Welcome to a Pressing Concerns Monday! We’ve got new EPs from Flat Mary Road and Rocket Bureau and new albums from Annabelle Chairlegs and Tacoblaster! Check ’em out below!
There will be a Tuesday blog post this week!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Flat Mary Road – The Camping EP
Release date: January 30th Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, college rock, indie pop, jangle pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Therapy Anthem
I first heard Philadelphia quartet Flat Mary Road in 2023, when they released Little Realities, an indie rock album I thought was strong at the time and have only appreciated more in the interim. Flat Mary Road’s warm and clever take on folk rock, jangly power pop, and Paisley Underground reminded me of classic college rock (I mentioned Miracle Legion at the time, which still holds), influences sorely underappreciated in the current landscape. Vocalist/guitarist Steve Teare, bassist Dan Papa, drummer Alex Irwin, and guitarist Alex Lewis’s first new music since Little Realities is the three-song Camping EP, a brief dispatch that nonetheless reaffirms that Flat Mary Road are remarkably adept at what they do.
The opening quasi-title track “The Last Time I Went Camping” is just beautiful, a shimmering, semi-psychedelic indie folk rock epic, winding its way like it’s traversing in the canoe on the cover (and in the lyrics) across miles of terrain on its own pace. It starts slow and gets giant. In most instances, “The Last Time I Went Camping” would be the “hit”, but Camping ends with an even larger-sounding one in “Therapy Anthem”. Unlike the EP’s opener, “Therapy Anthem” effectively starts at 100%, with a guitar riff that sounds like the sun rising over mountains and Teare declaring “Nobody wants to hear about somebody else’s dream anymore,” and Flat Mary Road are off to the races. When Teare sings “I am going into therapy again,” it’s given none of the winking awkwardness writers are all too prone to lapse into when talking of such matters; it’s given the same mystical but tangible feeling as the camping trip in “The Last Time I Went Camping” or the matter-of-fact goodbyes in “Parking on the Lawn”. I imagine it’s easier to commit to something when you have a band as strong as Flat Mary Road backing you, of course. (Bandcamp link)
Rocket Bureau – Maybes of Gold
Release date: February 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop, jangle pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Don’t Take Too Long
Madison, Wisconsin power pop project Rocket Bureau first came onto my radar last year thanks to their Party Armz EP; I called it a “seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll” and was impressed by one-man-band Kyle Urban’s ability to conjure all that up himself. Party Armz was the first Rocket Bureau record in five years, but we didn’t have to wait so long for Urban to return with new music: merely four months after that five-song EP, we’ve gotten another one called Maybes of Gold.
As a companion piece to Party Armz, Maybes of Gold is a coda that leans a little more into jangle pop and college rock than garage rock, although the “windows down anthems” are still present, particularly in closing track “Don’t Take Too Long”. Nonetheless, Maybes of Gold starts on a more subdued note with the ennui-laden pop rock of “Early Riser”, and the jangly title track feels like a more direct version of mid-tempo Guided by Voices classics. “Josie Lane”, right in the middle of the EP, is the record’s true ballad, complete with pensive arpeggios and self-harmonies, before “Til the Night Don’t Love You Anymore” initiates a more dramatic “big finish” completed by the aforementioned “hit” in “Don’t Take Too Long”. Over the course of two records and a third of a year, Kyle Urban’s put out ten spirited power pop songs and turned Rocket Bureau into a name that modern guitar pop fans ought to know. (Bandcamp link)
Annabelle Chairlegs – Waking Up
Release date: January 30th Record label: TODO Genre: Psychedelic rock, garage rock, desert rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Concrete Trees
Annabelle Chairlegs is Lindsey Mackin, a musician who first got her start in the Santa Fe band Treemotel and then began her current project after moving to Austin in 2013. Self-released Annabelle Chairlegs albums followed in 2015 and 2020; Waking Up is her first album in a half-decade, though she did release a few singles and an EP in the interim. This time, Mackin has partnered with new Texas/New York label TODO (The Narcotix, Surfbort, Porcelain) and enlisted garage rock maven Ty Segall to produce Waking Up, a confident collection of Lone Star State garage-psych rock. Waking Up reintroduces Annabelle Chairlegs by jumping around her areas of expertise: the opening title track is built from an a capella introduction and a simple groove once the music kicks in, “Concrete Trees” is sleek, quick-paced garage rock and roll, “Ice Cream on the Beach” is synth-drenched psychedelic pop, and “Above It All” veers into sunny 60s acoustic folk-pop. Eventually, Annabelle Chairlegs settles into a more overtly Western-evoking garage-psych-rock sound, but that doesn’t mean the second half is any less interesting (“Patty Get Your Gun” is an incredibly fun workout of this kind of thing, “Heavy Sleeper” is some toe-tapping retro-fuzz-pop, et cetera). It doesn’t sound like Mackin had any rust in need of shaking off, and Waking Up is as fresh and shined-up as anything in the genre. (Bandcamp link)
Tacoblaster – Digital Fun-Zone!
Release date: January 30th Record label: Les Disques Du Paradis/Flippin’ Freaks/Howlin’ Banana Genre: Garage rock, psychedelic pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: I Stay
Tom Caussade is one of the several Bordeaux, France-based musicians trying to turn their mid-sized European home city into a garage rock hub (see also TH Da Freak, Opinion, and SIZ). Tacoblaster is a power trio (featuring drummer Rémi Tourneur and bassist Sabina Ben Marzouk) as a live act, but in the studio, it’s more or less Caussade’s solo project. Digital Fun-Zone!, the fifth Tacoblaster album since 2021, was made almost entirely by Caussade and producer/multi-instrumentalist Stéphane Gillet (Ben Marzouk drops by for vocals on one track, and Jach Ernest’s Stéphane Jach plays trumpet on one). Caussade and Gillet take their curation of this “fun zone” quite seriously; they’re alchemists combining the elements of classic new wave-y power pop and trashy (er, I mean “surf-y”) turn-of-the-2010s garage rock. Either the post-punk bass, treadmill tempo, whirring synths, and Wavves-y chorus of opening track “Toxic Surfer” will do it for you or they won’t. But even if that isn’t your cup of tea, odds are that something will hit: the flowering psych-pop of “Pyjama”, the mid-tempo stroll of “Wendy”, the lo-fi pop punk of “Magic Dog”, the sludgy detour of “Toyland”, the perfect Ramones-core power pop of “I Stay”. This piece of bubblegum is an easy additional point towards Bordeaux in the garage-pop sweepstakes. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have four records coming out tomorrow, February 13th: new albums from Remember Sports, Gentle Brontosaurus, and Middleman, plus a “mini-album” from Sanpaulo. If you missed Monday’s blog post (which featured Dru the Drifter, Dennis Callaci and L. Eugene Methe, Fazed on a Pony, and Immaterialized), check that 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.
Remember Sports – The Refrigerator
Release date: February 13th Record label: Get Better Genre: Pop punk, power pop, alt-alt-country Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Roadkill
It was 2021’s Like a Stone that cemented Remember Sports as one of the great bands of their generation in my eyes. They’d followed an agreeable, well-worn path to get there–the Midwestern scrappy college indie-punk group moves to a major city (Philadelphia) and makes a more “mature” album (2018’s Slow Buzz). It’s all good, but Like a Stone was like a culmination everything they’d done up until that point and they sounded sharper than ever before to boot. It’s startling to realize that it’s been five years since Like a Stone, although there was an EP called Leap Day in 2022 and solo albums from vocalist/guitarist Carmen Perry and bassist Catherine Dwyer (as Spring Onion) in the interim. The original trio of Perry, Dwyer, and guitarist Jack Washburn welcomed new drummer Julian Fader (Sweet Dreams Nadine, Lane) into the group shortly after their last album, and the four of them went to Chicago’s Electrical Audio to self-produce The Refrigerator in 2024 (“just after” the sudden passing of the legendary studio’s founder, Steve Albini).
Remember Sports have been in Philadelphia for nearly a decade now, and they’re solidly enmeshed in the city’s indie rock scene–their members have spent recent years either playing in or with members of Friendship, 2nd Grade, and The Fragiles. I’m thinking about all the power pop and alt-country that’s come out of the city lately–the former has always been a part of Remember Sports’ sound, and Like a Stone even hinted at the latter, but The Refrigerator is the album that confirms that they’re all intertwined. The genre transition is a lot more natural and intuitive than, say, Waxahatchee’s, and they aren’t high-stakes “Americana” strivers like Wednesday–but, looking around now, these are Remember Sports’ peers. Remember Sports’ approachability, for lack of a better word, sets them apart. They don’t set out to inspire the kind of hyperbole those other acts inevitably attract; they just happen to make perfect albums.
In some ways, The Refrigerator picks up right where Like a Stone left off; specifically, the first four songs hit the exact same sweet spot of emo-ish introspection, rollicking indie-punk tempos, and massive power pop hooks. Having proved they still “have it”, Remember Sports then get weird with a five-minute piece called “Ghost”. With twangy violins, a locked-in rhythm section, and, oh right, a shocking amount of bagpipes, “Ghost” is like nothing Remember Sports have ever done before, but it’s still quite “them”. The Refrigerator is broken open from that point forward. The band offer up stuff like the hushed semi-title track “Fridge”, the torrential distorted-pop-fest “Roadkill”, and the quiet-loud 90s-esque euphoria of “Soothe Seethe”; no two songs are all that similar, but they all fit together. This is, of course, what great bands do in their second decade as a unit. (Bandcamp link)
Gentle Brontosaurus – Three Hares
Release date: February 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee pop, chamber pop, jangle pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Bend the Knee
I’ve written about the Madison, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Huan-Hua Chye via the two mostrecent albums from her solo project, Miscellaneous Owl; however, she’s also been the primary (but not only) lead vocalist and songwriter for the five-piece band Gentle Brontosaurus for even longer than Miscellaneous Owl’s inception. Three Hares is the band’s third album and first one since 2018; those of you who enjoyed Chye’s clever, catchy indie pop songwriting in Miscellaneous Owl will find plenty of it here. I’ve gotten used to Chye’s albums being scattershot (indeed, “miscellaneous”) collections of wide-ranging songs both thematically and musically; Gentle Brontosaurus is different, and both Chye’s writing and the band’s playing make conscious efforts to cohere.
Relationship dissatisfaction and interpersonal dead-ends are noticeable recurring themes; the complete incompatibility of “Tumbleweed”, the bouncy power pop send-off “Bend the Knee”, and the complex, thorny pornography/mythology meditation “My Favorite Monster” (“My favorite monster looks like loneliness / And loneliness looks just like a man,” a refrain in which Chye resists her more straightforward side) all qualify. The crown jewel of this side of Chye’s writing is “Cassini”, a ballad in which she plays the other woman to a married Neil deGrasse Tyson fan (this is, I think, the epitome of “down bad”). “Cassini” was co-written by a frequent Chye collaborator, England’s Tom Morton, and “collaboration” is what sets Three Hares apart from a busier Miscellaneous Owlbum. For one thing, the five-piece band setup (featuring horns, keys, and all the “rock band” instrumentation one could want) adds a lot to the music; I’ve heard Chye tackle self-image in her writing before, but, by bringing the race and gender exploration of “Blue” to Gentle Brontosaurus, the band turn it into something soaring and jaw-dropping.
For another, Chye isn’t the only singer-songwriter here; guitarist Scott Stetson brings two songs to the table, and keyboardist/trumpet player Nick Davies (also of Spiral Island) gets one. Stetson brings a slight post-Paul Westerberg Midwestern college rock edge to his songs (ironically, given one of the songs is called “Edge to Lose”, as in “I talk as if I ever had an…”) that Gentle Brontosaurus are able to shoehorn into their twee-horn-power-pop sound nonetheless. Davies’ sole song is the album closer, “Feeling of an Earthquake”, in which the band dabble in tasteful chamber pop and soft rock. Closing their album on a song led by somebody who hadn’t sang lead vocals anywhere else on the LP while also exploring a style they hadn’t really pursued up until that point is a statement about the big tent of Gentle Brontosaurus in and of itself; whether it’s the trumpet or the general sentiment that more ties back “Feeling of an Earthquake” to what came before it, the most important thing is that it does. (Bandcamp link)
Sanpaulo – Konstrukts Vol 1
Release date: February 13th Record label: Tone Scholar Recordings/Old 3C Genre: Post-rock, ambient rock, post-punk, minimal synth stuff Formats: Digital Pull Track: ¡Maybe It’s Mold!
