” sound, and “Free Association” really blooms between the rhythm section (that’s drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary of Hour and Jon Samuels on the bass) buzzing along and guest musician Jason Calhoun’s violin soaring. And, of course, Dan Wriggins is still Dan Wriggins, one of the great frontpeople of our time (first impression favorite lyric: “Order at the bar / Chaos outside”). Can’t wait to hear what he has to say about tree of heaven.

“Snowflakes”, Dropkick
From Primary Colours (2025, Bobo Integral/Sound Asleep)

Whether it’s with The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness, his Andrew Taylor & The Harmonizers project, or his oldest band, Dropkick, nobody does jangly, Teenage Fanclub-evoking wistful guitar pop like Scotland’s Andrew Taylor does. If you liked his previous records in this vein (from the last few years, I’d recommend 2021’s twin LPs Andrew Taylor and the Harmonizers and TBWTPN’s Songs from Another Life), you’re going to enjoy Dropkick’s latest album, Primary Colours, too. Time will tell how it holds up to Taylor’s impressive discography, but I’m already pretty sure that “Snowflakes” is one of the best songs of his that I’ve heard, full stop. Somehow the song is nearly four minutes long but feels like it doesn’t waste a second–it’s all bright power pop melody, all the time.

“You’re Like Me”, 72 Rats
From Nothing Left to Lose (2024, Grahamcracker)

72 Rats is the project of Seattle’s Graham Bremner, who started putting out records under the name at the beginning of this decade but has been making music for much longer than that–there’s a release on his Bandcamp page called This Drain that was recorded in 1995, for instance. I really like the sound of 72 Rats’ latest EP, Nothing Left to Lose, which features a full band (Mira Tsarina of Iffin on bass, Carl Christensen of The Lake Flora Band) backing up Bremner. There’s a British new waveiness to my favorite song on the EP, “You’re Like Me”, but filtered across the Atlantic and into a basement in a Robert Pollard-like way. Tsarina’s showy bass playing threatens to steal the show (and she also describes the EP as a cross between Joy Division and Wilco on Bandcamp, like she’s trying to undermine me too), but Bremner has a strong enough tune that “You’re Like Me” ends up well-rounded regardless.

“DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II”, Frog
From 1000 Variations on the Same Song (2025, Audio Antihero/Tapewormies)

1000 Variations on the Same Song, the sixth Frog album, is a departure from the more technicolored, eager-to-please pop sensibilities of their previous LP, even though it still sounds like a Frog record. As the title implies, 1000 Variations on the Same Song arose from head frog Daniel Bateman realizing he was working on “a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike” and deciding to embrace the similarities rather than try to vary things up some more; on this record, Frog sound more subdued and thoughtful, making their way through simple yet disorienting piano-led instrumentals at a leisurely pace. Bateman sounds almost divinely inspired in the most memorable parts of the record, giving a chant or even hymn-like quality to the refrain of highlight “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” (yes, he is saying “Damn, baby, what is you talking ‘bout” there, sliding it right into that yelp of a refrain). Read more about 1000 Variations on the Same Song here.

“Ghost Ship”, Lilly Hiatt
From Forever (2025, New West)

Lilly Hiatt hasn’t let me down yet. Perhaps the finest second-generation singer-songwriter in the realm of country-rock music (or any other genre, realistically) has been a consistent force for strong, emotional, but reliably rocking alt-country since she hooked up with New West for 2017’s Trinity Lane, and while Forever might not be as great as that one or 2021’s Lately, there’s some good stuff on it, not the least of which is “Ghost Ship”. It’s a pretty low-key mid–tempo country rock tune; there’s no way in hell that Hiatt’s vocals can ever fully fade into the background, but the garage rock guitars and vocal distortion let her take a bit more of a backseat than a lot of her material typically allows. It’s pretty rich underneath this protective layer, though (of course).

“Making Maps”, Rapt
From Until the Light Takes Us (2025, Start-track)

Jacob Ware has had a colorful musical past, but Until the Light Takes Us, the fifth album from the London singer-songwriter’s Rapt project, is definitely, inarguably “folk music”. It’s just Ware and his gently-plucked guitar for the most part, with intermittent percussion, bass, strings, and pianos fading into and out of frame and, all the while, Ware singing about death and dreams and love (and the disintegration thereof) in a winding pastoral, British conversational cadence. Ware resists the pop touches or heart-clutching relatability that made a select few “indie folk” acts stars earlier this century, but this isn’t to say Until the Light Takes Us is impenetrable or even unwelcoming–I’ve loved the most upbeat song on the record, “Making Maps”, from the moment I heard it. If you love the Mark Eitzel-40 Watt Sun-Idaho kind of slowcore, Ware hits the bullseye on this one, giving us one (1) olive branch to take with us into a difficult but rewarding folk album. Read more about Until the Light Takes Us here.

“Unkindness”, Johnny Chobani with Mary Macabre and Lorenzio Jones
From (What’s the Story) Hikikomori? (2024)

Johnny Chobani is a person from Philadelphia, possibly named Jake Innis, and the second album from the project, (What’s the Story) Hikikomori?, came out late last December. The album as a whole is a wild ride through lo-fi basement rock, offbeat pop, and electronic music; “Unkindness” is probably my favorite track from it. It’s an excellent slightly fuzzed-up pop rock tune with a serious Pixies streak–“Mary Macabre” and “Lorenzio Jones” are credited as guests on the song, and I’m not sure if they’re the two vocalists, but if they are they certainly did a bang-up job with this one. “Unkindness” is an unlikely five-minute rocker, taking a minute to get going and spending a good deal of its runtime wringing everything it can out of its chorus. It seems to be about waiting for bad things to inevitably happen–truly a song for our times.

“Music for a Silent Film”, Patches
From A Three Legged Chair (2025)

The most recent EP from remote-collaborative post-punk/college rock trio Patches is also unfortunately the group’s last. A Three Legged Chair is a clearinghouse release–five songs that were “scrapped, passed over, or shared elsewhere”, and the band openly state on their Bandcamp page that it “isn’t as good” as their albums–but, whether the band think so or not, it’s a nice appendix to Patches’ two excellent studio albums. And there’s some new terrain explored here, too–two songs feature the sister of Patches member Robin KC (credited as “KRMT”) on lead vocals, and they’re both highlights. “Music for a Silent Film” is my favorite song on A Three Legged Chair; the buzzing, sensory-overload dream pop sound is different than anything else on the EP and probably from anything Patches ever put out, period. Read more about A Three Legged Chair here.

“Glitter Witches”, The Illness
From Macrodosed (2025, Sea)

The Illness’ debut EP, 2023’s Summerase, contained shades of everything from post-punk to slacker rock to slowcore to baroque pop, marking a strong introduction to the “Liverpool-York (and beyond)” collective. The Illness continue to sack indie rock and indie pop history on their debut album, Macrodosed, their trademark freewheeling guitar pop music remaining intact over the course of two sides of vinyl. Even with all this said, “Glitter Witches” still kind of comes out of nowhere–it’s all shiny 80s synths, skittering basslines, and a gorgeous new wave-y chorus. It’s far from the meandering, David Pajo-featuring indie rock of the previous track on the record, but when The Illness showcase an ability to switch between these two sides so easily, who’s complaining? Read more about Macrodosed here.

