Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s got everything, and by “everything”, I mean three albums that are coming out tomorrow, February 6th (new ones from Vegas Water Taxi, Music City, and 2070) and an EP that comes out today (by Achers). The January 2026 Playlist went up earlier this week; check that out if you missed it.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Vegas Water Taxi – Long Time Caller, First Time Listener
Release date: February 6th Record label: PNKSLM Genre: Alt-country, singer-songwriter, power pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Chateau Photo
Everybody wants to be the quippy but sad alt-country guy these days, don’t they? Really, it’s kind of surprising how long it took a generation of singer-songwriters to realize that the whip-smart turn-of-phrase nature of classic country plus the poetic beat of David Berman (and, generously, Leonard Cohen) plus just a bit of real rock music (in this current game of telephone, borrowed from the Drive-By Truckers by way of Jake Lenderman) equals instant authenticity (or something close enough to it). Which leads us to Vegas Water Taxi, a London-based alt-country band led by Ben Hambro, a musician whose strange lyricism and singing is such that I assumed he must be from the Netherlands or something and is writing in a second language (but, nope, he’s just like this, apparently). After putting out a debut album in 2023, Vegas Water Taxi’s second album is actually two EPs in one, last year’s Long Time Caller with a new one called First Time Listener tacked onto it.
What does a British guy named Hambro (whose previous act, Lazarus Kane, dealt in “funky electro-pop”) and his band (bassist Fred Lawton, drummer Charlie Meyrick, vocalist Molly Shields, pedal steel player Rhodri Brooks, organist Louis Milburn, and violinist Holly Carpenter) have to say in a facsimile of “Americana”, anyway? Are these Brixton Windmill players really going to be the ones who hogtie the zeitgeist and prove they actually understand those lofty influences better than everyone else? Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that the songs on Long Time Caller, First Time Listener are quite good, and that helps Vegas Water Taxi’s attempts to do so go down very easy. Couplets like “The cops, they broke the door of my Hummer / Asked me about my long brat summer,” sound not only forgivable but laudable when they’re set right at the center of a beautifully-harmonized Teenage Fanclub-esque guitar pop masterpiece, I can tell you that much.
Some of this stuff just works on every level, and that’s all there is to it. The second song on the album, “Chateau Photo”, where Hambor sings “She left me for a guy who’s working in PR / He’s putting out a press release that I’m crying in a bar” over lilting pedal steel? I’m fully on board with that. The asides about being drowned in Liquid Death and the Matty Healy name-drop in “Brat Summer”? Well, they work in context, but they’re not something I’d clip to my locker, necessarily. The world probably doesn’t need a song called “Ozempic (Celebrity Weight Loss Blues)”, but if you can get past the fact that it’s called “Ozempic (Celebrity Weight Loss Blues)”, you’ll hear a pretty earnest and catchy meditation on body dysmorphia and authenticity (that guitar riff is pretty Lenderman; sure, why not?). Listening to Long Time Caller, First Time Listener, I did find myself more and more willing and able to “get past it”; if Vegas Water Taxi keep doing what they’re doing on this album, I won’t be alone in this. (Bandcamp link)
Music City – Welcome to Music City
Release date: February 6th Record label: Redundant Span Genre: Power pop, pop rock, garage rock, glam Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Pretty Feelings
Where is Music City? If Conor Lumsden is to be believed, it’s either Dublin (the musician’s city of origin and where he got his start as part of the power pop quartet The Number Ones) or London (where he’s currently based and where he started his newest project). To make his debut album as Music City, he took advantage from a long history of international touring to call up names like Tina Halladay and Hart Seely of Sheer Mag, Jay Arner of Energy Slime, Alastair MacKay of Dick Diver, and Evan Walsh and Pete O’Hanlon of The Strypes to play on Welcome to Music City. With Lumsden at the head of this wide-ranging orchestra, Welcome to Music City becomes a classic power pop album connected to but distinct from the more garage-y rock and roll of The Number Ones. Lumsden positions himself as a pop rock bandleader influenced by the classic rock and new wave-y pub rockers of his cities of origin and of the polished side of what us Americans probably think of as “music city” (that’s Nashville, Brits).
These days, I hear so many street punks making capable power pop that it’s easy to forget how much the genre owes to good old-fashioned nerds (music nerds, yes, but they still count). Lumsden hasn’t forgotten that, I think, and Welcome to Music City walks an impressive tightrope between well-earned swagger and a more bookish pop rock attitude. I don’t know how well “When That Day Comes By” would play in a basement, for instance, but I do know that it’s made by and for people who love the “craft” (hello, music blog readers!). On the other hand, “Common Sense”, featuring Halladay on co-lead vocals, leans about as heavily into “snottiness” as Music City can (if you have the vocalist for Sheer Mag on your track, some musical adjustments do seem to be in order, after all). Much of the best of Welcome to Music City, like “You Remember” and “Pretty Feelings”, transcends this “either/or”-type thing and just shoots for all-encompassing, unflagging power pop brilliance. The former is crisp and rubbery at the same time, and the latter is a stately, technicolor rave-up. Music City’s assembled quite the greeting committee. (Bandcamp link)
2070 – Big Blue
Release date: February 6th Record label: Danger Collective Genre: Art rock, dream pop, fuzz rock, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Transducer
Guitarist/vocalist Trevor Coleman started a project called 2070 over a decade ago while living in Michigan, but it was after he moved to Los Angeles that the group became a full-fledged band and started regularly putting out full-length records. I first heard 2070 thanks to their 2024 sophomore album, Stay in the Ranch, and the lineup that made that “noisy, fuzzy indie rock” LP (drummer Rogers DeCoud, guitarist Khari Cousins, and bassist Danny Rincon) are back on board for the third 2070 album, Big Blue. Perhaps reflecting their most stable lineup yet, Big Blue (their debut for Danger Collective Records) takes a step back from the excitable, kinetic attitude of Stay in the Ranch and gets to work at creating a more subdued, cohesive statement.
The shoegaze and lo-fi pop of Stay in the Ranch haven’t gone anywhere–indeed, they’re key ingredients in the hazy, murky, psychedelic pop music of Big Blue. Kicking off their album with a shimmering ambient-fuzz-pop instrumental called “VI Tape Lament, Tribute Etc.” is a bold decision by 2070, and while the next two songs on the album (the wonky, crawling “Transducer” and the slacker pop chugger “Birdschool (Off Sludge)”) are pretty catchy, neither of them beats you over the head with it. Songs on Big Blue are relatively brief but not “quick”, and 2070 float through them in a way that starts to blend them together after a while. The “Float On” interpolation in “Windowpane” sticks out, as does the fuzz-rock heights of “Cauldron”, but I don’t think that necessarily makes them better or more essential than the subtle cuts like “Scapegoat” and “The 1619”. The Stereolab-like drumming and synths of penultimate track “Modern Day Gold” is a curveball, but it fits with the exploratory energy 2070 bring to Big Blue as a whole, and, along with the laid-back finale of “V3”, it’s a fitting finale for the trip. And that’s how 2070 wrap up a new and distinct chapter in their growing history. (Bandcamp link)
Achers – Bottom of the Hill
Release date: February 5th Record label: Everything Sucks Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk, emo Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Bottom of the Hill
Achers may be from London, but this British quartet make music inspired by all kinds of noisy 1990s American indie rock, specifically the Pacific Northwest (Unwound, Lync), San Diego (Drive Like Jehu), and Washington, D.C. (take your pick). Guitarist/vocalist Pat Smiley, bassist, Sabrina Amade, drummer Ilia Lebedev, and guitarist Pavel Borisov started the band in 2022, and, after releasing a demo EP the following year, Lebedev left and was replaced with Vicki Butler. The five-song Bottom of the Hill EP represents a bit of “firsts” for Achers: their first new music with Butler, their first physically-released record, their first for their new label Everything Sucks (Good Grief, Schande, Crumbs), and their first professionally studio-recorded music (by Rich Mandell of ME REX and Happy Accidents).
The opening title track is a nice and dreary introduction to Achers, a dour Unwound-like guitar riff circling around a post-punk instrumental (the defeatist tune is, according to Smiley, about “class melancholia”). “Broken Clocks” has the cacophonous, dragging Drive Like Jehu-ish noisiness to it, a trait it shares with the frantic repetition in closing track “Go In”. Achers aren’t straightforward punk rockers; Bottom of the Hill almost always opts for the zag, relying on atmospherics and dynamics rather than pure white-hot energy first and foremost. That energy is still present, though, especially in the middle of the EP with “Blue Lights” (maybe the most “Dischord Records” song on the record) and the stumbling, sharp-pointed “Asahi Bear”. Bottom of the Hill is hardly the friendliest opening statement you’ll hear this year, which is a good indication that Achers already have a strong grasp on what makes this kind of music work. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to the January 2026 playlist! We’ve got some selections from the nascent year thus far in here, as well as some 2025 stragglers and a substantial selection of older material, too (if you’re wondering why there are so many records from 1998 on here, stay tuned in the coming weeks).
Joe Glass has three songs on this playlist. Trembling Blue Stars and Cub have two.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing three songs), Tidal (missing four). Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
“Man Who Lost His Diamond”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
The Rockford-originating, Chicago-based musician Joe Glass has been playing bass guitar in the live version of Kai Slater’s acclaimed mod revival/power pop project Sharp Pins as of late, but he’s a singer-songwriter in his own right as well. His second solo album, Snakewards, is perhaps the result of playing in what is by all accounts a very tight live trio in Sharp Pins; Glass has landed himself directly in the world of brisk, mid-fi, early Guided by Voices-evoking power pop that Slater (who put out the album on his Hallogallo label) has also been pursuing. We’re quite lucky Glass seems to have the knack for it, too–perfect jangle-power pop like “Man Who Lost His Diamond” doesn’t grow on trees. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Babe Pig in the City”, Langkamer From No (2026, Breakfast)
Langkamer are a good band. I wrote about their 2024 album Langzamerwhen it came out and was struck by its deep melancholy; their latest album, No, is, on the whole, a more upbeat offering from the Bristol band. “Babe Pig in the City” is a reminder that Langkamer know good guitar pop, and here it’s delivered in a slightly fuzzy garage-pop sheen. Vocalist Josh Jarman is able to hide under the distortion a little more here than on Langzamer, but his performance isn’t any less striking; his emotional, oddly passionate murmuring about pigs and cities and slaughters and frying pans is classic Langkamer, if there is such a thing by now.
“When I’m with My Brother”, Elvis 2 From Thank You Very Much (2026, Legless/Under the Gun)
You can find some fun stuff going through year-end lists in the dead of early January. I think this was on Add to Wantlist’s? Anyway, we’re got Elvis 2 here, which is apparently an artist from Australia who goes by the name of Mitch Casino. Thank You Very Much (yes, yes) is dirt-fi, in-the-red rock and roll music, with plenty of hooks in the best songs, like “When I’m with My Brother”. That weird little 8-bit synth hook thing is really catchy, and it fits with the whole radioactive Presley vibe (see the album’s cover art) when combined with the murky rest of the song.
“Alright”, Jo Passed From Away (2026, Youth Riot)
It took Jo Hirabayashi, the leader of Jo Passed, eight years to follow up the project’s debut album, Their Prime. Nonetheless, after moving from Vancouver to Monreal and recruiting a new group of backing musicians, Hirabayashi sounds more driven and intense than ever on Away, a gorgeous, tangible pop album in the realms of post-punk, psychedelia, and 70s studio-heavy rock. My favorite song on Away is in the second half: “Alright” is a fully-committed, kaleidoscopic power pop curveball like nothing else on the album. Jo Passed really throw everything they can spare into “Alright”, but Away is as strong as it is on the whole because they give just as much to everything else on the album. Read more about Away here.
“Self-Pity 6.0.1”, Vehicle Flips From The Premise Unraveled (1998, Magic Marker)
“Self-Pity 6.0.1” has got to be one of the best songs about ClipArt that I’ve ever heard. I’ve written about Frank Boscoe’s bands The Ekphrastics and Wimp Factor 14 on this blog before, but this is the first time I’ve touched on The Vehicle Flips, who were between those two previously-mentioned acts. The Premise Unraveled is midway between lo-fi, twee-ish 90s indie rock and folk rockier Mountains Goats-ish storytelling; “Self-Pity 6.0.1”, as brief and minimal as it is, really steals the show (“I am ClipArt / I live in the public domain / Paste me into your sorry-looking document / Without credit, without shame”).
“Letter Never Sent”, Trembling Blue Stars From Lips That Taste of Tears (1998, Shinkansen/Elefant/Clover/Noise Asia)
Is the 70-minute sophomore Trembling Blue Stars album the place to start in the discography of indie pop legend Robert Wratten (also of The Field Mice)? I’m guessing most fans would say no, but I listened to Lips That Taste of Tears and really enjoyed it! As you may be able to guess from the album title, this is a heady, messy, too-romantic breakup album, and the large expanse makes room for jangly, guitar-led indie pop and 80s synthy/sophisti-art-pop twisters. “Letter Never Sent” is a perfect pop song, as beautiful musically as it is ugly and desperate thematically. I’ll be thinking about that final verse from the spurned for a long time now, I think.
“Long Time Missing”, Tommy Keene From Isolation Party (1998, Matador)
As much as I love his 1980s albums and his Keene Brothers project with Bob Pollard, Tommy Keene’s two 90s albums are blind spots for me. Like many cult power pop acts, he returned to the indie world after a “failed” major-label stint, but Isolation Party hardly carries itself that way. The 90s alt-rock-scape was littered with bands emulating the half-mast pop brilliance of Paul Westerberg, but Keene stood alone in shooting for the full-fledged early power pop from which Westerberg himself drew inspiration. Like, holy shit, “Long Time Missing” would be a wrecking ball of all-in power pop at any point in time, but I can’t imagine how this must’ve hit in 1998.
“Ticket to Spain”, Cub From Come Out Come Out (1995, Mint)
Come Out Come Out (reissued by Mint Records last month) was Vancouver indie pop trio Cub’s second album, in which founding members Lisa Marr and Robynn Iwata, joined by new drummer Lisa G, pick up the irresistible twee-pop thread they began with their classic debut album, 1993’s Betti-Cola (it’s probably a more polished and “professional”-sounding album than Betti-Cola, not that it matters much one way or the other). Cub aren’t a “punk band” and wouldn’t be called “power pop” by that genre’s gatekeepers, but opening track “Ticket to Spain” is great, loud, “rocking” pop music no matter what we call it. Read more about Come Out Come Out here.
“Thorns in My Heart”, GUV From Warmer Than Gold (2026, Run for Cover)
After taking some time off from making new music, Ben Cook has shortened his power pop solo project’s longtime moniker from “Young Guv” to simply “GUV”, and, with Warmer Than Gold, he has indeed pretty cleanly broken his own mold. Inspired by Cook’s return to London (where he spent part of his childhood, splitting time with Toronto), he and producer James Matthew Seven worked remotely and then together making a busy, overwhelming pop album featuring alt-dance, walls of sound, and just enough of Cook’s guitar pop past. The surging, euphoric power pop of “Thorns in My Heart” represents one extreme of Warmer Than Gold’s sound, but even this highlight doesn’t do justice to the album’s full range. Read more about Warmer Than Gold here.
“50 Takes”, Fuzzy Feelings From Under the Pit (2026)
“Fuzzy Feelings” is a fairly apt band name for the latest project of Joseph Weber, a London-based musician who previously played in the early-2010s Brooklyn fuzz-pop group Gross Relations. After putting out an EP under the name Joey Relations in 2024, Weber began rolling out this latest band with a string of singles late last year leading up to Under the Pit, a twelve-song, twenty-one-minute exercise in lo-fi power pop that is indeed of both the “fuzzy” and “feelings” variety. One of the best moments on the whole album is “50 Takes”, a two-minute song that starts with a keyboard hook so great that Weber waits until the song is halfway over to even start singing. Read more about Under the Pit here.
“You Are My American Dream”, Dish Pit Violet From Dish Pit Violet (2026)
Dish Pit Violet is a new indie pop project from Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Violent Fink, and her self-titled debut album is a bright and vibrant pop album borne from a tumultuous time in her life–coming out as transgender, the subsequent estrangement from her immediate family, leaving a “toxic” band she co-founded and played in for several years. Fink’s first statement of her new life is defiantly committed to “dance rock grooves” and “cutie-pie sentiments” (as she puts it); these are appropriate descriptors for Dish Pit Violet’s synth- and horn-laden, danceable indie pop, which reminds me of the pop-forward side of Elephant 6 (of Montreal, of course, being the biggest one) and the queer pop of Pelvis Wrestley. Read more about Dish Pit Violet here.
“Film Noir”, Celebrity Telethon From Celebrity Telethon (2025)
Released on New Year’s Eve 2025, Celebrity Telethon finds Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon dropping their bandleader’s name from the project, and the Portland, Oregon alt-country/cowpunk group swaps out their typical fare for seedy, sleazy West Coast punk-garage-rock. “Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon”-era throwbacks are here and there, too, including probably my favorite song on the album, a mid-tempo slacker-pop song called “Film Noir” that finds Habegger embracing his inner Craig Finn. Read more about Celebrity Telethon here.
“Putty (In Your Hands)”, The Detroit Cobras From Mink, Rat or Rabbit (1998, Sympathy for the Record Industry)
Mink, Rat or Rabbit was the first album from the crate-digging Motor City garage rock group The Detroit Cobras; this is one of those albums that cemented Detroit as the garage rock capital of the world—or, at least, helped carry that already well-earned reputation into the 21st century. The group take an early R&B/rock-n-roll-forged sledgehammer to a bunch of selections from 60s girl groups, early soul, and Motown; their fierce version of “Putty (In Your Hands)”, originally by The Shirelles, is one highlight of many.
“Peeking Shows His Ignorance”, Gaze From Mitsumeru (1998, K)
Gaze have been known to me as one of the many Pacific Northwest bands that twee legend Rose Melberg played in (she was the drummer), but the Vancouver group were actually co-led by Miko Hoffman and Megan Mallet, neither of whom have been in any other bands that I know of. Mitsumeru, the first album of two that the band put out before breaking up, is a K Records indie pop classic, soft but with one foot in the power pop/punk-ish side of twee, too. “Peeking Shows His Ignorance” is a really fascinating look into how homophobia and queerness were discussed in certain circles at the time; if Gaze were able to be so pointed and articulate about it in 1998, I dunno what the hell everyone else’s excuses were.
“Point and Shoot”, Greg Freeman From Burnover (2025, Transgressive)
I made it a point to listen to the top five vote-getter albums in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll that I hadn’t listened to in full before, and Greg Freeman’s Burnover was pretty easily my favorite of the group. Perhaps that’s not so surprising given how in-line the Vermont singer-songwriter’s Neil Young/Jason Molina-influenced strain of alt-country indie rock is with what’s appeared on this blog (including via Freeman associates like Lily Seabird, Florry, and Dari Bay). A lot of people use those specific influences as a way of masking sloppy playing/writing, but Freeman’s doing a polished, tight, post-Songs: Ohia kind of country rock here. Opening track “Point and Shoot” is an impeccable pop song made deftly with material in which Freeman’s already proved to be an expert.
“New Pose”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
A second Joe Glass song, because there’s a ton of hits on it! Snakewards is an early contender for power pop record of the year, with the Sharp Pins/Hallogallo associate doing his best to get “mod revival” up there with various pizzas and sausages in terms of Chicago cultural signifiers. “New Pose” might be the best one except for all of the other ones that are just as good–I’m not sure there’s a single moment on the album as exciting as when this rave-up takes off, though. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Exploding Head”, R.E. Seraphin From Tiny Shapes (2020, Mt.St.Mtn./Paisley Shirt/Take a Turn)
The twin 2020 releases of Tiny Shapes and A Room Forever represent the first half of California power pop artist R.E. Seraphin’s catalog thus far, and they’re now together on one vinyl record for the first time ever thanks to Seraphin’s own label, Take a Turn. Both records deal in the college rock-guitar pop sound that Seraphin has continued to hone over the past half-decade; coming not long after the dissolution of Seraphin’s Texas-originating, garage rock-leaning group Talkies, Tiny Shapes is a transitional debut that nonetheless hits the ground running. “Exploding Head” might be a bit more “rock and roll” than where R.E. Seraphin is at these days, but it’s not like it’s less catchy. Read more about Tiny Shapes / A Room Forever here.
“Backtracking”, The Crowd Scene From Turn Left at Greenland (1998, EggBert/Harvey)
The Crowd Scene make a very specific kind of guitar pop music that comes from power pop and “college rock”; largely mid-tempo, acoustic and slightly folky, 60s-inspired but not in a recreation way. Less “cool” alternative history figures come to mind, like Robyn Hitchcock, World Party, John Wesley Harding, and 10,000 Maniacs. Natalie Merchant in particular seems worth mentioning when it comes to “Backtracking”, the languid mid-record highlight that’s probably my favorite song on their 1998 debut album, Turn Left at Greenland.
“Goodbye Delaware”, Awful Din From ANTI BODY (2026, We’re Trying)
Brooklyn quartet Awful Din formed back in 2014, but they only put out their debut album in 2022, and I myself only heard about them thanks to their 2024 EP Sunday Gentlemen. Somewhere between post-Lemonheads earnest jangle-power pop, John K. Samson storytelling, Taking Meds-style indie rock/punk, and big PUP choruses, Awful Din’s sophomore album ANTI BODY is a whirlwind, especially with three golden pop rock songs in “GFTO My Basement”, “Goodbye Delaware”, and “I Will Break You” opening the record up. “Goodbye Delaware” gets the nod on this playlist, not entirely because of the interpolation of “Don’t Let’s Start”, “Kickstart My Heart”, and “Our House” (among other choices), but it doesn’t hurt. Read more about ANTI BODY here.
“Pocket Games”, Cadallaca From Introducing… (1998, K)
I’m not sure how I’d never heard of Cadallaca before last month (at least I think I hadn’t); they were a short-lived (one LP) trio led by Corin Tucker and featuring the underrated Sarah Dougher on Farfisa organ and backing vocals. With the stripped-down setup (the third member, known only as “sts”, is the drummer) and the heavy Farfisa usage, this should land squarely in Nuggets/60s garage rock territory, but you also have Corin Tucker sounding exactly like Corin Tucker, so it’s also like an alternate-universe Sleater-Kinney album. “Pocket Games” is my favorite one, I think; it’s a Tucker ballad with Dougher doing cheery but not overly distracting organ highlights to it.
“End of the World”, Peaer From Doppelgänger (2026, Danger Collective)
Although upstate New York math-y indie rock trio Peaer spent the first half of this decade in relative silence after releasing some great material in the late 2010s, they continued to work on a third proper Peaer album, which finally arrived at the beginning of 2026 as Doppelgänger. For a band who hadn’t been afraid to get pretty noisy in the past, Doppelgänger represents a clear shift into more “refined”, “restrained”, “reserved” and other such “re”-word-territory. “End of the World” opens the album with Peaer’s clearest foray yet into “guitar pop”: it’s damn-near toe-tapping! Read more about Doppelgänger here.
OUT. came out of the mid-90s Louisville indie rock scene, wielding a ferocious early punk rock/hardcore punk-indebted fury more in line with Midwestern garage-y groups like New Bomb Turks and Laughing Hyenas than their hometown’s more math rock/post-hardcore/post-rock. Noise Pollution, their original label, has marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s sole album with its first-ever vinyl release. Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs remains an incredible document, perhaps the purest distillation of Kentucky punk rock and roll ever put to tape: the opening three or four songs are a sprint (including “You Destroy Me”, which kicks off the record), a clusterfuck of Bad Brains and 70s punk and Motörhead that’s virtually indistinguishable from something that’d come out on Goner or Feel It Records today. Read more about Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs here.
“Infinite Casualties”, Subtle Body From Subtle Body (2026, Strange Mono)
A new quintet from Philadelphia made up by a bunch of “punk, hardcore, and grind” veterans, Subtle Body are the latest group to throw their hats in the realms of muddy, spooky, lo-fi post-punk and synthpunk. Their self-titled debut cassette is a twenty-three-minute descent into the gothic side of basement punk; the bass swims in a murky sea of haunting vocals, freaked-out drums, and plenty of synths in most of Subtle Body’s rockers, including the highlight “Infinite Casualties”. Read more about Subtle Body here.
“Along the Moors”, Sandpit From On Second Thought (1998, Fellaheen)
Sandpit were a trio from Melbourne who lasted for one album, in which they explored a stone-faced and gray version of “90s-slacker-indie”. On Second Thought has a noisy, fuzzy, post-Sonic Youth kind of sound, and there’s also a really nice diamond-in-the-rough melodic quality to these songs that feels more like Eric’s Trip or even mid-period Sebadoh. “Along the Moors”, which opens the album, also reminds me of the Guv’ner song that I put on one of these playlists four years ago (four years ago? Jesus Christ!); I really enjoy the dour melodic side of 90s indie rock, clearly.
“Chaos Herder, Pt. 2”, Place Position From Went Silent (2026, Sweet Cheetah/Poptek/Bunker Park/Blind Rage)
Dayton trio Place Position had been pretty quiet since their first album back in 2014, but the dozen-year wait for LP2 has finally ended with Went Silent. Those still paying attention are rewarded with ten slow-moving but still frequently fiery post-hardcore/post-punk songs well-versed in the intricacies of the history of Dischord Records and its flagship bands. Those who enjoy that “flag-planting anthem” side of post-hardcore punk rock will be drawn in immediately with “Chaos Herder Pt. 2”, a stalwart, unflappable post-punk opening statement. Read more about Went Silent here.
“Say You’re Mine”, The Prize From In the Red (2025, Goner/Anti Fade)
An Australian power pop band that lists its influences as “Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Pretenders, Blondie, Rolling Stones, Faces, Flamin’ Groovies, Tom Petty, Dwight Twilley, Phil Seymour, The Toms, The Nerves and The Motors”, huh? I had a hunch that Melbourne’s The Prize would be up my alley, and indeed, their long-awaited debut album In the Red hits all the high notes one would want from such a group. The garage-y rock and roll power pop hits are strewn throughout this eleven-song, thirty-six minute exercise; “Say You’re Mine” is as good as any of them, though it’s hardly the only Romero/Sheer Mag-esque behemoth on the LP.
“Bubble Up”, Hello Whirled From The Other Need (2026, Sherilyn Fender)
Another year has begun with an album from the ever-prolific lo-fi rocker Hello Whirled near the starting gate. The Other Need is a fairly holistic overview of the Hello Whirled experience, a marriage of the basement-arena-prog of the less popular albums from bandleader Fern Spizuco’s north star of Robert Pollard with tortured angst and noisy, lo-fi clattering. The Other Need has some “pop” moments, certainly; bookmark “Bubble Up”, with its steady-building structure and exuberant power pop chorus, for your personal “Hello Whirled greatest hits” playlist. Read more about The Other Need here.
“Sacrifice”, Sweet Reaper From Still Nothing (2026, Alien Snatch/Naked Time)
There’s nothing wrong with starting off 2026 with some incredibly catchy, poppy garage rock. Sweet Reaper may be from the West Coast (Ventura, specifically), but the clean, sugar-rush, power-pop-garage-rock sound of Still Nothing reminds me more of what goes on over in Texas, with names like A Giant Dog, Flesh Lights, and Radioactivity (whose Jeff Burke mastered this record, which I didn’t know when I came up with the comparison initially) coming to mind. We’re all mortal, and, for Sweet Reaper, that means there’s no time to waste in between churning out garage-punk pop hits like “Sacrifice”. Read more about Still Nothing here.
“Honeymoon”, Bon Voyage From Bon Voyage (1998, BEC)
Bon Voyage are a duo comprised of Starflyer 59 mastermind Jason Martin and his wife Julie on lead vocals. Their self-titled debut album is more blatantly “pop music” than anything I’ve heard by the shoegaze/art rock-tending Starflyer 59; it’s full-on fuzzy indie-power-pop verging on “twee”. It’s very nineties, yes—the Martins bravely conduct a series of experiments marrying Belly/Breeders noise to the tenderness of The Sundays and that Sixpence None the Richer song (and sometimes Rentals-like synth hooks are there, too). “Honeymoon” is sugary sweet; even if you’re not the type to go in for an entire album of this stuff, it’s a solid way to spend three minutes.
“Suitcase and Atoms”, Elliott From U.S. Songs (1998, Revelation)
U.S. Songs was the Louisville emo group Elliott’s first LP, and while their hometown was known (to me, at least) for a post-rock/experimental bent to their underground music, that’s not really what we get here. Their emo is light on its feet, with a punk rock/proto-orgcore sound in line with California groups like Jawbreaker, Samiam, and Knapsack. There’s no math rock here (although, like a lot of math-y emo albums, the drums are great), and the heaviest they get is scattered chunky power chord riffs and vocals. “Suitcase and Atoms” is probably my favorite; it’s a classic emo-punk ramp-up, blast-off kind of thing.
“Vacation”, Cub From Come Out Come Out (1995, Mint)
The 30th anniversary edition of Come Out Come Out features three covers; a live version of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” (featuring “Italian harmonica man”), which they originally recorded for their debut album, is a new addition, but Cub’s versions of Yoko Ono’s “I’m Your Angel” and The Go-Go’s’ “Vacation” were from the first version of the record. They all work as “Cub songs”, but it’s probably not incredibly surprising that the “cuddlecore”/twee-pop group is especially qualified to take on the new wave-power pop classic “Vacation” and make it into their own. Read more about Come Out Come Out here.
“Cocaine Bear”, Wormy From Shark River (2026, Rose Garden)
Brooklyn musician Noah Rauchwerk has been quite active over the past decade, whether he’s been playing alongside his brother in the folk duo The Lords of Liechtenstein, drumming for Samia (among other acts) on tour, or guesting on the most recent Little Hag album. He’s nonetheless found time for his indie folk solo project Wormy in recent years, releasing an album called I’m Sweating All the Time in 2022 and following it up with Shark River this January. Shark River toes a fine line very well, balancing Rauchwerk’s delicate, intimate obvious influences (Bright Eyes, mid-period Mountain Goats) with the polish he’s pursued in some of his sideman work. “Cocaine Bear” is effectively a minimal-electric version of the best Slaughter Beach, Dog songs, simple, quiet, and incredibly memorable. Read more about Shark River here.
“Touché”, Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One From Antenna (2026, The Forever Exploding Dynamo)
The intriguingly-named Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One (the two sides of the equation are anagrams, who knew?) are a new band from Columbus made up of three longtime central Ohio indie rock musicians. The trio’s first album, Antenna, appeared on Bandcamp last October, but guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki has given it a wider release this month via his new record label, The Forever Exploding Dynamo. Antenna, a thirty-five-minute LP made up of only five songs, is “indie rock” for those of us who enjoy music that veers between the accessible and the challenging. “Touché”, right in the middle of the album, is a nice, dirty garage punk song in the midst of Sonic Youth-style eleven-minute art rock sprawlers and ambient pieces. Read more about Antenna here.
“Dig for Now”, The Fragiles From Sing the Heat of the Sun (2026, Living Lost)
Philadelphia musician David Settle ruled the realms of lo-fi indie rock in 2020 and 2021, putting out a slew of albums via his aliases The Fragiles, Big Heet, and Psychic Flowers. After a few years off, it’s nice to start off 2026 with the first album from The Fragiles in five years. While Big Heet deals in noisy post-punk and Psychic Flowers in shit-fi fuzz pop, The Fragiles has always been where Settle explores dreamier, almost psychedelic indie-gaze, and Sing the Heat of the Sun offers a strong collection of such material. There are a handful of instant-classic guitar pop songs on here, including the bouncy, scuzzy lo-fi pop of highlight “Dig for Now”. Read more about Sing the Heat of the Sun here.
“Made for Each Other”, Trembling Blue Stars From Lips That Taste of Tears (1998, Shinkansen/Elefant/Clover/Noise Asia)
Like “Letter Never Sent” earlier on this playlist, “Made for Each Other” is a massive pop song that’s also a massive break-up song; unlike “Letter Never Sent”, “Made for Each Other” takes a minute to move from a quiet, electronic-tinged beginning to a full-on symphonic chamber pop chorus. It’s absolutely worth sticking around until Trembling Blue Stars deliver the refrain and then sticking around again until they repeat it, the great fanfare triggered by the admission that gives the song its title (“Made for each other, but not made to last”).
“Tied Tight”, Joe Glass From Snakewards (2026, Hallogallo)
A third Joe Glass song? Surely there can’t be three different massive power pop hit singles on one album from the Chicago mod revivalist, right? Well, there are (and then some); just queue up “Tied Tight”, Snakewards’ penultimate song, if you don’t believe me. This one is Glass at his most Guided by Voices-like; that opening chugging guitar riff is built for fractured arena rock, and Glass’ floating, passionate vocal melodies (particularly his delivery of “In my head / I’m better off dead”) feel right out of Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia. Read more about Snakewards here.
“Threesome (Asking for a Friend)”, Sotto Voce From The Sound of Trying (2026, Makeout Artist)
The Sound of Trying is my first exposure to Brooklyn project Sotto Voce, and it’s a curious-sounding one; it’s almost like it’s trying to be an explosive, 90s-style indie rock album, a sensitive, sensual singer-songwriter album, and a sprawling, folk-y slowcore album all at once. I’m weirdly drawn to the last song on The Sound of Trying–it’s a long one, called “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” (sure, sure), and it’s a confusing but endearing mixture of coffeeshop folk, noodly, (but still largely acoustic) math-y guitars, and melodies that appear and disappear as bandleader Ryan Gabos shifts around tempos and times and whatnot. Beyond the fact that it sounds quite good, I like “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” because, I think, I can’t quite figure it out. Read more about The Sound of Trying here.
“Slackers & Go Getters”, Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales From Destination Heaven (2026, Born Losers)
Dogwood Tales are a rock-solid country rock group from Harrisonburg, Virginia, while Euphoria Again is the solo project of Johnny Klein, who I mostly know for being in the shoegaze revival group Knifeplay. The two acts made a collaborative record called Destination Heaven that dropped at the beginning of this year, and it’s a pretty unimpeachable collection of alt-country rock. “Slackers & Go Getters”, the penultimate track, includes vamping where the lead singer (by process of elimination, I think it’s Dogwood Tales’ Kyle Grim) introduces the rest of the band (including “Johnny Football”, who I imagine is Klein, on guitar). It’d be an odd choice to put on this playlist because of that, but “Slackers & Go Getters” is just such a fun, jammy track that I have no qualms about adding it here.
“The Decline of Country and Western Civilization”, Lambchop From Damaged (2006, Merge)
It’s been twenty years since the decline of country and western civilization; time really does fly, doesn’t it? Maybe you recognize that title as the name of two different Lambchop rarities compilations, but it’s also the last track on the long-running Nashville weirdo alt-country institution’s 2006 album Damaged. It’s beautiful and inscrutable in the way the best Lambchop songs are; it starts with Kurt Wagner proclaiming “Well, I hate Nathan Bedford Forrest / He’s the featured artist in the devil’s chorus,” (no lies there) and finds the time to diss “Pitchfork I-rock saviors” (again, the time flies…) and inject some real pathos into “Damn, they’re looking ugly to me”. Lambchop! Check ‘em out.
Hey there! It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four records coming out tomorrow, January 30th: the 30th anniversary reissue of OUT.‘s debut (and only) album, plus LPs from GUV, Sotto Voce, and Awful Din. Check them out, and also investigate Monday’s blog post (featuring R.E. Seraphin, Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled) if you haven’t yet.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
GUV – Warmer Than Gold
Release date: January 30th Record label: Run for Cover Genre: Psychedelia, Madchester, alt-dance, power pop, noise pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Thorns in My Heart
When we last heard from the Los Angeles-based musician Ben Cook AKA Young Guv, it was via a pair of LPs in 2022: the classic power pop-indebted GUV III and the “airier and more psychedelic” (as I said at the time) GUV IV. Desert vibes aside, GUV IV was still more or less a jangly guitar pop album of the kind Cook had been making since the mid-to-late 2010s, and thus worthy of the “Young Guv” moniker. After taking some time off from making new music, however, Cook is now back simply as “GUV”, and, with Warmer Than Gold, Cook has indeed pretty cleanly broken his own mold. During GUV’s four-year hiatus, we’ve seen similar power pop solo acts (like Dazy and Graham Hunt) increasingly incorporate 90s electronica, Madchester, and Screamadelica into their sounds, and, in simple terms, Warmer Than Gold (made as a collaboration with James Matthew Seven, AKA JMVII) is Cook’s entry into the fray. Inspired by Cook’s return to London (where he spent part of his childhood, splitting time with Toronto), Cook and Seven worked remotely and then together making a busy, overwhelming pop album featuring alt-dance, walls of sound, and just enough of Cook’s guitar pop past.
Warmer Than Gold is a forty-five minute “full-commitment” journey, much like most of its (generally substantially longer, given the CD era) direct influences. “Let Your Hands Go” comes out of the gate with a dance beat, and, if you give it a minute, GUV deploy a gigantic post-Britpop chorus to match the initial energy. “Blue Jade”, a propulsive dream pop/shoegaze-influenced rocker, is huge-sounding in a different way, and much of Warmer Than Gold leans towards one side of GUV’s sound or the other. The big beats of the title track, “Out of This Place”, and “Oscillating” form one towering end of Warmer Than Gold, and one the other end we’re greeted by the surging, euphoric power pop of “Thorns in My Heart” and the jangling, sun-drenched “Chasin Luv”. Somewhere in the midst of all this are subtler, more pensive moments–“Seaside Story” and “Never Should Have Said” evoke an earlier moment in British guitar music history, specifically proudly “indie” C86-esuqe indie pop. The sheer weight of Warmer Than Gold could come off as outshining these “hidden gem” moments, but it’s easy to follow along with a balancing act this passionate about what it’s juggling. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: January 30th Record label: Noise Pollution Genre: Garage punk, rock and roll, hardcore punk, punk blues Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: You Destroy Me
OUT. came out of the mid-90s Louisville indie rock scene, co-founded by vocalist Chad Donnelly and guitarist Dave Bird (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sunburned Hand of the Man) and quickly joined by the rhythm section of bassist Tony Bailey (Aerial M, Crain) and drummer Russ Pollard (Sebadoh, Folk Implosion). Their ferocious garage rock sound is a bit of an outlier compared to the more math rock/post-hardcore/post-rock I typically associate with Louisville, but their early punk rock/hardcore punk-indebted fury wasn’t that far off from (relatively) nearby Midwestern garage-y groups like New Bomb Turks and Laughing Hyenas. The four of them recorded Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs with Kevin Brownstein on “Derby Day, 1996”; by the time it came out via CD on then-fledgling label Noise Pollution on Halloween 1997, Pollard and Bailey had already left the band, and OUT. disintegrated as a group entirely by the end of the century.
Thirty years since recording Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs, unfortunately only half of OUT.’s first LP lineup are still with us; Donnelly died in 2001, and Bailey passed in 2009. Noise Pollution is nonetheless still going strong, and they’ve marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s sole album with its first-ever vinyl release and by unearthing two previously-unreleased recordings (“Missed Connection” and “Building a Better Monster”). Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs remains an incredible document, perhaps the purest distillation of Kentucky punk rock and roll ever put to tape. The opening three or four songs are a sprint, a clusterfuck of Bad Brains and 70s punk and Motörhead that’s virtually indistinguishable from something that’d come out on Goner or Feel It Records today. With “Sing While the World Sinks”, you get a clearer glimpse of the “Jesus Lizard/Birthday Party” side of OUT.’s influences, and the likes of “Seven” lean harder on good old “hard rock”, but OUT. never stop kicking out garage rippers (“Love Can Break Your Back”, “Where the River Runs”). Even though OUT.’s story feels a little too short in 2026, it’s still fortunate that everything aligned for long enough for Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs to happen at all. (Bandcamp link)
Sotto Voce – The Sound of Trying
Release date: January 30th Record label: Makeout Artist Genre: Art rock, folk rock, math rock, post-rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Threesome (Asking for a Friend)
Sotto Voce is Ryan Gabos, a Pittsburgh-originating, Brooklyn-based musician who’s been putting out home-recorded albums at a clip of about one a year since 2013. The most recent Sotto Voce album before this year was actually 2023’s Murgatroyd (with the archival Fool Ass EP coming the following year), so this is an atypically long gap between LPs by Gabos’ standards. The Sound of Trying, my first exposure to Sotto Voce, is a curious-sounding return to the world of solo home-recording by Gabos; it’s almost like it’s trying to be an explosive, 90s-style indie rock album, a sensitive, sensual singer-songwriter album, and a sprawling, folk-y slowcore album all at once. The majority of The Sound of Trying’s seven songs cross the five-minute mark, and two of them are over seven–more often than not, the different sides of Sotto Voce are explored within the same track.
The Sound of Trying begins with two songs that start off relatively softly and build into something noisy; the transition in “Sitting in a Tree” is more abrupt than the more typical math-y indie rock of “Kickball”, but it happens in both. At this point, I’d be ready to slot Sotto Voce into a (quite capable) “quiet-loud” indie rock group, but, aside from “It’s a Dull Pain”, Gabos effectively never returns to this formula again on The Sound of Trying. The eight-minute harmonics-aided “Miami from the Window Seat” disappears in a gentle, soft-rock breeze, and “Days Without Incident” similarly takes a leisurely route across its six minutes. I’m weirdly drawn to the last song on The Sound of Trying–it’s another long one, called “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” (sure, sure), and it’s a confusing but endearing mixture of coffeeshop folk, noodly (but still largely acoustic) math-y guitars, and melodies that appear and disappear as Gabos shifts around tempos and times and whatnot. Beyond the fact that it sounds quite good, I like “Threesome (Asking for a Friend)” because, I think, I can’t quite figure it out. All of The Sound of Trying has a bit of that to it. (Bandcamp link)
Awful Din – ANTI BODY
Release date: January 30th Record label: We’re Trying Genre: Emo, pop punk, orgcore, power pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Goodbye Delaware
Brooklyn quartet Awful Din formed back in 2014, but they only put out their debut album in 2022, and I myself only heard about them thanks to their 2024 EP Sunday Gentlemen (featuring a really good song about Anton Lavey called “Anton Lavey”). Founding members Aaron Groom (vocals/guitar) and Kat Doniger (guitar) reference 90s emo and punk as what brought them together in a band (Saves the Day and Texas Is The Reason, specifically), and on their sophomore album ANTI BODY, the group (now joined by new members Jay Rodriguez and Don Lavis on bass and drums) take those influences and make a fresh, catchy-sounding emo-pop-punk album out of them. Somewhere between post-Lemonheads earnest jangle-power pop, John K. Samson storytelling, Taking Meds-style indie rock/punk, and big PUP choruses, the opening stretch of ANTI BODY is a whirlwind between the three golden pop rock songs “GFTO My Basement”, “Goodbye Delaware”, and “I Will Break You”.
If you’ve forgotten that Awful Din are an emo band, the brake-tapping, string-laden hospital ballad “Foot Punk” will remind you, although the quartet throw themselves into that one so fully that it just adds another layer to ANTI BODY rather than arresting any momentum (and if that one doesn’t slow Awful Din down, the sparse, slow-building “Chaparral” certainly won’t either). The bass-led belter “15 Minutes of Shame” and a perfect jangly pop song called “Big’s In Paris Now” (of course) are B-side highlights, as is closing track “We Have We Are We Will”, in which Awful Din do the “cathartic big finish” thing as well as I’d expect them to do. It’s been a minute since I’ve heard an emo (or “emo-adjacent”, even) album that hits these notes as well as Awful Din do on ANTI BODY; it’s a welcome reminder of the power of this kind of thing. (Bandcamp link)
The first Pressing Concerns of the week gives us a reissue of R.E. Seraphin‘s first two records, plus new albums from Healing & Peace, Sweet Reaper, and Hello Whirled. Check them out below!
The blog will next update this Thursday (three posts a week will be returning soon, I think, but we’re not quite there yet).
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
R.E. Seraphin – Tiny Shapes / A Room Forever
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Take a Turn Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Exploding Head
We here at Rosy Overdrive have enjoyed the work of Vallejo, California power pop musician Ray Seraphin and his quasi-solo project, R.E. Seraphin, shining a spotlight on his 2022 EP Swingshiftand the 2024 LP Fool’s Mate(not to mention The Pennys, his recent duo with Tony Jay’s Michael Ramos). Those two records represent the second half of the R.E. Seraphin catalog thus far, and today we’re looking back at the first half: the twin 2020 releases of Tiny Shapes and A Room Forever, now together on one vinyl record for the first time ever. Both records were originally released by Bay Area stalwart labels Paisley Shirt and Mt.St.Mtn., and both deal in the college rock-guitar pop sound that Seraphin has continued to hone over the past half-decade.
Coming not long after the dissolution of Seraphin’s Texas-originating, garage rock-leaning group Talkies, Tiny Shapes is a transitional debut that nonetheless hits the ground running. “Today Will Be Kind” is exactly the kind of power pop-college rock anthem Seraphin’s always been good for on his records, and while the stretch from “Exploding Head” to “I’d Rather Be Your Enemy” (which is a Lee Hazelwood cover, yes) might be a bit more “rock and roll” than where R.E. Seraphin is at these days, it’s not like it’s less catchy (particularly “Exploding Head”, which is on the shortlist for Seraphin’s finest chorus). Later on the Tiny Shapes side of things, “Hear Me Out” hits the “sad jangle” spot pleasingly, but even that relatively brief diversion is scuttled when A Room Forever announces itself with “Clock Without Hands” (which would later be re-recorded for Fool’s Mate) and “Leave Me in the Tide”. Perhaps it’s a touch more subdued than the debut, but “Pillar of Shame” is the only real “slow song”; the album’s other cover, Luna’s “Lost in Space”, is kind of weird, too, but–and this shouldn’t be surprising at this point–these are all solid pop songs. It’s a worthwhile trip back, and we don’t even have to travel far from where Seraphin’s living these days, too. (Bandcamp link)
Healing & Peace – A Treatise
Release date: January 16th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi indie rock/folk/pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: The Shopkeeper
Columbus musician Alex Mussawir started a garage-y post-punk band called Kneeling in Piss in 2019, and after an album and a handful of EPs, switched gears in 2023 and released an EP of more casual, lo-fi folky indie rock under the name Healing & Peace. A Treatise is the first “Healing & Peace album”, and if you read the loose history of the project that Mussawir wrote to accompany its release, you’ll see names from Ohio bands you might know like The Drin, Winston Hightower, and Goners; some of them played on A Treatise, I think, but I couldn’t tell you who’s doing what. A couple of songs from the self-titled Healing & Peace EP show up again here, as well as the non-album single “Mezzanine Man”, but most of A Treatise is new to us. Mussawir has ended up in a comfortable, intriguing place after all these years of doing the “indie musician” thing; the acoustic-based, winking-to-shrugging A Treatise rides a warmly familiar line between lo-fi, 90s-style “slacker” rock and Flying Nun-esuqe folk-pop.
The lo-fi pop vignette “The Shopkeeper” became perhaps my favorite Kneeling/Healing in/and Piss/Peace song when I heard it two years ago, and it’s still a standout here, a tad more accessible than the cow-post-punk of “Unite Foodland”, the Mark E. Smith/Chris Knox-like talk-sung wisdom of “Into a Hole”, and the droning psych-folky undercurrent of “Horrible Sanctuary”. Elsewhere, Mussawir pleads with Sofia Coppola for a role in one of her movies in the harmonica-aided “Sofia, Baby Please” (“I’d like to leave Ohio / Your camera lights look soothing”), and the title track closes the album with a bit of folk-beat poetry: “I return now to my post / Middling, tedious / But honest,” Mussawir signs off. That’s how we get A Treatise. (Bandcamp link)
Sweet Reaper – Still Nothing
Release date: January 16th Record label: Alien Snatch/Naked Time Tapes Genre: Garage rock, power pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Sacrifice
There’s nothing wrong with starting off 2026 with some incredibly catchy, poppy garage rock. Introducing Sweet Reaper, a trio from Ventura, California who are new to me but apparently have been kicking out albums of this stuff since 2017: this is their fourth LP by my count, all either issued or reissued by German label Alien Snatch (Freak Genes, Slander Tongue, Eerie Family). The band (vocalist/guitarist Seth Pettersen, bassist/vocalist Danny Gomez, and drummer Sasha Green) may be from the West Coast, but the clean, sugar-rush, power-pop-garage-rock sound of Still Nothing reminds me more of what goes on over in Texas, with names like A Giant Dog, Flesh Lights, and Radioactivity (whose Jeff Burke mastered this record, which I didn’t know when I came up with the comparison initially) coming to mind.
Name and aesthetics aside, Sweet Reaper are less a full-on horror-punk group and more of a vaguely spooky/spooked, unnerved/unnerving one in terms of lyrical content. Musically speaking–well, we’re all mortal, and, for Sweet Reaper, that means there’s no time to waste in between churning out garage-punk pop hits. We’re barely five minutes into Still Nothing and we’ve already skated through “Clean”, “Sacrifice”, and “Motion”, all three of which are torrential two-minute tracks strong enough to be the centerpiece of this album on their own. If “Thought Police” and “Zero Candles” represent the introduction of ever-so-slightly darker post-punk elements to Sweet Reaper’s sound, they don’t herald a major shift, as rippers like “Hideaway” and “Meemees” continue to be on the table into the album’s home stretch. Sweet Reaper sound like they’re on the run for all of Still Nothing’s twenty-six minutes, and they’ve made a great rock and roll album in the process. (Bandcamp link)
Hello Whirled – The Other Need
Release date: January 1st Record label: Sherilyn Fender Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, post-punk, GBV-fi Formats: Digital Pull Track: Bubble Up
Another year has begun with a Hello Whirled album near the starting gate. In 2025, the ever-prolific Fern Spizuco (now Philadelphia-based after getting her start in New Jersey) released Gives Up and Plays the Hitson January 8th, and a host of striking titles followed over the next twelve months: Sex with God, Distance Fighter, Ours Is a Blank Map, In This House We Are Cold. Will 2026 be as busy for Spizuco’s home-recorded lo-fi indie rock enterprise? Only she knows, but at the very least I can observe that Hello Whirled have gotten an even earlier start this year, dropping The Other Need right on New Year’s Day.
Gives Up and Plays the Hits was, by design, an accessible place to try to get into Spizuco’s fifty-plus-album discography, and, while The Other Need has some “pop” moments, it’s a more holistic overview of the Hello Whirled experience, a marriage of the basement-arena-prog of the less popular albums from Spizuco’s north star of Robert Pollard with tortured angst and noisy, lo-fi clattering. Nobody else is doing jerky, striking, post-punk, anti-rock-and-roll anthems like “Ambition Wall”, “No More Eras”, and “Big Moan” like this, let alone doing so in a way that somehow sneaks real hooks into exercises like “Competitions”, “Emotional Support Notepad”, “Pink Deer”, and “Blood on the Page”. Mark “Bubble Up”, with its steady-building structure and exuberant power pop chorus, for the next “best of Hello Whirled” snapshot record, but you’re missing out on the experience by waiting until Spizuco puts out another one of those to take a peek into Hello Whirled. (Bandcamp link)
In this here Thursday Pressing Concerns, we’re featuring four albums coming out tomorrow, January 23rd: new ones from Place Position, Jo Passed, T. Gold, and Subtle Body. Check ’em out, and if you missed Tuesday’s blog post (featuring Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit), load that one up, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Place Position – Went Silent
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Sweet Cheetah/Poptek/Bunker Park/Blind Rage Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, math rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Chaos Herder Pt. 2
Here we are with Place Position, a trio from Dayton, Ohio evidently named after a Fugazi song, and who make music one might expect a trio evidently named after a Fugazi song to make. Bassist Chip Heck, Jesse Mays, and guitarist/vocalist Josh Osinkosky are probably all “lifers”; the first Place Position album came out in 2014, and all three of them have played in other bands in southwestern Ohio (The 1984 Draft, Shadyside, Landfilth…). Aside from a three-song single in 2020, Place Position had been pretty quiet since their first album, but the dozen-year wait for Place Position LP2 has finally ended with Went Silent. Those paying attention are rewarded with ten slow-moving but still frequently fiery post-hardcore/post-punk songs well-versed in the intricacies of the history of Dischord Records and its flagship bands; while it’s not as zen-like as Lungfish (or their best modern analogue, Vulture Feather), it does sound like a record that has benefited from its creators getting long(er) in the tooth.
Those who enjoy the “flag-planting anthem” side of post-hardcore punk rock will be drawn in immediately with “Chaos Herder Pt. 2”, a stalwart, unflappable post-punk opening statement. Like many a great Dischord record, however, Went Silent is also sneakily quite weird and subversive–this is apparent from the tense atmospheres propping up “Camber” in the first half, and it really comes to a head near the center of the album with strange art punk tangents “Buy Here, Pay Here” and “NO401OK”. Most everything on Went Silent is, to some degree, a “rocker”, but it’s to Place Position’s credit that they have a pretty wide-ranging and open attitude as to how (and when and where) to do that. If you want to know how to make music like this for the better part of twenty years, Place Position have put on a pretty good demonstration on keeping it fresh with Went Silent. (Bandcamp link)
Jo Passed – Away
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Youth Riot Genre: Art punk, psychedelia, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Alright
I remember the first Jo Passed record, which came out on Sub Pop back in 2018. It was a weird, jagged art rock album called Their Prime; I don’t think I was ready for it at the time, but listening back to it now, it sounds pretty good. It took Jo Hirabayashi, the leader of Jo Passed, eight years to follow up Their Prime, and he alludes to mental health problems in the interim–the previous, Vancouver-based version of Jo Passed dissolved, Hirabayashi moved to Toronto, and worked and reworked what eventually became Away. Aided by a new group of backing musicians (vocalist Téa Mei, drummers Mac Lawrie and Justin Devries, Meredith Bates on strings, and saxophonist/woodwind player Andromeda Monk), Hirabayashi sounds more driven and intense than ever on Away, a gorgeous, tangible pop album in the realms of post-punk, psychedelia, and 70s studio-heavy rock.
Everything on Away has its own personality–just running through the first half, there’s the woozy psych-pop opening track “brb”, the propulsive avant-garage art pop rock of “Precious Word”, the dreamy jangle of “Ico” (about Mei’s cat, apparently), the skronky horn-fest of “339”, and the delicate mid-tempo ballad at the core of “Dizzy Izzy”. My favorite song on Away is in the second half, though: “Alright” is a fully-committed, kaleidoscopic power pop curveball like nothing else on the album. Jo Passed really throw everything they can spare into “Alright”, but Away is as strong as it is on the whole because they give just as much to everything else on the album, from the nearly-percussionless minimal trip of “Too Much Thought” to the sprawling, triumphant deconstructed girl-group-pop of “J Walking”. Jo Passed may not have a clearly “straightforward” album in them because that’s not really what they do, but for a “challenging” band like this, Away is as good as it gets. (Bandcamp link)
T. Gold – Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Sleepy Cat Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, art rock, synthrock Formats: Digital Pull Track: New Land
Gabriel Anderson and Saman Khoujinian are a pair of musicians from Miami who are now based in Carrboro, North Carolina, where they co-founded Sleepy Cat Records in 2019 to release their band T. Gold’s self-titled debut album. Seven years later, Sleepy Cat has released a bunch of good records from North Carolina musicians like Lonnie Walker, DUNUMS, and Gibson & Toutant, and the label’s founding duo have finally returned as T. Gold with Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel, the project’s second album. A warmly familiar but nonetheless unique lesson, Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel is a friendly, accessible folk-pop album made by a duo who are clearly immersed in their state’s alt-country scene but also have a “quadraphonic improvisational synthesizer collective” called Delver. The production (from both members of T. Gold as well as Dylan Turner and Alex Bingham) is immaculate, and Khoujinian’s lead vocals are crystal clear, setting up Life Is a Wonder and It’s Cruel to be a nice, smooth folk-country-rock listen–except for all the electronic tinkering. It’s right up front and center from the synthesizers whirring along with opening track “Getting to Know the End”, and the extra instrumentation (provided by both Anderson and Khoujinian) adds another dimension to both rockers like “Jewel” and “slow ones” like “Speak with Spirits”. T. Gold truly shine at the intersection of the traditional and synthetic, as highlights like the mountain folk-tinged “New Land” and closing ballad “Wagoner’s Lad” make clear. Looking at what they’re able to do here, the Research Triangle’s music world is evidently all the richer for having T. Gold and its twin minds at the center of it. (Bandcamp link)
Subtle Body – Subtle Body
Release date: January 23rd Record label: Strange Mono Genre: Post-punk, lo-fi punk, synthpunk, goth, no wave Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Infinite Casualties
A new quintet from Philadelphia made up by a bunch of “punk, hardcore, and grind” veterans, Subtle Body are the latest group to throw their hats in the realms of muddy, spooky, lo-fi post-punk and synthpunk. The group (vocalist Bo, synth player Rachel, drummer Mike, guitarist Chips, and bassist Dave) have linked up with prolific local label Strange Mono (Idiot Mambo, Snow Caps, Webb Chapel) to release their self-titled debut cassette, a twenty-three-minute descent into the gothic side of basement punk. Dave’s bass swims in a murky sea of haunting vocals, freaked-out drums, and plenty of synths in “The Body”, the first non-intro track, and most of Subtle Body’s rockers (“Infinite Casualties”, “Social Dispute”, “Stolen World”) follow in much the same fashion. Nevertheless, Subtle Body still have the capability to swerve into a strange synth ambient piece right in the middle of the album (“Eyes on the Ground”), and are even able to more or less successfully merge their weird and punk sides with “Estrangement”. Subtle Body wrap up their first album about as quickly as possible, but there’s still time for one five-minute epic in “Black Candle”, which is effectively four minutes of pounding garage-post-punk and then a weird electronic outro; altogether, the future is looking nice and bleak for Subtle Body. (Bandcamp link)
The blog was inactive yesterday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the States, but we’re back today with a brand-new Pressing Concerns featuring new albums from Fuzzy Feelings, Storm Boy, and Ace of Spit, plus a reissue of Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs‘ sole LP. Check ’em out below!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs – Pigus Drunkus Maximus
Release date: January 16th Record label: Blind Owl/East of Lincoln Genre: Rock and roll, blues rock, R&B, bar rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dance with Your Baby
It’s not hyperbole in the slightest to refer to Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs as legends of the Los Angeles punk underground. The rock and roll/R&B group were led by the late “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a Kentucky transplant who has a song on a Van Halen album named after him, and the equally memorable Carlos Guitarlos featured on lead guitar. They associated with everyone from X to The Doors to Tom Waits in their heyday, and Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate released the band’s only recorded output, Pigus Drunkus Maximus, in 1987. The LP–which was actually recorded in 1981–has been out of print for decades, leading to Blind Owl Records and East Of Lincoln Productions partnering for its first ever reissue nearly forty years after it initially came out. Pigus Drunkus Maximus is a one-way ticket back to the Los Angeles chronicled by John Doe and Exene Cervenka in their contemporaneous records, although Koncek and his band preferred to survey the landscape via a collection of electric blues rock versions of songs collected from across rock and roll’s history. We start at 150% with the saxophone-heavy bar rock of “Dance with Your Baby” (one of the relatively few originals on the album), and the party continues through numbers like the garage rock strut of “Homework”, the blues-punk of “Obviously Five Believers”, and the soulful fire of “Hole in My Pocket”. Pigus Drunkus Maximus bears the burden of being the only recorded document of something that almost certainly couldn’t have been defined by one album, but thankfully the attempt to do so still sounds very good today. (Bandcamp link)
Fuzzy Feelings – Under the Pit
Release date: January 13th Record label: Self-released Genre: Lo-fi pop, power pop, fuzz pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: 50 Takes
“Fuzzy Feelings” is a fairly apt band name for the latest project of Joseph Weber, a London-based musician who previously played in the early-2010s Brooklyn fuzz-pop group Gross Relations. After putting out an EP under the name Joey Relations in 2024, Weber began rolling out this latest band with a string of singles late last year (initially under the name Funny Feelings; wonder what’s up with the name change) leading up to Under the Pit, a twelve-song, twenty-one-minute exercise in lo-fi power pop that is indeed of both the “fuzzy” and “feelings” variety. Imagine a “slacker”, more bummed-out version of Mythical Motors’ bite-sized one-man-electric-power-pop records, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Under the Pit. Fuzzy Feelings chug indifferently through amplified-to-rock hooks in “Powerline” and “Down & Sideways”, and an intense streak of lo-fi, minimal, drum-machine-aided garage-rock-guitar-pop remains essentially unbroken from there on: maybe “Hey” and “Soul Seeker” are a little softer, but they don’t cause the middle to drag. Aside from the twin thirty-second experiences of “Sludge Mains” and “Pink Sun”, the “outliers” are probably “50 Takes” (a two-minute song that starts with a keyboard hook so great that Weber waits until the song is half over to even start singing) and “Campaign” (okay, so here’s the ballad, right in the penultimate slot where it belongs). It’s everything you could want in one of these kinds of albums, in the least amount of time necessary to do it. (Bandcamp link)
Storm Boy – Beast Machine Theory
Release date: January 15th Record label: Self-released Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Tiny Fists
The Olympia-based “post-hardcore rock n roll” group Storm Boy was formed by guitarist/vocalist Chas Roberts and drummer Jeremy Anderson (who’d played together previously in the band Voycheck), and they quickly added guitarist/vocalist Charli Beaumont and bassist/vocalist Kuba Bednarek before their first EP, Superposition!, came out in late 2024. We’re joining the quartet on the occasion of their debut full-length, Beast Machine Theory, which is indeed a trip directly into the gruff, garage-y worlds of post-hardcore, punk rock, and even “orgcore”. They may be from the West Coast, but Storm Boy have clearly listened to a good deal of the Dischord Records discography, as first-half post-hardcore punk rock cuts like “Tiny Fists” and “Always Bet on Black (and Pink)” make clear. The beer-soaked anthem “From Your Mouth” lands closer to Hot Water Music, and Storm Boy indeed inject the necessary melodic punk energy and catchiness into that one to make it work. Unlike a lot of bands in this mold, Storm Boy really develop and tease these songs out; there’s only eight songs on this thirty-plus minute LP, meaning they’ve got the time to start “…And Then Four” with a spare, noir-ish opening minute and turn closing track “The Minute We’re Born” into a six-minute endurance-test finale. There’s a lot on Beast Machine Theory, and a lot to like on it, an encouraging sign for a band on their debut album. (Bandcamp link)
Ace of Spit – Ace of Spit II
Release date: January 3rd Record label: Sinkhole/Wombat Cock Genre: Garage rock, punk rock, surf rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Weapons Down
I first heard about St. Louis garage rockers Ace of Spit in 2022 thanks to their Sophomore Lounge-released self-titled debut album, a wild punk rock LP that sucked up and spat out surf rock, proto-punk, and even a bit of power pop on us all (it snuck onto my year-end list and everything). Four years later, Ace of Spit kicked off 2026 by releasing their sophomore album Ace of Spit II, this time co-released by legendary St. Louis music venue The Sinkhole’s record label and something called “Wombat Cock”. If anything, Ace of Spit II is an even greater commitment to the twin tornados of freewheeling garage punk and “spaghetti western” vibes; with one major exception, the quartet (Brett, Scott, Steve, and Gabe) spend all of this LP’s twenty-seven minutes prowling the fabled “Cramps to MC5” spectrum. The album’s first three songs are all “rippers”, to be sure, but the ever-so-subtle desert-rockabilly sound is already there, and it only gets more obvious in “Diaspora Rock”, “Road to Reno”, and the genuinely-Western-evoking “Past Continuous”. That one “major exception” I mentioned earlier is “Parts List”, a bizarre excursion into fuzzed-out, fried electronica (with Link Wray riffs over top of it, of course) for three minutes; no idea why that’s smack dab in the middle of the record, but I don’t mind it–and besides, everything else rocks, so who cares? (Bandcamp link)
The second Pressing Concerns of the week (and third of 2026) features four records coming out tomorrow, January 16th: new albums from Peaer and Wormy, a reissue from Cub, and the wider release of an album by Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One. Earlier this week, we looked at new records from Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, Rotundos / Vatos Tristes, and Joe Glass; check that post out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Cub – Come Out Come Out (30th Anniversary Edition)
Release date: January 16th Record label: Mint Genre: Twee, indie pop, cuddlecore, power pop, pop punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Ticket to Spain
The Vancouver, British Columbia indie pop group Cub are probably most well-known for their 1993 debut album Betti-Cola, a classic in twee (and self-described “cuddlecore”) that put Mint Records (now a Canadian institution) on the map. Come Out Come Out was the sophomore record (out of three; they broke up in 1997), originally released in 1995 as a triple 7” (of course) and reissued on CD in 2007. This vinyl edition is the first time that Come Out Come Out has been released on a boring-old 12-inch record, and it also marks the first time I’ve heard this record in full. Here, original members Lisa Marr (vocals/bass) and Robynn Iwata (guitar/backing vocals) are joined by new drummer Lisa G, and the three of them pick up the irresistible twee-pop thread that Cub began with Betti-Cola two years previously.
Come Out Come Out is probably a more polished and “professional”-sounding album than Betti-Cola (if nothing else, it features a stable core trio, with guest musicians like organist Lorraine Finch and percussionist Marc L’Esperance only used as additions to the main three). Cub aren’t a “punk band” and wouldn’t be called “power pop” by that genre’s gatekeepers, but opening track “Ticket to Spain” is great, loud, “rocking” pop music no matter what we call it. “My Flaming Red Bobsled”, “Voracious”, and “Life of Crime” are the work of a genuine garage rock band (imagine the intermittent “prowling” vibes of one of Cub’s biggest influences, Beat Happening, but with better musicianship), “Everything’s Geometry”, “Your Bed”, and “So Far Apart” are Cub at their fluffiest, and “New York City” (famously covered by Cub tourmates They Might Be Giants) ought to be an indie pop standard. Speaking of covers, there’s a Yoko Ono one and a Go-Go’s one (I’m partial to the latter, “Vacation”, but they both work as “Cub songs”), and there’s a bonus live version of Beat Happening’s “Cast a Shadow” (which they also did on Betti-Cola; it’s one of my favorite ones from that album) featuring an “Italian harmonica man”. In between wild harmonica solos and cringeworthy banter (Cub did their best with what the Italian harmonica man gave them, I admit), an all-time great indie pop song is performed. Marr sings “Cast a Shadow” with an audible big grin on her face, which sums up all of Come Out Come Out very well. (Bandcamp link)
Peaer – Doppelgänger
Release date: January 16th Record label: Danger Collective Genre: Math rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, slowcore Formats: Digital Pull Track: Just Because
The SUNY Purchase-originating trio Peaer were one of the great indie rock bands to emerge from the American Northeast in the mid-2010s, going from a Peter Katz solo project to a full-fledged band who put out two albums on Tiny Engines (their 2016 self-titled album and 2019’s A Healthy Earth). Although Katz, bassist Thom Lombardi, and drummer Jeremy Kinney spent the first half of this decade in relative silence, they continued work on a third proper Peaer album, finally arriving at the beginning of 2026 as Doppelgänger. The first song from Doppelgänger we heard, “Just Because” (released last year as a standalone single), was a sparkling missive right out of the more melodic end of the “Exploding in Sound math rock” heyday; it’s a bit perkier than Doppelgänger as a whole, but it’s the kind of well-crafted, sleek, friendly-but-not-overly-so indie rock that populates the record.
For a band who hadn’t been afraid to get pretty noisy in the past, Doppelgänger represents a clear shift into more “refined”, “restrained”, “reserved” and other such “re”-word-territory. The “rocking” side of Peaer is largely confined to wonky guitar solos in “Part of the Problem” and “Bad News”, as well as the trash-compactor-ending to “Rose in My Teeth”; they’re exciting moments, to be sure, but the less-explosive bridges in between them are what make up Doppelgänger’s foundation. “End of the World” opens the album with Peaer’s clearest foray yet into “guitar pop” (it’s damn-near toe-tapping!); if they don’t quite do anything like that again, “Part of the Problem” and “Just Because” at the very least form an undeniably catchy opening trio. “No More Today” is catchy too, I suppose, but it has a dour streak that’s apparently Doppelgänger’s final missing piece: from there, Peaer make songs like “Button” and “Bad News” sound like the most natural things in the world. Nonetheless, it took six years and (one imagines) a great deal of tinkering to get to Doppelgänger, and I don’t take this “effortless”-seeming final product for granted. (Bandcamp link)
Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One – Antenna
Release date: January 16th Record label: The Forever Exploding Dynamo Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock, experimental rock, noise rock, ambient Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Touché
The intriguingly-named Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One are a new band from Columbus made up of three longtime central Ohio indie rock musicians in drummer/keyboardist Keith Hanlon (The Black Swans, Orchestraville), guitarist/vocalist Keith Novicki (Closet Mix), and bassist Joel Walter (who’s put out a few solo albums). The trio’s first album, Antenna, appeared on Bandcamp last October, but Novicki has given it a wider release this month via his new record label, The Forever Exploding Dynamo. Antenna, a thirty-five-minute LP made up of only five songs, is “indie rock” for those of us who enjoy music that veers between the accessible and the challenging. Long-running groups like Oneida and the similarly-named Eleventh Dream Day come to mind–opening and closing your album with twin eleven-minute pillars of Sonic Youth-style art rock is a pretty inarguable “statement”, as is sticking a nice, dirty garage punk song right in the middle of your LP (“Touché”, which holds the center in between a meandering five-minute dream-rock song called “Keyhole” and the ambient piece “Defeated Lions”). It’s those opening and closing tracks that really cement Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One as true professionals in this arena (and, given that they together make up the majority of the album, that’s a good thing). “Dissolve Me Now” condenses from noise into something melodic, while “Dilly Dally” closes the album by effectively doing the reverse. There’s an art to making this kind of thing, and Eleven Plus Two = Twelve Plus One have hit the ground sculpting with Antenna. (Bandcamp link)
Wormy – Shark River
Release date: January 16th Record label: Rose Garden Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, indie folk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Cocaine Bear
Brooklyn musician Noah Rauchwerk has been quite active over the past decade, whether he’s been playing alongside his brother in the folk duo The Lords of Liechtenstein, drumming for Samia (among other acts) on tour, or guesting on the most recent Little Hag album. He’s nonetheless found time for his solo project Wormy in recent years, releasing an album called I’m Sweating All the Time in 2022 (with a companion version featuring Another Michael, Dogwood Tales, and Medium Build following not long afterwards). The sophomore Wormy album, Shark River, is another chance for Rauchwerk to call in a bunch of musicians he’s crossed paths with in his line of work–it features contributions from members of Remo Drive, Another Michael, Little Hag, and Samia, among others. With the kind of comfy indie folk Rauchwerk makes as Wormy, having too many cooks in the kitchen is a real concern, but Shark River walks the line very well, balancing Rauchwerk’s delicate, intimate obvious influences (Bright Eyes, mid-period Mountain Goats) with the polish some of his collaborators have pursued in their own music. Rauchwerk’s emotive singer-songwriter style is at the core of Shark River both in its most gigantic heartland-pop moments (“I Hate You”, “Old Dog”) and its simplest, quietest ones (“Cocaine Bear”, effectively a minimal-electric version of the best Slaughter Beach, Dog songs, and “Give Up”, featuring a great Hovvdy name-drop). Sometimes, it’s just as simple as this: the songwriting on Shark River is better than that of most of its peers, so it stands out. (Bandcamp link)
The second Pressing Concerns of 2026 is a survey of good new music that came out around New Years’: we have new albums from Celebrity Telethon, Dish Pit Violet, and Joe Glass, plus a split EP from Rotundos and Vatos Tristes. The blog is still on a two-posts-a-week schedule for now, but I think these will tide you over until 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.
Celebrity Telethon – Celebrity Telethon
Release date: December 31st Record label: Self-released Genre: Garage rock, cowpunk, country rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Film Noir
We either ended 2025 or began 2026 with a major twist. I first heard Portland, Oregon group Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon back in 2021, when the alt-country band released “Gretchen Took a Ride”; I called the single a combination of “dreamy folk” and “West Coast cosmic psychedelia” at the time. 2023’s The Knockout Game leaned a bit more into outlaw country-punk, but even so, that was a small change compared to where the Celebrity Telethon ended up on their latest album. Released on New Year’s Eve 2025 (necessitating me treating it like a 2026 release for blog purposes), Celebrity Telethon finds Habegger dropping his name from the project; whether intentional or not, the spotlight is now equally shining on players like bassist Jack Moriarty, drummer Isaac Beach, guitarist Addison Clark, saxophonist Tax Coffey, and everyone else who drops by to lay something down throughout these eleven songs.
There’s nothing neat and tidy about Celebrity Telethon: this is a seedy, sleazy West Coast punk-garage-rock album. When Habegger croaks about “watching skin flick movies with [his] motherfucking mother-in-law” over a runaway rock-and-roll instrumental, it’s a disconcerting warning to buckle up, and, not long afterward, “Neighborhood Regulars” takes the Celebrity Telethon into terrain closer to Midwestern freaks like Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go Records than anywhere near the Laurel Canyon. When the Celebrity Telethon dial up a dark, noirish country-punk sound on “The Rumors Are True” and “(A Return to) Salem’s Lot”, it’s a thin enough link to their previous work, although real Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon throwbacks are here and there, too. There’s a mid-tempo slacker-pop song called “Film Noir” that finds Habegger embracing his inner Craig Finn, a nice cowpunk exercise called “How’d You Get Here from So Far?”, and then the closing track is a blistering version of the old country song “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water”. The grand finale gets pretty batshit and absurd as it nears the five minute mark, a compelling argument that there’s plenty of fun to be had on the wrong side of town. (Bandcamp link)
Dish Pit Violet – Dish Pit Violet
Release date: January 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, chamber pop, twee, orchestral pop, synthpop, dance-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: You Are My American Dream
Dish Pit Violet is a new indie pop project from Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Violent Fink, and her self-titled debut album is a bright and vibrant pop album borne from a tumultuous time in her life–coming out as transgender, the subsequent estrangement from her immediate family, leaving a “toxic” band she co-founded and played in for several years. Fink’s first statement of her new life is defiantly committed to “dance rock grooves” and “cutie-pie sentiments” (as she puts it); these are appropriate descriptors for Dish Pit Violet’s synth- and horn-laden, danceable indie pop, which reminds me of the pop-forward side of Elephant 6 (of Montreal, of course, being the biggest one) and the queer pop of Pelvis Wrestley. Fink’s background is in post-punk, and that assuredly helps with the strong grooves and 80s synthpop tones of “Nobody’s Better”, “I Hope I’m Ready for You”, and “I Hate It When I Do That”, but the embrace of twee-pop directness is where Dish Pit Violet asserts a new, distinct identity.
This works very well for Dish Pit Violet’s love songs (“You Are My American Dream”, “Tip-Top-Drop-Dead-Knock-Out”, “Sweetheart”…look, there are a lot of ‘em), but Fink wields the gaudy, sequined blunt-force hammer when dealing with the heaviness at the heart of Dish Pit Violet, too. “Rough String” and “You Picked Jesus Over Me” do in fact come right out and say it (“Just because somebody loved you then / Doesn’t mean you owe them anything” in the former and, ah, the title line of the latter), and “Hi I’m Violet” opens the album with an unapologetic personal introduction. It’s the “simplicity” of “twee-pop” that makes it possible to bound across an eternity like this; it’s why that label gets applied to some of the most powerful music in the world to me, and it’s a power that Dish Pit Violet harnesses for an entire debut album. (Bandcamp link)
Rotundos / Vatos Tristes – Para Siempre
Release date: January 1st Record label: 7Songs Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore, emo Formats: Digital Pull Track: Upside Down
For the third January in a row, Chicago emo-punk group Rotundos have opened the year with new music: their Fragments EP got them on my radar in January 2024, their self-titled debut album followed almost exactly twelve months later, and this year they’ve invited another Windy City group, Vatos Tristes, to join in the fun via a split EP called Para Siempre. Featuring three songs from each band plus one collaborative finale, Para Siempre confirms that Rotundos (Jose Israel, Jacob Padilla-Caldero, Henry Speer, and new member Eric King) are one of the most explosive bands in Chicago post-hardcore/punk rock and introduces a band operating in similar terrain in Vatos Tristes (whose output up until now consisted of only a couple of singles and a live session). The former band continues to showcase their range, pulling out a blistering post-hardcore punk opener in “Upside Down”, turning to a skewed post-punk touch with “Late Nights”, and finishing with 90s emo atmospherics in “And You Know I…”. Vatos Tristes’ first two songs paint them as a classic Hum-esque “heavy shoegaze/alt-rock” group, but the trumpet, scatting, and overall Latin touches of “My Way” are a surprise and, as it turns out, help set up closing track “Pure Nieve”. The finale, described by the bands as a trip into Regional Mexican music, is a complete embrace of acoustic guitars and horns unlike anything else on Para Siempre. Given how in-sync Rotundos and Vatos Tristes sound out on this limb, however, the team-up feels automatic. (Bandcamp link)
Joe Glass – Snakewards
Release date: January 3rd Record label: Hallogallo Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop, mod revival Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Man Who Lost His Diamond
The Rockford-originating, Chicago-based musician Joe Glass has been playing bass guitar in the live version of Kai Slater’s acclaimed mod revival/power pop project Sharp Pins as of late, but he’s a singer-songwriter in his own right as well, releasing a collection of lo-fi, psychedelic guitar pop called Slither in 2022. His second solo album, Snakewards (good thematic titling we’ve got here), is perhaps the result of playing in what is by all accounts a very tight live trio in Sharp Pins; Glass has landed himself directly in the world of brisk, mid-fi, early Guided by Voices-evoking power pop that Slater (who put out the album on his Hallogallo label) has also been pursuing. Snakewards is not precisely on the same level of otherworldly retro-pop-adhering discipline as Sharp Pins’ Balloon Balloon Balloon; it’s a little looser and garagier in places still, but it’s cut from the same cloth. Perfect jangle-power pop like “Dust on Your Halo”, “Man Who Lost His Diamond”, “All About You”, “Tied Tight”, and “New Pose” (what a rave-up in that one!) don’t grow on trees, and the songs in between them aren’t throwaways, either; when the stocking-stuffers are as well-thought-out and -performed as “Buck Wild” and “Candy Blowout 2”, we’re set up for a rewarding front-to-back listen of a pop album. Thirty-one minutes never went so fast. (Bandcamp link)
Are you ready? Well, whether you are or not, we’re starting off 2026 in Pressing Concerns today. We’ve got four albums coming out tomorrow, January 9th: new LPs from The Fragiles, Winged Wheel, Six Going on Seven, and Clémentine March. “With a bang”, indeed. The actual first blog post of 2026 was the December 2025 playlist, which went up on Monday, so check that one out too if you missed it.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Fragiles – Sing the Heat of the Sun
Release date: January 9th Record label: Living Lost Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, psychedelic pop, dream pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Broken Pendulum
Philadelphia musician David Settle ruled the realms of lo-fi indie rock in 2020 and 2021, putting out a slew of albums via his aliases The Fragiles, Big Heet, and Psychic Flowers (on his own Living Lost label) before they all went silent for the past couple of years. It’s not like Settle hasn’t been busy in the meantime–he’s playing bass for the great 2nd Grade, and I believe he’s been raising a kid–but his bands have been missed as of late, so it’s nice to start off 2026 with the first album from The Fragiles in five years. While Big Heet deals in noisy post-punk and Psychic Flowers in shit-fi fuzz pop, The Fragiles has always been where Settle explores dreamier, almost psychedelic indie-gaze, and Sing the Heat of the Sun offers a strong collection of such material.
With a capable band behind him (Remember Sports/Spring Onion’s Catherine Dwyer on bass, Gavin Perez-Canto of DRILL on drums, and Ylayali’s Francis Lyons on occasional synth), Settle is able to give the songs of Sing the Heat of the Sun delicate but forceful readings. There are a handful of instant-classic guitar pop songs on here (the jangly, Flying Nun-ish opening track “Broken Pendulum” and the bouncy, scuzzy lo-fi pop of “Dig for Now” both fit), and The Fragiles hold together in the greyer, more challenging material that’s the heart of the record, too. On the one hand, you’ve got the quiet ballads of “River’s Roll” and “Drugstore Winner”, and on the other, a wall-of-sound shoegaze influence on the likes of “Unglued”–but songs like the thrilling fuzz-noise-pop “Hell Or” and the slowcore crescendo of “Fall into Gray” demonstrate that it isn’t an “either/or” proposition. Whether Sing the Heat of the Sun marks the return of David Settle to his trio of projects or if it’s just a one-off for now, it’s a strong reminder how good this guy is in this particular sandbox. (Bandcamp link)
Winged Wheel – Desert So Green
Release date: January 9th Record label: 12XU Genre: Post-rock, psychedelia, post-punk, art rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Speed Table
The “creatively and geographically scattered” indie rock supergroup Winged Wheel emerged in 2022 as a quartet with their remote-created first album and 12XU debut, No Island, and the album’s success led to an expanded lineup, in-person live shows and recording sessions, and a sophomore album called Big Hotel in 2024. After touring in support of that album last year, the now-sextet, which consists of Matchess and Circuit des Yeux’s Whitney Johnson, Spray Paint’s Cory Plump, Powers/Rolin Duo’s Matthew J. Rolin, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, Water Damage’s Lonnie Slack, and Idle Ray/Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Fred Thomas, began recording Desert So Green in Chicago. The resultant record is an overwhelming, beautiful, “collective” art rock album, checking the “post-rock”, “post-punk”, and “psychedelia” boxes at different intervals.
Desert So Green opens with what I’d call a “vibe”; specifically, a six-minute shimmering post-rock instrumental deemed “Canvas 11”. Winged Wheel flex their “far-reaching” muscles soon after that, though, as the empty-space and violin-aided “Canvas 2” imagines a deconstructed post-rock Mekons, and the pummeling, ethereal “Speed Table” kind of feels like their take on mid-period Swans. An album that can regularly veer into out-there moments like the collage of “Canvas 8” can’t really “settle in” to anything, but there’s a comfort to Winged Wheel’s dream-psych rhythm-forward moments like “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” and “Bird Spells” (and “I See Poseurs Every Day” is damn near a pop song made out of the stuff). Desert So Green may be Winged Wheel’s best work yet (time will tell and whatnot), but I can already confidently say that it sounds like a band with infinite possibilities between their members continuing the work of pursuing new ones. (Bandcamp link)
Six Going on Seven – Human Tears
Release date: January 9th Record label: Spartan Genre: Art rock, new wave, synthpop, sophisti-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Jack Jones
Six Going on Seven emerged in the mid-1990s from Boston’s post-hardcore/emo underground, playing shows with bands like Braid, The Promise Ring, and Elliott and putting out music on Hydra Head and Doghouse Records. When they reunited in 2024 after being split up for over twenty years, they signed with Spartan Records, who’ve recently worked with notable 90s emo bands like Boys Life, Knapsack, and The Van Veldt. So, when I pressed play on their fourth LP and first since 2021, Human Tears, I was of course expecting it to sound like Peter Gabriel. Kidding! But that’s indeed what comes to mind listening to “Jack Jones”, the first non-intro song on Human Tears.
The trio may not be the first emo-originating band to draw inspiration from 80s art rock (it is, in effect, trading in one “emotional” genre of music for another), but, to be clear, we’re talking about a full-on immersion in the decade and its array of new wave, synthpop, prog-pop, sophisti-pop, and so on and so forth. One thing that Six Going on Seven do leave behind in the 1980s is excess; this is a more streamlined take on this kind of music, with a few songs wrapping things up in around two minutes and even the longer ones feeling like they go on for only as long as they need to. That doesn’t stop Human Tears from being just as fun and awe-inspiring as the music Six Going on Seven have chosen to evoke, however. (Bandcamp link)
Clémentine March – Powder Keg
Release date: January 9th Record label: PRAH Genre: Art pop, chamber pop, indie pop, post-punk, psychedelic pop, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Upheaval
The French-British (currently London-based) musician Clémentine March began putting out records of Brazil-influenced orchestral art pop in the late 2010s, releasing two EPs and two LPs from 2017 to 2023. Powder Keg is March’s third solo album, and it features contributions from an impressive array of musicians she’s connected with touring and recording across Europe (Naima Bock, Sophie Jamieson, Katy J Pearson, Alabaster DePlume, Dana Gavanski, and members of Tapir!). Nonetheless, Powder Keg lands on the more laid-back side of French (or, I guess, part-French) indie pop; the album’s core trio of March, bassist Ollie Chapman, and drummer Sophie Lowe leisurely wander through a collection of pop songs where strings and horns jump in and out as the feeling strikes. Of course, they cover quite a bit of ground through their meandering; the sprawling, six-minute dream pop of opening track “After the Solstice” switches gears into the perfunctory horn-tinged indie pop of “Lixo Sentimental”, and then “Upheaval” surprisingly moves into electric alt-rock. “Fireworks”, “Symtomatique”, and “Lucie” all prove that March can make groovy post-punk pop gems, but Powder Keg is too ambitious to be content to ride the rhythms for all too long. Regardless of where Powder Keg ends up on any of its dozen tracks, though, deft pop touches are never too far away. (Bandcamp link)
We’re slowly easing into 2026; last week, we crammed threedifferentPressing Concerns in before the New Year and revealed the results of the Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll. The December 2025 playlist is a bit of a grab-bag, pulling stuff from all over last year and some odds and ends, too. There won’t be a Tuesday post this week; we’re probably looking at two a week for at least part of January.
Laika Songs, The Michael Character, and Moviola all have two songs on this playlist.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (I added a couple of extra songs to the streaming versions this time, because this month was unusually heavy for non-streaming picks). 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.
“Little Act”, Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls From Little Act (2025, Rock for Sale)
Nico Hedley and Léna Bartels launched a series called “Splits for Sale” last year, in which their record label Rock for Sale “pair[s] artists who have previously never worked together and invite[s] them to collaborate”. The second Splits for Sale EP links together two New York City folk acts: The Bird Calls, aka the solo project of Sam Sodomsky, and Izzy Oram Brown, a Brooklyn guitarist and songwriter who also played on Bartels’ most recent solo album. Little Act’s title track, in which Brown and Sodomsky share lead vocals, is a late entry for the best pop song of 2025: it’s the best of “lo-fi, drum machine indie pop” and “folk rock” all in one. Read more about Little Act here.
“Days of the Atom Bomb”, Endless Mike and the Beagle Club From The Forest Is the Trees (2025, Sidewalk Chalk)
Endless Mike and the Beagle Club are new to me, but I feel like I immediately understood the Johnstown, Pennsylvania act’s whole deal after just one listen to their latest album, The Forest Is the Trees. Endless Mike, aka Mike Miller, is a Rust Belt troubadour making alt-country, cowpunk, folk rock, “Americana”, “heartland rock” and touring the underground circuit for two decades. The Forest Is the Trees has a lot to like on it, but it boldly starts with its best song, a bottle rocket cowpunk/country punk rocker called “Days of the Atomic Bomb” that burns brighter than anything on the LP. Read more about The Forest Is the Trees here.
“Mario Party Crashout!”, Addicus From A Story About… (2025, Acid Punk)
Over ten scrappy indie-pop-punk songs, Addicus made their case as a notable name in the Upper Peninsula music scene with their 2024 self-titled debut album. The trio didn’t wait long to return, as we were given a sophomore Addicus album, A Story About…, a year and change later. It’s a shorter record than Addicus, but it’s their strongest one yet. Their bread and butter is still three-to-four-chord wreckers of punk-pop songs: see “Mario Party Crashout!”, a shining example of the form hidden in A Story About…’s second half. Read more about A Story About… here.
“Over & Over”, Summer Blue From Summer Blue (2025, New Morality Zine)
I associate Chicago label New Morality Zine with a certain muscular kind of music sitting at the intersection of hardcore punk, alt-rock, and shoegaze, but recent signee Summer Blue don’t quite fit the mold. The San Jose-based quartet (“Victoria, Matthew, Eric, and Syed”) call themselves a power pop band and reference groups like The Sundays and Velocity Girl as inspiration for their self-titled debut EP. I’m happy to report that Summer Blue nails this sort of wistful but euphoric dreamy 90s power pop sound, and the bursting-with-hooks “Over & Over” is one of the best pop songs I’ve heard in recent memory.
“A Little a Lot”, Dan Darrah From Vacationland (2025, Sunday Drive)
Toronto’s Dan Darrah ended 2025 by quietly dropping his second album of the year, Vacationland; unlike his lastcouple of LPs, this one is digital-only, and it doesn’t appear that his regular backing band The Rain play on this one. Maybe Vacationland is subsequently supposed to be a more casual or lower-stakes Darrah record, but there isn’t a drop-off in quality compared to his last few albums here. Vacationland is pretty laid-back and meandering as a whole, but the drum-machine-propelled opening track “A Little a Lot” is a lively exception. Read more about Vacationland here.
“Friendly Competition”, Constant Greetings From Good Sports (2025, Retriever)
I called New Brunswick indie rock group Constant Greetings’ sophomore album an “intriguing collection of somewhat hazy, somewhat dark, yet fairly catchy 90s-indebted indie rock” at the time, and I’m pleased to report that Good Sports, their third LP, lives up to and even expands upon that record’s foundation. Constant Greetings favor a relatively unadorned setup, but their songs are sneakily quite layered, and there’s a throughline from more garage-y indie-punk-rock to hook-y, melodic, punched-up pop rock like “Friendly Competition”, maybe the best song on the album. Read more about Good Sports here.
“Anxiety”, The Max Levine Ensemble From Sad State (2025)
Before his work in Rosy Overdrive fixtures Bad Moves and Dim Wizard, Washington, D.C. musician David Combs led the pop punk trio The Max Levine Ensemble alongside bassist Ben Epstein and drummer Nick Popovici in the early 2000s (a bygone era in which figures like “Plan-It-X Records” and “Ben Weasel” carried now-unthinkable weight). The first Max Levine Ensemble record in ten years isn’t “new music”, per se, but it’s three newly-recorded versions of previously-unreleased Max Levine Ensemble songs from the 2010s put to tape as an acknowledgement of the group’s 25th anniversary. The Ensemble is also playing a show with The Ergs as part of the anniversary commemoration, which saves me the trouble of making up a more tenuous excuse to reference The Ergs as a band to whose fans these songs will also appeal.
“Break It Down Again”, Sting Pain Index From The Revolution Somewhere Else (2025)
Sting Pain Index are a self-proclaimed “punk rock supergroup”, and I suppose that their newest EP, The Revolution Somewhere Else, is punk rock–sometimes of a noisy, abrasive, and “post-” variety, and sometimes not like that at all. The Revolution Somewhere Else ends with a shockingly faithful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Break It Down Again” (if the title of the EP sounded familiar but unplaceable to you–it’s a paraphrased lyric from this one). Sting Pain Index clearly saw something in this also-ran pop song that speaks to their agitated underground Americana, and its inclusion on The Revolution Somewhere Else is, ironically, successful at building this connection up. Read more about The Revolution Somewhere Else here.
“Optimism Shame”, Laika Songs From I Can Feel an Ending (2025, Two Worlds/Galaxy Train)
I Can Feel an Ending, Laika Songs’ second album in as many years, is an incredibly comfortable one: it’s just as large as 2024’s Slowly Spiraling Towards the Lightis and has at least as many great pop moments, but it’s even less concerned with presenting them punctually or linearly. So many of the most immediate tracks on I Can Feel an Ending come in its second half, including the gentle power pop charms of “Optimism Shame”, which is my favorite song on the LP at this exact moment. Read more about I Can Feel an Ending here.
“Telling You Nothing”, Moviola From Glen Echo Autoharp (1998, Spirit of Orr)
I took a trip over twenty-five years back to listen to an early album by the long-running Columbus, Ohio alt-country group Moviola, whose most recent album, Earthbound, appeared on this blog in 2025. Glen Echo Autoharp is a distorted, fuzzy example of Midwestern 90s indie rock that has legitimate twang in some places and sounds more like Guided by Voices, Sebadoh and the like in others. “Telling You Nothing”, the album’s opening track, is the “hit” of Glen Echo Autoharp if it has such a thing; it’s a beautiful, earnest pop rock ballad run through a substantial number of filters in between inception and appearance on-record.
“Sydd”, Pelted From Effort (2025, Broken Cycle)
One of the countless bands currently making music that features some degree of shoegaze and alt-country influence in Philadelphia is called Pelted (they call it “horse rock”), but there’s just something to their debut EP Effort that kept me returning to it as 2025 wound to a close. I think the third track, “Sydd”, is my favorite. It’s (I believe) the only song that band co-leader Dan Hanna sings; the vocals remind me a lot of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, and the lyrics–an offbeat character study of the titular unsavory figure–enhance the comparison in my mind. Read more about Effort here.
“Old Friend”, Erie Choir From Golden Reviser (2025, Potluck Foundation)
Eric Roehrig is a North Carolina indie rock veteran, probably most well-known as one of the two singer-guitarists in the late 90s/early 00s Saddle Creek group Sorry About Dresden (alongside the late Matt Oberst). Roehrig’s quasi-solo project Erie Choir has existed for nearly as long, though, and the group returned last year with an album called Golden Reviser (featuring contributions from ex-Sorry About Dresden members and other Saddle Creek-associated acts). It’s a solid record of relaxed folk rock and indie pop, but the rest of Golden Reviser didn’t prepare me for how much I ended up loving its closing track, “Old Friend”. It’s a really captivating roots/country rock finale, something that owes more to names like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett than Bright Eyes (but with a little bit of Saddle Creek edge to it, still, sure).
“Quit with Suzy (75K)”, Humbug From Open Season (2025)
Pasadena’s Humbug bill themselves as a “new power pop band”, but they don’t really slot into the jangly, wistful version of the genre happening upstate in San Francisco, nor are they necessarily really loud Weezer-worshipping alt-rockers, either. On Open Season, Humbug really sound like a band out of time, landing closer than anything to offbeat, catchy turn-of-the-century indie rock; not really 2000s “post-punk revival”, aware of XTC and The Beach Boys but not directly imitating them. This adds some dimension to Open Season–for instance, how many other bands would write about middle-class angst so directly and melodically as “Quit with Suzy (75K)”? Read more about Open Season here.
“Scared to Dance”, Hermetic Delight From Vagabond Melodies (2025, Facultative/October Tone)
The Turkish/French trio Hermetic Delight (currently based in Strasbourg) checked in last year with Vagabond Melodies, which is I believe their third LP since 2012. It’s a solid album sitting at the corner of “art pop” and “indie rock”, exploring the realms of synthpop, post-punk, and dream pop over its nine songs. My favorite song on Vagabond Melodies is a six-minute wrecking ball of a dance-pop song called (of course) “Scared to Dance”; the trio keep the energy steady, slick, and undeniable for the entirety of the track.
“Start Making Sense”, The Kyle Sowashes From Start Making Sense (2025, Anyway)
Kyle Sowash is a Columbus, Ohio indie rock institution who’s been stubbornly leading his eponymous band in gruff, punk-adjacent underground rock music for coming up on twenty years now. Start Making Sense, the Kyle Sowashes’ first LP in six years, is thirteen songs of The Kyle Sowashes experience, which can be described in loose genre-based terms (pop punk, “orgcore”, 90s-style indie garage rock) or more basic, kind-of-backhanded-sounding descriptors (“no-frills”, “workmanlike”, “everyman”, “barebones”). The title track is my favorite one; its beleaguered chorus feels like the big cathartic moment towards which it feels like the entire record was building up. Read more about Start Making Sense here.
“Mind Like a Tool”, Caution From Peripheral Vision (2025, Dust’s Delight)
I’ve written about Birmingham, Alabama musician Cash Langdon’s solo records before, but this is the first time I’ve touched on his duo with Nora Button, Caution. Following an EP in 2021 and an album in 2022 on the sorely-missed Born Yesterday Records, Button and Langdon have closed 2025 out with a new one called Peripheral Vision. It’s an impressive collection of fuzzy, distorted pop music, too sleazy and scuzzy for “dream pop” but too casual for “shoegaze”. Maybe just queue up “Mind Like a Tool”, the enthralling, somewhat hypnotic opening track, to get an idea of what Caution are up to here.
“The Impermanent Coffee Can”, The Michael Character From The Impermanent Coffee Can (2025)
On their eighteenth LP, The Impermanent Coffee Can, the vibrant, sweeping Michael Character sound is used to tackle the “divorce album”, with bandleader James Ikeda taking us to some understandably difficult places in his writing. The prolific Boston project’s rollicking folk rock/folk punk/somewhat jittery singer-songwriter material remains intact for this journey, but Ikeda and his collaborators veer away from it in the right places, too. The title track is the most beautiful song on the album, an unflinching and subtle account of what it’s like to have permanency blink out in front of one’s self along with all its taken-for-granted mundanity. Read more about The Impermanent Coffee Can here.
“Choices”, Fust & Merce Lemon From Cup of Loneliness / Choices (2025, Trouble Chair)
I’m not sure if you heard, but North Carolina alt-country stalwarts Fust made the best album of 2025, according to the influential music blog Rosy Overdrive. The Durham group spent some time on the road this year with similarly-minded Pittsburgh folk rock musician Merce Lemon, and they commemorated their time together by recording and releasing a 7” of George Jones covers. Fust take the lead on “Choices”, although Lemon does provide backing vocals–there’s not a whole lot for me to say about this cover other than it’s very well-done and shows how seamlessly the traditional side of country is sewn into Fust’s sound (which, of course, is more so than a lot of their peers, but it’s easy to take it for granted with how recognizable Aaron Dowdy and his band have made their “style” over three albums).
“Lace”, Boreen From Heartbreak Hill (2025, Bud Tapes)
The Portland, Oregon project Boreen had an impressive ten-year history leading up to Heartbreak Hill, their fifth and final album. I don’t know why bandleader Morgan O’Sullivan decided to end Boreen now, but I do know that the fourteen-song, fifty-minute Heartbreak Hill is an impressive send-off of adventurous and wide-ranging indie rock, folk, and pop music. There are lovely, sweet indie/jangle/power pop songs hidden in the midst of this tape, if you’re a fan of the diamond-in-the-rough experience; my favorite song on the album, “Lace”, is a second-half gem of the sort. Read more about Heartbreak Hill here.
“Go Home”, Space Jaguar From Every Room Is an Escape Room (2025, Subjangle)
Earlier in 2025, Ireland’s Mark Grassick debuted his new power pop project Space Jaguar with its debut album, If You Play Expect to Pay, which nailed the 90s-inspired jangly-power pop sweet spot. We didn’t have to wait too long for the second Space Jaguar record, thankfully, as Grassnick (once again with The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness and Dropkick’s Andrew Taylor on production) put out a surprise seven-song EP called Every Room Is an Escape Room in the middle of December. Every Room Is an Escape Room is every bit as capable at throwing out perfect power pop as its predecessor was; see “Go Home”, perhaps my favorite Space Jaguar song yet. Read more about Every Room Is and Escape Room here.
“Pleasant Obstacle”, Vulture Feather From Craving and Aversion (2025, Felte)
The vocals don’t kick in on Vulture Feather’s latest EP, Craving and Aversion, until nearly three minutes into the first track. Colin McCann, Brian Gossman, and Eric Fiscus take their time in setting up “Pleasant Obstacle”, giving the opening instrumental a lackadaisical undercurrent that nonetheless oddly retains a bit of the power trio’s trademark quiet intensity. At around the two-minute-thirty mark, though, Vulture Feather get serious, lock into a groove, and McCann’s intonation begins not long afterwards. They’ve done this for four records since June 2023, and it hasn’t gotten old a bit. Read more about Craving and Aversion here.
“Last Night on Planet Earth”, Pigeon Pit From Leash Aggression (2025, Ernest Jenning)
Last January, Olympia folk punk group Pigeon Pit released Crazy Arms, a triumphant culmination of all that Lomes Oleander and her band had been working towards that was one of my favorite albums of 2025. Leash Aggression, surprise-released in November and featuring a more stripped-down sound, seems designed to comparatively fly under the radar, but these ten songs are ten more examples of Oleander’s songwriting strengths and Pigeon Pit’s exuberant skills (even in a more barebones package, sure). “Last Night on Planet Earth” kicks off Leash Aggression with a pretty undeniable, infectious folk punk anthem–it may be a more subdued experience than Crazy Arms overall, but that’s a very relative descriptor.
“Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane”, Baby Grand From Check’er Lee (2025, PorchDog)
The Virginia-originating sibling folk duo Baby Grand (Haley and Colby Ellis) welcome drummer Cody Wade to the group for their fourth album, Check’er Lee, and the three of them have put together a charming fourteen-song collection of laid-back but clever banjo-led folk-country music. Haley, who wrote and sings the majority of Check’er Lee, gives us a folk-y whirlwind to start the album with “Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane” (first lines: “I bought a coffee for an arm and a leg / And now I’m alright because I don’t have the left”). Read more about Check’er Lee here.
“Miss Sweet Missives”, Friends of Cesar Romero From Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth (2025, Fluorescent Brown/Doomed Babe)
One-man South Dakota power pop machine J. Waylon Porcupine has stayed busy into the close of 2025, putting out a solid three-song EP called Cars, Guitars, Girls, but the selection for this playlist comes from an earlier Friends of Cesar Romero release: Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth, which came out back in April. I overlooked it at the time, but there’s some classic garage-power-punk-pop Friends of Cesar Romero material on this record, not the least of which is the sub-two-minute piano-banging “Miss Sweet Missives”.
“Butchery”, Wave Generators From Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One (2025, Fused Arrow)
I stole Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One from Zachary Lipez’s year-end list, which I always make a point to inspect sometime in late December or early January. Here we have a new punk-rap duo from New York comprised of Nosaj New Kingdom and Height Keech; they put out an album in 2024 called After the End, and they’re on their sophomore one already. There are a lot of these quick really crunchy, punk-pummeled rap tracks on Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One (“Bonjour” and “Beyond Beyond” are a couple other good ones), but the sub-two-minute rush of “Butchery” is probably my favorite here.
“Take It to the Night”, Rocket Bureau From Party Armz (2025)
Rocket Bureau is a band from Madison, Wisconsin, although the recorded version of Rocket Bureau is the one-man project of one Kyle Urban. The latest Rocket Bureau record is a five-song EP recorded entirely on an “analog tape machine from the early 1970s” called Party Armz, and it is a seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll. My favorite song on the EP is the closing track, “Take It to the Night”, which sends us out with surging, windows-down retro summertime power pop. Read more about Party Armz here.
“50s Song”, Dorothy From Sea Songs (2025, Fire Talk/Angel Tapes)
Dorothy are a new trio from London whose members are all pretty accomplished artists running the gamut from folk to ambient to slowcore to electronic music; Jude Woodhead, Marco Pini, and Francesca Brierley do their best to make a coherent five-song pop EP out of that spectrum. I suppose you could loosely call Sea Songs “dream pop”, although it’s on the more scattershot side of Dreamland, if that. The glitzy, (relatively) maximalist retro-pop of “50s Song” is a highlight, evoking acts like Flotation Toy Warning in its distorted but intense pursuit of pop music. Read more about Sea Songs here.
“Coast”, Snocaps From Snocaps (2025, Anti-)
Rosy Overdrive readers really liked the Snocaps album, ranking it in their collective top five; while it wasn’t quite that high up for me, I still did enjoy Katie Crutchfield’s long-overdue return to making music with her sister, Alison (Swearin’), as well as a return to making actual rock music again instead of perfectly fine Americana. Snocaps doesn’t meet the impossibly high bar of P.S. Eliot and those early Waxahatchee albums, but as a casual collaboration between two talented siblings (and also MJ Lenderman is there); well, I’d rather it exist than not exist, I can say that. Snocaps peaks with its opening song, “Coast”; it has the somehow-dramatic-but-barebones flourishes of the best Crutchfield material (like Swearin’’s “Big Change”, another classic opening track), but it’s a more low-key take on that kind of thing.
“That Was Yesterday”, Silk Daisys From Silk Daisys (2025)
Silk Daisys are the Atlanta-based duo of Karla Jean Davis and James Abercrombie, who made the jump from “occasional Soundcloud project” to “full-fledged rock band” in 2025 with their self-titled debut album. Pick your favorite dream pop/shoegaze-straddling band to compare them to–Silk Daisys is a nice, even-keeled survey of a wide array of fuzzed-out, poppy indie rock. Some of Silk Daisys is effectively just straight-up jangle/power pop, including “That Was Yesterday”, a gorgeous jangly guitar pop song hidden away in the second half of the album. Read more about Silk Daisys here.
“One Weird Trick”, DANA From Clean Living (2025, Budget Living)
The Columbus group DANA appeared on a few year-end lists by people whose taste I respect; maybe they were already on my list to check out, maybe not, but I think it was settled when I saw that they’re a post-punk/“egg punk”/self-described “avant-garage” group from Ohio. Apparently they’ve been around for a while: Clean Living, which came out back in June, was their first album in six years. And, yes, if you like weird, garage-y, offbeat, “Devo-core” rock and roll, Clean Living provides–“One Weird Trick” sums it up pretty well, marrying dark, rhythmic, muttering verses with a new chorus yelp.
“Forget the Tradeoffs”, Daddy Fell Through From Daddy Fell Through (2025, Olly Olly)
As one-half of Higher Selves Playdate, Fairfax, Virginia musician Steve Fitzpatrick enthusiastically melds “Athens, Georgia sound”, new wave, psychedelia, and synthpop together in glitzy pop songs; Fitzpatrick now has a new project called Daddy Fell Through, and it’s just about as far away from Higher Selves Playdate as he could get, stylistically at least. The self-titled Daddy Fell Through EP is five songs and eight minutes of Fitzpatrick strumming pop songs alone on an acoustic guitar. It’s acoustic, yes, but it’s not really “folk”–I can hear Fitzpatrick writing pop music for Higher Selves Playdate here, reaching for ideas that he and Jessica Kallista can tinker around with eventually. At the same time, though, I like the simplicity of songs like “Forget the Tradeoffs”, which can certainly stand on their own. Read more about Daddy Fell Through here.
“Malagradecido”, CuVa Bimö From Malagradecido (2025, Cuva Groove)
It’s been about a year since I first heard of Oakland punk group CuVa Bimö; the trio dropped their debut album, CB Radio, back on January 3rd of 2025. The “Bay Area garage punk”, “dark and distorted post-punk”, and “trashy noise rock” band decided to end the year with Malagradecido, a new EP (well, a new song and some live versions) that picks up where their first LP left off. Aside from being in Spanish, “Malagradecido” fits well with the leaner, more punk end of CB Radio; whether CuVa Bimö’s sophomore album (supposedly coming this year sometime) leans harder into this sound or if it’s similarly a grab bag remains to be seen, but it’s a pretty strong start.
“2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, The Michael Character From The Impermanent Coffee Can (2025)
The Impermanent Coffee Can speedruns the set-up to the breakup at the album’s emotional core–we aren’t given a chance to breathe until the middle of the album. As it turns out, slowing down there is a pretty uncomfortable place to be for James Ikeda, and he subsequently takes The Michael Character through the three “Anecdote” songs that flash away from the present. The jolt of the moody “2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, however, leads us right back to the current status of The Impermanent Coffee Can. “Feeling sentimental / Everything was ten years ago / People who I don’t see anymore / Show up in the way I play guitar / Show up in the way I say most words / Show up in the strangest places,” Ikeda sings, enjoying the gift of hindsight one last time. Read more about The Impermanent Coffee Can here.
“Press Coverage”, Laika Songs From I Can Feel an Ending (2025, Two Worlds/Galaxy Train)
This Laika Songs album is growing on me. I liked last year’s Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light, and I Can Feel an Ending felt like its equal as I was initially listening to and writing about it, but here in January I’m pretty sure now that it’s Evan Brock’s best work yet. “Press Coverage” was my first favorite song, and while it may have gotten outpaced by “Optimism Shame”, I still really like it; specifically, I like how it goes from a laid-back guitar pop strummer in its first half to a fuzz-pop Sparklehorse-type soaring number in its second half, and that it does so casually in just over two minutes. Read more about I Can Feel an Ending here.
“Stelissi”, Capsuna From Can’t Versus Can’t (2025)
I first wrote about Capsuna at the beginning of 2024–the Brussels-based quintet had just released their self-titled debut album of “charmingly fuzzy and lo-fi” indie pop rock. They’ve experienced some lineup changes since then, but their sophomore album Can’t Versus Can’t more or less picks up where Capsuna left off. It’s perhaps a bit more subdued, but Capsuna still pull out effortless-sounding jangly indie pop with stuff like closing track “Stelissi”, which is as bright and sparkly as anything on their first LP. Read more about Can’t Versus Can’t here.
“Tonight’s the Night – Live”, Neil Young & Crazy Horse From Neil Young Archives Vol. III (1976-1987) (2024, The Other Shoe/Reprise)
I’ve had Neil Young’s Archives Vol. III on ambiently over the holidays a lot this year; there were times where I thought about switching away from it permanently (I think I’m full-up on live versions of “Cortez the Killer” for this life and the next by now), but I’m glad I pressed on long enough to get absolutely rocked by this live version of “Tonight’s the Night”. Apparently this is the one from Live Rust, which I know I’ve heard before, but it really shines here, on Disc Number 10 (Sedan Delivery, which is mostly made up of live recordings from 1978). I made it through all 17 discs eventually.
“Pigeon Shot”, Moviola From Glen Echo Autoharp (1998, Spirit of Orr)
A second song from this Moviola album, because I’m really enjoying it and I can do weird things like this in the December and January playlists. “Pigeon Shot” is a little clearer than “Telling You Nothing”; it could very nearly be called an “alt-country ballad” if you were so inclined. It’s got a bit of “slacker” energy to it; imagine a more Midwestern, rusted-through version of Grandaddy’s shiny defeatism.
“Round These Walls”, Tall Dwarfs From Fifty Flavours of Glue (1998, Flying Nun)
I’m pretty sure I called this song the greatest song of all-time at one point recently, and I’ve never put it on a playlist, so I guess I have to make room for it here. This is one of these Tall Dwarfs songs that comes out of nowhere with simplicity and beauty and timelessness and a discipline for which the New Zealand duo aren’t typically known. Chris Knox has moments of this in his solo work too, and there are a couple other Flying Nun-associated acts that can pull it off, but this is still a rare thing. Appreciate it!
“Whistle and I’ll Come to You”, Soft on Crime From Noz Mat (2025, Eats It)
Dublin trio Soft on Crime have been one of the most reliable purveyors of power, jangle, and psychedelic pop ever since their debut album, 2023’s New Suite. The five-song Noz Mat cassette EP is slighter than the last couple of Soft on Crime records, sure, but that doesn’t lessen the thrill of hearing a handful more bursts of guitar pop straight from the garage. Noz Mat actually seems to get stronger and more solid as it goes on, right up to closing track “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”. It’s the only thing on the EP that could even be partially described as a “ballad”; it’s “pastoral’’, but only because that’s what makes sense for that hook. Read more about Noz Mat here.
Rosy Overdrive 