It’s been a good time for members of the band Closet Mix as of late. The quartet of Columbus, Ohio indie rock veterans put out an LP in 2024, and guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki’s other band, Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One released an album at the beginning of this year, too. Not to be outdone, Closet Mix vocalist/bassist Paul Nini (who’s also played in Great Plains, Log, and Peck of Snide) has now booted up his solo project Sanpaulo for a new digital EP called Konstrukts Vol 1. Nini also runs the Old 3C Label Group, a “cooperative…[of] artist-run, micro-indie record labels” that have released music from all of the aforementioned bands, and Sanpaulo’s discography has all been under this umbrella as well. Much of Sanpaulo’s output has been in the form of two-track singles, so this eight-song, eighteen-minute EP is a pretty substantial release for Nini.
Directly inspired by Young Marble Giants’ Testcard EP (an instrumental release decidedly less beloved than that band’s lone full-length), Konstrukts Vol 1 is indeed a collection of minimal, languid indie rock instrumentals (or, yes, “constructs”). The more “guitar rock”-based tracks, like “¡Welcome Webelos”, “¡Maybe It’s Mold!”, and even the post-rock-ish “¡Aggrieved Am I!”, feel like an extension of Nini’s even-keeled work with Closet Mix without vocals, while “¡Amazon Prime Minister!” and “¡Pancake Day!” find Nini messing around with synths and organs a little more in true Testcard fashion (although both still have one foot in rock music). Really, if there’s an outlier on Konstrukts Vol 1, it’s penultimate track “¡The Age of Steam and Sail!”, which pairs vibrant, uplifting guitar picking with water sound effects; it’s kind of a “cosmic country/folk”-type diversion, in an interesting way. Konstrukts Vol 1 is a curiosity from somebody who’s been making music for a long time but seems to be still looking for new angles on it; that bodes well for Nini’s future endeavors, and this EP is entertaining on its own, too. (Bandcamp link)
Middleman – Following the Ghost
Release date: February 13th Record label: Evil Speaker Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Carry the Lie
Middleman know their underground rock history, I can tell you that much. Over the course of two very good EPs (2022’s Cut Out the Middleman and 2024’s John Dillinger Died for You), the London quartet (Noah Alves, Harper Maury, Rory White and Ted Foster) honed decades of indie, garage, punk, and even emo-rock history with an affinity for the likes of Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., Jawbreaker, and Guided by Voices. They’re in the realm of fellow 90s indie rock revivalists Fluung and Late Bloomer (and similarly can veer from punk rock to surprisingly melodic moments), although they’ve got a British polish to their sound that makes it feel like they aren’t merely trying to recreate their favorite records. Their debut album, Following the Ghost, is short and sweet–at twenty-six minutes, it’s their largest statement yet, but it’s still a quick run-through of angsty, catchy, laser-focused punk rock. Following the Ghost’s resting state is “post-hardcore garage rock”, injected with regular bursts of J. Mascis-esque guitar soloing and/or Robert Pollard-worthy arena rock flourishes. The album’s slower tracks like “All But the Flame” and “Morning All the Time” demonstrate that Middleman are just as fluent in “guitar pop” as their other interests, but that isn’t to say that the rockers aren’t just as catchy (I’d earmark the guitar workout “Vacant Days”, the bottle-rocket “Long Goodbye”, and the light-on-its-feet “The Furthest Place” in particular). It’s a consistent step forward from a band that looks to be quite reliable already. (Bandcamp link)
The first Pressing Concerns of the week offers up new albums from Dennis Callaci and L. Eugene Methe, Fazed on a Pony, and Immaterialize, plus two new albums from Dru the Drifter. Read ’em below!
The blog will next update this Thursday.
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.
Dru the Drifter – The Atomizer / The Thinker
Release date: January 1st / January 29th Record label: Self-released Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, garage punk, lo-fi punk, synthpunk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Who’s Outside My Door? / I Left My Keys in a UFO
I first heard of the Nashville musician Dru the Drifter early last year when they released Power Drifter, a split EP with the very good Virginia egg/synth/garage punk group Power Pants. After looking into Dru the Drifter some more, I learned that they’re quite prolific, averaging seemingly about one (typically digital-only, self-released) album a month (a non-exhaustive list of 2025 Dru the Drifter titles: The Hunter, The Plumber, The Creeper, The Spider, The Timer, The Bank Robber). With that in mind, it’s not all that surprising that one of the first new records that crossed my path in 2026 was a Drifter album–specifically The Atomizer, which dropped on New Year’s Day. If you’re looking for some distorted, lo-fi southern garage punk to liven up your winter, then The Atomizer is twenty-eight minutes of what you’re seeking.
There’s a bit of the synth-y, hooky garage punk of Power Pants in here, but Dru the Drifter strikes me more as an iconoclast less inclined to commit to one tenet of rock and roll for too long (like somebody who doesn’t stay in one town for long…if only there was a more concise word for that). We’ve got garage-y power pop songs like “Who’s Outside My Door?”, “Doctor Doctor”, and “Utility Hat”, lo-fi pop nuggets like “Something” and “Arson for Hire”, heavier, nearly Ty Segall-esque garage heaviness like “Clam Sauce”, and whatever you want to call the melting, radioactive four-minute conclusion that is “Atomizer”. This is the first Dru the Drifter album I’ve listened to on the whole, and if they’re really putting something as good as The Atomizer out every month, I’m not planning on it being the last. I’ll be paying attention this year.
But wait, there’s more! In the time between I wrote about The Atomizer and publication date, Dru dropped another album called The Thinker, and I, true to my word, immediately queued it up when I saw that it had been released. Featuring fifteen songs, none of which are over two minutes long, The Thinker is more slapdash than The Atomizer’s occasional heaviness, but it’s otherwise every bit the tour de force of garage punk with varying levels of “pop”, “hardcore”, and “synth” that Dru’s previous LP was. Plus, it has a song called “I Left My Keys in a UFO” that lives up to its title. Perhaps The Atomizer is the more adventurous listen, and The Thinker is the straight-shooter, so you can chart your own course when it comes to dipping a toe in the Dru the Drifter world. Now I better hurry up and publish this before they release another album. (Bandcamp link 1) (Bandcamp link 2)
Dennis Callaci and L. Eugene Methe – The Last Chance Lottery
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Shrimper/Gertrude Tapes Genre: Experimental rock, lo-fi indie rock, post-rock, sound collage Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: I Only Came Here to Hear About You
Between his time in the underappreciated Inland Empire, California indie rock group Refrigerator (which he co-founded with his brother, Allen, in 1990) and his work as the leader of long-running lo-fi label Shrimper Records (which is still going strong, recently releasing records from Goosewind, Son of Buzzi, and Ben Woods), Dennis Callaci has led a singular and impressive music life. Meanwhile, over in Omaha, L. Eugene Methe has his own record label called Gertrude Tapes (Linda Smith, Dan Melchior, Andrew Weathers) and has played violin and/or piano on records from the likes of the Mountain Goats, Simon Joyner, and, yes, Refrigerator. A collaborative record between the two of them (co-released by their respective imprints) makes a load of sense, but it’s hard to predict what they’d make together based on their wide-ranging backgrounds.
The result of Callaci and Methe’s team-up, The Last Chance Lottery, is on the more “experimental” end of the two’s spectrums. Neither the warm lo-fi pop of Callaci’s main band nor the (relatively) straightforward folk music with which Methe has been intermittently associated are the dominant elements of this LP. Methe, responsible for the music on the album, conjures up a broken tapestry of pianos, strings, and abstract atmospherics. Callaci, who lends his voice, moves between a Howe Gelb-esque lazy talk-singing and a more frightened, nervous undercurrent. It reminds me of the stranger corners of New Zealand underground music, weird Xpressway albums that eschewed the “pop” side of Dunedin but clearly were made by people connected to that scene nonetheless. There’s a haunting beauty to the album’s piano ballads, namely “This House at Night” and “Faded Temple University”, and there’s sharp if scattered construction at the core of the noirish “Cherry Red Blues”, the post-rock claustrophobia of “Black Napkins”, and the simmering “I Only Came Here to Hear About You”. The late David Thomas was fond of saying, regarding his band: “Pere Ubu is not experimental. We know what we’re doing”. It’s a quote that came to mind listening to The Last Chance Lottery. (Bandcamp link)
Fazed on a Pony – Swan
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Wrong Party
I first heard New Zealand singer-songwriter Peter McCall and his project Fazed on a Pony in late 2022, when he released his debut album, It’ll All Work Out. At the time, I noted that McCall (while still being indie pop-ish) sounded more in line with American folk rock groups like Wild Pink and Friendship than the kind of indie rock for which his home country is known, and McCall continues to pursue this avenue in Swan, the second Fazed on a Pony LP. Swan is catchy and, at times, jangly enough to fit on the two esteemed guitar pop record labels that are co-releasing it, and McCall works to combine that side of his sound with folk-y indie rock and whatever the New Zealand version of “Americana” is on this album. For one, Fazed on a Pony employ a pedal steel player throughout the album (Shaun Malloch, who rounds out the quartet’s lineup with bassist Rassani Tolovaa and drummer Hamish Morgan) and the album’s Bandcamp page isn’t shy about invoking the likes of MJ Lenderman, David Berman, and Sparklehorse.
The alt-country influence is incorporated tastefully and reverently, but I think it makes the most sense to approach Swan as an indie pop album first and foremost. The acoustic-led opening track “The Perfect Swan” and the violin-aided “Heart Goes Blank” are the exceptions–in between and around them, there are pop-forward, earnest indie rock anthems like “Flashes”, “Wrong Party”, “Wait Forever”, and “Not Even Trying”, all of which are as good as those from any “heartland rock”/power pop-straddling band over in the United States (in Philadelphia, or anywhere). Even way into the album’s B-side, I’m struck by how concise and economical of a pop songwriter the person who’s penning stuff like “Rising Star” and “Anything Else” must be. McCall might’ve chosen a different way of going about making guitar pop than many of his Kiwi peers, but that doesn’t mean Fazed on a Pony isn’t partaking in a rich tradition on Swan nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)
Immaterialize – Perfect
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Fire Talk/Angel Tapes Genre: Dream pop, synthpop, indie pop, electronica Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Never Rained
Last December, Angel Tapes (the “emerging artists” sublabel of Fire Talk Records) released an EP called Sea Songs by Dorothy, a trio from London made up of three musicians who’d already put out a decent amount of music via other names. The first Angel Tapes release of 2026 comes from a similar type of group, albeit from Chicago this time–the duo Immaterialize are made up of Alana Schachtel (who has a solo project called Lipsticism) and Erik Fure (who’s released ambient music as DJ Immaterial). Immaterialize began in 2024 with a pair of non-album singles, one of which featured Windy City producer Angel Marcloid (AKA Fire-Toolz), who then went on to master the duo’s debut album, Perfect, and contribute bass guitar and songwriting to album opener “Everything But Myself”.
Together, Fure and Schachtel make what I’d call “dreamy indie pop”, although the nine-song, twenty-nine minute Perfect is wide-ranging enough that it’s still a little challenging to get a handle on Immaterialize. “Everything But Myself” opens the record with some late-90s-style electronic-tinged pop (it’s not quite trip-hop, but the beat is nonetheless a key ingredient in the song). “It’s a Vision” continues this thread in a more subdued fashion; “Cheesecake Factory”, a slow-moving, explosive synthpop ballad, feels like the first outlier on Perfect, but it’s not the last, as the minimal guitars of “Holds the Key” ensure just a couple of tracks later. If Perfect ever settles into a “groove”, it’s probably the delicate, deliberate pop music exemplified in the second half of the album by “Never Rained” and “Evolution”, although the acoustic guitar-led closing track “Marked Man” throws us one last curveball before Immaterialize end their first LP. Perfect may be the sound of Immaterialize figuring things out, but it’s fun to listen along to the process. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s got everything, and by “everything”, I mean three albums that are coming out tomorrow, February 6th (new ones from Vegas Water Taxi, Music City, and 2070) and an EP that comes out today (by Achers). The January 2026 Playlist went up earlier this week; check that out if you missed 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.
Vegas Water Taxi – Long Time Caller, First Time Listener
Release date: February 6th Record label: PNKSLM Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Chateau Photo
Everybody wants to be the quippy but sad alt-country guy these days, don’t they? Really, it’s kind of surprising how long it took a generation of singer-songwriters to realize that the whip-smart turn-of-phrase nature of classic country plus the poetic beat of David Berman (and, generously, Leonard Cohen) plus just a bit of real rock music (in this current game of telephone, borrowed from the Drive-By Truckers by way of Jake Lenderman) equals instant authenticity (or something close enough to it). Which leads us to Vegas Water Taxi, a London-based alt-country band led by Ben Hambro, a musician whose strange lyricism and singing is such that I assumed he must be from the Netherlands or something and is writing in a second language (but, nope, he’s just like this, apparently). After putting out a debut album in 2023, Vegas Water Taxi’s second album is actually two EPs in one, last year’s Long Time Caller with a new one called First Time Listener tacked onto it.
What does a British guy named Hambro (whose previous act, Lazarus Kane, dealt in “funky electro-pop”) and his band (bassist Fred Lawton, drummer Charlie Meyrick, vocalist Molly Shields, pedal steel player Rhodri Brooks, organist Louis Milburn, and violinist Holly Carpenter) have to say in a facsimile of “Americana”, anyway? Are these Brixton Windmill players really going to be the ones who hogtie the zeitgeist and prove they actually understand those lofty influences better than everyone else? Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that the songs on Long Time Caller, First Time Listener are quite good, and that helps Vegas Water Taxi’s attempts to do so go down very easy. Couplets like “The cops, they broke the door of my Hummer / Asked me about my long brat summer,” sound not only forgivable but laudable when they’re set right at the center of a beautifully-harmonized Teenage Fanclub-esque guitar pop masterpiece, I can tell you that much.
Some of this stuff just works on every level, and that’s all there is to it. The second song on the album, “Chateau Photo”, where Hambor sings “She left me for a guy who’s working in PR / He’s putting out a press release that I’m crying in a bar” over lilting pedal steel? I’m fully on board with that. The asides about being drowned in Liquid Death and the Matty Healy name-drop in “Brat Summer”? Well, they work in context, but they’re not something I’d clip to my locker, necessarily. The world probably doesn’t need a song called “Ozempic (Celebrity Weight Loss Blues)”, but if you can get past the fact that it’s called “Ozempic (Celebrity Weight Loss Blues)”, you’ll hear a pretty earnest and catchy meditation on body dysmorphia and authenticity (that guitar riff is pretty Lenderman; sure, why not?). Listening to Long Time Caller, First Time Listener, I did find myself more and more willing and able to “get past it”; if Vegas Water Taxi keep doing what they’re doing on this album, I won’t be alone in this. (Bandcamp link)
Music City – Welcome to Music City
Release date: February 6th Record label: Redundant Span Genre: Power pop, pop rock, garage rock, glam Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Pretty Feelings
Where is Music City? If Conor Lumsden is to be believed, it’s either Dublin (the musician’s city of origin and where he got his start as part of the power pop quartet The Number Ones) or London (where he’s currently based and where he started his newest project). To make his debut album as Music City, he took advantage from a long history of international touring to call up names like Tina Halladay and Hart Seely of Sheer Mag, Jay Arner of Energy Slime, Alastair MacKay of Dick Diver, and Evan Walsh and Pete O’Hanlon of The Strypes to play on Welcome to Music City. With Lumsden at the head of this wide-ranging orchestra, Welcome to Music City becomes a classic power pop album connected to but distinct from the more garage-y rock and roll of The Number Ones. Lumsden positions himself as a pop rock bandleader influenced by the classic rock and new wave-y pub rockers of his cities of origin and of the polished side of what us Americans probably think of as “music city” (that’s Nashville, Brits).
These days, I hear so many street punks making capable power pop that it’s easy to forget how much the genre owes to good old-fashioned nerds (music nerds, yes, but they still count). Lumsden hasn’t forgotten that, I think, and Welcome to Music City walks an impressive tightrope between well-earned swagger and a more bookish pop rock attitude. I don’t know how well “When That Day Comes By” would play in a basement, for instance, but I do know that it’s made by and for people who love the “craft” (hello, music blog readers!). On the other hand, “Common Sense”, featuring Halladay on co-lead vocals, leans about as heavily into “snottiness” as Music City can (if you have the vocalist for Sheer Mag on your track, some musical adjustments do seem to be in order, after all). Much of the best of Welcome to Music City, like “You Remember” and “Pretty Feelings”, transcends this “either/or”-type thing and just shoots for all-encompassing, unflagging power pop brilliance. The former is crisp and rubbery at the same time, and the latter is a stately, technicolor rave-up. Music City’s assembled quite the greeting committee. (Bandcamp link)
2070 – Big Blue
Release date: February 6th Record label: Danger Collective Genre: Art rock, dream pop, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Transducer
Guitarist/vocalist Trevor Coleman started a project called 2070 over a decade ago while living in Michigan, but it was after he moved to Los Angeles that the group became a full-fledged band and started regularly putting out full-length records. I first heard 2070 thanks to their 2024 sophomore album, Stay in the Ranch, and the lineup that made that “noisy, fuzzy indie rock” LP (drummer Rogers DeCoud, guitarist Khari Cousins, and bassist Danny Rincon) are back on board for the third 2070 album, Big Blue. Perhaps reflecting their most stable lineup yet, Big Blue (their debut for Danger Collective Records) takes a step back from the excitable, kinetic attitude of Stay in the Ranch and gets to work at creating a more subdued, cohesive statement.
The shoegaze and lo-fi pop of Stay in the Ranch haven’t gone anywhere–indeed, they’re key ingredients in the hazy, murky, psychedelic pop music of Big Blue. Kicking off their album with a shimmering ambient-fuzz-pop instrumental called “VI Tape Lament, Tribute Etc.” is a bold decision by 2070, and while the next two songs on the album (the wonky, crawling “Transducer” and the slacker pop chugger “Birdschool (Off Sludge)”) are pretty catchy, neither of them beats you over the head with it. Songs on Big Blue are relatively brief but not “quick”, and 2070 float through them in a way that starts to blend them together after a while. The “Float On” interpolation in “Windowpane” sticks out, as does the fuzz-rock heights of “Cauldron”, but I don’t think that necessarily makes them better or more essential than the subtle cuts like “Scapegoat” and “The 1619”. The Stereolab-like drumming and synths of penultimate track “Modern Day Gold” is a curveball, but it fits with the exploratory energy 2070 bring to Big Blue as a whole, and, along with the laid-back finale of “V3”, it’s a fitting finale for the trip. And that’s how 2070 wrap up a new and distinct chapter in their growing history. (Bandcamp link)
Achers – Bottom of the Hill
Release date: February 5th Record label: Everything Sucks Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk, emo Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Bottom of the Hill
Achers may be from London, but this British quartet make music inspired by all kinds of noisy 1990s American indie rock, specifically the Pacific Northwest (Unwound, Lync), San Diego (Drive Like Jehu), and Washington, D.C. (take your pick). Guitarist/vocalist Pat Smiley, bassist, Sabrina Amade, drummer Ilia Lebedev, and guitarist Pavel Borisov started the band in 2022, and, after releasing a demo EP the following year, Lebedev left and was replaced with Vicki Butler. The five-song Bottom of the Hill EP represents a bit of “firsts” for Achers: their first new music with Butler, their first physically-released record, their first for their new label Everything Sucks (Good Grief, Schande, Crumbs), and their first professionally studio-recorded music (by Rich Mandell of ME REX and Happy Accidents).
The opening title track is a nice and dreary introduction to Achers, a dour Unwound-like guitar riff circling around a post-punk instrumental (the defeatist tune is, according to Smiley, about “class melancholia”). “Broken Clocks” has the cacophonous, dragging Drive Like Jehu-ish noisiness to it, a trait it shares with the frantic repetition in closing track “Go In”. Achers aren’t straightforward punk rockers; Bottom of the Hill almost always opts for the zag, relying on atmospherics and dynamics rather than pure white-hot energy first and foremost. That energy is still present, though, especially in the middle of the EP with “Blue Lights” (maybe the most “Dischord Records” song on the record) and the stumbling, sharp-pointed “Asahi Bear”. Bottom of the Hill is hardly the friendliest opening statement you’ll hear this year, which is a good indication that Achers already have a strong grasp on what makes this kind of music work. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the January 2026 playlist! We’ve got some selections from the nascent year thus far in here, as well as some 2025 stragglers and a substantial selection of older material, too (if you’re wondering why there are so many records from 1998 on here, stay tuned in the coming weeks).
Joe Glass has three songs on this playlist. Trembling Blue Stars and Cub have two.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing three songs), Tidal (missing four). 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.
“Man Who Lost His Diamond”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
The Rockford-originating, Chicago-based musician Joe Glass has been playing bass guitar in the live version of Kai Slater’s acclaimed mod revival/power pop project Sharp Pins as of late, but he’s a singer-songwriter in his own right as well. His second solo album, Snakewards, is perhaps the result of playing in what is by all accounts a very tight live trio in Sharp Pins; Glass has landed himself directly in the world of brisk, mid-fi, early Guided by Voices-evoking power pop that Slater (who put out the album on his Hallogallo label) has also been pursuing. We’re quite lucky Glass seems to have the knack for it, too–perfect jangle-power pop like “Man Who Lost His Diamond” doesn’t grow on trees. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Babe Pig in the City”, Langkamer From No (2026, Breakfast)
Langkamer are a good band. I wrote about their 2024 album Langzamerwhen it came out and was struck by its deep melancholy; their latest album, No, is, on the whole, a more upbeat offering from the Bristol band. “Babe Pig in the City” is a reminder that Langkamer know good guitar pop, and here it’s delivered in a slightly fuzzy garage-pop sheen. Vocalist Josh Jarman is able to hide under the distortion a little more here than on Langzamer, but his performance isn’t any less striking; his emotional, oddly passionate murmuring about pigs and cities and slaughters and frying pans is classic Langkamer, if there is such a thing by now.
“When I’m with My Brother”, Elvis 2 From Thank You Very Much (2026, Legless/Under the Gun)
You can find some fun stuff going through year-end lists in the dead of early January. I think this was on Add to Wantlist’s? Anyway, we’re got Elvis 2 here, which is apparently an artist from Australia who goes by the name of Mitch Casino. Thank You Very Much (yes, yes) is dirt-fi, in-the-red rock and roll music, with plenty of hooks in the best songs, like “When I’m with My Brother”. That weird little 8-bit synth hook thing is really catchy, and it fits with the whole radioactive Presley vibe (see the album’s cover art) when combined with the murky rest of the song.
“Alright”, Jo Passed From Away (2026, Youth Riot)
It took Jo Hirabayashi, the leader of Jo Passed, eight years to follow up the project’s debut album, Their Prime. Nonetheless, after moving from Vancouver to Monreal and recruiting a new group of backing musicians, Hirabayashi sounds more driven and intense than ever on Away, a gorgeous, tangible pop album in the realms of post-punk, psychedelia, and 70s studio-heavy rock. My favorite song on Away is in the second half: “Alright” is a fully-committed, kaleidoscopic power pop curveball like nothing else on the album. Jo Passed really throw everything they can spare into “Alright”, but Away is as strong as it is on the whole because they give just as much to everything else on the album. Read more about Away here.
“Self-Pity 6.0.1”, Vehicle Flips From The Premise Unraveled (1998, Magic Marker)
“Self-Pity 6.0.1” has got to be one of the best songs about ClipArt that I’ve ever heard. I’ve written about Frank Boscoe’s bands The Ekphrastics and Wimp Factor 14 on this blog before, but this is the first time I’ve touched on The Vehicle Flips, who were between those two previously-mentioned acts. The Premise Unraveled is midway between lo-fi, twee-ish 90s indie rock and folk rockier Mountains Goats-ish storytelling; “Self-Pity 6.0.1”, as brief and minimal as it is, really steals the show (“I am ClipArt / I live in the public domain / Paste me into your sorry-looking document / Without credit, without shame”).
“Letter Never Sent”, Trembling Blue Stars From Lips That Taste of Tears (1998, Shinkansen/Elefant/Clover/Noise Asia)
Is the 70-minute sophomore Trembling Blue Stars album the place to start in the discography of indie pop legend Robert Wratten (also of The Field Mice)? I’m guessing most fans would say no, but I listened to Lips That Taste of Tears and really enjoyed it! As you may be able to guess from the album title, this is a heady, messy, too-romantic breakup album, and the large expanse makes room for jangly, guitar-led indie pop and 80s synthy/sophisti-art-pop twisters. “Letter Never Sent” is a perfect pop song, as beautiful musically as it is ugly and desperate thematically. I’ll be thinking about that final verse from the spurned for a long time now, I think.
“Long Time Missing”, Tommy Keene From Isolation Party (1998, Matador)
As much as I love his 1980s albums and his Keene Brothers project with Bob Pollard, Tommy Keene’s two 90s albums are blind spots for me. Like many cult power pop acts, he returned to the indie world after a “failed” major-label stint, but Isolation Party hardly carries itself that way. The 90s alt-rock-scape was littered with bands emulating the half-mast pop brilliance of Paul Westerberg, but Keene stood alone in shooting for the full-fledged early power pop from which Westerberg himself drew inspiration. Like, holy shit, “Long Time Missing” would be a wrecking ball of all-in power pop at any point in time, but I can’t imagine how this must’ve hit in 1998.
“Ticket to Spain”, Cub From Come Out Come Out (1995, Mint)
Come Out Come Out (reissued by Mint Records last month) was Vancouver indie pop trio Cub’s second album, in which founding members Lisa Marr and Robynn Iwata, joined by new drummer Lisa G, pick up the irresistible twee-pop thread they began with their classic debut album, 1993’s Betti-Cola (it’s probably a more polished and “professional”-sounding album than Betti-Cola, not that it matters much one way or the other). Cub aren’t a “punk band” and wouldn’t be called “power pop” by that genre’s gatekeepers, but opening track “Ticket to Spain” is great, loud, “rocking” pop music no matter what we call it. Read more about Come Out Come Out here.
“Thorns in My Heart”, GUV From Warmer Than Gold (2026, Run for Cover)
After taking some time off from making new music, Ben Cook has shortened his power pop solo project’s longtime moniker from “Young Guv” to simply “GUV”, and, with Warmer Than Gold, he has indeed pretty cleanly broken his own mold. Inspired by Cook’s return to London (where he spent part of his childhood, splitting time with Toronto), he and producer James Matthew Seven worked remotely and then together making a busy, overwhelming pop album featuring alt-dance, walls of sound, and just enough of Cook’s guitar pop past. The surging, euphoric power pop of “Thorns in My Heart” represents one extreme of Warmer Than Gold’s sound, but even this highlight doesn’t do justice to the album’s full range. Read more about Warmer Than Gold here.
“50 Takes”, Fuzzy Feelings From Under the Pit (2026)
“Fuzzy Feelings” is a fairly apt band name for the latest project of Joseph Weber, a London-based musician who previously played in the early-2010s Brooklyn fuzz-pop group Gross Relations. After putting out an EP under the name Joey Relations in 2024, Weber began rolling out this latest band with a string of singles late last year leading up to Under the Pit, a twelve-song, twenty-one-minute exercise in lo-fi power pop that is indeed of both the “fuzzy” and “feelings” variety. One of the best moments on the whole album is “50 Takes”, a two-minute song that starts with a keyboard hook so great that Weber waits until the song is halfway over to even start singing. Read more about Under the Pit here.
“You Are My American Dream”, Dish Pit Violet From Dish Pit Violet (2026)
Dish Pit Violet is a new indie pop project from Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Violent Fink, and her self-titled debut album is a bright and vibrant pop album borne from a tumultuous time in her life–coming out as transgender, the subsequent estrangement from her immediate family, leaving a “toxic” band she co-founded and played in for several years. Fink’s first statement of her new life is defiantly committed to “dance rock grooves” and “cutie-pie sentiments” (as she puts it); these are appropriate descriptors for Dish Pit Violet’s synth- and horn-laden, danceable indie pop, which reminds me of the pop-forward side of Elephant 6 (of Montreal, of course, being the biggest one) and the queer pop of Pelvis Wrestley. Read more about Dish Pit Violet here.
“Film Noir”, Celebrity Telethon From Celebrity Telethon (2025)
Released on New Year’s Eve 2025, Celebrity Telethon finds Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon dropping their bandleader’s name from the project, and the Portland, Oregon alt-country/cowpunk group swaps out their typical fare for seedy, sleazy West Coast punk-garage-rock. “Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon”-era throwbacks are here and there, too, including probably my favorite song on the album, a mid-tempo slacker-pop song called “Film Noir” that finds Habegger embracing his inner Craig Finn. Read more about Celebrity Telethon here.
“Putty (In Your Hands)”, The Detroit Cobras From Mink, Rat or Rabbit (1998, Sympathy for the Record Industry)
Mink, Rat or Rabbit was the first album from the crate-digging Motor City garage rock group The Detroit Cobras; this is one of those albums that cemented Detroit as the garage rock capital of the world—or, at least, helped carry that already well-earned reputation into the 21st century. The group take an early R&B/rock-n-roll-forged sledgehammer to a bunch of selections from 60s girl groups, early soul, and Motown; their fierce version of “Putty (In Your Hands)”, originally by The Shirelles, is one highlight of many.
“Peeking Shows His Ignorance”, Gaze From Mitsumeru (1998, K)
Gaze have been known to me as one of the many Pacific Northwest bands that twee legend Rose Melberg played in (she was the drummer), but the Vancouver group were actually co-led by Miko Hoffman and Megan Mallet, neither of whom have been in any other bands that I know of. Mitsumeru, the first album of two that the band put out before breaking up, is a K Records indie pop classic, soft but with one foot in the power pop/punk-ish side of twee, too. “Peeking Shows His Ignorance” is a really fascinating look into how homophobia and queerness were discussed in certain circles at the time; if Gaze were able to be so pointed and articulate about it in 1998, I dunno what the hell everyone else’s excuses were.
“Point and Shoot”, Greg Freeman From Burnover (2025, Transgressive)
I made it a point to listen to the top five vote-getter albums in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll that I hadn’t listened to in full before, and Greg Freeman’s Burnover was pretty easily my favorite of the group. Perhaps that’s not so surprising given how in-line the Vermont singer-songwriter’s Neil Young/Jason Molina-influenced strain of alt-country indie rock is with what’s appeared on this blog (including via Freeman associates like Lily Seabird, Florry, and Dari Bay). A lot of people use those specific influences as a way of masking sloppy playing/writing, but Freeman’s doing a polished, tight, post-Songs: Ohia kind of country rock here. Opening track “Point and Shoot” is an impeccable pop song made deftly with material in which Freeman’s already proved to be an expert.
“New Pose”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
A second Joe Glass song, because there’s a ton of hits on it! Snakewards is an early contender for power pop record of the year, with the Sharp Pins/Hallogallo associate doing his best to get “mod revival” up there with various pizzas and sausages in terms of Chicago cultural signifiers. “New Pose” might be the best one except for all of the other ones that are just as good–I’m not sure there’s a single moment on the album as exciting as when this rave-up takes off, though. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Exploding Head”, R.E. Seraphin From Tiny Shapes (2020, Mt.St.Mtn./Paisley Shirt/Take a Turn)
The twin 2020 releases of Tiny Shapes and A Room Forever represent the first half of California power pop artist R.E. Seraphin’s catalog thus far, and they’re now together on one vinyl record for the first time ever thanks to Seraphin’s own label, Take a Turn. Both records deal in the college rock-guitar pop sound that Seraphin has continued to hone over the past half-decade; coming not long after the dissolution of Seraphin’s Texas-originating, garage rock-leaning group Talkies, Tiny Shapes is a transitional debut that nonetheless hits the ground running. “Exploding Head” might be a bit more “rock and roll” than where R.E. Seraphin is at these days, but it’s not like it’s less catchy. Read more about Tiny Shapes / A Room Forever here.
“Backtracking”, The Crowd Scene From Turn Left at Greenland (1998, EggBert/Harvey)
The Crowd Scene make a very specific kind of guitar pop music that comes from power pop and “college rock”; largely mid-tempo, acoustic and slightly folky, 60s-inspired but not in a recreation way. Less “cool” alternative history figures come to mind, like Robyn Hitchcock, World Party, John Wesley Harding, and 10,000 Maniacs. Natalie Merchant in particular seems worth mentioning when it comes to “Backtracking”, the languid mid-record highlight that’s probably my favorite song on their 1998 debut album, Turn Left at Greenland.
“Goodbye Delaware”, Awful Din From ANTI BODY (2026, We’re Trying)
Brooklyn quartet Awful Din formed back in 2014, but they only put out their debut album in 2022, and I myself only heard about them thanks to their 2024 EP Sunday Gentlemen. Somewhere between post-Lemonheads earnest jangle-power pop, John K. Samson storytelling, Taking Meds-style indie rock/punk, and big PUP choruses, Awful Din’s sophomore album ANTI BODY is a whirlwind, especially with three golden pop rock songs in “GFTO My Basement”, “Goodbye Delaware”, and “I Will Break You” opening the record up. “Goodbye Delaware” gets the nod on this playlist, not entirely because of the interpolation of “Don’t Let’s Start”, “Kickstart My Heart”, and “Our House” (among other choices), but it doesn’t hurt. Read more about ANTI BODY here.
“Pocket Games”, Cadallaca From Introducing… (1998, K)
I’m not sure how I’d never heard of Cadallaca before last month (at least I think I hadn’t); they were a short-lived (one LP) trio led by Corin Tucker and featuring the underrated Sarah Dougher on Farfisa organ and backing vocals. With the stripped-down setup (the third member, known only as “sts”, is the drummer) and the heavy Farfisa usage, this should land squarely in Nuggets/60s garage rock territory, but you also have Corin Tucker sounding exactly like Corin Tucker, so it’s also like an alternate-universe Sleater-Kinney album. “Pocket Games” is my favorite one, I think; it’s a Tucker ballad with Dougher doing cheery but not overly distracting organ highlights to it.
“End of the World”, Peaer From Doppelgänger (2026, Danger Collective)
Although upstate New York math-y indie rock trio Peaer spent the first half of this decade in relative silence after releasing some great material in the late 2010s, they continued to work on a third proper Peaer album, which finally arrived at the beginning of 2026 as Doppelgänger. For a band who hadn’t been afraid to get pretty noisy in the past, Doppelgänger represents a clear shift into more “refined”, “restrained”, “reserved” and other such “re”-word-territory. “End of the World” opens the album with Peaer’s clearest foray yet into “guitar pop”: it’s damn-near toe-tapping! Read more about Doppelgänger here.
OUT. came out of the mid-90s Louisville indie rock scene, wielding a ferocious early punk rock/hardcore punk-indebted fury more in line with Midwestern garage-y groups like New Bomb Turks and Laughing Hyenas than their hometown’s more math rock/post-hardcore/post-rock. Noise Pollution, their original label, has marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s sole album with its first-ever vinyl release. Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs remains an incredible document, perhaps the purest distillation of Kentucky punk rock and roll ever put to tape: the opening three or four songs are a sprint (including “You Destroy Me”, which kicks off the record), a clusterfuck of Bad Brains and 70s punk and Motörhead that’s virtually indistinguishable from something that’d come out on Goner or Feel It Records today. Read more about Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs here.
“Infinite Casualties”, Subtle Body From Subtle Body (2026, Strange Mono)
A new quintet from Philadelphia made up by a bunch of “punk, hardcore, and grind” veterans, Subtle Body are the latest group to throw their hats in the realms of muddy, spooky, lo-fi post-punk and synthpunk. Their self-titled debut cassette is a twenty-three-minute descent into the gothic side of basement punk; the bass swims in a murky sea of haunting vocals, freaked-out drums, and plenty of synths in most of Subtle Body’s rockers, including the highlight “Infinite Casualties”. Read more about Subtle Body here.
“Along the Moors”, Sandpit From On Second Thought (1998, Fellaheen)
Sandpit were a trio from Melbourne who lasted for one album, in which they explored a stone-faced and gray version of “90s-slacker-indie”. On Second Thought has a noisy, fuzzy, post-Sonic Youth kind of sound, and there’s also a really nice diamond-in-the-rough melodic quality to these songs that feels more like Eric’s Trip or even mid-period Sebadoh. “Along the Moors”, which opens the album, also reminds me of the Guv’ner song that I put on one of these playlists four years ago (four years ago? Jesus Christ!); I really enjoy the dour melodic side of 90s indie rock, clearly.
“Chaos Herder, Pt. 2”, Place Position From Went Silent (2026, Sweet Cheetah/Poptek/Bunker Park/Blind Rage)
Dayton trio Place Position had been pretty quiet since their first album back in 2014, but the dozen-year wait for LP2 has finally ended with Went Silent. Those still paying attention are rewarded with ten slow-moving but still frequently fiery post-hardcore/post-punk songs well-versed in the intricacies of the history of Dischord Records and its flagship bands. Those who enjoy that “flag-planting anthem” side of post-hardcore punk rock will be drawn in immediately with “Chaos Herder Pt. 2”, a stalwart, unflappable post-punk opening statement. Read more about Went Silent here.
“Say You’re Mine”, The Prize From In the Red (2025, Goner/Anti Fade)
An Australian power pop band that lists its influences as “Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Pretenders, Blondie, Rolling Stones, Faces, Flamin’ Groovies, Tom Petty, Dwight Twilley, Phil Seymour, The Toms, The Nerves and The Motors”, huh? I had a hunch that Melbourne’s The Prize would be up my alley, and indeed, their long-awaited debut album In the Red hits all the high notes one would want from such a group. The garage-y rock and roll power pop hits are strewn throughout this eleven-song, thirty-six minute exercise; “Say You’re Mine” is as good as any of them, though it’s hardly the only Romero/Sheer Mag-esque behemoth on the LP.
“Bubble Up”, Hello Whirled From The Other Need (2026, Sherilyn Fender)
Another year has begun with an album from the ever-prolific lo-fi rocker Hello Whirled near the starting gate. The Other Need is a fairly holistic overview of the Hello Whirled experience, a marriage of the basement-arena-prog of the less popular albums from bandleader Fern Spizuco’s north star of Robert Pollard with tortured angst and noisy, lo-fi clattering. The Other Need has some “pop” moments, certainly; bookmark “Bubble Up”, with its steady-building structure and exuberant power pop chorus, for your personal “Hello Whirled greatest hits” playlist. Read more about The Other Need here.
“Sacrifice”, Sweet Reaper From Still Nothing (2026, Alien Snatch/Naked Time)
There’s nothing wrong with starting off 2026 with some incredibly catchy, poppy garage rock. Sweet Reaper may be from the West Coast (Ventura, specifically), but the clean, sugar-rush, power-pop-garage-rock sound of Still Nothing reminds me more of what goes on over in Texas, with names like A Giant Dog, Flesh Lights, and Radioactivity (whose Jeff Burke mastered this record, which I didn’t know when I came up with the comparison initially) coming to mind. We’re all mortal, and, for Sweet Reaper, that means there’s no time to waste in between churning out garage-punk pop hits like “Sacrifice”. Read more about Still Nothing here.
“Honeymoon”, Bon Voyage From Bon Voyage (1998, BEC)
Bon Voyage are a duo comprised of Starflyer 59 mastermind Jason Martin and his wife Julie on lead vocals. Their self-titled debut album is more blatantly “pop music” than anything I’ve heard by the shoegaze/art rock-tending Starflyer 59; it’s full-on fuzzy indie-power-pop verging on “twee”. It’s very nineties, yes—the Martins bravely conduct a series of experiments marrying Belly/Breeders noise to the tenderness of The Sundays and that Sixpence None the Richer song (and sometimes Rentals-like synth hooks are there, too). “Honeymoon” is sugary sweet; even if you’re not the type to go in for an entire album of this stuff, it’s a solid way to spend three minutes.
“Suitcase and Atoms”, Elliott From U.S. Songs (1998, Revelation)
U.S. Songs was the Louisville emo group Elliott’s first LP, and while their hometown was known (to me, at least) for a post-rock/experimental bent to their underground music, that’s not really what we get here. Their emo is light on its feet, with a punk rock/proto-orgcore sound in line with California groups like Jawbreaker, Samiam, and Knapsack. There’s no math rock here (although, like a lot of math-y emo albums, the drums are great), and the heaviest they get is scattered chunky power chord riffs and vocals. “Suitcase and Atoms” is probably my favorite; it’s a classic emo-punk ramp-up, blast-off kind of thing.
“Vacation”, Cub From Come Out Come Out (1995, Mint)
The 30th anniversary edition of Come Out Come Out features three covers; a live version of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” (featuring “Italian harmonica man”), which they originally recorded for their debut album, is a new addition, but Cub’s versions of Yoko Ono’s “I’m Your Angel” and The Go-Go’s’ “Vacation” were from the first version of the record. They all work as “Cub songs”, but it’s probably not incredibly surprising that the “cuddlecore”/twee-pop group is especially qualified to take on the new wave-power pop classic “Vacation” and make it into their own. Read more about Come Out Come Out here.
“Cocaine Bear”, Wormy From Shark River (2026, Rose Garden)
Brooklyn musician Noah Rauchwerk has been quite active over the past decade, whether he’s been playing alongside his brother in the folk duo The Lords of Liechtenstein, drumming for Samia (among other acts) on tour, or guesting on the most recent Little Hag album. He’s nonetheless found time for his indie folk solo project Wormy in recent years, releasing an album called I’m Sweating All the Time in 2022 and following it up with Shark River this January. Shark River toes a fine line very well, balancing Rauchwerk’s delicate, intimate obvious influences (Bright Eyes, mid-period Mountain Goats) with the polish he’s pursued in some of his sideman work. “Cocaine Bear” is effectively a minimal-electric version of the best Slaughter Beach, Dog songs, simple, quiet, and incredibly memorable. Read more about Shark River here.
“Touché”, Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One From Antenna (2026, The Forever Exploding Dynamo)
The intriguingly-named Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One (the two sides of the equation are anagrams, who knew?) are a new band from Columbus made up of three longtime central Ohio indie rock musicians. The trio’s first album, Antenna, appeared on Bandcamp last October, but guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki has given it a wider release this month via his new record label, The Forever Exploding Dynamo. Antenna, a thirty-five-minute LP made up of only five songs, is “indie rock” for those of us who enjoy music that veers between the accessible and the challenging. “Touché”, right in the middle of the album, is a nice, dirty garage punk song in the midst of Sonic Youth-style eleven-minute art rock sprawlers and ambient pieces. Read more about Antenna here.
“Dig for Now”, The Fragiles From Sing the Heat of the Sun (2026, Living Lost)
Philadelphia musician David Settle ruled the realms of lo-fi indie rock in 2020 and 2021, putting out a slew of albums via his aliases The Fragiles, Big Heet, and Psychic Flowers. After a few years off, it’s nice to start off 2026 with the first album from The Fragiles in five years. While Big Heet deals in noisy post-punk and Psychic Flowers in shit-fi fuzz pop, The Fragiles has always been where Settle explores dreamier, almost psychedelic indie-gaze, and Sing the Heat of the Sun offers a strong collection of such material. There are a handful of instant-classic guitar pop songs on here, including the bouncy, scuzzy lo-fi pop of highlight “Dig for Now”. Read more about Sing the Heat of the Sun here.
“Made for Each Other”, Trembling Blue Stars From Lips That Taste of Tears (1998, Shinkansen/Elefant/Clover/Noise Asia)
Like “Letter Never Sent” earlier on this playlist, “Made for Each Other” is a massive pop song that’s also a massive break-up song; unlike “Letter Never Sent”, “Made for Each Other” takes a minute to move from a quiet, electronic-tinged beginning to a full-on symphonic chamber pop chorus. It’s absolutely worth sticking around until Trembling Blue Stars deliver the refrain and then sticking around again until they repeat it, the great fanfare triggered by the admission that gives the song its title (“Made for each other, but not made to last”).
“Tied Tight”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
A third Joe Glass song? Surely there can’t be three different massive power pop hit singles on one album from the Chicago mod revivalist, right? Well, there are (and then some); just queue up “Tied Tight”, Snakewards’ penultimate song, if you don’t believe me. This one is Glass at his most Guided by Voices-like; that opening chugging guitar riff is built for fractured arena rock, and Glass’ floating, passionate vocal melodies (particularly his delivery of “In my head / I’m better off dead”) feel right out of Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Threesome (Asking for a Friend)”, Sotto Voce From The Sound of Trying (2026, Makeout Artist)
The Sound of Trying is my first exposure to Brooklyn project Sotto Voce, and it’s a curious-sounding one; it’s almost like it’s trying to be an explosive, 90s-style indie rock album, a sensitive, sensual singer-songwriter album, and a sprawling, folk-y slowcore album all at once. I’m weirdly drawn to the last song on The Sound of Trying–it’s a long one, called “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” (sure, sure), and it’s a confusing but endearing mixture of coffeeshop folk, noodly, (but still largely acoustic) math-y guitars, and melodies that appear and disappear as bandleader Ryan Gabos shifts around tempos and times and whatnot. Beyond the fact that it sounds quite good, I like “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” because, I think, I can’t quite figure it out. Read more about The Sound of Trying here.
“Slackers & Go Getters”, Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales From Destination Heaven (2026, Born Losers)
Dogwood Tales are a rock-solid country rock group from Harrisonburg, Virginia, while Euphoria Again is the solo project of Johnny Klein, who I mostly know for being in the shoegaze revival group Knifeplay. The two acts made a collaborative record called Destination Heaven that dropped at the beginning of this year, and it’s a pretty unimpeachable collection of alt-country rock. “Slackers & Go Getters”, the penultimate track, includes vamping where the lead singer (by process of elimination, I think it’s Dogwood Tales’ Kyle Grim) introduces the rest of the band (including “Johnny Football”, who I imagine is Klein, on guitar). It’d be an odd choice to put on this playlist because of that, but “Slackers & Go Getters” is just such a fun, jammy track that I have no qualms about adding it here.
“The Decline of Country and Western Civilization”, Lambchop From Damaged (2006, Merge)
It’s been twenty years since the decline of country and western civilization; time really does fly, doesn’t it? Maybe you recognize that title as the name of two different Lambchop rarities compilations, but it’s also the last track on the long-running Nashville weirdo alt-country institution’s 2006 album Damaged. It’s beautiful and inscrutable in the way the best Lambchop songs are; it starts with Kurt Wagner proclaiming “Well, I hate Nathan Bedford Forrest / He’s the featured artist in the devil’s chorus,” (no lies there) and finds the time to diss “Pitchfork I-rock saviors” (again, the time flies…) and inject some real pathos into “Damn, they’re looking ugly to me”. Lambchop! Check ‘em out.
Hey there! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records coming out tomorrow, January 30th: the 30th anniversary reissue of OUT.‘s debut (and only) album, plus LPs from GUV, Sotto Voce, and Awful Din. Check them out, and also investigate Monday’s blog post (featuring R.E. Seraphin, Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled) 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.
GUV – Warmer Than Gold
Release date: January 30th Record label: Run for Cover Genre: Psychedelia, Madchester, alt-dance, power pop, noise pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Thorns in My Heart
When we last heard from the Los Angeles-based musician Ben Cook AKA Young Guv, it was via a pair of LPs in 2022: the classic power pop-indebted GUV III and the “airier and more psychedelic” (as I said at the time) GUV IV. Desert vibes aside, GUV IV was still more or less a jangly guitar pop album of the kind Cook had been making since the mid-to-late 2010s, and thus worthy of the “Young Guv” moniker. After taking some time off from making new music, however, Cook is now back simply as “GUV”, and, with Warmer Than Gold, Cook has indeed pretty cleanly broken his own mold. During GUV’s four-year hiatus, we’ve seen similar power pop solo acts (like Dazy and Graham Hunt) increasingly incorporate 90s electronica, Madchester, and Screamadelica into their sounds, and, in simple terms, Warmer Than Gold (made as a collaboration with James Matthew Seven, AKA JMVII) is Cook’s entry into the fray. Inspired by Cook’s return to London (where he spent part of his childhood, splitting time with Toronto), Cook and Seven worked remotely and then together making a busy, overwhelming pop album featuring alt-dance, walls of sound, and just enough of Cook’s guitar pop past.
Warmer Than Gold is a forty-five minute “full-commitment” journey, much like most of its (generally substantially longer, given the CD era) direct influences. “Let Your Hands Go” comes out of the gate with a dance beat, and, if you give it a minute, GUV deploy a gigantic post-Britpop chorus to match the initial energy. “Blue Jade”, a propulsive dream pop/shoegaze-influenced rocker, is huge-sounding in a different way, and much of Warmer Than Gold leans towards one side of GUV’s sound or the other. The big beats of the title track, “Out of This Place”, and “Oscillating” form one towering end of Warmer Than Gold, and one the other end we’re greeted by the surging, euphoric power pop of “Thorns in My Heart” and the jangling, sun-drenched “Chasin Luv”. Somewhere in the midst of all this are subtler, more pensive moments–“Seaside Story” and “Never Should Have Said” evoke an earlier moment in British guitar music history, specifically proudly “indie” C86-esuqe indie pop. The sheer weight of Warmer Than Gold could come off as outshining these “hidden gem” moments, but it’s easy to follow along with a balancing act this passionate about what it’s juggling. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: January 30th Record label: Noise Pollution Genre: Garage punk, rock and roll, hardcore punk, punk blues Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: You Destroy Me
OUT. came out of the mid-90s Louisville indie rock scene, co-founded by vocalist Chad Donnelly and guitarist Dave Bird (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sunburned Hand of the Man) and quickly joined by the rhythm section of bassist Tony Bailey (Aerial M, Crain) and drummer Russ Pollard (Sebadoh, Folk Implosion). Their ferocious garage rock sound is a bit of an outlier compared to the more math rock/post-hardcore/post-rock I typically associate with Louisville, but their early punk rock/hardcore punk-indebted fury wasn’t that far off from (relatively) nearby Midwestern garage-y groups like New Bomb Turks and Laughing Hyenas. The four of them recorded Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs with Kevin Brownstein on “Derby Day, 1996”; by the time it came out via CD on then-fledgling label Noise Pollution on Halloween 1997, Pollard and Bailey had already left the band, and OUT. disintegrated as a group entirely by the end of the century.
Thirty years since recording Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs, unfortunately only half of OUT.’s first LP lineup are still with us; Donnelly died in 2001, and Bailey passed in 2009. Noise Pollution is nonetheless still going strong, and they’ve marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s sole album with its first-ever vinyl release and by unearthing two previously-unreleased recordings (“Missed Connection” and “Building a Better Monster”). Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs remains an incredible document, perhaps the purest distillation of Kentucky punk rock and roll ever put to tape. The opening three or four songs are a sprint, a clusterfuck of Bad Brains and 70s punk and Motörhead that’s virtually indistinguishable from something that’d come out on Goner or Feel It Records today. With “Sing While the World Sinks”, you get a clearer glimpse of the “Jesus Lizard/Birthday Party” side of OUT.’s influences, and the likes of “Seven” lean harder on good old “hard rock”, but OUT. never stop kicking out garage rippers (“Love Can Break Your Back”, “Where the River Runs”). Even though OUT.’s story feels a little too short in 2026, it’s still fortunate that everything aligned for long enough for Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs to happen at all. (Bandcamp link)
Sotto Voce – The Sound of Trying
Release date: January 30th Record label: Makeout Artist Genre: Art rock, folk rock, math rock, post-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Threesome (Asking for a Friend)
Sotto Voce is Ryan Gabos, a Pittsburgh-originating, Brooklyn-based musician who’s been putting out home-recorded albums at a clip of about one a year since 2013. The most recent Sotto Voce album before this year was actually 2023’s Murgatroyd (with the archival Fool Ass EP coming the following year), so this is an atypically long gap between LPs by Gabos’ standards. The Sound of Trying, my first exposure to Sotto Voce, is a curious-sounding return to the world of solo home-recording by Gabos; it’s almost like it’s trying to be an explosive, 90s-style indie rock album, a sensitive, sensual singer-songwriter album, and a sprawling, folk-y slowcore album all at once. The majority of The Sound of Trying’s seven songs cross the five-minute mark, and two of them are over seven–more often than not, the different sides of Sotto Voce are explored within the same track.
The Sound of Trying begins with two songs that start off relatively softly and build into something noisy; the transition in “Sitting in a Tree” is more abrupt than the more typical math-y indie rock of “Kickball”, but it happens in both. At this point, I’d be ready to slot Sotto Voce into a (quite capable) “quiet-loud” indie rock group, but, aside from “It’s a Dull Pain”, Gabos effectively never returns to this formula again on The Sound of Trying. The eight-minute harmonics-aided “Miami from the Window Seat” disappears in a gentle, soft-rock breeze, and “Days Without Incident” similarly takes a leisurely route across its six minutes. I’m weirdly drawn to the last song on The Sound of Trying–it’s another long one, called “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” (sure, sure), and it’s a confusing but endearing mixture of coffeeshop folk, noodly (but still largely acoustic) math-y guitars, and melodies that appear and disappear as Gabos shifts around tempos and times and whatnot. Beyond the fact that it sounds quite good, I like “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” because, I think, I can’t quite figure it out. All of The Sound of Trying has a bit of that to it. (Bandcamp link)
Awful Din – ANTI BODY
Release date: January 30th Record label: We’re Trying Genre: Emo, pop punk, orgcore, power pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Goodbye Delaware
Brooklyn quartet Awful Din formed back in 2014, but they only put out their debut album in 2022, and I myself only heard about them thanks to their 2024 EP Sunday Gentlemen (featuring a really good song about Anton Lavey called “Anton Lavey”). Founding members Aaron Groom (vocals/guitar) and Kat Doniger (guitar) reference 90s emo and punk as what brought them together in a band (Saves the Day and Texas Is The Reason, specifically), and on their sophomore album ANTI BODY, the group (now joined by new members Jay Rodriguez and Don Lavis on bass and drums) take those influences and make a fresh, catchy-sounding emo-pop-punk album out of them. Somewhere between post-Lemonheads earnest jangle-power pop, John K. Samson storytelling, Taking Meds-style indie rock/punk, and big PUP choruses, the opening stretch of ANTI BODY is a whirlwind between the three golden pop rock songs “GFTO My Basement”, “Goodbye Delaware”, and “I Will Break You”.
If you’ve forgotten that Awful Din are an emo band, the brake-tapping, string-laden hospital ballad “Foot Punk” will remind you, although the quartet throw themselves into that one so fully that it just adds another layer to ANTI BODY rather than arresting any momentum (and if that one doesn’t slow Awful Din down, the sparse, slow-building “Chaparral” certainly won’t either). The bass-led belter “15 Minutes of Shame” and a perfect jangly pop song called “Big’s In Paris Now” (of course) are B-side highlights, as is closing track “We Have We Are We Will”, in which Awful Din do the “cathartic big finish” thing as well as I’d expect them to do. It’s been a minute since I’ve heard an emo (or “emo-adjacent”, even) album that hits these notes as well as Awful Din do on ANTI BODY; it’s a welcome reminder of the power of this kind of thing. (Bandcamp link)
The first Pressing Concerns of the week gives us a reissue of R.E. Seraphin‘s first two records, plus new albums from Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled. Check them out below!
The blog will next update this Thursday (three posts a week will be returning soon, I think, but we’re not quite there 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.
R.E. Seraphin – Tiny Shapes / A Room Forever
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Take a Turn Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Exploding Head
We here at Rosy Overdrive have enjoyed the work of Vallejo, California power pop musician Ray Seraphin and his quasi-solo project, R.E. Seraphin, shining a spotlight on his 2022 EP Swingshiftand the 2024 LP Fool’s Mate(not to mention The Pennys, his recent duo with Tony Jay’s Michael Ramos). Those two records represent the second half of the R.E. Seraphin catalog thus far, and today we’re looking back at the first half: the twin 2020 releases of Tiny Shapes and A Room Forever, now together on one vinyl record for the first time ever. Both records were originally released by Bay Area stalwart labels Paisley Shirt and Mt.St.Mtn., and both deal in the college rock-guitar pop sound that Seraphin has continued to hone over the past half-decade.
Coming not long after the dissolution of Seraphin’s Texas-originating, garage rock-leaning group Talkies, Tiny Shapes is a transitional debut that nonetheless hits the ground running. “Today Will Be Kind” is exactly the kind of power pop-college rock anthem Seraphin’s always been good for on his records, and while the stretch from “Exploding Head” to “I’d Rather Be Your Enemy” (which is a Lee Hazelwood cover, yes) might be a bit more “rock and roll” than where R.E. Seraphin is at these days, it’s not like it’s less catchy (particularly “Exploding Head”, which is on the shortlist for Seraphin’s finest chorus). Later on the Tiny Shapes side of things, “Hear Me Out” hits the “sad jangle” spot pleasingly, but even that relatively brief diversion is scuttled when A Room Forever announces itself with “Clock Without Hands” (which would later be re-recorded for Fool’s Mate) and “Leave Me in the Tide”. Perhaps it’s a touch more subdued than the debut, but “Pillar of Shame” is the only real “slow song”; the album’s other cover, Luna’s “Lost in Space”, is kind of weird, too, but–and this shouldn’t be surprising at this point–these are all solid pop songs. It’s a worthwhile trip back, and we don’t even have to travel far from where Seraphin’s living these days, too. (Bandcamp link)
Healing & Peace – A Treatise
Release date: January 16th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi indie rock/folk/pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: The Shopkeeper
Columbus musician Alex Mussawir started a garage-y post-punk band called Kneeling in Piss in 2019, and after an album and a handful of EPs, switched gears in 2023 and released an EP of more casual, lo-fi folky indie rock under the name Healing & Peace. A Treatise is the first “Healing & Peace album”, and if you read the loose history of the project that Mussawir wrote to accompany its release, you’ll see names from Ohio bands you might know like The Drin, Winston Hightower, and Goners; some of them played on A Treatise, I think, but I couldn’t tell you who’s doing what. A couple of songs from the self-titled Healing & Peace EP show up again here, as well as the non-album single “Mezzanine Man”, but most of A Treatise is new to us. Mussawir has ended up in a comfortable, intriguing place after all these years of doing the “indie musician” thing; the acoustic-based, winking-to-shrugging A Treatise rides a warmly familiar line between lo-fi, 90s-style “slacker” rock and Flying Nun-esuqe folk-pop.
The lo-fi pop vignette “The Shopkeeper” became perhaps my favorite Kneeling/Healing in/and Piss/Peace song when I heard it two years ago, and it’s still a standout here, a tad more accessible than the cow-post-punk of “Unite Foodland”, the Mark E. Smith/Chris Knox-like talk-sung wisdom of “Into a Hole”, and the droning psych-folky undercurrent of “Horrible Sanctuary”. Elsewhere, Mussawir pleads with Sofia Coppola for a role in one of her movies in the harmonica-aided “Sofia, Baby Please” (“I’d like to leave Ohio / Your camera lights look soothing”), and the title track closes the album with a bit of folk-beat poetry: “I return now to my post / Middling, tedious / But honest,” Mussawir signs off. That’s how we get A Treatise. (Bandcamp link)
Sweet Reaper – Still Nothing
Release date: January 16th Record label: Alien Snatch/Naked Time Tapes Genre: Garage rock, power pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Sacrifice
There’s nothing wrong with starting off 2026 with some incredibly catchy, poppy garage rock. Introducing Sweet Reaper, a trio from Ventura, California who are new to me but apparently have been kicking out albums of this stuff since 2017: this is their fourth LP by my count, all either issued or reissued by German label Alien Snatch (Freak Genes, Slander Tongue, Eerie Family). The band (vocalist/guitarist Seth Pettersen, bassist/vocalist Danny Gomez, and drummer Sasha Green) may be from the West Coast, but the clean, sugar-rush, power-pop-garage-rock sound of Still Nothing reminds me more of what goes on over in Texas, with names like A Giant Dog, Flesh Lights, and Radioactivity (whose Jeff Burke mastered this record, which I didn’t know when I came up with the comparison initially) coming to mind.
Name and aesthetics aside, Sweet Reaper are less a full-on horror-punk group and more of a vaguely spooky/spooked, unnerved/unnerving one in terms of lyrical content. Musically speaking–well, we’re all mortal, and, for Sweet Reaper, that means there’s no time to waste in between churning out garage-punk pop hits. We’re barely five minutes into Still Nothing and we’ve already skated through “Clean”, “Sacrifice”, and “Motion”, all three of which are torrential two-minute tracks strong enough to be the centerpiece of this album on their own. If “Thought Police” and “Zero Candles” represent the introduction of ever-so-slightly darker post-punk elements to Sweet Reaper’s sound, they don’t herald a major shift, as rippers like “Hideaway” and “Meemees” continue to be on the table into the album’s home stretch. Sweet Reaper sound like they’re on the run for all of Still Nothing’s twenty-six minutes, and they’ve made a great rock and roll album in the process. (Bandcamp link)
Hello Whirled – The Other Need
Release date: January 1st Record label: Sherilyn Fender Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, GBV-fi Formats: Digital Pull Track: Bubble Up
Another year has begun with a Hello Whirled album near the starting gate. In 2025, the ever-prolific Fern Spizuco (now Philadelphia-based after getting her start in New Jersey) released Gives Up and Plays the Hitson January 8th, and a host of striking titles followed over the next twelve months: Sex with God, Distance Fighter, Ours Is a Blank Map, In This House We Are Cold. Will 2026 be as busy for Spizuco’s home-recorded lo-fi indie rock enterprise? Only she knows, but at the very least I can observe that Hello Whirled have gotten an even earlier start this year, dropping The Other Need right on New Year’s Day.
Gives Up and Plays the Hits was, by design, an accessible place to try to get into Spizuco’s fifty-plus-album discography, and, while The Other Need has some “pop” moments, it’s a more holistic overview of the Hello Whirled experience, a marriage of the basement-arena-prog of the less popular albums from Spizuco’s north star of Robert Pollard with tortured angst and noisy, lo-fi clattering. Nobody else is doing jerky, striking, post-punk, anti-rock-and-roll anthems like “Ambition Wall”, “No More Eras”, and “Big Moan” like this, let alone doing so in a way that somehow sneaks real hooks into exercises like “Competitions”, “Emotional Support Notepad”, “Pink Deer”, and “Blood on the Page”. Mark “Bubble Up”, with its steady-building structure and exuberant power pop chorus, for the next “best of Hello Whirled” snapshot record, but you’re missing out on the experience by waiting until Spizuco puts out another one of those to take a peek into Hello Whirled. (Bandcamp link)
In this here Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re featuring four albums coming out tomorrow, January 23rd: new ones from Place Position, Jo Passed, T. Gold, and Subtle Body. Check ’em out, and if you missed Tuesday’s blog post (featuring Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit), load that one up, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Place Position – Went Silent
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Sweet Cheetah/Poptek/Bunker Park/Blind Rage Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Chaos Herder Pt. 2
Here we are with Place Position, a trio from Dayton, Ohio evidently named after a Fugazi song, and who make music one might expect a trio evidently named after a Fugazi song to make. Bassist Chip Heck, Jesse Mays, and guitarist/vocalist Josh Osinkosky are probably all “lifers”; the first Place Position album came out in 2014, and all three of them have played in other bands in southwestern Ohio (The 1984 Draft, Shadyside, Landfilth…). Aside from a three-song single in 2020, Place Position had been pretty quiet since their first album, but the dozen-year wait for Place Position LP2 has finally ended with Went Silent. Those paying attention are rewarded with ten slow-moving but still frequently fiery post-hardcore/post-punk songs well-versed in the intricacies of the history of Dischord Records and its flagship bands; while it’s not as zen-like as Lungfish (or their best modern analogue, Vulture Feather), it does sound like a record that has benefited from its creators getting long(er) in the tooth.
Those who enjoy the “flag-planting anthem” side of post-hardcore punk rock will be drawn in immediately with “Chaos Herder Pt. 2”, a stalwart, unflappable post-punk opening statement. Like many a great Dischord record, however, Went Silent is also sneakily quite weird and subversive–this is apparent from the tense atmospheres propping up “Camber” in the first half, and it really comes to a head near the center of the album with strange art punk tangents “Buy Here, Pay Here” and “NO401OK”. Most everything on Went Silent is, to some degree, a “rocker”, but it’s to Place Position’s credit that they have a pretty wide-ranging and open attitude as to how (and when and where) to do that. If you want to know how to make music like this for the better part of twenty years, Place Position have put on a pretty good demonstration on keeping it fresh with Went Silent. (Bandcamp link)
Jo Passed – Away
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Youth Riot Genre: Art punk, psychedelia, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Alright
I remember the first Jo Passed record, which came out on Sub Pop back in 2018. It was a weird, jagged art rock album called Their Prime; I don’t think I was ready for it at the time, but listening back to it now, it sounds pretty good. It took Jo Hirabayashi, the leader of Jo Passed, eight years to follow up Their Prime, and he alludes to mental health problems in the interim–the previous, Vancouver-based version of Jo Passed dissolved, Hirabayashi moved to Toronto, and worked and reworked what eventually became Away. Aided by a new group of backing musicians (vocalist Téa Mei, drummers Mac Lawrie and Justin Devries, Meredith Bates on strings, and saxophonist/woodwind player Andromeda Monk), Hirabayashi sounds more driven and intense than ever on Away, a gorgeous, tangible pop album in the realms of post-punk, psychedelia, and 70s studio-heavy rock.
Everything on Away has its own personality–just running through the first half, there’s the woozy psych-pop opening track “brb”, the propulsive avant-garage art pop rock of “Precious Word”, the dreamy jangle of “Ico” (about Mei’s cat, apparently), the skronky horn-fest of “339”, and the delicate mid-tempo ballad at the core of “Dizzy Izzy”. My favorite song on Away is in the second half, though: “Alright” is a fully-committed, kaleidoscopic power pop curveball like nothing else on the album. Jo Passed really throw everything they can spare into “Alright”, but Away is as strong as it is on the whole because they give just as much to everything else on the album, from the nearly-percussionless minimal trip of “Too Much Thought” to the sprawling, triumphant deconstructed girl-group-pop of “J Walking”. Jo Passed may not have a clearly “straightforward” album in them because that’s not really what they do, but for a “challenging” band like this, Away is as good as it gets. (Bandcamp link)
T. Gold – Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Sleepy Cat Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, art rock, synthrock Formats: Digital Pull Track: New Land
Gabriel Anderson and Saman Khoujinian are a pair of musicians from Miami who are now based in Carrboro, North Carolina, where they co-founded Sleepy Cat Records in 2019 to release their band T. Gold’s self-titled debut album. Seven years later, Sleepy Cat has released a bunch of good records from North Carolina musicians like Lonnie Walker, DUNUMS, and Gibson & Toutant, and the label’s founding duo have finally returned as T. Gold with Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel, the project’s second album. A warmly familiar but nonetheless unique lesson, Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel is a friendly, accessible folk-pop album made by a duo who are clearly immersed in their state’s alt-country scene but also have a “quadraphonic improvisational synthesizer collective” called Delver. The production (from both members of T. Gold as well as Dylan Turner and Alex Bingham) is immaculate, and Khoujinian’s lead vocals are crystal clear, setting up Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel to be a nice, smooth folk-country-rock listen–except for all the electronic tinkering. It’s right up front and center from the synthesizers whirring along with opening track “Getting to Know the End”, and the extra instrumentation (provided by both Anderson and Khoujinian) adds another dimension to both rockers like “Jewel” and “slow ones” like “Speak with Spirits”. T. Gold truly shine at the intersection of the traditional and synthetic, as highlights like the mountain folk-tinged “New Land” and closing ballad “Wagoner’s Lad” make clear. Looking at what they’re able to do here, the Research Triangle’s music world is evidently all the richer for having T. Gold and its twin minds at the center of it. (Bandcamp link)
Subtle Body – Subtle Body
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Strange Mono Genre: Post-punk, lo-fi punk, synthpunk, goth, no wave Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Infinite Casualties
A new quintet from Philadelphia made up by a bunch of “punk, hardcore, and grind” veterans, Subtle Body are the latest group to throw their hats in the realms of muddy, spooky, lo-fi post-punk and synthpunk. The group (vocalist Bo, synth player Rachel, drummer Mike, guitarist Chips, and bassist Dave) have linked up with prolific local label Strange Mono (Idiot Mambo, Snow Caps, Webb Chapel) to release their self-titled debut cassette, a twenty-three-minute descent into the gothic side of basement punk. Dave’s bass swims in a murky sea of haunting vocals, freaked-out drums, and plenty of synths in “The Body”, the first non-intro track, and most of Subtle Body’s rockers (“Infinite Casualties”, “Social Dispute”, “Stolen World”) follow in much the same fashion. Nevertheless, Subtle Body still have the capability to swerve into a strange synth ambient piece right in the middle of the album (“Eyes on the Ground”), and are even able to more or less successfully merge their weird and punk sides with “Estrangement”. Subtle Body wrap up their first album about as quickly as possible, but there’s still time for one five-minute epic in “Black Candle”, which is effectively four minutes of pounding garage-post-punk and then a weird electronic outro; altogether, the future is looking nice and bleak for Subtle Body. (Bandcamp link)
The blog was inactive yesterday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the States, but we’re back today with a brand-new Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit, plus a reissue of Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs‘ sole LP. Check ’em out 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.
Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs – Pigus Drunkus Maximus
Release date: January 16th Record label: Blind Owl/East of Lincoln Genre: Rock and roll, blues rock, R&B, bar rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dance with Your Baby
It’s not hyperbole in the slightest to refer to Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs as legends of the Los Angeles punk underground. The rock and roll/R&B group were led by the late “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a Kentucky transplant who has a song on a Van Halen album named after him, and the equally memorable Carlos Guitarlos featured on lead guitar. They associated with everyone from X to The Doors to Tom Waits in their heyday, and Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate released the band’s only recorded output, Pigus Drunkus Maximus, in 1987. The LP–which was actually recorded in 1981–has been out of print for decades, leading to Blind Owl Records and East Of Lincoln Productions partnering for its first ever reissue nearly forty years after it initially came out. Pigus Drunkus Maximus is a one-way ticket back to the Los Angeles chronicled by John Doe and Exene Cervenka in their contemporaneous records, although Koncek and his band preferred to survey the landscape via a collection of electric blues rock versions of songs collected from across rock and roll’s history. We start at 150% with the saxophone-heavy bar rock of “Dance with Your Baby” (one of the relatively few originals on the album), and the party continues through numbers like the garage rock strut of “Homework”, the blues-punk of “Obviously Five Believers”, and the soulful fire of “Hole in My Pocket”. Pigus Drunkus Maximus bears the burden of being the only recorded document of something that almost certainly couldn’t have been defined by one album, but thankfully the attempt to do so still sounds very good today. (Bandcamp link)
Fuzzy Feelings – Under the Pit
Release date: January 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi pop, power pop, fuzz pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: 50 Takes
“Fuzzy Feelings” is a fairly apt band name for the latest project of Joseph Weber, a London-based musician who previously played in the early-2010s Brooklyn fuzz-pop group Gross Relations. After putting out an EP under the name Joey Relations in 2024, Weber began rolling out this latest band with a string of singles late last year (initially under the name Funny Feelings; wonder what’s up with the name change) leading up to Under the Pit, a twelve-song, twenty-one-minute exercise in lo-fi power pop that is indeed of both the “fuzzy” and “feelings” variety. Imagine a “slacker”, more bummed-out version of Mythical Motors’ bite-sized one-man-electric-power-pop records, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Under the Pit. Fuzzy Feelings chug indifferently through amplified-to-rock hooks in “Powerline” and “Down & Sideways”, and an intense streak of lo-fi, minimal, drum-machine-aided garage-rock-guitar-pop remains essentially unbroken from there on: maybe “Hey” and “Soul Seeker” are a little softer, but they don’t cause the middle to drag. Aside from the twin thirty-second experiences of “Sludge Mains” and “Pink Sun”, the “outliers” are probably “50 Takes” (a two-minute song that starts with a keyboard hook so great that Weber waits until the song is half over to even start singing) and “Campaign” (okay, so here’s the ballad, right in the penultimate slot where it belongs). It’s everything you could want in one of these kinds of albums, in the least amount of time necessary to do it. (Bandcamp link)
Storm Boy – Beast Machine Theory
Release date: January 15th Record label: Self-released Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Tiny Fists
The Olympia-based “post-hardcore rock n roll” group Storm Boy was formed by guitarist/vocalist Chas Roberts and drummer Jeremy Anderson (who’d played together previously in the band Voycheck), and they quickly added guitarist/vocalist Charli Beaumont and bassist/vocalist Kuba Bednarek before their first EP, Superposition!, came out in late 2024. We’re joining the quartet on the occasion of their debut full-length, Beast Machine Theory, which is indeed a trip directly into the gruff, garage-y worlds of post-hardcore, punk rock, and even “orgcore”. They may be from the West Coast, but Storm Boy have clearly listened to a good deal of the Dischord Records discography, as first-half post-hardcore punk rock cuts like “Tiny Fists” and “Always Bet on Black (and Pink)” make clear. The beer-soaked anthem “From Your Mouth” lands closer to Hot Water Music, and Storm Boy indeed inject the necessary melodic punk energy and catchiness into that one to make it work. Unlike a lot of bands in this mold, Storm Boy really develop and tease these songs out; there’s only eight songs on this thirty-plus minute LP, meaning they’ve got the time to start “…And Then Four” with a spare, noir-ish opening minute and turn closing track “The Minute We’re Born” into a six-minute endurance-test finale. There’s a lot on Beast Machine Theory, and a lot to like on it, an encouraging sign for a band on their debut album. (Bandcamp link)
Ace of Spit – Ace of Spit II
Release date: January 3rd Record label: Sinkhole/Wombat Cock Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, surf rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Weapons Down
I first heard about St. Louis garage rockers Ace of Spit in 2022 thanks to their Sophomore Lounge-released self-titled debut album, a wild punk rock LP that sucked up and spat out surf rock, proto-punk, and even a bit of power pop on us all (it snuck onto my year-end list and everything). Four years later, Ace of Spit kicked off 2026 by releasing their sophomore album Ace of Spit II, this time co-released by legendary St. Louis music venue The Sinkhole’s record label and something called “Wombat Cock”. If anything, Ace of Spit II is an even greater commitment to the twin tornados of freewheeling garage punk and “spaghetti western” vibes; with one major exception, the quartet (Brett, Scott, Steve, and Gabe) spend all of this LP’s twenty-seven minutes prowling the fabled “Cramps to MC5” spectrum. The album’s first three songs are all “rippers”, to be sure, but the ever-so-subtle desert-rockabilly sound is already there, and it only gets more obvious in “Diaspora Rock”, “Road to Reno”, and the genuinely-Western-evoking “Past Continuous”. That one “major exception” I mentioned earlier is “Parts List”, a bizarre excursion into fuzzed-out, fried electronica (with Link Wray riffs over top of it, of course) for three minutes; no idea why that’s smack dab in the middle of the record, but I don’t mind it–and besides, everything else rocks, so who cares? (Bandcamp link)
The second Pressing Concerns of the week (and third of 2026) features four records coming out tomorrow, January 16th: new albums from Peaer and Wormy, a reissue from Cub, and the wider release of an album by Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One. Earlier this week, we looked at new records from Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, Rotundos / Vatos Tristes, and Joe Glass; check that post 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.
Cub – Come Out Come Out (30th Anniversary Edition)
Release date: January 16th Record label: Mint Genre: Twee, indie pop, cuddlecore, power pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Ticket to Spain
The Vancouver, British Columbia indie pop group Cub are probably most well-known for their 1993 debut album Betti-Cola, a classic in twee (and self-described “cuddlecore”) that put Mint Records (now a Canadian institution) on the map. Come Out Come Out was the sophomore record (out of three; they broke up in 1997), originally released in 1995 as a triple 7” (of course) and reissued on CD in 2007. This vinyl edition is the first time that Come Out Come Out has been released on a boring-old 12-inch record, and it also marks the first time I’ve heard this record in full. Here, original members Lisa Marr (vocals/bass) and Robynn Iwata (guitar/backing vocals) are joined by new drummer Lisa G, and the three of them pick up the irresistible twee-pop thread that Cub began with Betti-Cola two years previously.
Come Out Come Out is probably a more polished and “professional”-sounding album than Betti-Cola (if nothing else, it features a stable core trio, with guest musicians like organist Lorraine Finch and percussionist Marc L’Esperance only used as additions to the main three). Cub aren’t a “punk band” and wouldn’t be called “power pop” by that genre’s gatekeepers, but opening track “Ticket to Spain” is great, loud, “rocking” pop music no matter what we call it. “My Flaming Red Bobsled”, “Voracious”, and “Life of Crime” are the work of a genuine garage rock band (imagine the intermittent “prowling” vibes of one of Cub’s biggest influences, Beat Happening, but with better musicianship), “Everything’s Geometry”, “Your Bed”, and “So Far Apart” are Cub at their fluffiest, and “New York City” (famously covered by Cub tourmates They Might Be Giants) ought to be an indie pop standard. Speaking of covers, there’s a Yoko Ono one and a Go-Go’s one (I’m partial to the latter, “Vacation”, but they both work as “Cub songs”), and there’s a bonus live version of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” (which they also did on Betti-Cola; it’s one of my favorite ones from that album) featuring an “Italian harmonica man”. In between wild harmonica solos and cringeworthy banter (Cub did their best with what the Italian harmonica man gave them, I admit), an all-time great indie pop song is performed. Marr sings “Cast a Shadow” with an audible big grin on her face, which sums up all of Come Out Come Out very well. (Bandcamp link)
Peaer – Doppelgänger
Release date: January 16th Record label: Danger Collective Genre: Math rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, slowcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Just Because
The SUNY Purchase-originating trio Peaer were one of the great indie rock bands to emerge from the American Northeast in the mid-2010s, going from a Peter Katz solo project to a full-fledged band who put out two albums on Tiny Engines (their 2016 self-titled album and 2019’s A Healthy Earth). Although Katz, bassist Thom Lombardi, and drummer Jeremy Kinney spent the first half of this decade in relative silence, they continued work on a third proper Peaer album, finally arriving at the beginning of 2026 as Doppelgänger. The first song from Doppelgänger we heard, “Just Because” (released last year as a standalone single), was a sparkling missive right out of the more melodic end of the “Exploding in Sound math rock” heyday; it’s a bit perkier than Doppelgänger as a whole, but it’s the kind of well-crafted, sleek, friendly-but-not-overly-so indie rock that populates the record.
For a band who hadn’t been afraid to get pretty noisy in the past, Doppelgänger represents a clear shift into more “refined”, “restrained”, “reserved” and other such “re”-word-territory. The “rocking” side of Peaer is largely confined to wonky guitar solos in “Part of the Problem” and “Bad News”, as well as the trash-compactor-ending to “Rose in My Teeth”; they’re exciting moments, to be sure, but the less-explosive bridges in between them are what make up Doppelgänger’s foundation. “End of the World” opens the album with Peaer’s clearest foray yet into “guitar pop” (it’s damn-near toe-tapping!); if they don’t quite do anything like that again, “Part of the Problem” and “Just Because” at the very least form an undeniably catchy opening trio. “No More Today” is catchy too, I suppose, but it has a dour streak that’s apparently Doppelgänger’s final missing piece: from there, Peaer make songs like “Button” and “Bad News” sound like the most natural things in the world. Nonetheless, it took six years and (one imagines) a great deal of tinkering to get to Doppelgänger, and I don’t take this “effortless”-seeming final product for granted. (Bandcamp link)
Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One – Antenna
Release date: January 16th Record label: The Forever Exploding Dynamo Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, experimental rock, noise rock, ambient Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Touché
The intriguingly-named Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One are a new band from Columbus made up of three longtime central Ohio indie rock musicians in drummer/keyboardist Keith Hanlon (The Black Swans, Orchestraville), guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki (Closet Mix), and bassist Joel Walter (who’s put out a few solo albums). The trio’s first album, Antenna, appeared on Bandcamp last October, but Novicki has given it a wider release this month via his new record label, The Forever Exploding Dynamo. Antenna, a thirty-five-minute LP made up of only five songs, is “indie rock” for those of us who enjoy music that veers between the accessible and the challenging. Long-running groups like Oneida and the similarly-named Eleventh Dream Day come to mind–opening and closing your album with twin eleven-minute pillars of Sonic Youth-style art rock is a pretty inarguable “statement”, as is sticking a nice, dirty garage punk song right in the middle of your LP (“Touché”, which holds the center in between a meandering five-minute dream-rock song called “Keyhole” and the ambient piece “Defeated Lions”). It’s those opening and closing tracks that really cement Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One as true professionals in this arena (and, given that they together make up the majority of the album, that’s a good thing). “Dissolve Me Now” condenses from noise into something melodic, while “Dilly Dally” closes the album by effectively doing the reverse. There’s an art to making this kind of thing, and Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One have hit the ground sculpting with Antenna. (Bandcamp link)
Wormy – Shark River
Release date: January 16th Record label: Rose Garden Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, indie folk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Cocaine Bear
Brooklyn musician Noah Rauchwerk has been quite active over the past decade, whether he’s been playing alongside his brother in the folk duo The Lords of Liechtenstein, drumming for Samia (among other acts) on tour, or guesting on the most recent Little Hag album. He’s nonetheless found time for his solo project Wormy in recent years, releasing an album called I’m Sweating All the Time in 2022 (with a companion version featuring Another Michael, Dogwood Tales, and Medium Build following not long afterwards). The sophomore Wormy album, Shark River, is another chance for Rauchwerk to call in a bunch of musicians he’s crossed paths with in his line of work–it features contributions from members of Remo Drive, Another Michael, Little Hag, and Samia, among others. With the kind of comfy indie folk Rauchwerk makes as Wormy, having too many cooks in the kitchen is a real concern, but Shark River walks the line very well, balancing Rauchwerk’s delicate, intimate obvious influences (Bright Eyes, mid-period Mountain Goats) with the polish some of his collaborators have pursued in their own music. Rauchwerk’s emotive singer-songwriter style is at the core of Shark River both in its most gigantic heartland-pop moments (“I Hate You”, “Old Dog”) and its simplest, quietest ones (“Cocaine Bear”, effectively a minimal-electric version of the best Slaughter Beach, Dog songs, and “Give Up”, featuring a great Hovvdy name-drop). Sometimes, it’s just as simple as this: the songwriting on Shark River is better than that of most of its peers, so it stands out. (Bandcamp link)
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