“30 Years”, Power Pants
From PP7 (2025, Punk Valley/Knuckles on Stun/Idiotape)

There’s not a moment of respite to be found on PP7, the latest album from prolific Winchester, Virginia power pop/synthpunk/egg punk project Power Pants. Only one song reaches the two-minute mark, and all of them are a delirious assault of train-speed punk guitars, blaring synth hooks, and gruff but somewhat anxious-sounding vocals. Within ten seconds, PP7 already cranks out a barrage of Power Pants’ typical tricks; opening track “30 Years” positively roars out of the gate with a garishly catchy synth part and guitars streaming out of control, and the garage punk vocals kick in not long afterwards and hold their own against the instrumental torrent. Read more about PP7 here.

“Independent Animal”, Guided by Voices
From Universe Room (2025, GBV, Inc.)

Coming in at barely over a minute, my favorite track on the most recent Guided by Voices album is a song that captures the band’s unparalleled brilliance in brevity. Universe Room is a difficult album, even for this era of Guided by Voices–apparently they really mixed up recording styles on this record, having different band members record all the music for different tracks, which I appreciate. I don’t know which member(s) are responsible for the sound of “Independent Animal”, but it’s an immediate highlight, capturing the “get the idea down and nail it, no repetition required” attitude of classic Guided by Voices albums (it also kind of sounds like the at-this-point-underrated “classic lineup reunion” albums of the early 2010s, too). There are basically two sections to the song–the “proper” verse-to-chorus first half, and then a brief but earned 30 second victory lap. It all sounds great.

“Content Baby”, Cheekface
From Middle Spoon (2025)

“Content Baby” is another certified Cheekface power pop hit–and it’s quite rich beyond its smooth dance-pop-punk exterior, too. I feel like I could write a whole essay on this song, if I were the kind of person to do the whole “long essays about a single piece of music” thing (somebody should pick up this thread for me!). I have to keep things reined in here, but where does one even begin with a song with lyrics like “You like the good type of drone / I like the bad type of drone / We are two cute little perverts / With a heart made of gold” and a chorus that goes “Treat me like your content baby / You have my consent to share me”? “Content Baby” is also where Middle Spoon gets its title, and I think it zeroes in on what I think this record is all about–sickly sweet, suffocating, grotesque comfort. They’ve really outdone themselves with this one; Cheekface, you shouldn’t have. I mean, maybe you really shouldn’t have. Read more about Middle Spoon here.

“Nightmare Rider”, Minorcan
From Rock Alone (2025)

Ryan Anderson’s Minorcan project is modeled after vintage southern college rock/power pop/alt-country troubadours, and the singer-songwriter’s latest album is an album about community, family, and human connections that was made entirely by one person alone at home (hence Rock Alone). Anderson sums this all up in “Nightmare Rider”, a song that’s anything but naive in its continued pursuit of its ideals. “To live without you, ooh, that’s my nightmare / To live without you, ooh, that’s my worst fear,” Anderson sings in the refrain–the lingering on the fear in this, the biggest moment on Rock Alone, is telling. “I say it all with gritted teeth / They want us to stay lonely,” goes the next line, and I shouldn’t have to tell you what the one after that entails. Read more about Rock Alone here.

“(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again”, Publicity Department
From Old Master (2025, Safe Suburban Home)

The latest album from London’s Publicity Department generally follows a winding, meandering slacker rock path, British pessimism and irony fighting against the melodies and hooks to come to a convincing draw. Bandleader Sean Brook writes that Old Master is partially written from the “perspective of old men raging at a world they have all but destroyed but no longer understand”, and there’s a yet-to-be extinguished defiance in my favorite track on the album, “(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again”. Book really takes that convoluted title out for a walk in the chorus, sounding positively triumphant over a (recorded entirely by Book himself, like most of Old Master) whimsical but utilitarian guitar pop body. Read more about Old Master here.

“Grindset Blues”, May Leitz
From A Touch of Grace (2025, Lonely Ghost)

May Leitz is a prolific hyperpop artist; we join her with A Touch of Grace, her debut for Lonely Ghost Records. It’s a trip, but not unnecessarily so–the core of each of these tracks is undeniably effective pop hooks, and when Leitz throws either 80s synthpop dressings or an assault of pop punk guitars at them (maybe even in the same song), it’s a complimentary balancing act. Speaking of balancing acts, the run-ragged, country-infused “Grindset Blues” is an early highlight on A Touch of Grace–it works way better than you’d think, and that’s without even getting into Leitz’s lyrics about the titular lifestyle sapping her life force (“I know one day it ends in a premature heart attack” / “I can’t complain, see, I’ve dug my own grave”). Read more about A Touch of Grace here.

“Lighter Touch”, Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth
From Two of Us (2025, Happen Twice)

The latest release from Rosy Overdrive favorite Noah Roth is a collaborative EP with a new-to-me figure who nonetheless proves to be a match for Roth in the realms of classic folk and pop songwriting, Samuel Aaron. Two of Us starts off with relatively buttoned-up folk-pop music and gets a little more curious as it goes on, perhaps cataloging this new songwriting team-up in real-time (the record was written and recorded in one day, per their label Happen Twice). They’re all successes, but I think that the oddest song on the EP, “Lighter Touch”, is my favorite–Roth breaks the 1970s cosplay fully by AutoTuning their vocals, leading a fiery but very catchy song about a recovery of sorts (“I don’t think about you much anymore / I’ve adopted a lighter touch than before”) that bleeds into the closing cover of The Beatles’ “Two of Us”. Read more about Two of Us here.

“Criminal Activities”, The Rishis
From The Rishis (2025, Primordial Void/Cloud Recordings)

Despite a credits section again filled with indie rock royalty, Elephant 6-associated group The Rishis resist the urge to turn their self-titled sophomore album into an overstuffed affair and instead continue to lock their gaze on creating perfect pop tunes in their chosen folky, slightly psychedelic realms. For the most part, the Rishis’ guests are integrated seamlessly, but when Mac McCaughan steps in on guitar on “Criminal Activities”, The Rishis are all of a sudden riding Superchunk-like electricity for a two-minute surprising album highlight. For the most part, The Rishis (while indeed being a little more electric than their 2022 debut album August Moon) isn’t such a stark departure from their typical sound, but when you’ve got a member of Superchunk on the track, there’s no harm in leaning into his strengths a bit more. Read more about The Rishis here.

“November”, Moon Orchids
From Moon Orchids (2025, Positively 4th Street)

Moon Orchids caught my attention by referencing names like Magnolia Electric Co. and Silkworm as points of influence for their self-titled debut, but the one I’d lean the most on in describing the sound of Moon Orchids is the same act from which those bands took a good deal of inspiration–Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Moon Orchids is a “folk/rock” record like classic Young LPs, with mandolin and acoustic guitar-led folk songs sitting right next to blustery, meandering Crazy Horse-style rock explosions. My favorite (probably) song on the album falls into the latter camp–the sweeping “November” (featuring lead vocals from trumpet player Morgan Keltie) sprawls for nearly six minutes in an incredibly agreeable, meandering manner. Read more about Moon Orchids here.

“Same Mistakes”, Whelpwisher
From Same Mistakes (2025)

You can always count on Chicago’s Ben Grigg for a brief, noisy guitar pop tune. Gregg hasn’t neglected his solo project Whelpwisher even as he’s played key roles in bands like Babe Report, Big Big Bison, and FCKR JR over the past few years, with the twelve-song, nineteen-minute Same Mistakes kicking off 2025 with a collection of short, catchy, and loud Grigg rock music. My favorite song on Same Mistakes is probably the title track, which doesn’t even need eighty seconds to come out swinging with feedback-laden power pop hooks and a delicate pop core underneath all of the clatter.

“Mtn. Decoy”, Jordan Krimston
From Count It All Joy (2025, DHCR)

Earlier in this playlist, I said that I chose Jordan Krimston’s “Castle Cloud” “over” “Mtn. Decoy” for this playlist; since I wrote that, however, I came back to this one and decided that it needed to be here too. Loosely speaking, “Mtn. Decoy” is in the same arena of adventurous emo-pop as “Castle Cloud”, but the math-y percussion of that one is replaced with a smoother ride here. The shuffling beat and Krimston’s casual but pointed sung-spoken vocals are indeed hip-hop-influenced (as I alluded to when I wrote about “Castle Cloud”), but for the most part it’s still more or less a guitar-driven pop song (that, nonetheless, has plenty of fun with its synth touches, too).

“Out of Body Out of Mind”, Above Me
From Above Me (2025, Dandy Boy)

San Francisco band Blue Ocean made a noisy, experimental post-rock-influenced version of shoegaze on their underheralded records; apparently the group quietly broke up last year, but this bad news is tempered by the announcement and debut release from co-founder Rick Altieri’s new solo project, Above Me. Still certainly operating in the wider worlds of “shoegaze” and “noise pop”, Altieri doesn’t try to recreate the sensory overload sensation of his previous band on Above Me, instead taking advantage of the self-recorded, drum-machine-heavy pallet to make some heavily fuzzed-out, psychedelic pop music. The blossoming fuzz-dream-pop of opening track “Out of Body Out of Mind” sets the stage pretty much immediately–and though the EP matches it in pop-forward moments and challenges us all a bit later on, this first move is still Above Me’s best so far. Read more about Above Me here.

“Kid 1”, Dead Gowns
From It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow (2025, Mtn. Laurel)

I touched on Dead Gowns a bit back in 2023, when the Geneviève Beaudoin project released a deluxe version of their 2022 EP HOW featuring a couple of bonus tracks. “Kid 1” was one of those extra songs, but it wasn’t until I heard it on It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow that it really stuck out for me. The first-ever Dead Gowns LP is almost a decade in the making, and it’s a sprawling collection of folk rock and alt-country that’s a lot to take in, but “Kid 1” serves an important purpose by offering up welcoming guitars and a dramatic pop attitude early on in the LP’s runtime. The Maine-based singer-songwriter has the qualities that could make her the latest indie-folk-rocker to take the next step up, but regardless of how successful It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow ends up being, Beaudoin’s doing good work.

“The Shape of Thirst to Come”, The Thirsty Giants
From THIRST A.D. (2025)

Ooh boy, a Midwestern garage punk trio whose music is loud, scuzzy, and occasionally grotesque. The Thirsty Giants are an “inter-generational basement punk” band currently spread out between Duluth and Makato, Minnesota and made up of guitarist/vocalist Holden Perron, drummer David Perron, and bassist Hunter Thiesen. The group have put out a handful of records that straddle the line between LP and EP; the brief six-song Thirst A.D. (out on March 7th) is solidly in the latter camp, but The Thirsty Giants make the most of their brief time, especially on lead single “The Shape of Thirst to Come”. A swaggering blues-y garage punk song, it’s not quite Butthole Surfers-level “fucked-up Americana” but it does indeed capture the attitude of classic SST and Touch & Go bands that cast their gaze upon Detroit.

“What Is Tough to See”, …or Does It Explode?
From Tales to Needed Outcomes (2025, Snmyhymns)

…or Does It Explode? is a band hailing from Madison, Wisconsin whose previous music mixed Dischord Records-influenced post-hardcore with more cavernous and exploratory Midwest emo sounds. Tales to Needed Outcomes (initially conceived as a solo project for guitarist/vocalist Shawn Bass before the rest of the band got involved) explores …or Does It Explode?’s more intimate side, operating in the world of horn/string-laden Midwest emo, orchestral slowcore and post-rock, and good old-fashioned 90s basement indie rock. It has the core of the bedroom project it began as, but it benefits greatly from the full punk-trained band backing it up at all times. It’s hard for me to single out specific tracks on Tales to Needed Outcomes because it’s such a cohesive experience, but “What Is Tough to See” (the first proper song on the album after an intro track) really does set the scene and prepare us for the long, beautiful journey that follows. Read more about Tales to Needed Outcomes here.

“Downhill”, The Winter Journey
From Graceful Consolations (2025, Turning Circle)

Manchester’s The Winter Journey released their debut album in 2008, and their first LP in over fifteen years, Graceful Consolations, does remind me a bit of the duo’s era of origin–a precocious and deliberate period of “indie music”, where everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Belle & Sebastian was suggesting that maybe there was something new to be gained from the old guard of 70s folk rock, Brian Wilson, and soft rock after all. “Downhill”, which opens Graceful Consolations, starts with Anthony Braithwaite singing a gorgeously wistful melody alongside folk-y guitar playing; halfway through the brief track, Suzy Mangion arrives as a second voice, and the piano and bass begin to fill the song out. This is Graceful Consolations in a nutshell–deceptively simple, but complete and containing so much. Read more about Graceful Consolations here.

“Oh, Oh”, Nikki Minerva
(2024, Kid)

Nikki Minerva seems like a name to watch for a certain subset of this blog’s readership. The Chicago-based singer-songwriter only has a couple of released songs to their name so far, but their latest one (their second “proper” single, third if you count a demo in 2023) is more than enough to get a grip on their music. “Oh, Oh” is a six-minute, dreamy haze of an indie folk tune–the “dream” part is basically literal, as Minerva sings of waking up and falling back into a dream, and the song itself hovers somewhere in between. Spindly guitars and slow-motion percussion eventually join Minerva’s acoustic chords, and a good portion of the second half of the track is made up of laid-back guitar soloing. Minerva refers to writing the lyrics as “[bleeding] all those emotions out”–the title almost seems like an attempt to deflect the, ahem, confessional writing found in every other line in the song, but it works well enough that no obscurity is necessary.

“Let It Through”, Vulture Feather
From It Will Be Like Now (2025, Felte)

Vulture Feather have gotten to work hammering out slow, deliberate, Lungfish-esque guitar-heavy post-punk ever since their 2023 debut album, Liminal Fields. Vulture Feather’s hallmarks–Colin McCann’s otherworldly yowling vocals and chiming guitar, the steady, glacial movement, a rapturous devotion to minimalism and repetition–remain intact on It Will Be Like Now, even though there is a subtle loosening of their sound on their latest record. It’s hard to single out specific Vulture Feather songs because everything they ever do feels like one big single movement, but It Will Be Like Now has some notable mile markers–for one, closing track “Let It Through” (the one with Green on baritone guitar) is really indescribable, just four minutes of one three-chord guitar progression and McCann giving it everything in the vocals. Read more about It Will Be Like Now here.

Pressing Concerns: Sorrows, Saoirse Dream, Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth, The Illness

Good morning! Pressing Concerns time! This Monday edition of the column brings us a long-lost third album from early 1980s band Sorrows, new albums from Saoirse Dream and The Illness, and a collaborative EP between Samuel Aaron and Noah Roth. A bunch of strong music down below!

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

Sorrows – Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Big Stir
Genre: Power pop, garage rock, rock and roll
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Never Mind

There’s nothing scarier than an angry power pop band. A bunch of polished-up guys in skinny ties performing Beatlesque melodies with tightly-controlled harmonies with all of their rage trained on their intended target–watch out! And in 1981, the New York power pop band Sorrows were angry. And the object of their fury was a classic power pop bugaboo: label-executive meddling in their music (ranking somewhere behind a girl that’s “done them wrong” and ahead of an authority figure with an unbridled hatred for “rock and roll music”). After a promising debut album in 1980 with Teenage Heartbreak, the messiness that came with recording and releasing its follow-up, Love Too Late, was so strenuous that they broke up not long after recording a single overnight session with Mark Milchman at Mediasound Studios in 1981. These final recordings seemed to disappear with Sorrows’ demise, but a recent partnership with Big Stir Records–who have recently released a solo album from guitarist/vocalist Arthur Alexander and a “corrected” version of Love Too Late–led to the opportunity for Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow to see the light of day, finally. We’re left with a compelling and timeless-sounding belated final statement–with little if any studio trickery, Arthur, vocalist/guitarist Joey Cola, vocalist/bassist Ricky Street, and drummer Jett Harris bash out eleven originals and three covers with the attitude of a bar band with nothing to lose.

Arthur was the band’s primary songwriter, and Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow reveals him as a gifted power pop composer who took his songs even further whenever he got the chance. Quite possibly the album’s strongest track, opener “Never Mind” achieves every power pop band’s dream of combining early Beatles bubblegum pop with punk rock, and if most of his other tracks can be slotted neatly into either “power pop” (“Out of My Head”, “Kiss You Later”) or “garage rock” (“Let Me Know”, “Too Much Love”), they’re still excellent examples of them, and they’re just as impressive as the album’s lone “epic”, Side B opener “Cricket Man” (a highly colorful, imaginative, Beatles-y tribute to John Lennon, which gains a lot of power for originating in the immediate aftermath of the singer’s assassination). By and large, the cover songs and other-band-member-penned tracks keep the foot on the gas–Street contributes three solid songs, but it’s Cola’s lone writing credit, the 50s-bitten dancefloor number “That’s Your Problem”, that might be my favorite of this category. The non-originals are chosen expertly, too–their take on the Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?” is probably the most “fun” one, but their blistering version of “You Don’t Own Me” (a song by The Pirates, the former backing band for 60s rock and roller Johnny Kid who later reformed without him) is the one that closes the album with a defiant statement.  They don’t indeed, Sorrows. (Bandcamp link)

Saoirse Dream – Saoirse Dream

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Hyperpop, synthpop, indie pop, bedroom pop, noise pop, chiptune, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Catherine Never Broke Again

First off, let me get this out of the way. Lauren Records signed a power pop/pop punk band called Star 99 out of San Jose whose lead singer is named Saoirse Alesandro, but they’ve also recently signed a solo project from Portland, Oregon called Saoirse Dream that’s led by one Catherine Egbert. I’ve gotten my Saoirses crossed before, but now that I’ve familiarized myself with Saoirse Dream and their self-titled debut album, I don’t anticipate having that problem any longer. Since the beginning of this decade, Egbert has been connected to “hyperpop” as a movement, both through her work as Saoirse Dream (which debuted in 2021 with everything✱, with star★☆ following the next year) and as part of collectives like webcage and User-177606669. Her debut album for Lauren Records is indeed a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy, and the garish manipulations that I personally associate with hyperpop. Compared to the last hyperpop-ish artist I wrote about, May Leitz, Saoirse Dream isn’t as sonically chaotic–I could imagine more typical pop punk/indie pop versions of most of these songs (in fact, they might already be in there somewhere), but Egbert has such a handle on these extra touches and tools that they pretty much always feel like they add to the music.

Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas in any case, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music. We’ve got “Initialize” in the first slot, which begins with chirping 8-bit synths and then offers up a soaring emo-pop chorus, “Down in Flames” walks a tightrope between “blaring post-MGMT-style synth hooks” and “almost-whispered bedroom pop verses”, and the two ends of “Broad Shoulders!! Gold Stars!!” are 90s alt-slacker-pop and crunchy hard rock guitars. Most of my favorite songs on Saoirse Dream I’d categorize as “hyper-pop punk bangers”; “Montage” kicks its chorus out like it’s trying to soundtrack the titular sequence (“It’s sort of like being alive!”), then there’s “Catherine Never Broke Again”, two minutes of high-flying, high-stakes mundanity (Incidentally, if I was trying to explain to someone how transmisogyny is just misogyny, I don’t think I could come up with anything more succinct than “I still get catcalled in jeans and a T-shirt / When I wear high heels, still get misgendered”), and the ska punk-tinged closing track “Something Cool” (nice Rosenstockian gang vocals on this one!). Egbert resists the urge to blow up “God Knows I Could Tear Us Apart” to unrecognizable proportions–that one needs subtlety to make us sit with the discomfort at the heart of the track. Usually, the growth in Saoirse Dream isn’t very obvious–but there’s no sweat from Egbert when it has to be, too. (Bandcamp link)

Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth – Two of Us

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Happen Twice
Genre: Folk-pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi pop, indie folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Lighter Touch

There was a twelve-month period in 2022 and 2023 where I wrote about three different albums from Chicago-originating singer-songwriter and Beatles superfan (I mean, I’m presuming) Noah Roth, a disparate trio of LPs that established them as a talent both in producer-tinkerer and acoustic folk bard mode. It’s been a minute since a Noah Roth solo release, but they’ve kept busy between their fuzz rock supergroup Mt. Worry and experimental art-folk-pop duo Hell Trash. The latest Roth-related release is another duo, but this time it’s with an unfamiliar (to me) figure in Samuel Aaron. What I’ve sampled from Aaron’s work thus far suggests a musician who’s also interested in classic folk and pop songwriting, perhaps more of a traditionalist than Roth but with offbeat instincts, too (the bio from their new label, Happen Twice, explicitly mentions Lennon-McCartney–Aaron, I think, is Paul in this comparison). Their debut EP together, Two of Us, is subsequently the most pop-forward Roth release in some time; the duo put together four laid-back, comfortable folk-pop originals and one cover (yes, the titular Beatles song) with an ease that’s quite impressive for a new collaboration.

There’s a nice throughline for a five-song, fifteen-minute EP within Two of Us–it starts off with relatively buttoned-up folk-pop music and gets a little more curious as it goes on, perhaps cataloging the evolution of this new songwriting team-up in real-time (the record was written and recorded in one day, per Happen Twice). Like I said earlier, I’d been unfamiliar with Aaron before now, but he earns his spot alongside Roth pretty quickly on opening track “My Guitar’s Got a Leak”, with his earnest, almost country-ish vocals contrasting nicely with Roth’s lower, steadier register (that Beatles-y undercurrent to the instrumental is pretty swell, too). There’s an interesting theological bent to “I’ll Never Win” (both Roth and Aaron get some mileage out of their respective “namesakes” in this one), and the banjo/drum machine creation “Squirrels in the Walls” is a nice lo-fi watery, domestic tune (sample verse: “I think you’re hair’s clogging the shower drain / It’s much longer than my hair / I believe it is your hair / That’s clogging up the shower drain”). These are all successes, but I think that the oddest song on the EP, “Lighter Touch”, is my favorite–Roth breaks the 1970s cosplay fully by AutoTuning their vocals, a fiery but very catchy song about a recovery of sorts (“I don’t think about you much anymore / I’ve adopted a lighter touch than before”) that bleeds into the closing cover of “Two of Us”.  It’s a nice “end credits” closer, although I certainly wouldn’t mind a sequel or two. (Bandcamp link)

The Illness – Macrodosed

Release date: February 14th
Record label: Sea
Genre: Indie pop, post-punk, art rock, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Glitter Witches

My familiarity with The Illness, a “collective” based in “Liverpool-York (and beyond)”, began in 2023 with their Summerase EP. Summerase was their second release, following a two-song self-titled EP in 2020 that featured Steve West and Bob Nastanovich; Summerase may not have had any cameos from members of Pavement, but I was impressed with the range of the twelve-minute EP, which featured four indie pop songs with shades of everything from post-punk to slacker rock to slowcore to baroque pop contained within them. A couple of years later, The Illness have put together their debut full-length, Macrodosed, and they return to the well of enlisting 90s indie rock royalty by having David Pajo of Slint and Papa M play guitar on the record and even sing lead vocals on one song (considering that I noted the Papa M vibes of “I Was a Quarrelsome Youth” from Summerase when I wrote about it, this seems like a very apt collaboration; Smog also came up with regard to that track, so I look forward to Bill Callahan appearing on The Illness LP2 in 2027). Regardless of who’s on the album, The Illness continue to sack indie rock and indie pop history on their most substantial release yet, their trademark freewheeling guitar pop music remaining intact.

After the instrumental introduction, Macrodosed wastes no time getting to work and delivering the goods–“Championship DNA” is an awesome first proper statement, a bit garage-y, a bit power poppy, and a bit noisy, throwing the gauntlet down in under two minutes. The Illness give Pajo “Speedway Star” to sing, and the indie rock veteran leads the collective down into a haze of psychedelic, clattering, Sonic Youth-y noisy mid-tempo rock. “Glitter Witches” wrests Macrodosed out of this jagged ditch with shiny 80s synths, skittering basslines, and a gorgeous new wave-y chorus–even for The Illness, it’s a bit out of nowhere. After the string-laden 60s pop of “Waiting for the 2nd Bell”, Macrodosed consistently gets a bit more zoned-out and stoned, but The Illness are still very active through odysseys like “Slow Conductor” and the vocoder pile-up of “Entropolis”. The chilly distortion-ocean of “The Depths” eventually careens its way into an almost sea shanty-like singalong refrain (you might have to listen closely to hear it under the fuzz, but it’s there), and semi-title track “Macrodoser” pulls everything together for a six-minute post-punk/synthwave/sophisti-pop conclusion. The Illness have no problem blowing up their whole deal to fit a forty-minute LP; it seems like the struggle would’ve been figuring out how to grind things to a halt. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

The Bulletin Board: March 2025

Hey folks! The inaugural February 2025 edition of the Rosy Overdrive Bulletin Board was a success, so we’re back at it again in March!

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

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

Northeastern U.S. and Canada:

Midwestern Medicine, Teenage Tom Petties, and Crystal Canyon at Space, Portland (ME) (with Ladybrain), March 6th

Mui Zyu, Ducks Ltd., Ombiigizi, and Tallies at Wavelength Music Festival, Toronto, February 28th to March 1st

The Bug Club at Longboat Hall, Toronto, March 25th

Vundabar, Pet Fox, and Fantasy of a Broken Heart at Paradise Rock Club, Boston, March 7th

Hell Beach at Warehouse XI, Somerville (MA) (with Half Past Two and Omnigone), March 23rd

Bellows at Camp Cataract, Niagara Falls (ON) (with Perfect Strangers), March 8th

Peel Dream Magazine at Tubby’s, Kingston (NY) (with Babehoven), March 5th

Ethan Beck & The Charlie Browns at Alphaville, Brooklyn (with Zack Keim, Mikey Carnevale, and Buga), March 1st

The Sunshine Convention at The Delancey, Manhattan (with Powdermaker and Lollirot), March 6th

Humilitarian at Bar Freda, Queens (with Warpark, Tysk Tysk Task, and Sam Zalta), March 8th

Bruiser & Bicycle at Alphaville, Brooklyn (with Dolly, fib, Wiring, and Little Cliff), March 15th

Upper Wilds and Savak at Mama Tried, Brooklyn (with DJ Paul Bruno), March 20th

Onesie at Main Drag Music, Brooklyn (with Alice Danger, Safe Houses, and Automat0m), March 22nd

Beeef at Alphaville, Brooklyn (with Spirit Ghost, DD Island, and Wet Bastard), March 29th

Golden Apples at Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia (with Queen Jesus, Sandcastle, and Goshupon), February 28th

Ther at a DM for address show, Philadelphia (with Gabbo and Macbuck), March 7th

The Goodbye Party at God’s Automatic Body, Philadelphia (with Cryptid Summer and two short film screenings), March 15th

The Tisburys at Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia (with Bar Dust: A Tribute to The Pogues), March 21st

False Tracks at Broken Goblet, Bensalem (PA) (with Scream and Violent Society), March 21st

Yo La Tengo at the Howard Theatre, Washington DC (with the Sun Ra Arkestra), March 22nd

All My Friends Are Cats at Mr. Robot Project, Pittsburgh (with Leisure Hour, Finalbossfight!, and Secret Tunnel), March 6th

Six Flags Guy at Mr. Roboto Project, Pittsburgh (with Vireo, Sad Bulldog, and Deftcat), March 7th

The Bevis Frond and Oneida in Somerville (MA), Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, February 28th to March 2nd

Friko in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Cambridge (MA), Montreal, and Toronto, (with Peel Dream Magazine in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn), March 3rd to March 11th

Hour in Washington DC and Philadelphia, March 6th to March 7th

2nd Grade (solo) in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Brooklyn (with The Smashing Times in Baltimore), March 8th to March 11th

Powerwasher in Baltimore, Queens, Philadelphia, Reading (PA), and Baltimore again (with Grocer at first Baltimore show), March 9th to March 16th

Ratboys in Boston, Troy (NY), Brooklyn, Glenside (PA), and Washington DC, March 10th to March 15th

Lilly Hiatt in Philadelphia, Cambridge (MA), Brooklyn, Washington DC, and Millvale (PA), March 11th to March 15th

Star 99 in Pittsburgh, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington DC (with Sunday Cruise), March 17th to March 20th

Patterson Hood and Lydia Loveless in Somerville (MA), Brooklyn, Sellersville (PA), and Washington DC, March 18th to March 23rd

Macseal in Somerville (MA), Philadelphia, and Manhattan, March 20th to March 22nd

Sarah Shook and the Disarmers in Washington DC and Pittsburgh, March 22nd to March 23rd

Baths in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Somerville (MA), Kingston (NY), Montreal, and Toronto, March 22nd to March 29th

Chaepter in Buffalo, Boston, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh (with Husbands in Boston), March 22rd to March 27th

Tsunami and Ida in Woodstock, Somerville (MA), Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York City, March 22nd to March 29th

Sharp Pins in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, and Toronto (opening for The Hard Quartet), March 25th to April 1st

The Spatulas in Brooklyn, Kingston (NY), Montreal, and Boston (with Chronophage and Home Blitz in Brooklyn), March 27th to March 30th

Southern U.S.:

Late Bloomer at The Milestone, Charlotte (with Felix Tandem, Creatures of the Sun, and Aluminum 6), March 8th

Good Flying Birds, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, and Hill View #73 at The Big Pop Show (Duke Coffeehouse) in Durham, March 22nd to March 23rd

Babe Report at Al’s Bar, Lexington (KY), March 30th

Little Mazarn, Hell Trash, Free Range, and Dead Gowns at Passing Through, Elmwood Farms, Dallas, March 8th

The John-Pauls at The Buzz Mill, Austin (with Porch Swing Orchestra and The Coffin Fits), March 15th

Macseal and Guppy in Denton and Austin, February 28th to March 1st

Friko and Peel Dream Magazine in Atlanta and Raleigh, February 28th to March 1st

Poison Ruin in Birmingham, New Orleans, Denton, Austin, Oklahoma City, and Nashville, March 1st to March 9th

Hour in Charlottesville and Richmond, March 4th to March 5th

American Motors in Louisville, Memphis, Atlanta, Charleston (SC), Charlotte, and Raleigh (with Thousandaire in Atlanta), March 5th to March 15th

Lilly Hiatt in Atlanta, Charleston (SC), Charlotte, and Durham, March 6th to March 9th

Baths in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, and Richmond, March 10th to March 21st

Lee Bains III in Atlanta, Huntsville (AL), Lexington, and Nashville, March 11th to March 15th and March 26th

Vundabar in Asheville, Birmingham, San Antonio, and El Paso (with Yot Club and faerybabyy), March 12 to March 17th

Vulture Feather in Lubbock, Austin, Denton, and Amarillo, March 19th to March 22nd

Dogwood Tales in Winchester (VA), Charlottesville, Lexington, Louisville, Nashville, Atlanta, Athens (GA), Greensboro, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, March 21st to March 29th

Star 99 in Raleigh, Nashville, Memphis, Denton, Austin, and Oklahoma City, March 21st to March 27th

Sharp Pins in Nashville, Atlanta, and Carrboro (NC) (opening for The Hard Quartet), March 21st to March 23rd

Patterson Hood and Lydia Loveless in Carrboro (NC), Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, and Louisville, March 25th to April 5th

Midwestern U.S.:

All My Friends Are Cats at Mr. Robot Project, Pittsburgh (with Leisure Hour, Finalbossfight!, and Secret Tunnel), March 6th

Six Flags Guy at Mr. Roboto Project, Pittsburgh (with Vireo, Sad Bulldog, and Deftcat), March 7th

Six Flags Guy, Villagerrr, and Abel at Ace of Cups, Columbus (with Rug), March 10th

The Laughing Chimes and Six Flags Guy at Cafe Bourbon St, Columbus (with Hourglass and Shop the Pig), March 15th

Micah Schnabel and Shane Sweeney of Two Cow Garage at Frankie’s, Toledo (with Ben Nichols of Lucero and Chamberlain), March 6th

Wowza in Kalamazoo at Factory Coffee, Kalamazoo (with Sensor Ghost and Suck City), March 9th

Rotundos at Reggie’s, Chicago (with Boundary Waters, Constant Headache, and Vatos Tristes), February 28th

Big’n at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Mr. Phylzzz and Urine Hell), March 1st

Maria Elena Silva at Color Club, Chicago (with Ben MacDonald & Friends), March 1st

The Bevis Frond at Schubas, Chicago (with Helicopter Leaves), March 6th

Shredded Sun at Burlington Bar, Chicago (with Riddle M, Orange Foods, and Chorus Truly), March 11th

Deep Tunnel Project at The Hideout, Chicago (with Man’s Body), March 13th

Babe Report at Bottom Lounge, Chicago (with Ovlov, Krill 2, and Bursting), March 15th

Cel Ray at Empty Bottle, Chicago (with Daddy’s Boy and Nylon), March 24th

Mia Joy at Lincoln Hall, Chicago (with Lunar Vacation), March 25th

Sarah Shook & The Disarmers at Fitzgerald’s, Berwyn (IL) (with Dale Hollow), March 28th

Rotundos at GMan Tavern, Chicago (with Parachute Day, When We Was Kids, and Griefeater), March 28th

Oscar Bait at Beat Kitchen, Chicago (with The Brokedowns, Nervous Passenger, Two Houses, and Royal Dog), March 28th

Dusk and Graham Hunt at Cactus Club, Milwaukee (with Misprints and Innuendo), March 2nd

Footballhead at X-Ray Arcade, Milwaukee (with Superbloom and Bleary Eyed), March 29th

Miscellaneous Owl at Communication, Madison (with Lukie P and M Shays), March 7th

Hour in Bloomington (IN) and Yellow Springs (OH), March 2nd to March 3rd

American Motors in Chicago, Columbia (MO), Lincoln (NE), and Kansas City, March 6th to March 9th

Poison Ruin in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, March 7th to March 10th

Friko in Ferndale (MI), Columbus, and Indianapolis, March 13th to March 15th

Lee Bains III in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Madison, Green Bay, Minneapolis, Dubuque (IA), Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Bloomington (IN), March 14th to March 25th

Macseal in Minneapolis, Chicago, Ferndale (MI), and Lakewood (OH), March 14th to March 18th

Star 99 in Chicago, Bowling Green (OH), and Pittsburgh (with Sunday Cruise), March 15th to March 17th

Lilly Hiatt in Millvale (PA), Cleveland, Columbus, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Berwyn (IL), St. Paul, and Des Moines, March 15th to March 24th

Powerwasher in Cincinnati, Kalamazoo, Chicago, and Cleveland, March 18th to March 21st

Chaepter in Chicago, Fort Wayne (IN), Akron (OH), Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Dayton, and Indianapolis, March 20th to March 29th

Cel Ray in Springfield (IL), Carbondale (IL), Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago, March 20th to March 24th

Yo La Tengo in Nelsonville (OH), Cleveland, and Cincinnati, March 23rd to March 25th

Sarah Shook and the Disarmers in Pittsburgh, Lakewood (OH), Ferndale (MI), Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Berwyn (IL), Indianapolis, and Lawrenceburg (IN), March 23rd to March 30th

Babe Report in Dekalb (IL), St. Louis, and Cincinnati (with Humdrum and Ovef Ow in Dekalb, with Hennen (mem. Shady Bug) in St. Louis), March 29th to March 31st

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

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

Naked Giants in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Milwaukee (with Girl and Girl), March 31st to April 2nd

West Coast/Western U.S.:

Gaytheist and Wild Powwers at Southgate Bar, Seattle (with Nasalrod), March 1st

Bug Seance and Lowe Cellar at Bad Bar, Seattle (with Nonbinary Girlfriend and Pink Steam), March 6th

Guitar at Dante’s, Portland (OR) (with Fish Narc and Toner), March 8th

Telehealth at Mississippi Studios, Portland (OR) (with Buddy Wynkoop and Queen Rodeo), March 16th

The Goods, The Wind-Ups, and Fast Execution at Little Hill Lounge, El Cerrito (CA), March 1st

Poppy Patica at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco (with Earlimart and fime), March 1st

The Telephone Numbers at The Make Out Room, San Francisco (opening for The Rubinoos), March 3rd

The 1981 at The Kilowatt, San Francisco (with George Children and Lawnwacker), March 5th

Above Me and Mister Baby at Hit Factory, San Francisco, March 7th

Marbled Eye at The Knockout, San Francisco (with Trough, The Heart Wants, and Street Eaters), March 14th

Chime School at The Make Out Room, San Francisco (opening for The Rubinoos), March 17th

Ducks Ltd. and Half Stack at Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, March 25th

Black Ends in Vancouver (BC), Victoria (BC), Nanaimo (BC), Portland (OR), and Seattle, February 28th to March 2nd and March 24th to March 25th

Naked Giants in Wenatchee (WA), Portland (OR), Vancouver (BC), Boise (Treefort), and Denver, March 1st and March 21st to March 29th

Macseal in Mesa (AZ), Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland (OR), Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Denver (with Guppy in Mesa, Los Angeles, and Oakland), March 3rd to March 12th

Vulture Feather in Hayfork (CA), Eugene (OR), Portland (OR), Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Corvallis (OR), Arcata (CA), Chico (CA), Oakland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Lubbock, Austin, Denton, Amarillo, Taos (NM), Denver, Grand Junction (CO), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (with The Reds, Pinks & Purples in San Francisco), March 5th to March 28th

Anna McClellan in Friday Harbor (WA), Seattle, Olympia, and Portland (OR) (with Kelsey Magnuson), March 13th to March 16th

Baths in San Diego, Tucson, and Albuquerque, March 6th to March 8th

The Bevis Frond in Seattle, Portland (OR), San Francisco, and Los Angeles, March 8th to March 12th

Oneida and Kinski in Seattle, Vancouver (BC), Bellingham (WA), Portland (OR), Arcata (CA), San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles (with Terry Gross in San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles), March 15th to March 22nd

Vundabar in El Paso, Santa Fe, Tucson, Pomona (CA), Ventura (CA), Sacramento, Bellingham (WA), Vancouver (BC), Boise (Treefort), Salt Lake City, Boulder (CO), and Omaha (with Yot Club and faerybabyy), March 17th to April 2nd

Washer in Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland (OR), Boise (Treefort), Vancouver (BC), and Seattle (with Ovlov), March 21st to March 29th

This Is Lorelei in San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland (OR), San Francisco, and Los Angeles (with Starcleaner Reunion), March 23rd to April 4th

Ducks Ltd. and The Bug Club in Portland (OR), Seattle, Boise (Treefort), and Denver (with Bory in Portland), March 27th to April 1st

Star 99 in Denver, Salt Lake City, Reno, San Jose, Berkeley, and Los Angeles (with Sunday Cruise; with Josaleigh Pollett in Salt Lake City), March 28th to April 5th

Lilly Hiatt in Seattle, Trout Lake (WA), Portland (OR), San Francisco, Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, March 28th to April 5th

Australia:

Marbled Eye in Melbourne, Geelong, Melbourne again, Sydney, and Brisbane (with Dom Sensitive and Possible Humans at “Jerkfest” in Geelong), March 21st to March 30th

United Kingdom and Ireland:

Publicity Department at George Tavern, London (with Bloody Death and Piglet), March 11th

The Bug Club in Cardiff and Kings Heath, February 28th to March 1st

Dancer, Good Grief, Sassyhiya, and Fightmilk at Leicesterval, Leicester, March 1st and March 2nd

Dancer in Sheffield, Leicester, Cambridge, London, and Birmingham, February 28th to March 4th

Kal Marks in Manchester, Glasgow, Lees, Liverpool, Newcastle, Derby, Bristol, London, and Brighton (with Thank), March 13th to March 22nd

CŒUR À L’INDEX in London, Bristol, Exeter, Sheffield, and London again (with Jetstream Pony at the first London show), March 26th to March 30th

Europe:

Flight Mode at Revolvor, Oslo (with Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson and Ben Leiper), March 22nd

Chime School in Spain (Madrid, Gijon, Zaragoza, Lugo, Santander, Bilbao, Ourense, and Leon), March 21st to March 29th

Pressing Concerns: Cheekface, The Men, Andy Bell, Kristin Daelyn

What a great Pressing Concerns we’ve got below! It’s got the brand-new Cheekface album that came out earlier this week in it, as well as new albums from The Men, Andy Bell, and Kristin Daelyn that come out tomorrow, February 28th. Check it out, and be sure to dial up the blog posts from Monday (featuring David Ivan Neil, Gaytheist, Winter & Hooky, and Joshua Wayne Hensley) and Tuesday (featuring Moon Orchids, Midwestern Medicine, Publicity Department, and Smalltalk) if you haven’t yet.

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.

Cheekface – Middle Spoon

Release date: February 25th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, post-punk, Cheekface
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Art House

Why do you like Cheekface? Well, there are several legitimate answers from my vantage point. For the better part of a decade now, the Los Angeles trio have been making an incredibly specific type of music, a proprietary blend of power pop, dance-punk, and Television combined with Greg Katz’s everyman talk-singing vocals mixed up in a way scientifically guaranteed to garner Cake comparisons. The orations of Katz, a state-of-the-union collection of one-liners and fake-outs from somebody who has incomplete knowledge of every subject, have always been the immediate draw, but recent Cheekface material has emphasized “chops”, in particular last year’s It’s Sorted, which leaned heavily on rhythm section Amanda Tannen (bass) and Mark Echo Edwards (drums) to lock into a more dance-friendly groove. This growth (ironically, given that one of these songs is titled “Growth Sux”) is present on the fifth Cheekface LP, Middle Spoon, but rather than continue speeding down that path, the trio reach back to some of their other cornerstone influences this time around. Cheekface the big-chorus power pop slingers are back in a big way on Middle Spoon, as much as they were on 2022’s Too Much to Ask (the high watermark of this side of the band), if not more so. You can still dance to it (always people pleasers, Cheekface), but somehow it’s a more cathartic hip-swaying.

A lot of these aforementioned power pop bangers are found on Middle Spoon’s second half, but maybe the LP had to be kind of backloaded because the opening track, “Living Lo-Fi”, is positively unstoppable. It’s a giant tune–no wonder the song spends a whole stanza sympathizing with Goliath (“Now David was a murderer / Who had a problem with the tall / And as somebody who’s tall / You find the whole thing quite offensive”). The next in our gallery of rogues is mid-LP highlight “Art House”, which might be a roundabout way of acknowledging that Cheekface, “cool” influences aside, are never going to be thought of as an “art house” band. Katz actually sings really well in the chorus, emoting like an emo-pop frontperson on the “sticky arthouse floor”, and if the central metaphor of the song is a little convoluted (“You are a grey and grainy scene / You are not big on dialogue / And I can only turn you on / If I want to get confused”), well, that fits with the theme. “Don’t Dream” also deserves a mention here, even if I don’t have much to say about it other than that it’s an incredible move to open a Cheekface song with “Are you sick of my shit yet?”. “Content Baby”, though–I feel like I could write a whole essay just on that one. I have to keep things reined in here, but where does one even begin with a song with lyrics like “You like the good type of drone / I like the bad type of drone / We are two cute little perverts / With a heart made of gold” and a chorus that goes “Treat me like your content baby / You have my consent to share me”. 

“Content Baby” is also where Middle Spoon gets its title, and I think it zeroes in on what this record is all about–to me, at least. These songs are about comfort–sickly sweet, suffocating, grotesque comfort. It takes the discomfort one gets in the back of one’s head while in mindless dopamine pursuit mode and eliminates it, chasing down the comfort until it’s wolfed down every morsel of it and we’re all so comfortable that now we’re completely uncomfortable about it all over again. Middle Spoon is beautiful ruins, Katz running around the wreckage of society yelling about how “growth sux” and about how he loves reruns because he “know[s] what’s gonna happen” and about how he doesn’t get foreign cinema. Speaking of the wreckage of society, there’s a rap-funk-metal song on here called “Military Gum” where Cheekface let McKinley Dixon run wild and it sounds way better than it should. It sounds great, like if Rage finally cut out all that political BS. Just don’t think too hard about it. (Bandcamp link)

The Men – Buyer Beware

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Fuzz Club
Genre: Garage punk, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Fire Sermon

Buyer beware, Brooklyn garage rock merchants The Men are back once again. Of course, this isn’t all that surprising–if there’s one thing that’s predictable about their music, it’s that there’s always more of it, and the quartet (guitarist/vocalists Nick Chiericozzi and Mark Perro, bassist Kevin Faulkner, and drummer Rich Samis) have kept their foot on the gas this decade after linking up with producer Travis Harrison (Guided by Voices) and new label Fuzz Club Records for 2023’s New York City and a couple of “bonus”-type LPs in Fuzz Club Sessions and Manhattan Fire. New York City found the band returning to their garage rock roots after a couple of more eclectic and experimental releases, and with Buyer Beware, The Men have torn even further into this vein. A straight-up punk rock album, Buyer Beware is a baker’s dozen tracks’ worth of fiery rock and roll from the garage in the vein of Rocket from the Tombs, the first wave of New York punk, and even a bit of early/proto-Sub Pop in its heavier moments. Moments of squealing saxophones are banged-out piano throughout the album help The Men retain their metropolitan undercurrent, but these extra moments don’t take the place of white-hot guitars; instead, they surge right alongside of them, doing their best to keep up.

No one can accuse Buyer Beware of starting out too slowly–pretty much everything on the album’s first half either begins with piercing amplifier feedback or immediately lurches into foot-on-gas garage punk rock. We have to grade things on a curve to differentiate these songs: “Pony” and the title track are “merely” satisfying, crunchy rock songs, while “Fire Sermon” and “PO Box 96” are straight-up insanity. The first song on Buyer Beware that could reasonably described as “pretty” is “Charm”, which has excellent melodies and harmonies underneath the fuzz, but the violent chain-punk excursion of “Black Heart Blue” (featuring the memorable couplet “Jesus in the manger / I’d fuck up a stranger to get next to you”) rises up almost in direct reaction to it. The bottled-up explosion of “Nothing Wrong” (they wait almost an entire minute before the full might of The Men kicks in!) signals…something, but it’s not until the home stretch of Buyer Beware where things truly get palpably heavier, sludgier, grungier. The chugging chords of “The Path” are positively drenched in psychedelics, and while the Dead Moon-esque graveyard rock of “Tombstone” is a little more “normal Men”, they stretch this scorcher out to nearly four minutes. The metallic psych-punk returns on “Get My Soul”, the finale that finds The Men howling “you’re never gonna get my soul” over the musical fireworks. Jesus in the manger, I couldn’t imagine being wild enough to try. (Bandcamp link)

Andy Bell – Pinball Wanderer

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Sonic Cathedral
Genre: Psychedelia, krautrock, post-punk, art rock, space rock, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Panic Attack

For someone who’s been making music for nearly forty years, Andy Bell’s had a pretty impressive decade in the 2020s thus far. The Ride guitarist and vocalist (and onetime Oasis bassist) began a partnership with Sonic Cathedral (Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Dummy, Whitelands) at the beginning of this decade, and it’s sparked a wildly prolific period for the musician–I swear, for a while there it seemed like every time I turned around he had something new coming out, whether it was a proper solo album (like 2020’s The View from Halfway Down or 2022’s Flicker), a release from his side project GLOK, an EP of remixes or reimaginations of older recordings, or collaborations with labelmates like Masal (oh, and Ride is still going strong, too). Bell’s latest record is another long-player, an eight-song record called Pinball Wanderer, and we find the shoegaze legend waist-deep in a vibrant world of warped psychedelia, krautrock/post-punk/space rock grooves, and electronic/synth-led dream pop. Pinball Wanderer is one of those albums that sounds like the work of an eternal tinkerer, but he (presumably with help from producer Gem Archer, another ex-Oasis member) has shaped and edited these explorations into something incredibly varied but just as rewarding.

On one end of the spectrum, we have songs like the opening track “Panic Attack”, which reflect Ride’s greatest secret weapon–great pop songs. This steady-moving psychedelic pop track may be the single most accessible moment on Pinball Wanderer, but there’s also an excellent dream pop cover of The Passions’ “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” (featuring another labelmate, Dot Allison, on lead vocals, and none other than Michael Rother of Neu! on guitar), the pastoral instrumental title track (which has a bit of a 70s psychedelic folk vibe to it with a few more modern tricks), and the two-minute synthpop rest stop of “The Notes You Never Hear”, all of which I’d call “pop music” in their own specific ways. And then, on the other hand, we have the grooves. The most successful exploration in this vein is the longest one, the eight-minute “Apple Green UFO”, a wild extraterrestrial odyssey that never lets the rhythms at its core float into the atmosphere. Of course, we do “gotta hand it” to the garish electro-funk whispers of “Music Concrete” and the Stereolab-Dummy-core drone pop finale of “Space Station Mantra”, too. Andy Bell will probably get back to cooking up something new pretty soon, and while his next record might sound pretty different than Pinball Wanderer, I won’t be mistaking his wanderlust for a lack of commitment to whatever project he’s throwing himself into at the moment. (Bandcamp link)

Kristin Daelyn – Beyond the Break

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Orindal
Genre: Folk, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: An Opening

The Philadelphia singer-songwriter Kristin Daelyn debuted in 2021 with an album called Gardens & Plantings, a quiet folk record recorded and played almost entirely by Daelyn herself. Daelyn’s music is a natural fit for Orindal Records, and the cult Chicago folk/indie pop/ambient label has picked her up four years later as she gears up to release her sophomore album, Beyond the Break. Once again largely a Daelyn solo work, she nonetheless gets help from prolific co-producer Jason Cupp (Low Praise, Ratboys, American Football) and musicians Dan Knishkowy (Office Culture, Ben Seretan, Adeline Hotel) on guitar, Danny Black of Good Old War on steel guitar, baritone guitar, and bass, and Patrick Riley on strings on a couple of tracks apiece. Regardless of whether or not extra instrumentation was later added, the acoustic guitar-and-vocals cores of these songs were recorded by Daelyn at home live, and there’s subsequently a very direct and clear quality to Beyond the Break that’s befitting of Daelyn the writer. Beyond the Break is a brief album–its eight songs total less than 24 minutes altogether–but (aside from the sixty-second intro track) none of these songs feel abbreviated; Daelyn and her collaborators get just about everything they can out of them, in fact.

The presentation of Beyond the Break naturally places an emphasis on Daelyn’s lyrics and guitar playing–for the latter, she’s inspired by solo fingerstyle guitarists like John Fahey and Leo Kottke, but the name that she first references for the former is poet Mary Oliver. These are pretty hallowed influences, but the interplay between these two pillars is Beyond the Break’s greatest strength to my ears; the guitar is the anchor, the immediately satisfying part of her writing that’s always doing something compelling but never showy, while her lyrics are more insular, stories told in sanded-down short statements interspersed with the guitars and other instruments. For the most part, Daelyn’s songs hover in the midst of imagery of dreams, nature, dreams of nature, and nature that feels like dreams–worlds that can be comforting or dark, even as Daelyn’s writing doesn’t tip her hand. There will be occasional snatches of something more concrete in these songs–like the redwood tree and Massachusetts in “White Lilies”–but Beyond the Break is largely too insular to offer up even these semi-solid mile markers. The person who’s penning songs like “Wanted”, “Longing”, and “An Opening” is deep in herself–and no amount of fresh-air guitar fingerpicking can make these compositions simple. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: