Hey there! It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, and The Disassociation, and a new EP from Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac! Check them out below!
We will have a Tuesday post this week (it’s been a minute, I know!).
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.
Stuck – Optimizer
Release date: March 27th Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk, synthpunk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Sicko
Stuck has been a fixture in Chicago indie rock since their formation in the late 2010s. Guitarist/vocalist Greg Obis’ history making noisy post-punk goes back even further, to his time in the underrated trio Yeesh alongside Babe Report drummer Peter Reale and Alex Doyle. After that group’s demise, Obis linked up with drummer Tim Green, guitarist Donny Walsh, and bassist David Algrim; albums Change Is Bad (2020) and Freak Frequency (2023) followed, as well as an EP called Content That Makes You Feel Good in 2021. Optimizer, Stuck’s third album, is their first as a trio (Walsh left the group in 2022), and the three of them tapped Andrew Oswald (Marbled Eye, Public Interest, Blue Zero) to record the album at Electrical Audio. Obis is a mastering engineer himself, taking over Chicago Mastering Service from Shellac’s Bob Weston and working on a bunch of albums I’ve written about (just in the past year: Wishy, Ducks Ltd., Maneka, Will Stratton, Winter, and Shallowater), but it doesn’t take a studio professional to guess that Oswald’s finely-honed, sharp-edged, greyscale post-punk background is an inspired pairing with Stuck’s blunt-force noisy Windy City punk rock.
Believe it or not, Optimizer is about as adventurous as this kind of music gets (without transforming into something else entirely). Opening track “Totally Vexed” ought to be Stuck at their noise-punk pummeling best, but swirling keys and strings are surprising touches–and then the absurd Devo-y synths of “Instakill” throw something completely different at us, as does the surging, blaring garage-punk anthem “Sicko”. Combine the skewed perspective of labelmates Landowner with the bleakness of Meat Wave and just a bit of the experimentation of FACS, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Optimizer, one of the most “Chicago underground rock” albums I’ve heard in recent memory (and I’ve heard a lot of them!). The trio sound kinetic and volatile on tracks like “Net Negative”, “It Isn’t”, and “Punchline”, post-punk songs that provide some limber acrobatics in between tough, chewy noise rockers like “Fire, Man” and “GG”. “It’s hard to see it now, but looking back somehow / You’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed,” Obis sings in the latter, over a mixture of post-punk and swelling, symphonic indie rock that’s somehow become “classic Stuck”. (Bandcamp link)
Miscellaneous Owl – The Wanting Chemical
Release date: March 6th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, bedroom pop, twee, power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Walling Up the Train
This is the thirdyear in a row that I’m writing about a Miscellaneous Owl album that came out in March after the project’s mastermind, Huan-Hua Chye, spent February participating in the February Album Writing Month exercise. This time, however, it’s not even the first Chye album album of the year: the Wisconsin singer-songwriter’s five-piece indie pop band Gentle Brontosaurus broke an eight-year gap between LPs in February with Three Hares. The Gentle Brontosaurus LP had plenty of great Chye-penned material on it, but if you missed the Midwestern bedroom pop auteur in solo mode, playing with acoustic indie folk and Magnetic Fields synths and all other manners of tinkering, The Wanting Chemical has us covered.
The Wanting Chemical isn’t Gentle Brontosaurus levels of full-band power pop, but perhaps the return of Chye’s band has trickled into Miscellaneous Owl’s latest album–there’s a bit more electric guitar, some of which I’d even describe as “chugging”. Still, an album that starts with a glittering indie pop song about “American Death” and a power pop stomp about how “You Can’t Save Everything” (beginning with “three dead shrews in a line beside the walking trail”) is classic Miscellaneous Owl. Elsewhere, Chye uses the rockers to serenade the apocalypse (“Em-Dash Shibboleth”, which is indeed the “AI lament”), reminisce on more turbulent times (the Paisley-ish “Camel Crush”), and to get a bit literary (with “Walling Up the Train”).
It wouldn’t be a Miscellaneous Owlbum without some garish synthpop, a role filled by “Counting the Breaths of a Ticking Clock”, and the gaps between these attention-grabbers are filled with the quiet stuff (I’m partial to the lo-fi, fuzzy murmur of “Metaphorical Snow” myself). The twinkling folk-pop of “Centering” closes The Wanting Chemical on a curious note, a pretty pottery and seasonal metaphor which nonetheless has some gore in it, too (roadkill, of course). Chye has a few different recognizable musical hallmarks as Miscellaneous Owl, but a just-as-defining aspect of her albums is her surprising and oftentimes challenging writing, veering from opaque to diaristic (simultaneously, sometimes, I might even say). (Bandcamp link)
The Disassociation – Losing Is a Luxury
Release date: March 21st Record label: Shrimper Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Five Miles to Mexico
Thirty-something years after their initial formation in 1990, right now is a fruitful time for fans of the cult Inland Empire, California indie rock group Refrigerator. The quintet (Chris Jones, Daniel Brodo, Mark Givens, Allen Callaci, and Dennis Callaci) put out their fifteenth album in late 2024, and the past couple years have also seen two collaborative releases by Dennis Callaci (one with Heimito Kunst and one with L. Eugene Methe). The latest Refrigerator-related project is called The Disassociation, an eight-piece “collective” featuring all five band members as well as Amy Maloof (of the Pomona band Falcon Eddy), the novelist (and bassist) Jonathan Lethem, and Sam Sousa (a radio host who supposedly once played in a hardcore band called Bring Your Brain).
Callaci’s side projects hew towards the experimental, but The Disassociation’s first LP, Losing Is a Luxury, largely retains the warm, casual, folky lo-fi indie pop of Refrigerator’s proper records. It also just happens to contain a bit…more than that, too. The winding, delicate lo-fi pop of opening track “Five Miles to Mexico” is vintage Refrigerator, but Maloof’s vocals and the showy bass guitar parts on “Breaking Glass” take the song into new terrain. I would categorize some of the material on Losing Is a Luxury as more Refrigerator-like (“The Map Ain’t the Territory”, even with Maloof’s vocals, and “One Willful Act”) and some a little further afield (like the rootsy tinges to “Merle” and–especially–“Beer Commercial”, or the piano ballad “The Rat in My Kitchen”), but it’s not like there’s a huge gap between these different “sides” to The Disassociation. If I wasn’t so well-versed in Refrigerator (a great investment for one to make, by the way), I’d likely just think of The Disassociation as one big, weird, in-sync family. Maybe that’s what Losing Is a Luxury is, regardless. (Bandcamp link)
Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac – Two Heavy Hearts
Release date: January 30th Record label: Hidden Bay Genre: Indie folk, lo-fi folk, indie pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Brighton’s Hills
Toulouse-based label Hidden Bay Records has put out a fair amount of French indie pop in recent years, and the imprint kicked off 2026 with another entry in their ongoing project. Louisa Bénâtre is a musician who may be known to some as the drummer of Toulouse “crunch pop” quartet Vemberlain, and she’s also the sister of Camille Bénâtre, who’s put out some solo records on Hidden Bay. Her latest release is a four-song cassette called Two Heavy Hearts that she made with “longtime friend” Barbara Bessac, stemming from a period of time in late 2021 where Bessac, in Britain for an extended period of time, sent Bénâtre three poems as a way of keeping in touch. Bénâtre set these poems to music, the duo wrote a fourth song together after Bessac returned to France, and they then recorded what would become Two Heavy Hearts (with help from Camille).
Bénâtre’s lo-fi pop influences (Broadcast, Au Revoir Simone, Sibylle Baier) range from “dreamy” to “actively sound like they’re fading away”, and this is reflected in this low-key EP. Two Heavy Hearts opens with a simple folk-ish song called “Brighton’s Hills”, leaning heavily on an acoustic guitar and a meandering vocal performance; Bénâtre & Bessac don’t set out to grab us, but we’re welcome to witness what they’re creating. “A Choir” is much in the same manner, although the minimal Casio and harmonies are small but difference-making additions. The drum machine/Casio-organ dream pop of “Fine” is probably the EP’s black sheep, although the barebones bossa nova pop isn’t all that far removed from the stark bedroom folk of the rest of Two Heavy Hearts. “Fluffy” wraps the dozen-minute EP up much like how it begins–spare but beautiful to anyone paying attention. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a very good one, featuring an album from True Green that came out earlier this week and three records coming out tomorrow, March 27th: new LPs from Sluice and Helicopter Leaves, plus a new EP from HEDGE. If you missed the other blog post this week, Monday’s (featuring Julianna Riolino, Swirls, Entrez Vous, and a Chicago lo-fi indie rock compilation), check that one out here.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
True Green – Hail Disaster
Release date: March 24th Record label: Spacecase Genre: Lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Terry’s Parrot
One of my favorite albums of 2024 was My Lost Decade, the debut LP from a Minneapolis musician and novelist named Dan Hornsby who makes music under the name True Green. My Lost Decade was an inspired combination of Hornsby’s sharp storytelling with Beatles-esque kitchen-sink lo-fi pop cooked up by Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom. I’ve subsequently been hotly anticipating the sophomore True Green album, Hail Disaster, made once again by Hornsby and Ransom with a collection of Minneapolis- and Memphis-centric collaborators including Zach Mitchell (Missed Dunks at Summer League, Big Clown) and Dustin James (Green/Blue, Waveless). Hail Disaster was preceded a year ago by a two-song single; both “Consider the Priesthood” and “Falconry” ended up making the album, and the quieter, more pensive side of True Green displayed on those songs was, as it turns out, an apt preview of the band’s second album. Not everything on Hail Disaster is such a clear turn into sparse, spacey folk-rock, but there’s a subdued, adrift nature throughout the entire album spurred by both Hornsby’s delivery and True Green’s musical choices.
Three different songs on Hail Disaster reference birds in their title, and that’s not including “Bindi Sue”, a hymn-like tribute to the late conservationist Steve Irwin (James wrote the music for that one). Two different songs mention stingrays (including the Irwin song, of course). The hard-left detours into offbeat power pop and strange dance music of My Lost Decade are gone entirely, with True Green declining to go further than occasionally mustering up a “somewhat jaunty” for guitar pop highlights “Italian Lightning”, “Jonathan”, and “Beatlemania”. One of the songs is about how to draw hands; it’s called “How to Draw Hands”, and Hornsby sings “Go slow, it’s no race,” from the perspective of his mother giving him artistic advice in it. The more time I spend with Hail Disaster, the more I’m drawn in by its overwhelming calmness, a rejection of calamity drawn from what I must assume is Hornsby taking that aforementioned advice. My (current) two favorite songs on the album wouldn’t work without this perspective.
“Terry’s Parrot” is, I think, the emotional core of Hail Disaster; the story isn’t entirely complete without extra context (according to Hornsby, it’s about his uncle who died of AIDS), but we just need to understand the idea of heavy loss to feel the full impact of that song’s final verse. “Bodysurfing” is probably the most beautiful song on Hail Disaster (and there’s a lot of competition for that title), Hornsby and Ransom giving the sparkling, polished, dreamy guitar pop treatment to the former’s tale of a family’s home getting robbed while they’re having “the time of [their] lives” at the beach. “The first half of your life is Tetris / And the second half is Jenga,” Hornsby sings, towards the end of “Bodysurfing”, suggesting a loss of innocence, but he just as immediately shrugs the conclusion off: “But maybe it’s all just / Bodysurfing”. Hail Disaster could’ve ended on that note, but Hornsby generously gives us a conclusion that elucidates the record’s points more finely with “Sparrows & Lilies”. “You worry yourself sick / You worry yourself silly / Think about the sparrows / Think about the lilies,” is how that one begins, and “Like an aquarium in a submarine / You kept yourself apart from everything,” is the refrain. I will admit that I was slightly disappointed that Hail Disaster didn’t have anything as catchy as “My Pecadilloes” on it when I first heard it, but I understand it now. It takes a lot of discipline to let as much go as True Green do on Hail Disaster. (Bandcamp link)
Sluice – Companion
Release date: March 27th Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co. Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Vegas
For the past few years now, North Carolina’s Sluice have been known to me as “the band that’s not Fust”, despite sharing several touring bills, band membership, and one-syllable naming conventions with the Asheville alt-country group. Given that Fust made my favorite album of last year, that’s not a bad place to be, but Companion, Sluice’s third album and first since 2023, is enough for them to make a name for themselves beyond that in an increasingly crowded North Carolina indie-alt-country-rock scene. The main quartet of Sluice is singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, drummer Avery Sullivan, bassist Oliver Child-Lanning, and fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, all of whom are in Fust (and two other Fust members, bandleader Aaron Dowdy and Frank Meadows, also appear on Companion). Not to keep talking about Fust, but I can’t help but thinking about how their 2025 album, Big Ugly, seized the little “moment” that their scene is having by polishing Dowdy’s storytelling and songwriting into vibrant, immediately-grabbing country rock–Companion is, conversely, a different beast. It’s a more challenging, wide-ranging “folk rock” album, with plenty of accessible moments and just as many I would hardly describe as such.
The wobbly, steady country rock of opening track “Beadie” is as warm an opening to Companion as one could hope for, and “Rachet Strap” isn’t far behind. On the other end of the album, “Zillow” is a gorgeous penultimate track that interpolates an old Fust song and “Vegas” pulls the trick of saving the catchiest song on the LP for last (it’s an exhilarating, whirlwind country-rock flashback to Morris’ time touring with Angel Olsen as her merch guy in the 2010s, an up-close experience with “indie stardom” that nearly made him quit music and that really wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in the album’s sequencing). In between these four songs is what we call “the fun stuff”–some good old-fashioned Bill Callahan worship (damn, “Torpor” is really good), twin sprawling nine-minute songs (the disintegrating folk-drone of “Unknowing” in particular rules), an empty-space experimental piece, and the fun vocalizing going on at the beginning of “WTF”. After sitting with Companion for a minute, I’ve come to the conclusion that Sluice have also seized their moment. (Bandcamp link)
Helicopter Leaves – Sabrina Nickels
Release date: March 27th Record label: Noyes Genre: Power pop, indie pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: It Really Never Did
Chicago musician Anthony Vaccaro has been widely heard this decade as part of the Beach Bunny phenomenon; he plays guitar and has contributed songwriting to the very popular Windy City indie pop trio. Vaccaro first stepped out on his own in 2023 with Get Stuck In, the home-recorded debut album from his solo project Helicopter Leaves, but it’s the second LP under the name that has fully realized the guitar pop potential that Vaccaro clearly possesses. Sabrina Nickels (named for a recently-deceased family friend who was integral in Vaccaro’s development as a songwriter) is once again entirely written and performed by Vaccaro, but this time he enlisted Sean O’Keefe as a producer and recorded the LP between Electrical Audio and O’Keefe’s Rosebud Studios, a decision that seems to serve the record’s material. For its smooth, eleven-track/thirty-five-minute runtime, Helicopter Leaves hew towards vibrant, immaculately-executed Teenage Fanclub-inspired power pop in the vein of modern crafters like Hurry, Bory, The Sylvia Platters, and Dan Darrah. Vaccaro’s relatively delicate vocals keep Sabrina Nickels with one foot in the worlds of twee and indie pop, but the big guitars and even bigger refrains are hardly bashful.
Sabrina Nickels is a whirlwind; this feeling is greatly enhanced by “It Really Never Did”, a starry-eyed power pop opening track that’s as good as any guitar pop I’ve heard this year. Helicopter Leaves bash out similarly-minded hits in a professional but inspired manner–“Falling Water (Before You)”, “Number Girl”, and “Show Me All Your Landscape Paintings” are all simply sublime. The “deviations” from Vaccaro’s preferred mode are pretty small and still very “power pop”; the blaring synth in “Moreoff More Off Than On” and the slow start to “Sorry from Now On” both give way to big hooks, and the surprisingly electric conclusion to Sabrina Nickels (the garage-tinged “What’s One More Place?” and the fuzz-fest closing track “Self-Reliance”) doesn’t abandon them either. I don’t know if I’d call Sabrina Nickels the “best” power pop album of the year so far, but it’s perhaps the purest distillation of the form of 2026 yet. (Bandcamp link)
HEDGE – Freeze Frame High Five
Release date: March 27th Record label: Best Brother Genre: Power pop, pop punk, punk rock, fuzz rock, orgcore, Bob Mould Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Hey Dude
The only band I can think of in recent memory to list Weston as an influence, HEDGE are a pop punk trio from Worcester, Massachusetts who caught my attention with their 2024 debut album, Better Days. I called it an “all-in Bob Mould-style aggressive power-pop-punk record”, and the Sugar/Superchunk sap continues to flow on the group’s brand new EP Freeze Frame High Five. Sprinting through a half-dozen songs in under ten minutes, guitarist “Christopher”, bassist “Pillowman Pete”, and drummer “Rainy Maple Stanford-Cordaro” take us on a foot-on-gas journey through post-Jawbreaker 90s “indie punk” energy and intensity with a power pop sensibility. “Hey Dude” and “Snapple Cap” are just monster trucks of pop songs, and Christopher’s deep, almost conversational voice and vocal melodies make him feel like a pop punk version of The Bevis Frond’s Nick Salomon. Nothing on Freeze Frame High Five is over two minutes long, but ninety-or-so seconds is enough time to give “Ice Rink” a college rock undercurrent and “Hit the Road” a sense of melancholy. The EP closes with a cover of Guided by Voices’ “My Valuable Hunting Knife” that only sort of tries to keep the original melody intact (and not even that with the tempo); it’s impressive in its own weird way how HEDGE’s pop punk steamroller flattens it into something that sounds almost exactly like the rest of Freeze Frame High Five. This quick EP is all the time HEDGE needs to reaffirm themselves as one of the best currently out there at what they do. (Bandcamp link)
In an eclectic Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got a new album from Swirls, a new EP from Entrez Vous, a deluxe version of the Julianna Riolino album from last year, and a compilation of new Chicago indie rock bands including Friko, Sharp Pins, and Horsegirl. Check them out below!
We’ll be back on 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.
Various – Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025
Release date: March 18th Record label: Desert Island Discs/New Now Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, fuzz pop, dream pop, post-punk, noise rock, chamber pop, experimental rock, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: En Utero
Well, here we are, then. I’ve written quite a bit about what’s going on in Chicago via bands and acts like Sharp Pins, Friko, and Joe Glass, and I haven’t been the only one to take notice. A bunch of teenagers in the Windy City (sometimes connected to nearby Midwestern cities) making underground indie rock music inspired by varying combinations of early Guided by Voices, Flying Nun, Elephant 6, 1960s psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and their home city’s noise rock; some bands (like Horsegirl, Lifeguard, and the aforementioned Friko) have turned buzz into A-list indie record deals and Pitchfork hype, but everybody’s always been adamant that they’re part of a larger scene (sometimes referred to as “Hallogallo”, after Lifeguard/Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater’s cassette label and zine). Red Xerox, assembled by local chronicler and TV Buddha drummer Eli Schmitt, is a well-earned and useful five-year marker for this scene (though, as Slater says on Schmitt’s Bandcamp page: “This compilation is not a reminiscence of the good old days or a document of a time long gone, it is NOW!”).
If you’ve been reading this blog, I probably don’t need to tell you that the Sharp Pins and Friko selections are excellent guitar pop songs–if you like those, Red Xerox also offers up similarly-minded cuts from Dwaal Troupe (another Slater band, who let “En Utero” hiss its way to an excellent big finish), P. Noid (a new-to-me duo who K-Records their way through “Go Somewhere Else”), and Horsegirl (one of their earliest songs, “Sea Life Sandwich Boy”, shows up here). Plenty of other cuts from Red Xerox are “hits” in their own ways, even if they aren’t as upfront in their pop aspirations, from the bouncy post-punk of Uniflora’s “Two or More” to the minimalist indie pop of Post Office Winter’s “Mother, Sister, Nurse” to TV Buddha’s tinny psychedelic shit-wave “Baby, Woah!”. The earnest indie folk of Free Range has always felt drawn from a different era of Chicago music than the rest of these young acts, but Sofia Jensen’s project has been embraced by the mod-revivalists all the same, and “Lost and Found” is as good as anything else on this compilation. At this point, I’ve hit on almost every song on Red Xerox (and I didn’t even get to the most bizarre one–shout out Current Union ™ and their no wave fetishism), which is a good sign for a compilation. I look forward to several of these bands launching the next five years of Red Xerox very soon. (Bandcamp link)
Julianna Riolino – Echo in the Dust (Deluxe)
Release date: February 27th Record label: MoonWhistle Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, country rock, art rock Formats: Vinyl, CD (both original version only), digital Pull Track: Like a Rembrandt
I first knew Julianna Riolino as a member of Daniel Romano’s Outfit, most recently seen contributing to their excellent 2024 album Too Hot to Sleep. Members of the Outfit releasing solo albums is hardly an uncommon occurrence; Carson McHone released one just last year, and Riolino herself already had one under her belt by that point with 2022’s All Blue. Nonetheless, a desire to more fully focus on her solo career led to Riolino leaving the Outfit shortly after Too Hot to Sleep, and she self-released a sophomore album called Echo in the Dust late last year. Though I missed Echo in the Dust on the first go-around, a “deluxe” re-release of it (featuring three additional songs) caught my ear, and I can say now that the Canadian musician has successfully carved out her own style honed from classic 60s folk rock, bits of 70s and even 80s singer-songwriter touches, and snatches of Romano-esque energetic power pop.
Opening track “Like a Rembrandt” is the kind of polished, exuberant, poppy country rock I’d expect from a “Daniel Romano-associate solo album”, and Riolino generously gives us several more songs in a similar vein throughout Echo in the Dust between the glammy alt-country of “It’s a Shakedown”, the breezy guitar pop of “On a Bluebird’s Wing”, and the original LP’s bittersweet closing track “The Less I Know”. I’m sure I’d be happy with an entire album of this kind of material, but Riolino isn’t just interested in that, and so we get songs like the synth-rock glider “Full Moon” (a collaboration with Weird Nightmare), the horn-laden throwback pop of “Seed”, the cavernous, gently-rocking “Let Me Dream”, and the somewhat angsty studio-experiment rock of “I Wonder”. The “bonus tracks” land somewhere in between, all largely pop songs of a relatively thoughtful variety; that Riolino chose the extremes in the “final” tracklist of Echo in the Dust is probably a reflection of the range she’s seeking to explore in her solo work. She’s off to a strong start with this one. (Bandcamp link)
Swirls – Surge
Release date: March 6th Record label: Howlin Banana/A Tant Rêver Du Roi Genre: Garage rock, power pop, mod Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Short Fuse
Another French garage rock band, eh? Alright, let’s see what Swirls have to offer. They’re a quartet from Nantes–Guillaume Cibard, Hugo Allard, Samuel Sprent, and Théo Radière are their names, and they all used to play together in a band called The Von Pariahs. Surge is their second album as Swirls, following 2024’s Top of the Line; both LPs have come via stalwart French indie labels Howlin Banana and A Tant Rêver Du Roi. Swirls specifically reference Australian garage punk and The Hives as influences, and you’d probably have a rough guess as to how Surge sounds based off of those references. You wouldn’t be wrong, but there’s this 60s proto-garage rock charm to it, too; it doesn’t sound like the British Invasion and Nuggets per se, but it has the same simple, almost childlike relationship to rock and roll as bands who came about in its relative infancy did.
Swirls sing about whatever happens to be on their mind, whether it’s the concept of needing to sleep every day in “Sleep” (“Now I’m 30 and I’m practically dead/ ‘cause I’ve got back pain wired through my body”) or daydreaming about questionable financial decisions in “A Car or a Guitar”. “Short Fuse” feels right out of 1964 (“(He’s got a short fuse) And it’s yesterday’s news / (He’s got a short fuse) And I’ve got no excuse”); we’re into early The Who territory here. If there’s a theme to Surge, it has something to do with youth and growing up; in addition to the back-crack in “Sleep”, “Neverland” and “Powerstation” deal with it to some degree, too. The members of Swirls have been making this kind of music for over a decade now; they’re different people than in their Von Pariahs days. Thankfully, it sounds like they’re taking fun garage rock with them into their old age thirties. (Bandcamp link)
Entrez Vous – Tell Her a Joke
Release date: March 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, power pop, dream pop, experimental pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: (Crying in the) Sportsbook
I first heard the Chapel Hill indie pop duo Entrez Vous last year via their sophomore album, Antenna Legs Hear Everything; just a little under a year since that LP’s “garage rock, weird psych pop, and power pop” blend (as I said at the time), Kelly Reidy and Clark Blomquist have returned with their third record since 2023. This time it’s a five-song, eleven-minute EP called Tell Her a Joke, made with help from Chris Girard (bass/bass VI/guitar), Sean Armbruster (organ), Shareen El Naga (organ/electric piano), Danny Grewen (trombone), Justin Blatt (violin), and Paul Finn (who recorded it). Girard, Armbruster, and El Naga now seem to be proper members of Entrez Vous, but the expanded lineup hasn’t lessened the group’s tossed-off, garage-y indie pop rock charms.
“(Crying in the) Sportsbook” is an instant classic from the North Carolina group–golden vintage pop harmonies, country rock shuffling, and a winking vocal performance from Reidy all see to that. It’s over in ninety seconds, and the organ-tinged folk-pop of “Willy” and the drum-machine dreaminess of “Oh, Raquel!” also wrap things up in under two minutes. The digital Side Two is the classic weird flipside, led off by the four-minute psychedelic trip of “Her Favorite Horse” and ending with an orchestral instrumental called “Bootsy’s Place”; Entrez Vous are more than equipped to make the former work as a pop song, and the latter is a perfectly reasonable comedown finale. It’s pretty much all you could want in a stopgap EP, and I look forward to Entrez Vous continuing to stockpile fun and interesting pop music via their current hot hand. (Bandcamp link)
In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 20th: new ones from Gladie, Otoliths, This House, and Filth Is Eternal. If you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, and Corespondents), 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.
Gladie – No Need to Be Lonely
Release date: March 20th Record label: Get Better Genre: Indie punk, pop punk, grunge-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Push Me Down
This Philly indie punk rock musician still does it the old-fashioned way. At a time when many of August Koch’s peers from the 2010s indie underground have moved on to making more “mature”, tasteful alt-country and/or indie folk, the former frontperson of the now-defunct first-run Tiny Engines band Cayetana has kept the slightly-emo, slightly pop-punk flame alive with Gladie. They’re on their third album now, and No Need to Be Lonely sees Koch joined by bassist Evan Demianczyk, multi-instrumentalist Matt Schimelfenig, drummer Miles Ziskind, and backing vocalist Liz Parsons, not to mention Jeff Rosenstock in the producer’s (and organist’s) chair. Everything about No Need to Be Lonely’s release–from Rosenstock’s involvement, to its release on DIY staple Get Better Records (Remember Sports, Teenage Halloween, Worriers), to a chorus of backing vocalists on “Talk Past Each Other” featuring members of The Sidekicks, Chumped, and Koch’s former Cayetana bandmates–is a callback to a bygone era of indie rock, but No Need to Be Lonely doesn’t come off as sentimental or stuck in the past.
No Need to Be Lonely is immediate, hard-hitting, and raw because that’s what it should be–that’s how Koch writes, plays, and sings. The revved-up, huge guitars make themselves known before anything else on the album, but Koch’s frayed, cracking voice isn’t far behind (both feature heavily on “Push Me Down”, a wrecking ball of an opening track). Koch’s writing is just as blunt–she pulls no punches in singing about humiliation, people pleasing, screaming in open fields, and the like. When Koch repeats “I won’t hold back a compliment / I’ll be careful with how my time is spent,” in the chorus of “Brace Yourself”, it’s the kind of lyric that loses some of its impact when written out without context–in the song, it’s a liferaft clung to in a tsunami. The primary mode of No Need to Be Lonely is nice and grungy; many of the mid-tempo numbers, like “Talk Past Each Other” and “Lucky for Another”, still have a bite to them, and the true detours (“Fix Her”, “I Will If You Will”, “Blurry”) don’t overstay their welcome. In the closing track, “Unfolding”, Koch mutter “Nostalgia’s just fool’s gold,” over a steady, weary indie rock instrumental–if it sounds familiar to us, it’s not because Gladie is looking backwards. (Bandcamp link)
Otoliths – Lithos
Release date: March 20th Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop, indie pop, college rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Bi-Weekly Lady
The Chicago-originating, Oakland-based musician Tom Smith has been in a bunch of different bands: Smokin’ Ziggurats, Office, Mazes, Social Studies, Silverware, and Abracadabra, to name a few. His latest project is called Otoliths; they debuted in 2024 with a song on a compilation, and their next release is a full-fledged debut album called Lithos. The majority of Lithos was recorded by Jason Kick and Marta Alvarez at Santo Recording with the lineup of Smith on vocals and guitar, Daniel Pearce on drums, Ben McClintock on bass and guitar, Akhil Bhatt on keyboard and vocals, and Ainsley Wagoner on additional vocals (one song, “Minna”, was recorded by Trans Am/Terry Gross’ Phil Manley with a slightly different lineup). Otoliths’ debut album fits right in with the jangly indie pop/college rock revival happening across the San Francisco Bay Area, although they only acknowledge this in a roundabout way by calling themselves a “post-punk band” influenced by Emmett Kelly and Martin Newell (the latter of which is so popular in the modern guitar pop movement that Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records were able to put together an album-length tribute record to him in 2024, mind you).
I hear plenty of Flying Nun, The Soft Boys, and even Elvis Costello in the casual power pop of opening track “Maeve’s Melody”, and Lithos really does come out swinging between the Kiwi Jr.-like stop-start college rock of “Sense in Asking”, the massive fuzz-pop hooks of “Bi-Weekly Lady”, and the jangly psychedelia of “Limb from Limb”. The cruise control vibes of “Bar Pilots” at the beginning of Side Two turn out to actually be last call of a sort–Otoliths spend the final four songs getting comfortable in the spacier realms of dream pop/post-punk. “Go to Sleep” and “Minna” have nice undergirding rhythms, while “Projectionist” ends Lithos with a slow-building that simply comes to a stop in lieu of releasing anything. Lithos loads plenty of melodic guitars and catchy choruses up front, but Otoliths show their mettle by weaving it into less obvious material, too–it all results in a very promising first LP. (Bandcamp link)
This House – Soft Rains Will Come
Release date: March 20th Record label: Pink Cotton Candy/Red Wig/Ramble Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, art punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Burned House
From 1979 to 2008, G.W. Sok was the unmistakable barking lead vocalist of Dutch noise rock group The Ex, leading the band from anarcho-punks to globe-trotting experimentalists on dozens of albums before departing. Sok has led a Mike Watt-esque career since then, blazing a trail littered with countless collaborations spanning everything from jazz to punk to spoken word. One of these many records was Is This a House?, a 2024 album Sok made with the Spain-originating, Copenhagen-based “noise, jazz and electronic” producer/musician Ignacio Córdoba; the two of them made an “experimental collage album” combining Córdoba’s electronic with occasional rhythms and Sok’s spoken word, and the duo must’ve hit on something, because they started a project called This House not long afterwards.
Unlike Is This a House?, Soft Rains Will Come feels like the work of a real rock band–Córdoba plays most of the instruments on the album, but drummer Søren Høj and synth player P.J. Fossum also help with this feeling. Sok gets to growl and prowl over top of unforgiving rhythmic post-punk again, just like he did with The Ex. It basically sounds like an Ex album with more synths in some parts, which is certainly fine by me; “Oh My, Butterfly” is probably the most Ex-like song on here, but pretty much all of these eight songs hit the same “grinding noise rock” sweet spot at some point in their (frequently stretching-past-five-minute) runtime. Almost every song is lyrically inspired by a different poem, apparently (from Atwood, Bukowski, and Prévert, among others); while Sok’s exact words may not always be important to the structure of these noisy, blaring soundscapes, it’s essential that he sound like he always means it–and I come away from Soft Rains Will Come believing he’s got just as much of a fire under him now as he did forty years ago. This House continues one of the most important threads of Sok’s music career: no matter how twisted and convoluted things get, the passion always makes it through. (Bandcamp link)
Filth Is Eternal – Impossible World
Release date: March 17th Record label: MNRK Heavy Genre: Punk rock, alt-rock, melodic hardcore Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Long Way
The Seattle quintet Filth Is Eternal have shared the stage with Baroness and Botch, and they currently share a record label with the likes of Underoath, High on Fire, and Judas Priest. This is, admittedly, further into the realm of “heavy music” than Rosy Overdrive typically ventures (if the name “Filth Is Eternal” didn’t give it away). Nonetheless, the blog is always happy to spotlight good punk rock, and Filth Is Eternal’s fourth album, Impossible World, is most certainly that. On this record, the group (vocalist Lis DiAngelo, guitarists Brian McClelland and Colin Jenkins, bassist Logan Miller, and drummer Emily Salisbury) have thrown themselves headfirst into the realm of meaty, muscular, punk-heavy alt-rock (and, good news: it’s the kind with giant hooks, too). Impossible World hits like a tractor-trailer: a dozen short, serious, grey, loud bursts of heavy metal/hardcore-tinged grunge-pop songs in just under a half-hour. DiAngelo is clear and unwavering over top of guitars set to “rumbling down the highway” and rhythms doing their requisite pounding. It’s hard to pick highlights because Impossible World is an incredibly even listening experience, but you can’t go wrong with the first four songs, which introduce us to where Filth Is Eternal is at perfectly and breathlessly. Once Impossible World turns the faucet on, it just keeps pouring out until “Skorpio” comes to a close. (Bandcamp link)
We’ve got four new albums for you in this Monday Pressing Concerns, all of which came out last week: new LPs from Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman, The Notwist, Land Whales, and Corespondents. Check ’em out!
No Tuesday post this week. Due to personal life business and whatnot, we may be down to two posts a week for the foreseeable future. But we’ll be back on 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.
Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman – The Great Degradation
Release date: March 11th Record label: Self-released Genre: Country punk, cowpunk, alt-country, singer-songwriter, Americana Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Bongos
Two Cow Garage co-leader and central Ohio cowpunk poet laureate Micah Schnabel is about two years removed from The Clown Watches the Clock, a smart, catchy, and funny opus of Midwestern desperation, poverty, and general ambience (I mean, what’s the difference?) that stands as one of the long-running musician’s best works. The cult alt-country lifer is back with a record called The Great Degradation, made with his partner, poet and musician Vanessa Jean Speckman, and partially spurred on by the two of them getting priced out of their Columbus apartment. The duo assembled a group of collaborators with substantial overlap from The Clown Watches the Clock‘s personnel (engineer Alex Douglas, drummer Jason Winner, organist/guitarist Jay Gasper, bassist Todd May, and pianist Frank Turner) and bashed out The Great Degradation over “2.5 days in two separate basements in Columbus”, and the result is an ornery, more laser-focused sequel to Schnabel’s last LP.
Compared to the bittersweet character sketches that opened The Clown Watches the Clock, Schnabel and Speckman barely even bother with these useful middlemen in The Great Degradation’s opening salvo: the duo’s seething landscape-view look at “MAHA” carnage and transphobia resolves to simply “Hands up! Who’s had enough?”. There’s still plenty of wit on this record–“Enemy of the State”, for one (“We’re enemies of the state! / Mental, emotional wellbeing? Not great!”), and “C.I.Hey!” also has plenty of memorable lines before the climax, where Schnabel asks if he, too, can receive the Jackson Pollock treatment for his art. The dark folk rock of “Diamond Dave” and “Omaha (Villain)”, conversely, sound like the work of somebody whose relationship with “wit” is nearing its end. Like most Schnabel-helmed records, The Great Degradation is a rollercoaster, and we’re again rewarded with moments of country rock catharsis–the best ones on this album are the transcendent hackeysack/drum circle anthem “Bongos” and the singalong “2P4P” (repeat after me: “We live in a death cult called the USA / Gets a little more expensive every day”). You won’t find Schnabel and Speckman’s art in The Atlantic, exactly, but the inland stories land a lot closer to home (and I don’t mean that in a strictly geographic sense). (Bandcamp link)
The Notwist – News from Planet Zombie
Release date: March 13th Record label: Morr Music Genre: Art rock, 90s indie rock, psychedelia, chamber pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: X-Ray
I admit that I’m not the most familiar with the oeuvre of The Notwist. I certainly know of them, the long-running German group acclaimed for merging indie rock and electronica around the turn of the century (they’ve actually been around since the 1980s, initially as a punk band). Currently, the “main trio” of the band is comprised of founding members Markus Acher and Micha Acher plus newer recruit Cico Beck, but the “expanded live formation” of the band more than doubles its numbers (specifically, Theresa Loibl, Max Punktezahl, Karl Ivar Refseth, and Andi Haberl). News from Planet Zombie, The Notwist’s tenth album and first in five years, was recorded by the seven of them in their “home base” of Munich; the resulting album subsequently has a strong foundation in solid indie rock music, even if I’d characterize it as largely “unclassifiable” beyond that. Sometimes quick and straightforward, sometimes symphonic and patient, News from Planet Zombie sounds like a veteran band confidently going wherever their ideas happen to take them.
Chilly indie rock collides with woodwinds in the six-minute opening track “Teeth”, a winding journey that remains engrossing right until single “X-Ray” kicks in with garage rock structure, post-punk rhythms, and a melancholic vocal melody from Markus Acher. The rocking side of The Notwist returns in “The Turning” and parts of “Silver Lines”, but News from Planet Zombie also encompasses the psychedelic pop of “Propeller”, a beautiful chamber-folk cover of “Red Sun” (an underappreciated Neil Young cut from 2000’s Silver & Gold), and the country ballad of “Projectors”. The compact, smooth-moving Notwist found in “The Turning” and “X-Ray” is what drew me into News from Planet Zombie at first, and it’s the layers of “Teeth” and the quiet “Snow” that kept the record on my mind. It’s a very good way to construct a sturdy, long-haul kind of album–it’s like they’re experts at this or something. (Bandcamp link)
Land Whales – How to Make a Breakfast
Release date: March 13th Record label: Buh Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, punk rock, fuzz rock, shoegaze Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Little Glow
Land Whales were started by vocalist/guitarist Martín Schellekens in Havana, Cuba in 2021; initially, they were called Hey Joni, but the name had changed by the time they released an EP (Libélula) and LP (Null Days) in 2023 on local label Death Heaven Flowers. Schellekens recently relocated from Havana to The Netherlands, but not before recording How to Make a Breakfast, the second Land Whales album, with regular collaborator Martín Espinosa. Released via Buh Records, the Lima, Peru-based label that has been chronicling experimental and underground Latin American music for over twenty years, How to Make a Breakfast is an abrasive, maxed-out noise rock record; more accessible influences like Sonic Youth and shoegaze are present, but Schellekens and Espinosa are truly committed to making challenging pillars of noise music as well.
The first two tracks on How to Make a Breakfast make Land Whales’ seriousness abundantly clear: they start the LP with “Pierce”, which is two minutes of droning feedback and then two more of sludgy noise punk, and then “The Trial” is blistering, frenetic, self-destructive post-hardcore. The reprieve (relatively speaking, I mean) comes in the form of “Eyes Out” and “Little Glow”, both of which are distorted but are more or less straightforward indie rock sounds in a Sonic Youth vein, and “Slit Your Guts” is the closest that Land Whales get to straight-up shoegaze on the album. Brace yourself, though, because Schellekens and Espinosa then take us on an eight-minute feedback-laden odyssey called “No Privacy” and follow it up with an appropriately-titled sludgy number called “The Torment”. Land Whales are the real deal, and, though Schellekens may not live there anymore, it’s certainly worth highlighting that How to Make a Breakfast is entirely the product of a Cuban rock scene clearly meriting a spotlight beyond its country of origin. (Bandcamp link)
Corespondents – Exploding House
Release date: March 12th Record label: Antiquated Future Genre: Post-rock, jazz-rock, surf rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Strawberry Ashtray
The confusingly-named Seattle quartet Corespondents have been doing their thing for over twenty years now–said “thing” being instrumental, “surf-inspired” post-rock. The four of them (currently Doug Arney, Todd Arney, Olie Eshleman, and Kieran Harrison) are on their tenth album now, Exploding House, out via Pacific Northwest indie rock stalwart label Antiquated Future (Rose Melberg, Guidon Bear, Fred Thomas). Compared to the other long-running, (sometimes) instrumental Seattle post-rock group I know, the noise rock-adjacent Kinski, Corespondents have a wildly different set of influences: psychedelia, jazz, Tropicália, and, indeed, surf rock. Exploding House is a concise one, fitting six compositions into twenty-seven quick minutes. Opening track “Rubbin My Dirt Ball” introduces Corespondents with spindly guitars, strong but casual rhythms, and synths set to “whooshing”; the brighter songs on the album, like “Strawberry Ashtray” and “Queen Nut”, follow in its footsteps. On the more challenging end of the spectrum, the seven-minute “Furtive Lurker” chronicles Corespondents’ full descent into jazz rock, while closing track “Vegan Meditation Part 2: K-hole at the AI Weiwei Jawa Rave: Sisyphus Mix” (sure, sure) is a little closer to ambient-rock. It’s nothing that those of you willingly signing yourselves up for “surf-inspired post-rock” can’t handle, though. (Bandcamp link)
In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we look at four albums coming out tomorrow, March 13th, from Bill Orcutt, Missed Dunks at Summer League, Dialup Ghost, and The Foot & Leg Clinic. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Railcard, Star Moles, Timeout Room, and The Early), 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.
Bill Orcutt – Music in Continuous Motion
Release date: March 13th Record label: Palilalia Genre: Experimental rock, post-rock, jazz rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Giving Unknown Origin
What’s Bill Orcutt up to now? Indie rock fans may remember his 90s noise rock/experimental band Harry Pussy, but the Miami-originating, San Francisco-based musician has reinvented himself as a prolific solo artist over the past decade and a half. Though Orcutt is known for free improvisation, his hit 2022 album Music for Four Guitars (I mean, as much of a “hit” as this kind of thing can be) spotlit a strong compositional element (and it also birthed the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish). Once again released via his own label Palilalia, Orcutt’s latest solo album, Music in Continuous Motion, finds the guitarist returning to the realm of four-guitar compositions (all played by himself, of course). I only have a passing familiarity with Orcutt’s work (for instance, I haven’t heard any of the five solo albums that came in between this one and Music for Four Guitars), but the fluid spirit of Music in Continuous Motion drew me in pretty quickly.
I mean, it’s called Music in Continuous Motion, and that’s exactly what it sounds like. The four guitars intertwine and play off of each other, but they’re always moving towards something–and moving quickly, as Orcutt wraps up every one of these songs in under three minutes (and the LP itself in under thirty). Even the titles flow into each other; I’m not sure if all twelve of them combined make a coherent statement per se, but the ones adjacent to each other all seem to be in communication, at least (“Because sharp also smooth”, “And warm to the touch”, “Now nearly gone”, “Unfinished not fragile”, “Yet always moving”, et cetera). The songs are somewhat chaotic but outwardly melodic; “Giving unknown origin”, the opening track, positively chimes along, and the next few songs are all markedly tuneful (even “Now nearly gone”, the most abrasive song up until that point on the record, has some tasteful and understandable guitar solos baked into it). I don’t regret peeking into the world of Bill Orcutt; if Music in Continuous Motion is at all representative, it’s a quite vibrant one. (Bandcamp link)
Missed Dunks at Summer League – Fared Well
Release date: March 13th Record label: Machine Duplication Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Missed Dunks at Summer League
I have my pre-conceived notions on what “Memphis rock music” sounds like. It’s the land of the Oblivians, Jay Reatard, and Goner Records (not to mention “rock and roll”); I would come to an album released on an underground “always documenting, always DIY” cassette label (Machine Duplication Recordings, run by True Green and Big Clown’s Zach Mitchell) expecting some relatively unhinged mixture of “garage rock” and “punk rock”. If you’re in the same boat as me, I’d encourage you to shelve your expectations when it comes to Missed Dunks at Summer League, a new indie rock band from Jordan Petersen-Kamp. Petersen-Kamp began this project not long after landing in Memphis from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his debut album under the name, Fared Well, is largely a solo effort (Mitchell and Elijah Poston provide additional percussion, and Spence Bailey is credited with production and additional bass).
Compared to the bands around them in their adopted hometown, Missed Dunks at Summer League’s influences are a bit more…esoteric? The dominant sound of Fared Well is greyscale, chilly, introverted 90s indie rock–Machine Duplication mentions Built to Spill and the Mountain Goats as ingredients, though they don’t particularly sound like either one of those acts. Fared Well does rock in its own way–the opening title track features a nice bass groove and a hypnotic guitar riff, “Miller’s Thumb” trudges forward in an Electrical Audio kind of way, and “Don’t Slip” could very nearly be called “garage rock”. They aren’t the only relatively upbeat moments on Fared Well, but the plodding, introspective side of Missed Dunks at Summer League is already apparent there, and Petersen-Kamp dives fully into it with “Pinaceae” and “Big Lake”. There are more apt choices if you’re looking for a quick hit of Memphis rock and roll music, but if you’re down for a band with a little more deliberation in their stride that can still get it up for rockers like “It Feels Good to Be Bored”, Missed Dunks at Summer League are here to help. (Bandcamp link)
Dialup Ghost – Donkey Howdy
Release date: March 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, indie pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Sunny Boy
The Nashville alt-country quartet Dialup Ghost have been making music since 2018, when they released their debut album, I’m Fine, I’m Fine. At the time, their lineup was solidifying into vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Russ Finn, bassist/guitarists Jade McPeak and Jordan Smith, and drummer Jack Holway; eight years later, the four of them have just made their fifth album together, Donkey Howdy. The album’s goofy title is “an attempt to free the band from over-seriousness and over-thinking”, and these eleven songs (recorded last year with Truck Roley at Bunker Noise) also represent an attempt by Dialup Ghost to incorporate musical ideas beyond their alt-country roots (Roley’s synthesizer and McPeak’s trumpet feature prominently in a few songs). Both Finn’s writing and Nashville drawl help Dialup Ghost stay squarely in the big-tent version of “alt-country”, but Donkey Howdy is a subsequently adventurous and weird album reflecting a band still restless after several records together.
If you can hang with the first two songs of Donkey Howdy, you’ll enjoy the rest. There are some genuinely fun country rock moments on this album, so Dialup Ghost’s decision to open their album with an acoustic guitar-led folk-y ballad in “Seafoam Ceiling” and the depressing synth-Americana number “Shallow Ends” is pretty bold. The duality of Dialup Ghost is on full display with the goofy, endearing, power pop/country synthesis in the most accessible songs on Donkey Howdy, “Bigger Households”, “Yer the Only One on My Mind”, “Soot Sprite”, and “Sunny Boy”. Those are the ones I’d direct any skeptics to at first, but there’s plenty to like in Dialup Ghost’s weirder areas; the seven-minute trumpet-folk meditation on a lost stand of pines of “The Giving and Taking of Shade” is slowly becoming one of my favorite tracks on the record. It’s a good sign that Dialup Ghost find success at both ends of Donkey Howdy. (Bandcamp link)
The Foot & Leg Clinic – Sit Down for Rock and Roll
Release date: March 13th Record label: Bingo Genre: Post-punk, garage rock, art rock, psych/prog-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Where Did All the Fruit Go?
Sometime around the beginning of this decade, four musicians from Glasgow made the good decision to begin playing music together, and the not-so-good decision to call their band “The Wife Guys of Reddit”. After a smattering of EPs and singles across the last few years, the quartet (co-led by vocalists/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Arion Xenos and Niamh R MacPhail, joined by pianist Angus Fernie and drummer Elise Atkinson) have linked up with Bingo Records (The Bug Club, U.S. Highball, Tulpa) to release their debut LP. They’ve rechristened themselves The Foot & Leg Clinic (a marginally better name, I suppose) and asked us to Sit Down for Rock and Roll with an offbeat, catchy, and surprising collection of British indie-art-rock (“wonk rock”, they call it).
Sit Down for Rock and Roll is a bit hard to get a read on at the outset: listening to “Intro – Showtime”, it sounds like we’re in for a bunch of low-key twee indie folk-pop, while the inchworm rhythms, quote unquote angular guitar riffs, and sing-muttering of “The Early Bird” suggests that The Foot & Leg Clinic are one of those new-fangled “British post-punk bands”. The truth is that neither description comes all that close to capturing Sit Down for Rock and Roll, an album stocked with catchy, pop-forward garage rock like “Dear Bongo” and “Where Did All the Fruit Go?” that imagine a more polite version of their labelmates in The Bug Club, as well as the psychedelic, folk, and even prog undertones to pieces like “Music for Baby Fairy”, “…Halcyon”, and “The Mariposal Antidote” (the latter of which is actually nearly as catchy as the previously-mentioned cohort). The Foot & Leg Clinic seem to contain multitudes, and their first album is an oddly compelling listen thanks to it. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It’s got a new compilation from Railcard, plus new albums from Star Moles, Timeout Room, and The Early! These are good!
No blog post this Tuesday, unfortunately. Need to catch up on some things; Pressing Concerns will be back on 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.
Railcard – Railcard
Release date: February 6th Record label: Slumberland/Skep Wax Genre: Indie pop, power pop, twee, folk-pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Born in ‘62
Peter Momtchiloff has probably been most heard as the founding guitarist of archetypal twee-pop quintet Heavenly, who have just returned with their first new album since 1996 in February. He’s also backed Jessica Griffin in her band Would-Be-Goods since 1999, and that band also returned with a new album in February. And if you’ve been paying attention to the indie pop world, you’d also know that there’s a third Momtchiloff-associated record that came out in February. Meet Railcard, a new indie pop supergroup co-founded last year by Momtchiloff (bass), Rachel Love of Dolly Mixture (vocals/guitar/keys), and Ian Button of Thrashing Doves, The Catenary Wires and the recently-reunited lineup of Heavenly (vocals/drums/guitar). After adding trumpeter Allison Thomson (Trash Can Sinatras, Heist) to complete the quartet, Railcard quickly released two digital EPs last October and December; this CD compilation from Skep Wax and Slumberland collects the seven songs from them as well as three new ones.
Although Button and Love (who also trade off lead vocals) are Railcard’s songwriting duo, Railcard is also very much in line with Momtchiloff’s other bands in its pursuit of timeless-sounding indie pop. Loosely speaking, the group have two different modes: a triumphant, confident, often horn-aided 60s-style pop rock side, and a softer, more pensive take on indie-soft-folk-rock-pop. Although Railcard is presented in chronological order (four songs from the Railcard EP, three from E.P. 2, and then the three new ones), it all feels of a piece; the original EP showcases both the direct (“Narcissus” and “Born in ‘62”, the year in which Momtchiloff, Love, and Button indeed all originated) and indirect (“Cherry Plum” and “Revolutionary Calendar”) sides of Railcard, and the rest of the record elaborates upon these poles. The trumpet showcase “Northern Soul Dancing”, the string-aided retro finale “Think About That”, and the propulsive “Disco Loadout” are all immediate highlights from the rest of Railcard, though don’t sleep on cuts like the sub-two-minute, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dream pop of “Day Dream”, either. Railcard plan to follow this compilation with a “proper” album soon enough, but Railcard is an adequate first statement on its own. (Bandcamp link)
Star Moles – Highway to Hell
Release date: February 26th Record label: Historic New Jersey Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, piano pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Halo
Star Moles is Emily Moales, a prolific Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music under the name since 2017 and as of late has been averaging at least one Star Moles record per year, sometimes on Earth Libraries (The Juniper Berries, The Medium, Pelvis Wrestley) and sometimes on Historic New Jersey Recordings. The latter, who’ve released Highway to Hell, is the label of Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko; Basko (who also plays with Moales in the band Hot Machine) produced this album and played most of the instruments that Moales didn’t on it (Sam Sullivan of Sam & Louise plays some guitar, and Jem Seidel adds percussion on one song). Moales has described Star Moles’ music as “medieval-via-1960s folk-troubadour” before, and that’s not far off from the offbeat, transcendent, marching-to-the-beat-of-her-own-drum singer-songwriter I hear on Highway to Hell (it is an album for people who wish Mary Timony made more records that sound like Mountains, perhaps).
You can squint at Highway to Hell’s opening track, “The End”, and see both a boozy dive-bar ballad and a traditional folk song (as far as album-length theses go, exploring the space, or lack thereof, between the two seems like a fairly promising one). Highway to Hell doesn’t necessarily feel like a reaction to anything, per se, but it does serve as a nice antidote to the polished, glossy, “SSRI-core” side of modern “indie folk”; stuff like “Real Magic” and “Factory Train” are very well-executed and disciplined, do not get me wrong, but the vision that Moales and Basko have in mind with these songs is something beautiful in a more challenging way. That’s all well and good, but Highway to Hell also works because it’s quite fun; stuff like the tinkering pop rock of “Time”, the meandering piano ballad “Overdog”, and ever-so-slightly “Philly alt-country”-curious closing track “Halo” are all going to stick with me. If not immediately rewarding, Highway to Hell is instantly intriguing, and there’s a clear road to the full charms of the album from there. (Bandcamp link)
Timeout Room – Celebration Station
Release date: February 20th Record label: Tough Gum Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi pop, pop punk, power pop Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Night Eye
Timeout Room crash-landed into view back in 2023 with an album called Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, a brilliant, skewed, and bizarre collection of guitar pop that was like The Cleaners from Venus as interpreted by a lo-fi punk from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (S.T. McCrary, responsible for everything on that LP). A follow-up LP took three years to materialize, but Celebration Station is a fantastically frayed collection of jangle pop, power pop, and garage punk that meets the high bar set by Timeout Room’s debut. McCrary gets some more help this time around (Kallie Tiffault on bass and backing vocals for a few songs, Atticus Lopez drums on half the album, Stevie Spring plays a guitar solo on “Don’t You Feel Better Off?”), and some of the more overtly silly aspects of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures are absent (there are no fake rock radio interlude tracks, for instance), leading to a tighter, more rocking collection of tracks that is nonetheless still very fun.
“Don’t You Feel Better Off?”, “Night Eye”, and “Keep Me Up” are an incredibly strong opening trio (discounting the intro track “STMS”, with which I have no beef); the first of those three, with its blistering guitar solo, is some nice, gritty, post-Wipers rock-and-roll, “Night Eye” continues McCrary’s mission to shove pop punk-level hooks and attitude into lo-fi guitar pop, and “Keep Me Up” is sloppy, tinny college rock in the vein of acts like Silicone Prairie. Some of the best power pop on Celebration Station comes afterwards, though–“All Away” slips more of an overt British Invasion interpretation over top of McCrary’s melody, and the tick-ticking drum machine pop of “Domino” and “I Hope It Don’t Take Long” (the latter of which feels right out of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures) are true Side-Two gems. After the excitement of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, Celebration Station feels like Timeout Room settling down just a little bit and confirming that they’ve got more up their sleeves yet. (Bandcamp link)
The Early – I Want to Be Ready
Release date: February 27th Record label: Island House Genre: Post-rock, experimental, jazz, electronica Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Hill Forms
The Early is the instrumental, experimental post-rock duo of drummer/percussionist Jake Nussbaum (who’s also played with Ben Seretan) and guitarist/korg player Alex Lewis (also of Flat Mary Road), currently based in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively. The Early’s roots go all the way back to Lewis and Nussbaum’s time as high schoolers in New Jersey in the early 2000s, but they really took off again after reuniting in Philadelphia at the beginning of this decade, releasing records like On Juniper, Impatient, and Squashed Dragons from 2022 to 2024. Nussbaum is now a lecturer in Liberal Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but The Early haven’t slowed down, releasing a three-song EP called Cusp last December and quickly following it with a full-length called I Want to Be Ready this February.
Named after choreographer and dancer Danielle Goldman’s book of the same name, I Want to Be Ready is a five-song, forty-one minute exploration of spontaneity and improvisation drawing heavily from the duo’s formative Chicago-based 90s post-rock. Like a lot of post-rock, I Want to Be Ready often starts in a challenging, minimal place and builds to something bigger and louder, though there’s no clear roadmap to these five songs. “Hill Forms” is beautiful, relatively approachable instrumental jazz-post-rock, sure, but “The Laughing Earth” is ten minutes of mostly-percussion-led emptiness before getting a little busy in the last couple, and thirteen-minute penultimate track “Flossless” ends more or less as it begins. The Early’s playing sounds natural and fluid, but I can also hear the communication between Nussbaum and Lewis in how they guide these tracks along. I Want to Be Ready stands out among experimental rock music thanks to the titular desire expressed and, eventually, realized by it. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring three records coming out tomorrow, March 6th (new LPs from Status/Non-Status and Human Potential, and a new EP from Powerwasher), plus one that came out on Tuesday (an album from Abi Reimold). Check ’em out, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: a Pressing Concerns featuring Heavenly, Royal Ottawa, Me, You, & My Metronome, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary; Tuesday: the February 2026 playlist), check those out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Status/Non Status – Big Changes
Release date: March 6th Record label: You’ve Changed Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, art rock, psychedelia, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Good Enough
Anishinaabe indie rocker Adam Sturgeon exploded onto the scene (well, my scene) in 2021 with an EP called 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years that introduced his Status / Non Status project (he’d previously made music as Whoop-Szo). Over the next three years, another Status / Non Status EP, an LP, and two albums from OMBIIGIZI (Sturgeon’s duo with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman) followed, and the chaotic, all-over-the-place energy of 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years began to congeal into a recognizable sound combining 90s indie and alt-rock, psychedelia, and folk. Big Changes is nonetheless the first Status / Non Status album since 2022, and Sturgeon takes the opportunity to make an overwhelming, emotional Canadian rock album. Of course, as per usual, Sturgeon shares the spotlight: contributors to Big Changes include members of Sunnsetter, Zoon, and Broken Social Scene, as well as Julie Doiron (anyone who’s heard Sturgeon’s music knows how much of an influence Doiron’s old band Eric’s Trip has been on it, so that feels significant).
Sturgeon has the gift of pulling together blunt alt-rock with the mistiness of dream pop, and “At All” opens Big Changes with a nice, fuzzy, vaguely unsettled summation of Status / Non Status’ core sound. Speaking of unsettling, “Peace Bomb” embodies the contradiction of its title, buzzing and whirring and sounding apocalyptic and catchy all at once. If Big Changes isn’t the most outwardly friendly Adam Sturgeon album, the moments of beauty are still there; “Basket Weaving” (featuring Colleen “Coco” Collins) is an obvious example, the six-minute Canadian rock hymn “Good Enough” (featuring Doiron) perhaps even more so. I would call “Good Enough” the album’s centerpiece if not for “Arnold”, an intense, uncomfortable song that is uplifting at times but without waving away the darker details. Big Changes’ finale, the six-minute post-rock monolith “Tom Climate”, is able to rival the record’s aforementioned emotional peaks without a word; it sounds like mountains moving. “Tom Climate” careens to a stop amidst feedback, electronic sputtering, and a pounding drumbeat; Big Changes are here, indeed, but Status / Non Status haven’t proclaimed a winning faction yet. (Bandcamp link)
Abi Reimold – Picking Stones
Release date: March 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, bedroom folk Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Destiny
It’s been ten years since Abi Reimold released Wriggling, their first and, up until now, only album. Put out via Sad Cactus (Floral Print, Maxshh, Powerwasher), it was a dingy indie rock album from the basements of mid-2010s Philadelphia; Pitchfork’s Nina Corcoran compared them to Mitski and Angel Olsen at the time, believe it or not. Lurch forward a decade, and Reimold is back with a humble collection of eight songs called Picking Stones, reinventing themself as a dusty slacker folk/alt-country singer-songwriter. Though it was recorded with a full band (drummer Evan Campbell, pedal steel player Zena Key, bassist Bill Magerr, and Evan McGonagill, with whom Reimold has played in Hour, on cello), Picking Stones puts the spotlight entirely on Reimold’s writing. These intimate songs of infatuation, yearning, drinking, and smoking are, despite the vibe they give off, not shrinking violets themselves.
“Pining like an evergreen / On the curb your Christmas tree,” Reimold sings to open Picking Stones via its title track, a sparse acoustic one–the torch song is very nearly extinguished, but we can still see a little light. I can hear the classic country influence in the occasionally-rousing “Drinking Song” (“I don’t care if it’s twelve o’clock or it’s noon”, indeed), while the twee-folk turn of “Open to Suggestions” is content to lackadaisically sketch out a nice little life (“We’re good together, you and me and Mary Jane”), punctuated by the fifty-second coda of “Stoned” (“I wanna get stoned on you / You’re the highest that I ever fell”). Late-album highlights “Phasing” and “Destiny” present perhaps the most “complete” version of 2026 Abi Reimold’s sound, a mixture of the greyscale 2010s indie rock in which they came up, confounding, slowcore-ish turn-of-the-century singer-songwriters like Nina Nastasia, Hannah Marcus, and Jenny Mae, and just a touch of the orchestral work Reimold’s done in Hour (McGonagill’s cello is what really knocks “Destiny” out of the park for me). There’s a lot to like in Picking Stones if you get to know it, and I wouldn’t mind Reimold making another one of these in under ten years. (Bandcamp link)
Human Potential – Eel Sparkles
Release date: March 6th Record label: What Delicate Genre: Art rock, post-punk, psychedelia Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Art Beat
In the early 2000s, Andrew Becker was the drummer for cult Washington, D.C. trio Medications, playing on their first EP and LP (both released on Dischord) before departing. He resurfaced in the Brooklyn group Screens not long afterwards, but they broke up in 2011, and Becker has been helming a solo project called Human Potential ever since. Eel Sparkles is the seventh album from the musician and filmmaker (currently based in Los Angeles) under the Human Potential name, self-released on Becker’s own label What Delicate Recordings like the six albums before it. Not that I necessarily expected Becker’s current music to sound like a band he drummed for twenty years ago, but it’s notable just how far away Eel Sparkles is from Medications’ relatively minimal post-punk/post-hardcore; this is a polished, layered, slightly dreamy, slightly psychedelic indie rock record.
Opening track “Sun-E Corporation Teenage Anthem” is very nearly prog-pop, just as contorted as it is sunny, and “The House That Kept Hemingway Alive” does something similar with the added layer of brisk, fidgety percussion. Speaking of percussion, the drumbeat that anchors the five-minute “Art Beat” (lives up to its title, yes) goes a long way towards making that one’s relatively chaotic, boisterous energy one of Eel Sparkles’ clearest standouts. Human Potential rarely rock straightforwardly, but Eel Sparkles does rock–the folk-tinged “Practice Songs for the Unloved”, the incredibly wonky art punk of “The Sightseer”, and the constantly-in-motion “I Have Always Been Some Human” ensure that the album is arguably even more engaging in its back half. There’s a tension between these bursts of energy and the more suspended-animation moments on Eel Sparkles (like most of “Do You Remember Albert?” and “Street Sweeper’s Daughter”); this helps the album feel like the work of an artist intensely piecing together an overarching vision. (Bandcamp link)
Powerwasher – Pressure
Release date: March 6th Record label: Strange View Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk, garage punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Parachute
Back in 2024, the Baltimore quartet Powerwasher put out their debut album, Everyone Laughs, which combined the garage-y post-punk of their 2020 EP The Power of Positive Washing with some noisier post-hardcore. Almost exactly two years after Everyone Laughs, Powerwasher are back with Pressure, an EP that condenses their whole deal into five songs and fifteen minutes. The band are still very much the explosive, fun, hardcore-ish punk rock group of their past work (you’ll hear bits of classic SST Records, Nomeansno, and, of course, Dischord here), but Powerwasher have taken this between-album release to get a little weird, too.
“Parachute” is a hard-charging, electric punk opener, but the no wave-y horns and strange whirring sounds hint at some of the odder undercurrents (and, occasionally, straight-up currents) on Pressure. “10,000 Cuts” is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard from Powerwasher yet, switching between aggressive hardcore-ish punk to more subtle, almost dreamy math rock around halfway through. The metallic egg punk of “Mirage” is simple enough until RXKNephew kamikazes in for the last minute or so (finally, the collaboration we’ve all been clamoring for!); Neph is (somewhat sadly) the only guest rapper to appear on Pressure, but the drilling post-punk of “3-meo-pce” and the avant-hammer “Haste” ensure the EP ends on a bang nonetheless. This noisy, busy dispatch from the world of Powerwasher should hold us until the four of them get another LP together. (Bandcamp link)
Here it is: the February 2026 playlist! The new year feels in full swing, and we’ve got selections from some truly great albums below.
Gentle Brontosaurus, Cootie Catcher, Friends of Cesar Romero, Flin Flon, Kerrin Connolly, Fazed on a Pony, and Remember Sports have two songs each on this playlist.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing two songs), Tidal (missing one song). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Junkmail”, The Tammy Shine From Ok Shine Ok (2026, HHBTM)
The Tammy Shine is Tammy Eaton, who you may also know as the frontperson of the Denver-originating, Elephant 6-associated group Dressy Bessy. “Junk Mail”, the fourth song on The Tammy Shine’s debut album Ok Shine Ok, caught my attention immediately. It’s a bonkers pop song–it’s bratty, campy, euphoric, fiery, whatever; it sounds like mall-pop-punk at one point, like a Guided by Voices track at another point, like turn-of-the-century alt-pop another. It has at least five hooks you could build a song out of, slammed together like a can of Fanta crushed by a cartoon anvil. Read more about Ok Shine Ok here.
“Mail Pouch Chew”, Human Mascot From Ketchup Mill (2026)
Human Mascot are a self-described “Americhaotica”, “countrygaze”, and “art punk” trio from Boston, and Ketchup Mill appears to be their second record. On this one (seven songs, twenty minutes, call it an EP or LP based on your preference I suppose), Human Mascot continue in the grand tradition of New England math rock bands that know how to write a pop hook, from Pet Fox to Rick Rude to Lane. Blown-out noisy guitars veer into golden melodies (of both the instrumental and vocal variety), exemplified when the claustrophobic opening track “Hollow Log” gives way to the weird but undeniably catchy alt-math-country-pop-rock thing “Mail Pouch Chew”. Read more about Ketchup Mill here.
“Bend the Knee”, Gentle Brontosaurus From Three Hares (2026)
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 dating back even further 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. Both Chye’s writing and the band’s playing make conscious efforts to cohere on Three Hares; relationship dissatisfaction and interpersonal dead-ends are noticeable recurring themes, like in the bouncy power pop send-off “Bend the Knee”. Read more about Three Hares here.
“Loiter for the Love of It”, Cootie Catcher From Something We All Got (2026, Carpark)
On Something We All Got, their first for Carpark Records, Cootie Catcher have clearly “gone for it”; armed with a label with a larger reach and (presumably) more resources than before, the quartet have polished the stranger, “out-there” side of their sound away and honed in on making big-hook, excitable indie pop songs. Were the wonky, oftentimes headscratching synth-trails of last year’s Shy at First part of Cootie Catcher’s initial appeal to me? Sure, but any worry that the band may have inadvertently sanded off their strong suits is laid to rest by the gorgeous, twinkling opening ballad “Loiter for the Love of It” (You think you know slacker-twee? Cootie Catcher will show you slacker-twee). Read more about Something We All Got here.
“Trauma Blonding”, Friends of Cesar Romero From Soul Scouts (2026, Doomed Babe/Kit Fox)
The first Friends of Cesar Romero offering of 2026 (coming almost exactly two months after the previous one, December’s Cars, Guitars, Girls EP) is a ten-song, eighteen-minute jolt called Soul Scouts, and it’s my favorite release of the South Dakota project in quite a while now. Friends of Cesar Romero records run the gamut from sunny, hook-heavy power pop to ripping basement garage punk; Soul Scouts hews towards the latter, but, as always, there’s a trace of the former in these songs as well. J. Waylon Porcupine absolutely tears into “Trauma Blonding”, an early highlight that’s all quick tempos, lurking fury, and very pleasing guitar tones. Read more about Soul Scouts here.
“Big Amygdala”, Kerrin Connolly From Simpleton (2026)
Over the past decade, Boston’s Kerrin Connolly has gone from a musician with a YouTube following to an artist with multiple records to their name; they’ve put out two albums, an EP, and a “mini-album” since 2020. They’ve self-described their latest album, Simpleton, as a “12-song concept album detailing the modern hero’s journey”; written, produced, and performed almost entirely by Connolly themself, it’s a massive, imminently attention-grabbing pop-rock album. It’s a shiny mess of power pop, orchestral pop, musical theater, and 80s-evoking synthpop, often all in short succession. Read more about Simpleton here.
“Ukraina”, Flin Flon From A-Ok (1998, Teen-Beat)
For as much as I love those late-period Unrest albums, I’ve never really explored co-founder (and Teenbeat labelhead) Mark Robinson’s music after that band’s mid-90s dissolution, until last month at least. Flin Flon was Robinson’s second post-Unrest band after the short-lived Air Miami; 1998’s A-Ok was the first album of what seems to be a few. Compared to Unrest, it’s more direct; the spacier, post-rock kind of side of that band is absent on A-Ok, replaced by a fairly smooth rhythmic post-punk sound over which Robinson is free to do his golden indie pop thing. “Ukraina” is maybe the best song on the album (the other candidate is also on this playlist); it’s a sub-three-minute triumph of the indie pop/post-punk experience.
“Chateau Photo”, Vegas Water Taxi From Long Time Caller, First Time Listener (2026, PNKSLM)
Vegas Water Taxi is a new-ish London-based alt-country band led by Ben Hambro; their 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. I was admittedly skeptical that a British guy named Hambro would have much interesting to say in a facsimile of “Americana”, but Vegas Water Taxi’s strong grasp on Teenage Fanclub-esque guitar pop goes a long way towards winning me over. 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. Read more about Long Time Caller, First Time Listener here.
“Roadkill”, Remember Sports From The Refrigerator (2026, Get Better)
It’s startling to realize that it’s been five years since Remember Sports’ last album, 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). The torrential distorted-pop-fest “Roadkill” is a second half highlight; like the bagpipe-laden “Ghost”, it’s the pop-punk group pushing their envelope with dynamic shifts, unusual instrumentation, and pop music inverted. Read more about The Refrigerator here.
“From All Ways”, Crooked Fingers featuring Matt Berninger From Swet Deth (2026, Merge)
Sweth Deth, Eric Bachmann’s first album as Crooked Fingers in fifteen years, features an impressive list of guest vocalists, including The National’s Matt Berninger on the gentle soft rock glide of “From All Ways”. As recognizable as Berninger’s voice is in general, I didn’t realize it was him on “From All Ways” at first; it’s a bit of an odd placement for him, his stoic baritone in the chorus functioning as a balance to the brisk tempo Berninger brings to the verses (and if the latter wins out, it’s still interesting to hear Berninger try to keep up in this situation). Read more about Sweth Deth here.
“Flashes”, Fazed on a Pony From Swan (2026, Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream)
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. 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. Blink and you’ll miss one of the best moments, the two-minute “Flashes”, a simple-sounding but secretly brilliant pop construction. Read more about Swan here.
“Gonna Be Good”, Triples From Every Good Story (2026, Bleak Enterprise)
I knew nothing about Triples when I put this song on this playlist; apparently it’s the Toronto-based project of Eva Link, sister of PACKS’ Madeline Link (who also played in an earlier version of the band). Compared to her sister’s more consciously downbeat, muddled work, Triples’ new EP Every Good Story is go-ahead polished power pop at its core; opening track “Old Routine” has some sunny “adult alternative” pop vibes, and my favorite song, “Gonna Be Good”, is positively bouncy as it trots its way to the teen-movie-soundtrack kinda chorus.
“Pretty Feelings”, Music City From Welcome to Music City (2026, Redundant Span/Sentric)
Welcome to Music City is a classic power pop album connected to but distinct from the more garage-y rock and roll of ringleader Conor Lumsden’s other band, The Number Ones. Lumsden positions himself as a pop rock bandleader influenced by the classic rock and new wave-y pub rockers of his city of origin (Dublin) and of the polished side of what us Americans probably think of as “music city” (that’d be Nashville). Welcome to Music City walks an impressive tightrope between well-earned swagger and a more bookish pop rock attitude, though much of the best of Welcome to Music City, like “Pretty Feelings”, transcends this “either/or”-type thing and just shoots for all-encompassing, unflagging power pop brilliance. Read more about Welcome to Music City here.
“Transducer”, 2070 From Big Blue (2026, Danger Collective)
Big Blue is the third album from Los Angeles fuzz rock group 2070, and their debut for Danger Collective Records. Perhaps reflecting the quartet’s most stable lineup yet, Big Blue takes a step back from the excitable, kinetic attitude of 2024’s 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. The wonky, crawling “Transducer” is pretty catchy, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it. Read more about Big Blue here.
“DFL”, The Paranoid Style From Known Associates (2026, Bar/None)
“DFL” is my favorite Paranoid Style song in a minute–and, given that Known Associates is their third album since 2022, there’s been plenty of competition for that. The folk rock/college rock/power pop revivalists led by writer Elizabeth Nelson (and, as of late, also featuring blog regular William Matheny as well as Peter Holsapple of the dB’s) are always good for some whip-smart, catchy post-Elvis Costello music journalist rock, and “DFL” is everything you could want in such an endeavor (it stands for “dead fucking last”, for any confused Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party members).
“Gwendolyn, Approximately”, The Sylvia Platters From Will Tomorrow Be Enough (2026, Dutch Customer)
Every couple of years, the Vancouver quartet The Sylvia Platters turn up with a brief collection of breezy, jangly power pop. Fast forward two years after 2024’s Vivian Elixir, and The Sylvia Platters are back with a new lineup and a new five-song cassette EP called Will Tomorrow Be Enough, a twenty-minute record that’s further confirmation that The Sylvia Platters are honors students of Teenage Fanclub and their jangly indie pop ilk. The five-minute “Gwendolyn, Approximately” is Will Tomorrow Be Enough’s crown jewel; this multi-part college rock opera piece has a massive chorus and all sorts of twists and turns in between repetitions of it. Read more about Will Tomorrow Be Enough here.
“Mind the Gap”, Kerrin Connolly From Simpleton (2026)
We’ve got a pair of excellent selections from Kerrin Connolly’s latest album on this playlist. “Mind the Gap” (alongside “Big Amygdala”, also from Simpleton and appearing earlier on this playlist) is one of the catchiest power pop songs I’ve heard this year, showcasing Connolly’s ability to shoehorn whip-smart writing into big hooks. It reminds me of recent material from the likes of Pacing, Rosie Tucker, and Career Woman, which is no small feat–these are acts that have landed at or near the top of the blog’s year-end lists before. Read more about Simpleton here.
“Therapy Anthem”, Flat Mary Road From The Camping EP (2026)
Flat Mary Road’s warm and clever take on folk rock, jangly power pop, and Paisley Underground on their 2023 LP Little Realities reminded me of classic college rock, and the Philadelphia’s quartet’s first new music since then (the three-song Camping EP) is a brief dispatch that nonetheless reaffirms that Flat Mary Road are remarkably adept at what they do. “Therapy Anthem”, the EP’s final song, effectively starts at 100%, with a guitar riff that sounds like the sun rising over mountains and lead singer Steve Teare declaring “Nobody wants to hear about somebody else’s dream anymore”. Read more about The Camping EP here.
“Prime Mover Unmoved”, Charm School From Schadenfreude Ploy (2026, Surprise Mind/Karmic Tie)
Last year, Louisville noise rock quartet Charm School released their debut album, Debt Forever, a snarling, furious post-punk record about financial anxiety and other American topics. Now based in Los Angeles, this year’s four-song EP Schadenfreude Ploy is still Charm School at their 90s underground rock-evoking best. “Prime Mover Unmoved” is one of the band’s most adventurous songs yet, a mess of post-rock/math rock, an odd psychedelic pop interlude, and an ascendant garage rock part that Charm School stubbornly refuse to turn into the song’s centerpiece. Read more about Schadenfreude Ploy here.
“Face of Smiles”, Doug Gillard From Parallel Stride (2026, Dromedary)
The first of two Guided by Voices-related songs on this playlist, “Face of Smiles” is the lead single from longtime Robert Pollard collaborator and current GBV guitarist Doug Gillard’s upcoming solo album Parallel Stride. It’s Gillard’s fourth solo LP and first since 2014’s Parade On; given that Guided by Voices (who he rejoined in 2016) continue to put out multiple new albums every year, it’s not surprising it took a bit of time to get another one of these together (although true fans know that his two songwriting contributions to the 2017 GBV album August by Cake are some of the best ones on there). “Face of Smiles” is classic Gillard, breezy but muscular in the hooks and guitar riff departments; I look forward to the rest of Parallel Stride.
“Quarter Note Rock”, Cootie Catcher From Something We All Got (2026, Carpark)
Montreal quartet Cootie Catcher won me over early last year with their sophomore album, Shy at First, an electronic-twee pop balancing act that ended up being an unlikely breakout record. Less than a year later, vocalist/bassist Anita Fowl, vocalist/guitarist Nolan Jakupovski, vocalist/synth player Sophia Chavez, and drummer Joseph Shemoun have returned with a record of glittering, undeniable pop music in Something We All Got–“Quarter Note Rock” is a straight-up monster of a guitar pop song, and the record-scratching and talking-singing (particularly the “You / could be / An essential part of the team…” part) provides a strong link to their previous record. Read more about Something We All Got here.
“Middle of Summer”, PONY From Clearly Cursed (2026, Take This to Heart)
It’s been a little under two years since Toronto group PONY released Velveteen, which I called a “monster of a pop album” with the hooks to back up its 90s-alt-pop-rock worship. On Clearly Cursed, the band’s founding duo of vocalist Sam Bielanski and guitarist Matty Morand (aka Pretty Matty) are joined by bassist Christian Beale and drummer Joey Ginaldi, though the alternatively dreamy and grungy power pop that’s resulted is in lockstep with PONY’s previous output. “Middle of Summer”, my favorite song on Clearly Cursed, is a breezy song about death–it may not be the “largest” song on the album, but it’s one of the catchiest and just right for its subject matter.
“Rock & Roll Jesus”, Voxtrot From Dreamers in Exile (2026, Cult Hero)
The Austin, Texas quintet Voxtrot were a mid-2000s “blog rock” band, building buzz off of a pair of EPs and then releasing one album before breaking up at the end of that decade. Ramesh Srivastava, Jason Chronis and Matt Simon are described as the band’s current “nucleus”, but all five original members of Voxtrot contribute to Dreamers in Exile, and the quintet have made an incredibly polished, vibrant, multi-layered, “mature” pop album together. If this kind of thoughtful, AM-fluent post-chamber indie pop is in any way relevant to you, Dreamers in Exile plays like a lost greatest hits collection; there isn’t a dull moment whether Voxtrot are leaning into the strings or getting more electric. See “Rock & Roll Jesus” for the latter: it genuinely does rock. Read more about Dreamers in Exile here.
“Bitter But Better”, Friends of Cesar Romero From Soul Scouts (2026, Doomed Babe/Kit Fox)
I could list all of the exciting, blistering garage-pop-punk moments on Soul Scouts all day, but funnily enough, it’s the closing stretch where Friends of Cesar Romero’s power pop streak really starts to dominate–it turns out that bandleader J. Waylon Porcupine saved the biggest, most straightforward power pop anthem for last with closing track “Bitter But Better”. If Soul Scouts feels like an album-length (well, an eighteen-minute-length) letting-off-of-steam, “Bitter But Better” is both the light at the end of the tunnel and a summation of the process that led us to this moment. “I don’t miss missing you” is a simple enough line, but Porcupine spends all of Soul Scouts making sure it lands. Read more about Soul Scouts here.
“A Million Broken Hearts”, Lande Hekt From Lucky Now (2026, Tapete)
Bristol musician Lande Hekt put out a pair of solo albums in the early 2010s as her previous band, Muncie Girls, was winding down, but Lucky Now is her first LP in four years and the first after the official breakup of the 2010s trio she led. Like Hekt’s recently-defunct Tapete labelmates Ex-Vöid, Lucky Now is an earnest, emotional take on British guitar pop, C86 and jangle pop delivered without sacrificing personality for recreation. “A Million Broken Hearts” is my favorite song on the record; it’s got shimmering guitars, bittersweet vocals, and a pretty undeniable hook.
“Odessa”, Flin Flon From A-Ok (1998, Teen-Beat)
Although A-Ok is more laid back than the best pop albums from Mark Robinson’s previous and more well-known band Unrest, the best songs on this album are, in their own way, as good at being pop music as Unrest’s highs were. “Odessa” is a brilliant piece; it’s clearly indie pop excellence from the beginning, but when the danceable, shuffling rhythms take over around the thirty-second mark, it really digs its nails in and doesn’t let go for four minutes. Also, all the songs on A-Ok seem to be named after cities and towns in northern Canada, which as far as I can tell doesn’t have anything to do with the actual music. That’s pretty cool.
“Selfish”, Remember Sports From The Refrigerator (2026, Get Better)
Remember Sports have been in Philadelphia for nearly a decade now, and they’re solidly enmeshed in the city’s indie rock scene. I’m thinking about all the power pop and alt-country that’s come out of that 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. Remember Sports’ approachability, for lack of a better word, sets them apart from other big indie/alt-country names–they don’t set out to inspire the kind of hyperbole other acts inevitably attract, they just happen to make perfect albums. “Selfish” has a subtle rootsiness, incorporated with all the respect a Midwestern pop punk band currently on the East Coast can give to it. Read more about The Refrigerator here.
“The Charmer”, Toadies From The Charmer (2026, Spaceflight)
The Toadies, eh? There are a handful of 90s alt-rock one-hit-wonders that retain cult followings to this day–Local H and my personal favorite, Harvey Danger, come to mind–and though I think that also applies to the Fort Worth, Texas authors of “Possum Kingdom”, I’d never really looked into them until I happened to catch the title track of their upcoming new album The Charmer. They recorded the album with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio weeks before his sudden passing, and, as it turns out, that environment is the exact right kind of backdrop for the Pixies-ish barebones, mid-tempo indie-alt-rock thing that the band is doing on this song. I’ll have to check this one out.
“Wild Bones”, All Feels From Evasive Sentimental (2026, Flower Sounds)
All Feels are a western Massachusetts-based indie rock quintet who release music on Flower Sounds (The Fruit Trees, Wendy Eisenberg, The Lentils) and are led by vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Candace Clement (also of Footings). Their latest release is a Justin Pizzoferrato-recorded six-song EP called Evasive Sentimental, and the group (also featuring guitarists Noah and Kate Dowd, bassist Will Meyer, and drummer Jon Shina) reveal themselves to be adept creators of comfortable-sounding, dreamy indie guitar pop throughout it. The reverby guitars and big vocals of “Wild Bones” calls to mind a dreamier version of emo-y indie punk groups like Katie Ellen and early Remember Sports, hardly a bad place to land.
“Blue”, Gentle Brontosaurus From Three Hares (2026)
As somebody who has enjoyed Huan-Hua Chye’s solo project Miscellaneous Owl over the past couple of years, hearing her as the frontperson of a real-deal indie rock band is an interesting experience. Collaboration is what sets Three Hares apart from a busier Miscellaneous Owlbum: the five-piece band setup (featuring horns, keys, and all the “rock band” instrumentation one could want) really does add 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 are able to turn it into something soaring and jaw-dropping. Read more about Three Hares here.
“Cats Dogs and Babies Jaws”, Ganger From Hammock Style (1998, Domino)
1998’s Hammock Style was the sole LP from the Glasgow post-rock group Ganger; they’d put out several singles and EPs beforehand, though, and they’d already experienced some major lineup shifts by the time Hammock Style rolled around. “Scottish post-rock” is probably defined by Mogwai (with whom Ganger apparently toured) more than anyone, but Ganger’s minimal, guitar-based, sometimes instrumental, slightly jazz/math-influenced take on it feels more American—specifically what was going on in Chicago around this time. The six-minute, skewed indie pop/math rock/post-rock opening track “Cats Dogs and Babies Jaws” actually feels quite current today!
“Saved the World, Left Us All”, Keta Ester From Love Apple (2026)
I’ve been familiar with the music of Keegan Graziane thanks to his work with Bruiser & Bicycle, the Albany-originating psychedelic folk band he co-founded with Nicholas R. Whittemore. Bruiser & Bicycle have released three great albums from 2019 to 2025, but Graziane decided he needed to make a solo album on top of that, apparently. The sprawling, fifty-minute Love Apple leaves the convoluted, surprising, and progressive pop sensibilities of Graziane’s other band intact, with the main difference being a more stripped-down, folk-influenced take on this kind of music that provides something of a breather from Bruiser & Bicycle’s “sensory overload” vibes. The beautiful morning folk rock of “Saved the World, Left Us All” nonetheless finds Keta Ester exploring relatively new terrain. Read more about Love Apple here.
“Wrong Party”, Fazed on a Pony From Swan (2026, Meritorio/Melted Ice Cream)
Swan is catchy and, at times, jangly enough to fit on the two esteemed guitar pop record labels that are co-releasing it, and Fazed on a Pony work to combine that side of their 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) and the album’s Bandcamp page isn’t shy about invoking the likes of MJ Lenderman, David Berman, and Sparklehorse. The pop-forward, earnest indie rock anthem “Wrong Party” is as good as those from any “heartland rock”/power pop-straddling band over in the United States (in Philadelphia, or anywhere). Read more about Swan here.
“We Outlast Them All”, Guided by Voices From Crawlspace of the Pantheon (2026, GBV, Inc.)
If the Doug Gillard song from earlier on this playlist wasn’t enough Guided by Voices-adjacent material for you, we’ve got the band themselves on here with the lead single from their upcoming forty-fourth studio album. Of course, Robert Pollard leading his collaborators in a rousing Guided by Voices-core song called “We Outlast Them All” is pointed in its own way, but there’s a lot more to like from our first sample of Crawlspace of the Pantheon than just mythology. Pollard sneaks both the name of the album and “Shit Midas” (the name of a Suitcase demo from 2000) into the lyrics, and the music has a steady, unwavering guitar pop quality to it that Guided by Voices are often reluctant to embrace so fully. Promising!
“Here Comes Everybody”, Royal Ottawa From Here Comes Everybody (2026, The Beautiful Music)
The long-running Canadian band Royal Ottawa first came onto my radar in 2023 with their massive double album Carcosa, but they’ve been releasing music off and on since the 1990s. After a career spent releasing music fairly sporadically, it’s a pleasant surprise to get a brand-new EP from Royal Ottawa less than a year and a half after Carcosa–the four-song, twenty-two-minute Here Comes Everybody. Half of Here Comes Everybody is taken up by the ten-minute title track, and it’s here where Royal Ottawa fully give in to the motorik vibes and endurance-test desert rock music that hover around the edges of their sound. There are plenty of different “kinds” of ten-minute songs out there; “Here Comes Everybody” is the steady, forward-chugging kind, one that doesn’t flag for a second. Read more about Here Comes Everybody here.
Welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got a new album from Heavenly and new EPs from Royal Ottawa, Me, You & My Metronome, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary. Check them out below.
We do have 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.
Heavenly – Highway to Heavenly
Release date: February 27th Record label: Skep Wax Genre: Twee, indie pop, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Excuse Me
Highway to Heavenly has been a long time coming now. The legendary British twee-pop quintet understandably disbanded after the death of their drummer, Matthew Fletcher, in 1996, and Heavenly was let to lie until earlier this decade: the quintet began reissuingall oftheir records on Skep Wax (the label co-owned by Heavenly vocalist/guitarist Amelia Fletcher and bassist Robert Pursey), they played a few reunion shows with Ian Button on drums where they road-tested new music, and the single “Portland Town” showed up last June. It was only a matter of time before Heavenly released a new album, and here we are almost exactly twenty years after Operation Heavenly with the fifth Heavenly LP, Highway to Heavenly. The remaining original members (Fletcher, Pursey, guitarist Peter Momtchiloff, and keyboardist Cathy Rogers) formally welcomed Button in on drums, and the five of them recorded the songs of Highway to Heavenly in Kent and London with producer Toby Burroughs (Clémentine March, Sassyhiya, Rozi Plain).
More than most 90s indie rock groups, there seems to be a sense of trepidation around the idea of a “Heavenly reunion album”; it’s probably a combination of the simplicity of the “twee” music they pioneered, their tragic original end, and the personal connection many have to Heavenly’s music. The secret, though, is that the members of Heavenly never went away or stopped making good music–there were the two post-Heavenly bands in Marine Research and Tender Trap, and Fletcher, Pursey, and Momtchiloff all have multiple currently-active bands, many of which have appeared on this blog, including The Catenary Wires, Swansea Sound, Railcard, and Would-Be-Goods (Rogers, who pursued careers in reality television production and neuroscience after Marine Research ended, is the one exception). These acts may not be well-known outside of devoted indie pop lifers, but you can listen to them and learn that the members of Heavenly still very much know what they’re doing; this (as well as Fletcher and Pursey’s sharp taste in new indie pop bands exemplified by who they’ve signed to Skep Wax) was enough to have plenty of confidence in Highway to Heavenly before I heard it.
Highway to Heavenly sounds like how you’d want it to sound–Heavenly aren’t trying to erase twenty years of growing their sound and musicianship with other acts and revert to 1996, but they’ve naturally created something that slots nicely after Operation Heavenly nonetheless. The massive indie pop opening stretch from “Scene Stealing” to “Press Return” would make this whole Heavenly revival thing worth it even if the rest of Highway to Heavenly was disappointing (even if I don’t think I necessarily needed a Heavenly tribute to Portland, Oregon, the desire for refuge for nonconformists coming from these longtime fiercely independent upstream-swimmers is quite resonant). Thankfully, though, the rest of Highway to Heavenly continues the winning streak, giving us things to chew on between “Deflicted” and “The Neverseen” and nailing more indie pop hits with “She Is the One” and “Excuse Me”. “That Last Day” closes Highway to Heavenly with a sudden collision of sadness and loss; about the death of Fletcher’s mother, “The Last Day” is an affirmation both that tragedy and death are part of Heavenly’s story and that the band can continue on in the face of it. Fletcher ends “That Last Day” on an uncertain note, asking “Did I do all that I could?”; this query feels unlike anything Heavenly had broached before, but it’s also always been in their nature to tackle whatever lay before them with indie pop. (Bandcamp link)
Royal Ottawa – Here Comes Everybody
Release date: February 4th Record label: The Beautiful Music Genre: Psychedelic rock, Paisley Underground, college rock, desert rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Here Comes Everybody
The long-running Canadian band Royal Ottawa first came onto my radar in 2023 with their massive double album Carcosa, but they’ve been releasing music off and on since the 1990s (and their origins go back even further than that, as multiple band members played in short-lived 1980s post-punk group Bugs Harvey Oswald). Carcosa was a hefty dose of dense, hard-to-classify, long-in-the-tooth rock music; I referenced bands like Eleventh Dream Day, The Church, and The Dream Syndicate when I wrote about it, which should give you some idea. After a career spent releasing music fairly sporadically, it’s a pleasant surprise to get a brand-new EP from Royal Ottawa less than a year and a half after Carcosa; perhaps their new partnership with The Beautiful Music has encouraged them, as the Ottawa-based label has stepped up to put out the four-song, twenty-two-minute Here Comes Everybody on vinyl.
Royal Ottawa continue cataloguing their version of post-college rock, post-Paisley Underground psychedelia/folk rock on these four songs: like a lot of the greatest moments on Carcosa, opening track “Golden Eyes” is a rocker that sounds like it just came into being one day, or like it’s an excerpt of some kind of eternal jam. “Range Road” similarly conjures up this lost feeling, though it’s a bit of a softer folk rock take on it, pairing nicely with “Pine” (probably the closest thing to the “guitar pop” side of college rock on here). Of course, half of Here Comes Everybody is taken up by the ten-minute title track, and it’s here where Royal Ottawa fully give in to the motorik vibes and endurance-test desert rock music that hover around the edges of their sound. There are plenty of different “kinds” of ten-minute songs out there; “Here Comes Everybody” is the steady, forward-chugging kind, one that doesn’t flag for a second and achieves meditative bliss in a way that’s not unlike how it feels to take in Carcosa as a whole. Royal Ottawa are clearly locked into something–their sound is aged, but as exciting as any new band. (Bandcamp link)
Me, You, & My Metronome – Hooray for the Status Quo
Release date: February 6th Record label: Petite Village Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, dream pop, chamber pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Settle Down
Me, You, & My Metronome is Jon Sakata, a lo-fi pop artist who has apparently been making music under the name since the mid-2000s and during stints in San Francisco and Austin. Some of those early recordings are collected on Bandcamp, but Me, You & My Metronome’s recent history begins in late 2024, when Sakata, now based in Montreal, released an EP called Red Pipes under the name via Petite Village Records (The Wesleys, Museums, Othello Tunnels). A little over a year later, Me, You & My Metronome is back with another EP, again on Petite Village–this time it’s a seven-song, twenty-three minute affair called Hooray for the Status Quo (“Things can go south pretty quickly, so waking up feeling the same as the day before can be pretty special,” Sakata writes on Bandcamp regarding the title).
I know exactly the kind of music in which Me, You, & My Metronome deals, and you likely do too if you read this blog reguarly: dreamy, lo-fi, romantic, 80s-inspired guitar pop, with bits of new wave, synthpop, jangle pop, college rock, and C86-inspired indie pop all in play here. I can think of countless bands and projects currently toiling away in relative obscurity nailing this kind of thing, from Goodbye Wudaokou in England to Melancolony in the Bay Area to EEP and Ross Ingram in El Paso to Lost Film in New England; Petite Village mentions fellow Montrealers Prism Shores as a similar act, I don’t disagree. We get one lilting, catchy but melancholic pop song after another to start off Hooray for the Status Quo; if you can be patient with the deliberate chamber pop opening track “Neighborhood Anthem” and the swelling strings of “Cut Back the Sound”, you’re rewarded with fuzz-pop hit “Embroiled in Meaning”, the EP’s one unqualified “rocker”. Hooray for the Status Quo is ultimately a record for those of us who can appreciate material like the mini-orchestral, Sparklehorse-evoking pop music of “Settle Down”; if this is Me, You, & My Metronome’s status quo, they’re maintaining a high standard. (Bandcamp link)
Michael Cormier-O’Leary – Proof Enough
Release date: February 25th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Indie folk, chamber folk, singer-songwriter Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Pressed Flowers
Michael Cormier-O’Leary stays busy: he’s busy co-running Dear Life Records (the Rosy Overdrive-staple alt-country/folk label he founded), he’s busy leading the instrumental chamber music ensemble Hour, he’s busy playing in bands like Friendship and 2nd Grade (that latter one’s new since we last checked up on him). He makes solo records too, of course; in recent years we’ve gotten two “song”-based ones (2021’s More Light!! and 2023’s Anything Can Be Left Behind) plus a piano-improvisation collection (2022’s Heard from the Next Room). Cormier-O’Leary’s latest solo release is a six-song cassette EP called Proof Enough that explores “family roots” and “generational pain”; created almost entirely by Cormier-O’Leary himself (backing vocals from Heeyoon Won of Boosegumps and 22º Halo the only accompaniment), it’s the kind of release that naturally gets overshadowed by someone with a large and constantly-expanding body of work.
Nonetheless, it’s worth digging into Cormier-O’Leary’s writing here, as it’s very deliberate and thoughtful. Inspired by memories of his own family, his own marriage and fatherhood, and fiction (the EP’s title comes from Sense and Sensibility), Proof Enough is empathetic, intricate chamber-folk music; the imparting of “Sky Is Blue” and the portrait of “Del” are some of the most complete writing I’ve heard from Cormier-O’Leary yet. The music is humble but it, too, feels very developed; it’s in line with his previous work, but fans of slow-moving chamber folk like American Music Club or Lambchop will appreciate the compositions here. “Pressed Flowers” closes Proof Enough with an undeniably beautiful song inspired by Cormier-O’Leary’s marriage; like so much related to “family”, it’s saccharine on the surface and layered deeply below. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive 