In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from Hurry and William Matheny as well as new EPs from TIFFY and Twin Bloom. This also would’ve more or less been last Thursday’s Pressing Concerns if I’d been able to post a “normal” one (I’ve been experiencing computer difficulties lately, which has impacted the blog schedule a little bit). I’m hoping to get things back on track this week, though.
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.
Hurry – Zoned Out
Release date: July 10th Record label: Lame-O Genre: Power pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: All Sunk In
Hurry has been the anchor of Philadelphia’s jangle and power pop scenes for over a decade now; every three years or so, we seem to be able to count on Matt Scottoline to show up with ten great Teenage Fanclub-inspired guitar pop songs regardless of which political party is in the White House or which microgenres Uproxx happens to be extolling. We are now at Zoned Out, which is the seventh Hurry album. Once again it was released by Lame-O Records, recorded by Slaughter, Beach Dog’s Ian Farmer, and features a similar cast of musicians to the last Hurry album (Scottoline, Farmer, Rob and Joe DeCarolis, and Justin Fox). This is the one where Teenage Fanclub co-founder Gerard Love (one of the biggest influences–quite possibly the biggest influence–on Hurry) sings on a track, and it’s also the one where Scottoline decides to cover a song from his labelmates U.S. Highball (to me, that’s just as exciting as the Gerard Love thing).
In a not-totally-hopeless future in which Hurry keeps adding to their stack of records at a steady clip, those abovementioned wrinkles might be how I keep Zoned Out separate from Fake Ideas and Don’t Look Back in my mind. But the core of Zoned Out is exactly what I would expect from Scottoline–world-class delicate power pop. The first song on the album, “All Sunk In”, is already one of my favorite Hurry songs –I love how simply it starts, just clean guitar chords and Scottoline’s voice for forty-five seconds. It’s a moment that brings “How does he keep doing it?” to the tongue, but the rest of Zoned Out is a humble but inarguable reminder of the pop talent that allows Scottoline to, indeed, get away with it. There’s something fascinating about how “The Dumbest Person You’ve Ever Seen” is built around some really gripping guitar soloing and “Just Fine” almost mathematically cuts away any excess, yet they still evoke the same mood. The U.S. Highball cover is impressive, too–I’ve never once listened to that Glasgow indie pop duo’s quick-hit drum machine jangle-pop and thought “you know, I wish somebody slowed this song’s tempo down and stretched it out a lot”. And yet, “Laughing in Reverse” is a Hurry song now, with Scottoline wringing every bit of melody out of it. Hearing Hurry do what they do never gets old. (Bandcamp link)
William Matheny – Material Witness
Release date: July 10th Record label: Diamond Teeth Genre: Alt-country, country rock, power pop, roots rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Babylon Man
William Matheny has been playing in bands in and around his native West Virginia since the early 2000s, and he’s as booked as ever lately between playing the bass for alt-country star John R. Miller and the keys for Washington, D.C.-based Music Critic Rock act The Paranoid Style. Despite his commitments, Matheny found time to write and record Material Witness, his third solo LP and first in three years–in a pleasant surprise, he halved the time it took between his 2017 debut Strange Constellations and 2023’s That Grand, Old Feeling. Not only that, but Matheny gathered up some of his talented collaborators (bassist Tucker Riggleman of The Cheap Dates, guitarists Adam L. Meisterhans of Rozwell Kid and Slaughter Beach, Dog and Bud Carroll of American Minor, pianist Jeremy John Batten, and drummer Clint Sutton) to head down to Nashville to record with Justin Francis, a Pittsburgh-originating producer with big-name country and underground punk rock records on his resumé.
The album that Matheny and his band recorded sounds a lot like a William Matheny album, which is a very good thing to sound like. Material Witness is as comfortable as ever between the “power pop” and “alt-country” labels frequently applied to its creator, made by a singer-songwriter with new wave and honky tonk in his DNA but who doesn’t really make either of them. I’d say that Material Witness is Matheny’s “tightest” album, but they’re all very tight so this might be recency bias talking. At the very least, the six-piece barrelling through the ragged, longing pop of opening track “Babylon Man” sounds as close to Matheny’s rock-and-roll live act as they’ve ever gotten on-record. Matheny isn’t the first musician to explore the “roots rock” end of Nick Lowe and Marshall Crenshaw (and probably not even the first one to put an Appalachian twist on it, though we could always use more of that). But he’s the only person who could write “If I Were a River”, a road-worn hymn about punk sticker-covered bathrooms, canaries in coal mines, and trying to make something out of the intrinsic pain and randomness of being. At the very least, I don’t think anyone else could write and sing “If I Were a River” and make it go down as easy as Matheny does. (Bandcamp link)
TIFFY – I Wanted to Know
Release date: July 10th Record label: Repeating Cloud/Totally Real Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: IRB
Somerville, Massachusetts’ Tiffany Sammy has been making self-described “dream-rock” music since the late 2010s as TIFFY, eventually adding other musicians like guitarist Tom Stevens, bassist JK Wong, and drummer Palana to the project. Sammy’s pursuit of the “dream-rock” sound has led to her crossing paths with plenty of notable Northeastern indie rock institutions, releasing records on labels like Totally Real and Dollhouse Lightning and recording with Justin Pizzoferrato of Easthampton, Massachusetts’ Sonelab. TIFFY’s latest EP, I Wanted to Know, links up with three more like-minded collaborators–it’s being co-released on cassette by Maine’s Repeating Cloud Records, features Sadie Dupuis (Sad13, Speedy Ortiz) on guitar on one track, and also contains a track recorded live at Bradford Krieger’s Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island.
The “proper” version of I Wanted to Know–the one you’ll hear on streaming services–is five tracks long and comprised of three new compositions, an interlude, and the aforementioned Big Nice-recorded alternate take of one of the new tracks. The physical cassette contains a lot more than that, namely two demos and an entirely different four-song EP called Divine Hand. I’ll refrain from commenting too much on Divine Hand in anticipation of if and when it gets a wider release (in summary: it’s pretty good) but the I Wanted to Know side is enough on its own to continue TIFFY’s strong streak. Sammy’s songwriting, inspired by classic dream pop, 60s girl-group melodies, and jangly indie rock, is once again punched up by a full-band sound–the sublime “Scam Likely” is enhanced by Stevens’ pedal steel, “Drive Thru Deja Vu” surges into the realm of power pop power chords and heroic guitar soloing, and “IRB” has just a bit of Dupuis’ math-pop in its DNA. I Wanted to Know is a snippet of where TIFFY is currently at, and both the digital and expanded cassette versions of this snapshot paint a promising picture. (Bandcamp link)
Twin Bloom – Twin Bloom
Release date: July 10th Record label: Dandy Boy Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Summer’s Gone
Twin Bloom are a new indie rock quartet from Oakland; their debut single, “Magazine Dreams” b/w “Summer’s Gone”, was released early last year by Bay Area indie pop label Dandy Boy Records. Both of these songs are on Twin Bloom’s self-titled debut EP, which the group (guitarist/vocalist Gvir Aviv, guitarist Mickle Nguyen, bassist/keyboardist Joshua Cano, and drummer Sandra Alva) recorded with Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone and Best House Studios. While Twin Bloom can indeed be described as “indie pop”, these four songs are less directly inspired by the straightforward jangly twee pop of many of their labelmates and instead chase a more cavernous, 1980s-evoking sound–Twin Bloom’s pop music is filtered through ambitious reverb-y dream-gaze and new wave sheens.
Opening track “Magazine Dreams” is large enough to introduce us to Twin Bloom’s range of influences–it’s a big, glitzy, blinking, synth-tinged 80s pop rock statement, although I can still glimpse that guitar pop center of the track among the trappings. The dream pop “Signals” is a little more subdued in the verses, but the chorus shoots for the stars, too; the same can be said for closing track “Under the Current”, an earnest jangle-dream-rock send off. The closest thing to “Bay Area indie pop” on Twin Bloom is probably “Summer’s Gone”; it fits in with the rest of the EP, but it’s a little more overtly “Teenage Fanclub-y guitar pop”. No one direction “works” more than the others for Twin Bloom, and I look forward to hearing how they present themselves on a longer-form record sooner or later. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: July 10th Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co. Genre: Noise pop, noise rock, space rock, art rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
My first thought when I saw that Parts & Labor had reunited after an eleven-year hiatus was, of course, joy–they are, after all, one of the best bands of the 2000s, and more than likely responsible for the best “rock music” to emerge out of Brooklyn during the George W. Bush administration. My second thought was: well, who’s going to be the drummer? Was it going to be Christopher Weingarten, the music journalist whose frenetic, deranged playing pushed the power trio into lightning-speed territory in the first half of their legendary four-album run, or would it be Joe Wong, the film-scorer whose relatively refined style led the band through a swooning, space-rock evolution in the final half of their career? The answer, I’m happy to report, is both: on Parts & Labor’s first album since 2011, band co-leaders Dan Friel (guitar/keys/vocals) and BJ Warshaw (bass/vocals) are now a quartet rounded out by Weingarten and Wong behind simultaneous kits.
Parts & Labor were a card-carrying member of the technicolor 2000s underground noise rock movement, associating with the likes of Deerhoof, Melt-Banana, Oneida, and Lightning Bolt as they made their own aggressive, squealing, tinnitus-inducing (literally, unfortunately, in the case of Warshaw) version of pop music. If you’ve kept up with Friel’s work in recent years as leader of Upper Wilds, it’s more or less in the same vein–gigantic choruses and loud, distorted music–but with squelching synths and (especially early on) a neck-breaking tempo. It’s music for people who can get into both the aforementioned Lightning Bolt and power pop, although they were certainly also “punk” in their own way (they did a very good Minutemen cover on their best album, Mapmaker). I love Upper Wilds a lot (and I am excited for their upcoming fifth album, Mercury) but there’s nothing out there that did what those Parts & Labor LPs did.
And that includes Set of All Sets, the new Parts & Labor album. Because it’s more than what Parts & Labor used to be, somehow. It has twice as many drummers, for one. And it’s twice as long! For a band that stuck to clean forty-minute albums (and once put out an “EP” of fifty songs in under a half-hour), this seventy-nine-minute double LP is like nothing else they’ve ever done. So, all of a sudden, Parts & Labor are back and flexing by barreling through several lengthy space-krautrock tracks in completely new terrain for the band. And yet, it’s recognizably the same brilliant Parts & Labor underneath the makeup. There are plenty of moments in the four-part “Endless Cycle” song series that harken back to those earlier albums, from the choral refrain in Part 1 to the tuneful squall of synths at the start of Part 2 to the rumbling rhythms in Part 3 to the big finish of Part 4. Set of All Sets is more than a pop album, but when it’s particularly interested in being one–like in the jaw-dropping eight-minute “Many Worlds” (which sounds like getting run over by a spaceship) and “Haunted Limbs” (one of the most Dan Friel songs to ever Dan Friel)–it’s unmatched.
There are seventeen tracks here, and while the terrain is rugged and varied, there’s hardly much in terms of respite. Assuming you treat the “Endless Cycle”s as separate songs, “Indecision Tree” is the longest one, and you do get a little bit of a breather in its industrial scraping before it eventually takes off (and not long after that, Friel is once again bellowing at us in “Parallel Tracks”, a classic Parts & Labor trash-compactor pop number). Otherwise, nearly everything in Set of All Sets is unrelenting, pummeling catharsis, although sometimes that can be as simple as the pied-piper synth riff that leads us through “Like They’re Here to Stay”. That little detail is key to why Set of All Sets works–beyond the glitzy, overwhelming exterior is the intricacies of a world all to itself.
Welcome to the June 2026 playlist! We’ve got a bunch of songs on here that I enjoyed last month, and I think you’ll enjoy them too. Check them out below!
Emperor X and Vesuvian have three songs on this playlist. Spacemoth and Bellows have two.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify (missing two songs), Tidal (missing one). 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.
“Cassandra (The Ox Is on My Tongue)”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
I first heard the Philadelphia group Vesuvian thanks to a song on a Gaza benefit compilation, which led me to their 2023 debut album, More Treble. At the time, they were more or less a Joey DeGrado solo project, and the name of their game was fuzzy, lo-fi alt-country. Now a solid quartet, Vesuvian appear to have completely reinvented themselves on their self-titled sophomore album: there’s still a slight twang, but Vesuvian is a mesmerizing mixture of riff-forward classic rock as filtered through abrasive underground indie/noise rock and lyrics preoccupied with mythology, history, and other esoteric subjects that sound particularly gripping coming from DeGrado’s deadpan, almost Albini-esque mouth. “Cassandra (The Ox Is on My Tongue)” is the kind of seething, puzzling, and catchy rock song of which we could always use more.
“Delta9 Self Immolation”, Bellows From “Que Bello!” (2026, Bloody Knuckles)
Even in Rosy Overdrive’s most long-winded era I probably would’ve struggled to do justice to something like the hour-long double LP “Que Bello!”; it’s an album that has so much to it that I’m still finding new and interesting angles every time I put it on. Bellows draw us in perfectly with two of the record’s best songs right up front: “Delta9 Self Immolation”, in slot number two, is the punchy, sub-two-minute hook-infested robot-pop song that follows a more expansive opening track. Read more about “Que Bello!” here.
“Haunted Limbs”, Parts & Labor From Set of All Sets (2026, Ernest Jenning)
Parts & Labor were a card-carrying member of the technicolor 2000s underground noise rock movement, associating with the likes of Deerhoof, Melt-Banana, Oneida, and Lightning Bolt as they made their own aggressive, squealing version of pop music (gigantic choruses and loud, distorted instrumentals). Set of All Sets, the first new Parts & Labor album in eleven years, is a seventy-nine-minute double LP that’s like nothing else they’ve ever done. Set of All Sets is more than a pop album, but when it’s particularly interesting in being one–like in highlight “Haunted Limbs”, one of the most Dan Friel songs to ever Dan Friel–it’s unmatched. I’ll have more to say about Set of All Sets soon.
“Do We Exist?”, Spacemoth From Inward Eye (2026, Greenway)
2022’s No Past No Future was an excellent-sounding debut album, a charming and exciting mixture of Stereolab-worshipping analog synths, hard-hitting percussion, and pop music of the “space”-y variety. Still very much a pop album, Inward Eye feels like an accentuation of the layered and psychedelic sides of Spacemoth’s debut; it’s an album that feels very “tinkered with”, an area in which Spacemoth clearly thrive. Opening track “Do We Exist?” is an actually pretty streamlined take on Stereolab and krautrock via up-front pop music, with Spacemoth’s trademark rubbery hooks front and center. Read more about Inward Eye here.
“Feeling Nothing”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
Deeply-felt personal (real or fictional) narratives have always been the glue holding Emperor X’s Chad Matheny’s writing together, and Unified Field offers up beautiful examples of the form, like probably my favorite song on the album, “Feeling Nothing”. Songs like this bolster the granular details throughout Unified Field but they also live and breathe on their own. With Unified Field literally on the front lines (it was largely recorded in Ukraine, a subject touched on more explicitly elsewhere on the album) and subsequently sounding more urgent than ever in parts, it’s absolutely needed. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Of Some Use”, Sun Kin From Bobby’s Voice (2026)
Bobby’s Voice is a “cross-generational collaboration” between Kabir Kumar (aka Sun Kin) and Rajesh Prakash (“RP”) Kumar, Kabir’s father: the elder is the lyricist and the younger Kumar wrote the music and performs vocals. Kiran “Bobby” Kumar was RP’s brother and Kabir’s uncle, who passed away in the Kumars’ native Delhi in 2018; Bobby’s Voice is RP’s attempt to tell his brother’s story from the deceased Kumar’s perspective. The material with which Kabir has been given to work is undeniably difficult, in multiple ways, but, all things considered, the Kumars pull this off admirably; at the very least, “Of Some Use” (which soundtracks something of a rebirth) is one of Sun Kin’s best pop songs in its own right. Read more about Bobby’s Voice here.
“Falling Star”, Dark Surfers From Falling Star (2026)
Dark Surfers’ first new music since their 2024 EP Songs from a Wednesday Night is here in the form of a two-song single called Falling Star. The A-side of this single is maybe my favorite song that I’ve heard from the Trenton, New Jersey quartet yet, finding the band (vocalist/guitarist Christopher Yaple, guitarist Ian Everett, bassist Kelli Kalikas, and drummer George Miller) taking a detour from the softer indie pop of their last record to a more college rock and power pop-indebted sound. It’s still excellently “laid-back”, don’t get me wrong, but the handclap-bait beat and the slowed-down rock and roll riff are nice touches.
“Firecracker (4th of July)”, Jr. Juggernaut (2026, Nickel Eye)
Dave Alvin by way of X. Elliott Smith. Cymbals Eat Guitars. Jr. Juggernaut? Yes, I’m ready to induct the newest single from the Los Angeles power pop/punk power trio into the “indie/alt songs about the 4th of July” Hall of Fame already. Vocalist/guitarist Mike Williamson, drummer Wal Rashidi, and bassist Noah Green (also of The Pretty Flowers) won me over with 2024’s Another Big Explosion, a huge, loud album of Bob Mould/Sugar worship with the hooks and desperation to back it up; “Firecracker (4th of July)” would’ve been one of the best songs on that album, and it shines on its own here this holiday weekend just like a….uh…something that’s bright?
“Before the Feeling’s Gone”, National Photo Committee From Red Hot Photo Committee (2026, Ever/Never)
The debut album from Chicago alt-country group National Photo Committee, Red Hot Photo Committee, has been a while in the making (you can hear some of these songs in their initial forms in the 2023 live tape Live Nude Photo Committee) but I’m happy to report that the first proper album from the group was worth the gestation time. Bandleader Maxwell Bottner is compelling and clever, of course, but the reason I enjoyed this album at first is because so much of it–particularly highlight “Before the Feeling’s Gone”–genuinely country-rocks. Read more about Red Hot Photo Committee here.
“Your Name”, Chorus Truly From Is As Real As You Are (2026, Gentle Reminder/Home Late)
On Chorus Truly’s first proper EP, Is As Real As You Are, bandleader Zo Talkin and their collaborators make snappy, polished guitar pop with bits of college rock, jangle pop, and power pop in the mixture. Talkin’s confident, centered vocals separate Chorus Truly from a lot of modern college rock-influenced bands; there’s more than a bit of the classic Pretenders sound in these six songs. Everything on Is As Real As You Are is decidedly pop music, but the smooth-sailing jangly indie pop of opening track “Your Name” is the “hit” if I’ve ever heard one. Read more about Is As Real As You Are here.
“Blind Horse”, NAYAN From In the Dirt (2026, Red Stapler)
Two years after their debut album, Rock N Roll Ruined My Life, Washington, D.C.’s NAYAN have pared down to a quartet and have returned with a six-song EP called In the Dirt, recorded by J. Robbins at his Magpie Cage Recording Studio. In the Dirt is nothing less than an extremely vigorous, open-hearted rock and roll record bearing the mark of longtime musicians doing it purely for the love of the genre. Opening track “Blind Horse” is a brilliant, surging anthem, a foot-on-gas beginning to an impressively varied, compact package. Read more about In the Dirt here.
“Hecate in the Highlands”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
Our second Vesuvian song on this playlist (out of three) finds our Philadelphia punk rock heroes developing and nailing a bunch of touchpoints to their sound: a big old Thin Lizzy guitar riff, Greek mythology deployment front and center, grousing talk-singing (or muttering) verses, and a singalong chorus. It could be from a musical that absolutely tanks but gets a cult following in the years afterwards. I just don’t know what to tell you if you don’t like this one.
“Bridget Because”, Hypnolovewheel From Parallel Universe (2026, Octopeace)
Hypnolovewheel were one of the great lost college rock bands of the late 1980s and early 90s; they formed in New York in 1986 and released five LPs before dissolving in 1993. Their music was pop with a healthy amount of distortion, psychedelia, and post-punk attitude–it would’ve fit in well with what was going on in New Zealand at the time, and it did fit in well with their sonic and geographical neighbors in Yo La Tengo. The first fifteen songs on the retrospective compilation Parallel Universe are from the band’s five studio albums, presented in no particular order–well, no particular chronological order, I mean, as the front end of Parallel Universe is stacked with could’ve-been-hits like “Bridget Because”. Read more about Parallel Universe here.
“Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds”, the Mountain Goats From Days (2026, Cadmean Dawn)
Everything on the eleven-song, thirty-eight minute Sea of Night was recorded by Wade Easy himself, and the entirety of the album is devoted to building a singular, striking ambience. Easy’s signature sound is a hushed, molasses-slow, Appalachian-shaded, “atmospheric” and “gothic” one. It’s electric, but I don’t know if I’d call it “rock” music. If early Songs: Ohia is “folk music” than I suppose that Sea of Night is too, but there’s a hazy, psychedelic side to Wade Easy that was never really the style of Jason Molina. It’s hard to call out specific songs from Sea of Night, but “Dead Moons” captures the entire thing as well as anything else on it. Read more about Sea of Night here.
“Make Me Whole”, Lovewell From Everything You Ever Wanted (2026, Another Year/Financial)
Everything You Wanted finds Lovewell’s founding duo of Mark Palladino and Joe Bradshaw welcoming new members Bobby Pettigrew and Jake Watkins into the band. Rather than shaking up their sound, these new recruits seem to have fallen right into lockstep with the sublime, hook-driven emo-dream-gaze sound that Palladino and Bradshaw did so well on 2022’s Around the Flowers. Few bands are doing the “delicate, crystal-clear vocal melodies mixed with fuzzed-out, gas-pedal-driven punk/alt-rock instrumentals” thing better than Lovewell right now; guitar pop anthems like “Make Me Whole” feel second-nature for them. Read more about Everything You Ever Wanted here.
“Pharmacies”, The Laughing Chimes From Behind Your Blue Fields (2026, Slumberland)
Early last year, Athens, Ohio jangle pop group The Laughing Chimes debuted a darker, more post-punk/goth-indebted sound with Whispers in the Speech Machine. The journey from 2022’s Zoo Avenue EP to that endpoint was captured in an album’s worth of outtakes and scrapped sessions, which the band decided to release this year as Behind Your Blue Fields. As someone who first got into the Chimes as a Guided by Voices-inspired lo-fi guitar pop group, Behind Your Blue Fields is full of gems, nuggets, and whatnot; the seventy-second jangle-snippet “Pharmacies” just might be the best of them all (plus, The Laughing Chimes say their band name in the lyrics, so that’s cool).
“Coin”, Comfy From Steel Chimp (2026)
Always nice to hear new music from Rochester, New York power pop/pop punk quartet Comfy (who share members with another good and likeminded group in Big Nobody). The four-song Steel Chimp EP is the group’s first new music since late 2024’s Goated & Foreboded LP, and it’s a sharp ten-minute collection of power pop, alt-rock, pop punk, and post-grunge hooks. My favorite track on Steel Chimp is “Coin”, which opens with wobbly, uncertain power chords and wobbly, uncertain vocals and ends on a fire-and-brimstone, Raytheon-and-Lockheed-namechecking note.
“Cold”, Yea-Ming and the Rumours From Residue (2026, Dandy Boy)
I’ve good news: the 60s pop, folk rock, and gentle-side-of Yo La Tengo conjured up by I Can’t Have It Allonce again factor heavily into Residue, Yea-Ming and the Rumours’ fourth album. The Rumours are heavily linked to the San Francisco Bay Area’s indie pop scene (their label, Dandy Boy, is at the center of it, and most of their members are pulling double duty, at least), but their take on the genre has always been a different, “proto-” version compared to that of their janglier/twee-er peers. There’s a freedom to this that The Rumours embrace in Residue; the stop-and-go power pop of “Cold” is one of my favorites, but it’s just one facet of what they do here. Read more about Residue here.
“Somebody Wants to Send You a Message”, Styrofoam Winos From Any River (2026, Dear Life)
The exploits of the Nashville-based supergroup Styrofoam Winos and its members are numerous, spilling over into neighboring scenes in Louisville and Asheville and sharing members with both Ryan Davis and MJ Lenderman’s bands. Still, there’s something special about when Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel get together, swapping instruments, lead vocals, and song ideas to the tune of breezy but adventurous folk rock. Aside from a truly incredible bass clarinet solo from Equipment Pointed Ankh’s Jim Marlowe on “Somebody Wants to Send You a Message”, Any River is entirely the work of the three of them, and it sounds like a band still very in-tune with one another. Read more about Any River here.
“Ostrich Toss”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
“Ostrich Toss” might be the most interesting thing on Unified Field. It’s a bouncy one, a Looney Tunes-esque see-saw between the narrator and their foil before the titular flightless bird delivers a speech condemning, I guess, all of humanity, at the end of the song. Perhaps the characters in the song have State-level analogues, or perhaps the ultimate driver of “Ostrich Toss” is a different kind of subjugation or industrial violence. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking about it and turning it over in my head–Unified Field, as with the rest of Emperor X’s best work, is expertly designed to provoke in such a way. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Only a Matter of Time”, Eliksa From From Falmer Court (2026, Crafting Room)
Eliksa’s debut EP, From Falmer Court, was recorded live at something called The Great Thatch Barn in the record’s titular city over an “intensive five-hour window” and initially released earlier this year as a video before the audio was put out by Crafting Room. Crafting Room calls Eliksa a “slacker-folk” act, but I’m not sure many slackers make high-concept, well-produced concert film debut releases in historic British barns. There’s a compelling contradiction between the polish of the video and the music, which is ultimately pretty simple and stripped down folk-pop. In terms of immediately-hitting guitar pop, “Only a Matter of Time” is the biggest success, but not the only one. Read more about From Falmer Court here.
“Here We Go Again”, Shrubs From Rising (2026, FABCOM)
From 1994 to 2018, Shrubs were a New Jersey rock trio making what we’d sometimes call “college rock”, a mixture of power pop, garage rock, psychedelia, folk rock, and roots rock that recalls bands like Refrigerator, several Flying Nun Records acts, and frequent associate The Feelies. Rising is a posthumous Shrubs CD collection featuring the two songs that Shrubs had written for their next album before guitarist/vocalist Jay LoRubbio’s death and augmented by two WFMU radio sessions the band recorded in 2008 and 2011. My selection is from the WFMU sessions, as there’s something very compelling about hearing a band rocking stripped-down versions of their own original pop songs like “Here We Go Again”. Read more about Rising here.
“First Greens”, Sea Moss From Big Tube Scene (2026, Zum Audio)
Sea Moss and Miscomings are two noise punk bands from the Pacific Northwest; after the two bands shared a bill in Portland, they hit it off and the split album Big Tube Scene took form. Each band gets a side on this split album, and each half ends with a collaborative track featuring all six musicians playing together. The A-Side is Sea Moss doing what Sea Moss does best, absolutely pummeling us with electronic-driven noise punk for five torrential tracks; opening track “First Greens” tells you more or less everything you need to know. Read more about Big Tube Scene here.
“Cruisin’”, Big Nothing From Big Nothing (2026, Dead Broke)
Philadelphia’s Big Nothing were sneakily one of the better guitar pop bands of the turn-of-the-last-decade, mining later-Replacements, The Lemonheads, and Buffalo Tom styles for diamond-in-the-rough pop songs on strong albums like 2022’s Dog Hours. They’ve jumped from Lame-O to Dead Broke Rekerds for their latest album and first in four years, a self-titled one that ends up being a low-key collection of mid-tempo guitar pop I’ll likely appreciate more as time passes. “Cruisin” is definitely the hit to my ears, a mid-tempo, slightly jangly alt-rock-radio could’ve-been-hit that hits all the right marks.
“Who’s Gonna Love You Now?”, The Tubs From Hard Life (2026, Merge)
Everyone loves The Tubs, the most visible band to emerge from the scrum of post-Joanna Gruesome projects from some combination of Owen Willams, Lan McArdle, Max Warren, George Nicholls, and Matthew Green. The Williams-led Tubs put out excellent albums of Welsh jangle pop on Trouble in Mind in 2023 and 2025, and with that label’s unfortunate shuttering, they’ve leapt to Merge for this year’s upcoming Hard Life. The first taste of Tubs LP3 is a breezy one in “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?”, a typically-desperate-sounding power pop jangler that feels shorter than its three-minute runtime.
“Meetcha at Minnies (The Captain’s Song)”, Onesie From Way Thousand Bump to the Sky (2026, Sell the Heart)
I first heard Brooklyn quartet Onesie back in 2023, when the excellent Liminal Hiss–an electric mixture of power pop, jangle pop, psychedelia, and prog-pop–became one of my favorite albums of that year. On their most recent album, Way Thousand Bump to the Sky, Onesie have “stripped down” to the trio of bandleader/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Ben Haberland, guitarist Rob Lanterman, and drummer Jason Bauers, but this album (recorded by Guided by Voices producer Travis Harrison) doesn’t abandon the ambition and maximalist pop rock of their last LP. The choppy beginning of “Meetcha at Minnies (The Captain’s Song)” doesn’t prepare us for everywhere this song ends up going, for instance.
“Paper Cup”, Spacemoth From Inward Eye (2026, Greenway)
Maryam Qudus spent several years working as a producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, producing records from Forest Bees and Sour Widows, among others. When it came time for her own project Spacemoth to debut, Qudus was more than ready. Qudus has spent a lot of time since her 2022 debut No Past No Future on tour–both with Spacemoth and as the keyboardist for garage-pop act La Luz–and it was on the road that the second Spacemoth album, Inward Eye, started to take shape. While Spacemoth’s studio-experimentation frequently yields vibrant, kaleidoscopic pop music, Qudus is just at home in the grainy, distorted sheen that covers up the just-as-strong pop song “Paper Cup”. Read more about Inward Eye here.
“Elixir”, Supermilk From Grief Hospital (2026, Specialist Subject)
Always nice to have more new music from Supermilk, one of the bright lights in London’s indie pop/rock underground. The four-song Grief Hospital EP follows the 2024 album High Precision Ghosts and last year’s live collection Lazy Teenage Boasts, and if you liked either of those then I have some good news for you about what you’ll hear on this one. Supermilk’s unique sound remains intact on Grief Hospital, one part Superchunk/Bob Mould revival like their peers in Good Grief but with a more British indie pop and even a bit of XTC/post-punk undercurrent to highlights like “Elixir”.
“Are You Looking for Something?”, The Hobknobs From Helmets Off (2026, 12XU/Cargo)
The Hobknobs are the new duo made up of a couple of Dutch indie veterans in Lewsberg vocalist/guitarist/violinist Arie van Vliet and The Klittens’ Yaël Dekker. Even compared to the relatively stripped-down indie rock of Lewsberg and the streamlined post-punk/indie pop of The Klittens, Helmets Off is a quiet affair. Those who appreciate “minimalism” in indie pop will find a lot to love in Helmets Off, in which van Vliet and Dekker sing together twee-ly over guitars, percussion, and keys all used sparingly. On “Are You Looking for Something?”, my favorite song on Helmets Off, The Hobknobs sound like a C86 band confidently making their way through a Peel Session. Read more about Helmets Off here.
“Diana’s Jacket (As Told by Danny DaChamp)”, Fishboy From Bravest Neighbor (2026, XLFNT)
I’ve been (ahem) waiting for a new Fishboy album ever since the high-concept twee-power-pop rock-opera Waitsgivingbecame one of my favorite albums of 2021. The recently-announced Bravest Neighbor finds the Denton, Texas singer-songwriter Eric Michener and his project prepping a suite of songs just as ambitious as Waitsgiving was, if not more so (I hope to get into it more as the album gets closer). For now, we’re left to turn over “Diana’s Jacket (As Told by Danny DaChamp)”, a hard-charging (for Fishboy, at least) twee-power-pop song that does indeed revolve around the titular jacket (it’s somewhere between The Weakerthans and The Apples in Stereo, I think).
“Chrysanthemum Flowers”, Bellows From “Que Bello!” (2026, Bloody Knuckles)
Arriving four years after Next of Kin, Bellows’ newest record once again lands on the maximalist side of indie pop, but the hour-long double LP “Que Bello!” puts the project’s intricacies on an even larger canvas. The core of Bellows (Oliver Kalb, Jack Greenleaf, Ian Cory and Frank Meadows) recorded the bulk of “Que Bello!” in 2023 and 2024, with Kalb, Greenleaf, and vocalist Emily Reo putting the finishing touches on it last year; the band has released the eighteen-song album in five “chunks” over the past two months, perhaps an acknowledgement that it is indeed a lot to take in. “Chrysanthemum Flowers” is the jaw-dropping, kaleidoscopic “tapestry” piece as the opener, the first indication that “a lot” doesn’t have to be “difficult”. Read more about “Que Bello!” here.
“Do You Feel It Too?”, …or Does It Explode? From Realities Disguised as Symbols (2026, Middle-Man)
Last year’s Tales to Needed Outcomesfound Madison’s …or Does It Explode? exploring post-rock, slowcore, and even orchestral music, which, as it turns out, was something of an outlier for the quintet. Their “normal” sound is much more indebted to the post-hardcore side of 1990s emo, and it’s to this genre they return on their fourth album, the Electrical Audio-recorded Realities Disguised as Symbols. The endlessly floating ambience of the last LP has been replaced by something noisier and grittier, and fans of vintage Touch & Go noisy post-rock will enjoy the one-two opening punch of “Instincts” and “Do You Feel It Too?”. Read more about Realities Disguised as Symbols here.
“Fortunate Death”, Vesuvian From Vesuvian (2026, Worry Bead)
I absolutely love that Vesuvian swiped the Third Eye Blind “Never Let You Go” riff for this song. And why not? It’s not like they were doing anything good with it. “Fortunate Death” is subsequently a little less explosive than the other two Vesuvian songs on this playlist, but it does alright for itself. At the very least, it’s nice to imagine an alternate universe where I get to hear lyrics like “Cold stone beneath my back / Your knife held up aloft / Let my blood spill / To seed the summer crops” on the Modern Rock radio.
“Line Go Up Line Go Down”, Emperor X From Unified Field (2026, Bar None)
“Line Go Up Line Go Down” is the shining example of big-picture, global Emperor X on Unified Field. Everything is perfect on that one, an extremely fervent rejection of the invisible hand with a complex but understandable call to action. When I talk about the “uniqueness” of Emperor X, I’m absolutely thinking of the bridge to “Line Go Up Line Go Down”, the clearest journey into Chad Matheny’s personal politics on the record. No matter where one falls on the political spectrum, one could certainly find something objectionable in Matheny’s linking together of the Soviet Union, United Nations, and European Union as he weighs the failures and ideals of all three–the brilliance and righteousness of “Line Go Up Line Go Down” is such that any quibbles with framing I might have start to look like the luxurious window-dressing they ultimately are. Read more about Unified Field here.
“Sugar in the Shoe”, The Cowboys From Captain Easy’s Downfall (2026, Feel It)
The Bloomington, Indiana-originating band The Cowboys may be spread out between Indiana, Ohio, and Mexico City these days, but that didn’t stop the Feel It Records flagship garage rock/power pop legends from assembling the rollicking nineteen-song Captain Easy’s Downfall. Rock ‘n’ roll/power pop missiles like “Sugar in the Shoe” are Stiff Records throwbacks that The Cowboys could probably bash out in their sleep, but the time and distance haven’t dampened the energy they inject into them. Read more about Captain Easy’s Downfall here.
“Velvet Rabbit Portal”, Some Velvet Sidewalk From Critters Encore (2026, K/Perennial)
Initially active from 1987 to 1997, Eugene, Oregon’s Some Velvet Sidewalk were a K Records band who seemed to hew towards the noisier/punk-er side of that label. Their first album in over twenty-five years, Critters Encore, is right out of their original era in the best way: it sounds like 1980s underground punk and post-punk filtered through a heavy lo-fi Pacific Northwestern lens. It’s the same pressure cooker that made “grunge”, though Critters Encore is a specific kind of Cascadian noise rock that feels like a later part of a caveman evolution drawing also featuring the Wipers, Dead Moon, Mudhoney, and the U-Men. The world needs weird rock and roll records that kind of don’t make sense, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have, after all these years, risen to the occasion. Read more about Critters Encore here.
Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns! It’s a bit of a hodge-podge this week (it’s a holiday weekend in the States, which may have something to do with it), but there’s still plenty to enjoy here with a new album from Smirk, a posthumous release from Shrubs, and new EPs from Eliksa and Mirrorball. Check them out below, and if you missed Monday’s blog post (featuring Fire Man, NAYAN, Lovewell, and The Hobknobs), check that out too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Shrubs – Rising
Release date: July 4th Record label: FABCOM! Genre: College rock, folk rock, power pop, roots rock, garage rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Here We Go Again
From 1994 to 2018, Shrubs were a New Jersey rock trio making what we’d sometimes call “college rock”, a mixture of power pop, garage rock, psychedelia, folk rock, and roots rock that recalls bands like Refrigerator, several Flying Nun Records acts, and The Feelies (with whom Shrubs rubbed elbows on multiple occasions). Just as Shrubs started work on what was to be their sixth album, the death of guitarist/vocalist Jay LoRubbio brought the band to a sudden and seemingly final halt. Last year, though, drummer/vocalist Rob Takleszyn and bassist/vocalist Bob Torsello met up with Feelies frontperson Glenn Mercer to record the two songs that Shrubs had written for their next album. These two new recordings lead off Rising, a posthumous Shrubs CD collection that’s augmented by two WFMU radio sessions the band recorded in 2008 and 2011.
Of the two “new” songs, I’m most partial to “Let’s Go”, a Torsello-penned guitar pop tune that sounds like a great lost NRBQ recording, but there’s no denying the poignancy of “Lou’s Place”, which LoRubbio wrote in tribute to what I can only imagine was one of his biggest influences in Lou Reed and which Takleszyn sings in his departed bandmate’s stead. Not only do Shrubs get a nice coda to their career, though, we also get to hear twenty-one tracks’ worth of the band, vibrant and alive, plowing through their catalog on WFMU. If you’re intrigued by bands who “sound like they should be on WFMU” and garner Feelies and NRBQ comparisons, Rising is a must-listen as an introduction to Shrubs’ whole thing. There’s something very compelling about hearing a band rocking stripped-down versions of their own original pop songs (like highlights “Gone to Hell” and “Here We Go Again”) and paying tribute to their influences and peers (they cover The Bevis Frond and, of course, The Feelies here) all in one. It speaks very well of Shrubs that they conducted themselves such that something as strong as Rising could be assembled in their wake. (Bandcamp link)
Eliksa – From Falmer Court
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Crafting Room Genre: Folk rock, indie pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Only a Matter of Time
We all only get one chance to make a first impression, and the Brighton project Eliksa seems intent on putting together a unique one. Eliksa is led by the eponymous, mononymous singer-songwriter who grew up “in the French countryside” before moving to Brighton and assembling a backing band including Noah Fox, Tim Spencer, Monty Taft, and Mina-Mae Alexander. Eliksa’s debut EP, From Falmer Court, was recorded live at something called The Great Thatch Barn in the record’s titular city (it’s a historic 13th century “Tithe Barn”, a concept I admit I didn’t learn about until now) over an “intensive five-hour window”. They filmed this five-song, fifteen-minute session, and it was first released as a video on Elika’s YouTube channel before Crafting Room Recordings put out the audio as a standalone digital EP this week. The video is very nicely done and you ought to watch it if Eliksa’s thing sounds up your alley, but this is technically just about the audio of From Falmer Court and I do need to get around to talking about what it sounds like.
Crafting Room calls Eliksa a “slacker-folk” act, but I’m not sure many slackers make high-concept, well-produced concert film debut releases in historic British barns. There’s a compelling contradiction between the polish of the video and the music, which is ultimately pretty simple and stripped down folk-pop. Basically, we get four pieces of laid-back, acoustic-driven British indie pop as well as one instrumental interlude connecting them. “Never Enough” was the advance single and it’s strong enough to be one, but I might have a slight preference for “Only a Matter of Time” in terms of immediately-hitting guitar pop. The low-key rock and roll of “Aquamarine Lampshade” and the bittersweet closing track “After All the Trouble” aren’t slouches either, though. On From Falmer Court, Eliksa do indeed have the material to back up their ambition.
Smirk – Speculative Fiction
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Smoking Room Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, post-punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Perfect World
When we last checked in on Los Angeles garage rock group Smirk, it was late 2022, and the Nick Vicario-led project had just put out their debut LP, Material, on Feel It Records; I called it classic West Coast punk rock with a “dark streak” at the time. Vicario has actually been playing in garage bands since the early 2000s (first in his hometown of Portland, Oregon), although that tantalizing edge I detected in Material hasn’t dulled a bit over the years and various projects. The first three Wipers albums loom large over Speculative Fiction, an album that takes a garage punk’s sound, slows it down and cleans it up just a bit, but keeps (and, arguably, enhances) the fresh-feeling dark post-punk energy at the heart of Smirk. At thirteen songs and nearly forty-five minutes, Speculative Fiction is by far the most substantial Smirk release yet, and features members of Advertisement, Ceremony, Pardoner, and Poison Ruin backing Vicaro up at various points on the LP.
The band claim relatively lighter, more pop-forward acts like Big Star and Guided by Voices as influences for Speculative Fiction, which I find amusing, as I find very little overt reference to that kind of sound in these songs. Do not get me wrong, it’s a pretty catchy punk album, but the strongest examples of the art on Speculative Fiction are either snotty garage rock rippers like “I Shall Be Released” or loud, all-out punk rock like “Perfect World”. Then, after that all-out sprint, we’re treated to “Abide”, the “Wipers doing a post-punk update of a Christian hymn” exercise we never knew we needed, and “Ritual Torture”, which is, of course, the closest thing to genuine “jangle-punk” on the LP. Speculative Fiction is anything but an abandoning of Smirk’s earlier releases, but Vicario is clearly wrestling with something here, and it’s just what this album needs. (Bandcamp link)
Mirrorball – Mirrorball
Release date: July 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Take a Shot
Mirrorball are a duo from Los Angeles made up of vocalist Alexandra Johnstone and guitarist/keyboardist Scott Watson who’ve been putting out singles together since 2019. As best as I can tell, though, Mirrorball is the band’s first EP, made up of three songs released in the past few years and two new ones. Mirrorball evoke a very specific, 2010s kind of dreamy, psychedelic indie pop–it’s no coincidence that they recorded these songs with Chris Coady, who’s produced records from Beach House, DIIV, and Smith Westerns, among others. Mirrorball is polished but hazy-sounding, evoking several decades’ worth of southern California history. “Red Hot Dust” introduces us to Mirrorball with perfunctory piano keys and up-front, meandering vocals from Johnstone; it’s intriguing, and they keep us on such a ride through the Mazzy Star-like guitars of “Take a Shot”, the (relatively) glitzy indie pop of “Tinsel for a Tear”, and the busier, lightly sunshine-psych touches of closing track “Devil Mirror”. With that, the first chapter of Mirrorball’s hopefully lengthy career is wrapped up quite neatly.
In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ve got new albums from Fire Man, Lovewell, and The Hobknobs, and a new EP from NAYAN. Check them 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.
Fire Man – How to Erase Everything
Release date: May 8th Record label: Self-released Genre: Punk rock, post-hardcore, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: How to Erase Everything
I’ve written about Fire Man, the New York-based punk project of Caio Brentar (vocals/guitar/bass) and Kiyoshi Chinzei (drums), a few times now. 2023’s Yerself Is Fire was a weird and exciting noise rock record in the vein of early oddball SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Touch & Go Records bands, while the warfare-inspired Territorial Conquest 2024 EP took things in a notably heavier direction. The newest Fire Man album, How to Erase Everything, represents yet another sonic shift for Fire Man, this time into something more restrained and less overtly “hardcore/noise rock”-inspired. Brentar and Chinzei are still punks by trade, to be sure, but they temper their sound with everything from folk punk to college rock to dance punk to even ska-punk (on “Newspaper”).
“I Still Believe” is an energetic opening track, but Fire Man choose to kick off How to Erase Everything with something a little closer to skate punk or early/proto-“pop punk” than their more typical noise rock fare. The dynamic “Marry You” explores 90s Dischord post-hardcore structures for an appropriately nervous song, and by the time we get to the acoustic “Kosciuszko Bridge” and the fist-pumping, emo-influenced anthem “Dylan the Swimmer”, How to Erase Everything has wandered pretty far from what I think of when I think about the “Fire Man sound”. An impressively consistent album, I may actually prefer the second side of How to Erase Everything, and the surprises keep coming with the aforementioned “Newspaper”, the dance-punk “Move to Queens” (which takes a stand against the titular activity), and the emo/post-punk grand finale of the title track. Whether or not How to Erase Everything is Fire Man’s best LP yet is an open question, but the duo have accomplished something new and impressive for them here nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)
NAYAN – In the Dirt
Release date: May 22nd Record label: Red Stapler Genre: Power pop, heartland rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Blind Horse
It was two years ago that I heard the debut album from NAYAN, the latest project from Washington, D.C. indie rock veteran Nayan Bhula. I called Rock N Roll Ruined My Life “bombastic, wide-scale indie rock” that displayed its Bruce Springsteen influence openly; it may not be what one thinks of when they hear “D.C. indie rock”, but NAYAN proved to be quite deft at it. Two years later, NAYAN have pared down to a quartet (Bhula, Mike Nilsson, Eddie Fuentes, and Andrew Gabor) and have returned with a six-song EP called In the Dirt, recorded by J. Robbins at his Magpie Cage Recording Studio. In the Dirt is nothing less than an extremely vigorous, open-hearted rock and roll record bearing the mark of longtime musicians doing it purely for the love of the genre. Opening track “Blind Horse” and “Hit the Pavement” are brilliant, surging anthems, foot-on-gas moments buoyed by the horn-aided “Right Thing to Do” and tempered by surprising left turns like the art rock journey of “End of the Daydream Nation” and the aptly-titled closing track “Dark Times”, in which NAYAN let just a little bit of Dischord-style post-punk creep into their sound. NAYAN have once again displayed the full range of their sound, but they impressively do it in a more compact package with In the Dirt. (Bandcamp link)
Lovewell – Everything You Ever Wanted
Release date: June 12th Record label: Financial/Another Year Genre: Shoegaze, alt-rock, dream pop, emo Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Make Me Whole
Towards the end of 2022 I first heard Lovewell, a New England (Massachusetts and New Hampshire)-based duo of former hardcore/metal musicians who’d “graduated” into the world of “shoegaze-y, dream-y, emo-ish indie rock” (as I called Around the Flowers at the time). Aside from a couple of non-album singles, Everything You Ever Wanted is Lovewell’s first new music since Around the Flowers, and it finds the founding duo of Mark Palladino and Joe Bradshaw welcoming new members Bobby Pettigrew and Jake Watkins into the band. Rather than shaking up their sound, these new recruits seem to have fallen right into lockstep with the sublime, hook-driven emo-dream-gaze sound that Palladino and Bradshaw do so well. Few bands are doing the “delicate, crystal-clear vocal melodies mixed with fuzzed-out, gas-pedal-driven punk/alt-rock instrumentals” thing better than Lovewell right now; just in the first half, they churn out guitar pop anthems like “Gloaming”, “Make Me Whole”, and “Want to Bloom” like it’s second-nature for them. Everything You Wanted is an unflagging collection–“Overflow”, the record’s “ballad”, is probably the closest thing to a deviation from Lovewell’s bread and butter, and even that one swoons into a satisfying finale. Four years and two new band members later, Lovewell are as fixated as ever on their own personal platonic ideal of pop music. (Bandcamp link)
The Hobknobs – Helmets Off
Release date: June 26th Record label: 12XU/Cargo Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Are You Looking for Something?
It appears that the cult Dutch indie rock quartet Lewsberg are no longer active, but a couple of its members have started new projects recently: Lewsberg guitarist/keyboardist Michiel Klein debuted a new group called Magasin in March, and June sees the debut LP from The Hobknobs, the duo of Lewsberg vocalist/guitarist/violinist Arie van Vliet and fellow Dutch group The Klittens’ Yaël Dekker. Even compared to the relatively stripped-down indie rock of Lewsberg and the streamlined post-punk/indie pop of The Klittens, Helmets Off is a quiet affair. Those who appreciate “minimalism” in indie pop will find a lot to love in Helmets Off, in which van Vliet and Dekker sing together twee-ly over guitars, percussion, and keys all used sparingly. At their “jauntiest”, The Hobknobs can sound like Jonathan Richman (“Easier Listening”) or a C86 band confidently making their way through a Peel Session (“Are You Looking for Something?”), while they also have their moments of meticulously-rhythmic Young Marble Giants stuff (“Around the Bend”) or lo-fi Pollardesque melodies (“Enamoured”). The construction may be light, but the material and execution are anything but–this sixteen-song, forty-minute debut LP is a forceful argument to pay attention to The Hobknobs. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Spacemoth, Some Velvet Sidewalk, and Unlettered, plus a split LP from Sea Moss and Miscomings, all of which are out tomorrow (June 26th). If you missed either of this week’s earlier posts (Monday’s featured Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, Wade Easy, and Chorus Truly, and on Tuesday we looked at the upcoming Emperor X album), check those out, too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Spacemoth – Inward Eye
Release date: June 26th Record label: Greenway Genre: Indie pop, space pop, synthpop, psychedelic pop, post-punk, krautrock Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Do We Exist?
Maryam Qudus spent several years working as a producer and engineer at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone Recording, producing records from Forest Bees, Sour Widows, and La Luz, among others. When it came time for her own project Spacemoth to debut, Qudus was more than ready–2022’s No Past No Future was an excellent-sounding album, a charming and exciting mixture of Stereolab-worshipping analog synths, hard-hitting percussion, and pop music of the “space”-y variety. Qudus has spent a lot of time since No Past No Future on tour–both with Spacemoth and as the keyboardist for La Luz–and it was on the road that the second Spacemoth album, Inward Eye, started to take shape. Still very much a pop album, Inward Eye feels like an accentuation of the layered and psychedelic sides of No Past No Future; it’s an album that feels very “tinkered with”, an area in which Spacemoth clearly thrive.
Opening track “Do We Exist?” is an excellent and actually pretty streamlined take on Stereolab and krautrock via up-front pop music, and these rubbery hooks mark later-record highlights like “Telepathic Butterflies” and the propulsive “Cloud of Echoes”. While Spacemoth’s studio-experimentation yields vibrant, kaleidoscopic pop music in those instances, Qudus is just at home in the grainy, distorted sheen that covers up the just-as-strong pop song “Paper Cup”, or in the sensory overload final track “In the Garden”. More than about any other project I can think of, Qudus’ production background is a clear asset to everything about Spacemoth, and Inward Eye keeps things fresh and the momentum rolling. (Bandcamp link)
Sea Moss & Miscomings – Big Tube Scene
Release date: June 26th Record label: Zum Audio Genre: Noise rock, noise punk, no wave Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: First Greens
Sea Moss and Miscomings are two noise punk bands from the Pacific Northwest–the former is a voice/drums/electronics duo from Portland made up of Noa Ver and Zac Dag, and the latter a quartet from Seattle featuring vocalist Chani Murillo, guitarist Sam Hendricks, bassist Liam Downey, and drummer Crow Ross. Sea Moss have a ferocious, chaotic, “a lot with a little” sound reminiscent of Lightning Bolt and Melt-Banana; when I wrote about Miscomings’ most recent album, Hat, I describe basically an egg punk/synthpunk group who’d grown into something louder and noisier. The partnership makes a lot of sense, and after the two bands shared a bill in Portland, they hit it off and Big Tube Scene took form.
Each band gets a side on this split album, and each half ends with a collaborative track featuring all six musicians playing together. The A-Side is Sea Moss doing what Sea Moss does best, absolutely pummeling us with electronic-driven noise punk for five torrential tracks, while Miscomings grind up six blasts of garage punk/post-punk with the pedal pushed just as much to the floor. Miscomings and Sea Moss are more than capable of matching each other’s energies, and their collaborative tracks are the sound of mutually assured destruction. Big Tube Scene nearly has me believing that the split LP is the ideal format for this kind of music. (Bandcamp link)
Some Velvet Sidewalk – Critters Encore
Release date: June 26th Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk, lo-fi indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Velvet Rabbit Portal
At the risk of stating something everyone who reads this blog already knows, there was a shockingly high number of great bands making “indie rock” in the decade known as “the nineties”, many of which have not received a just level of appreciation. I know and love many of these bands, and every year I find more that fit this bill through reissues or my own crate-digging. Some Velvet Sidewalk fell in the dreaded “heard of them, haven’t heard them” category for me before they reunited and returned with their first album in nearly three decades this year, but I’m quickly getting up to speed.
Initially active from 1987 to 1997, Eugene, Oregon’s Some Velvet Sidewalk were a K Records band who seemed to hew towards the noisier/punk-er side of that label. Their new album, Critters Encore, sounds right out of their original era in the best way: it sounds like 1980s underground punk and post-punk filtered through a heavy lo-fi Pacific Northwestern lens. It’s the same pressure cooker that made “grunge”, though Critters Encore is a specific kind of Cascadian noise rock that feels like a later part of a caveman evolution drawing also featuring the Wipers, Dead Moon, Mudhoney, and the U-Men (with Pere Ubu being honorary Oregonians here). Some things have gotten lost in that long game of telephone, but others have certainly been gained. The world needs weird rock and roll records that kind of don’t make sense, and Some Velvet Sidewalk have, after all these years, risen to the occasion. (Bandcamp link)
Unlettered – Devil’s Bowl
Release date: June 26th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Burn After Reading
After playing in the noisy New York indie rock bands Gapeseed and Poem Rocket in the 1990s and 2000s, Mike Knowlton resurfaced in Florida at the beginning of this decade with a brand-new project called Unlettered that finds him pursuing grimy, grey, Sonic Youth/Blonde Redhead-esque art-noise. Unlettered has been prolific since its inception, with three EPs from 2021 to 2023 and a debut album from 2024; after their first-ever year off, Unlettered are back with their sophomore album, Devil’s Bowl. Like he was on Five Mile Point, Knowlton is joined by co-vocalist and co-lyricist Kelly Grimm, while this time Peter Gordon (also from Poem Rocket and Gapeseed) joins on drums for two songs. Devil’s Bowl is noisy but mechanical in a post-punk way; the vocals are, as always, mixed very low, and names like Polvo, Mission of Burma, and Unwound continue to be conjured up at various points in Unlettered’s music. It’s an energetic and bleak album at the same time, which few genres other than this one are really able to hit this satisfyingly. If it wasn’t clear by now, Mike Knowlton is an expert at the art. (Bandcamp link)
Release date: June 26th Record label: Bar None Genre: Experimental folk, folk punk, folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Chad Matheny is one of the most unique and exciting songwriters of his era, and for the fast few years he’s been acting like it–self-releasing albums, hiding some of his best material on high-concept digital-only releases, appearing in opening slots for tours by bands much bigger (and less interesting) than his Emperor X project who nonetheless recognize the debt they owe to Matheny’s long-running career. Matheny’s music is instantly recognizable–bits of “folk punk” and Mountain Goats-ish folk rock with very specific geopolitical, transportational, and interpersonal (always found in the midst of these heady subjects) concerns. It is tempting to frame Unified Field, the latest Emperor X album, as a “return to form” in some way–it finds him returning to Bar None Records (who released 2011’s Western Teleport, arguably his most beloved album) after years in the semi-independent wilderness, and he’s even doing the “advance singles leading up to a wide digital and physical release” thing with this one. Of course, there’s not really a one-size-fits-all “form” when it comes to Emperor X, so what we’re talking about here is a fascinating and singular album in a fascinating and singular discography.
Unified Field was largely recorded in Ukraine, a country that the Florida-originating, Berlin-based Matheny has spent a lot of time in over the years; his recent experiences in the war-torn country (and his perception of these experiences in the non-war-torn countries in which he lives and tours) explicitly shape what we can reductively call the more “political” side of Unified Field; I’ll talk about that end in a second, but the album, like the rest of the Emperor X oeuvre, is more than that. The deeply-felt personal (real or fictional) narratives have always been the glue holding Matheny’s writing together, and Unified Field offers up beautiful examples of the form like the title track, “Superbus”, and (probably my favorite song on the album) “Feeling Nothing”. They bolster the granular details throughout Unified Field but they also live and breathe on their own. With Unified Field literally on the front lines and subsequently sounding more urgent than ever in parts, they’re absolutely needed.
The other end of the spectrum is Matheny’s explicit zeroing in on immigration in “Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan!”, the Russian-Ukrainian War in “Pissing With the Flashlight On”, and market forces in “Line Go Up Line Go Down”. While the first two come from deeply sincere places and are also both quite catchy, “Line Go Up Line Go Down” is the shining example of big-picture, global Emperor X on Unified Field. Everything is perfect on that one, an extremely fervent rejection of the invisible hand with a complex but understandable call to action. When I talk about the “uniqueness” of Emperor X, I’m absolutely thinking of the bridge to “Line Go Up Line Go Down”, the clearest journey into Matheny’s personal politics on the record. No matter where one falls on the political spectrum, one could certainly find something objectionable in Matheny’s linking together of the Soviet Union, United Nations, and European Union as he weighs the failures and ideals of all three–the brilliance and righteousness of “Line Go Up Line Go Down” is such that any quibbles with framing I might have start to look like the luxurious window-dressing they ultimately are.
I’m going to have to do a fourth paragraph here to tackle what I’m viewing as another category in Matheny’s writing in Unified Field–an overtly metaphorical, surprisingly (for Emperor X) vague and opaque side seen in “Cybertruck”, “Ostrich Toss”, and “I Am a Beached Whale”. These all read like fables of some kind, following straightforward narratives holding up larger points that may or not be obvious at first. Climate change and extraction capitalism hover over all three to a degree–“Cybertruck” seems to use the titular vehicle as an opulent metaphor for the rotting death march certain actors seem hell-bent on keeping us following (let’s not forget to draw the link between the endless drones and bombs falling around Matheny’s choice of recording location and the slow-roasting of the planet, of course). “I Am a Beached Whale” is pretty sad; I kind of don’t want to think about that one right now. “Ostrich Toss” might be the most interesting thing on Unified Field. It’s a bouncy one, a Looney Tunes-esque see-saw between the narrator and their foil before the titular flightless bird delivers a speech condemning, I guess, all of humanity, at the end of the song. Perhaps the characters in the song have State-level analogues, or perhaps the ultimate driver of “Ostrich Toss” is a different kind of subjugation or industrial violence. I’m not sure, but I’m thinking about it and turning it over in my head–Unified Field, as with the rest of Matheny’s best work, is expertly designed to provoke in such a way. (Bandcamp link)
Hello, and welcome to a Monday Pressing Concerns! We’ve got new albums from Sun Kin, National Photo Committee, and Wade Easy, and a new EP from Chorus Truly. 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.
Sun Kin – Bobby’s Voice
Release date: June 5th Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, folk-pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Of Some Use
I’ve been a fan of Kabir Kumar and their project Sun Kin ever since 2024’s Sunset World, an excellent art pop album that was one of my favorite LPs from that year. Kumar has been quite busy since then, playing in the band Guppy, co-founding the duo Left Tracks, guesting on the most recent Pacing album, and releasing a Sunset World remix album (Sunrise World, featuring Miracle Sweepstakes, Planet 81, and Pacing) and an ambient one (Painting Whales). Bobby’s Voice is Sun Kin’s return to “pop music”, although it’s a very different animal than the vibrant, apocalyptic Sunset World. This record is actually a “cross-generational collaboration” between Kabir’s father, Rajesh Prakash (“RP”) Kumar; the elder as lyricist and the younger Kumar writing the music and performing vocals. Kiran ‘Bobby’ Kumar was RP’s brother and Kabir’s uncle, who passed away in the Kumars’ native Delhi in 2018. Bobby was unable to walk for most of his life due to a stroke suffered in 1979, and his brother eventually left Bobby behind by moving to New York to raise his own family; Bobby’s Voice is RP’s attempt to tell his brother’s story from the deceased Kumar’s perspective.
The material with which Kabir has been given to work is undeniably difficult, in multiple ways–on the one hand, Bobby’s Voice tackles specific circumstances and situations that I imagine may never have been addressed in “indie pop” before, and, if the lyrics of Bobby’s Voice are a family member attempting to step into another’s shoes, Kabir’s setting them to music and singing them are effectively another level of interpretation. All things considered, the Kumars pull this off admirably–Kabir injects a more subtle, folky sound into these songs than what Sun Kin has been in the past, but it’s still within Kabir’s fairly vast wheelhouse. At the very least, “Of Some Use” (which soundtracks something of a rebirth) is one of Sun Kin’s best pop songs in its own right, and album bookends “Spinning” and “Pyre” pull off a more understated beauty. “Judas” and “ICU”, conversely, are the challenging, meaty centers of Bobby’s Voice that work best when experienced as part of RP and Bobby’s stories rather than on their own. That’s certainly not a knock on the quality of those songs, just an example of how Sun Kin was able to evolve into something new to fit this new, unique direction. It was not the Sun Kin album I would’ve expected after Sunset World, but I’m glad Bobby’s Voice came into existence nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)
National Photo Committee – Red Hot Photo Committee
Release date: April 3rd Record label: Ever/Never Genre: Alt-country, fuzz rock, country rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Before the Feeling’s Gone
Oh boy, another fuzzy alt-country rock band from Chicago who’ve garnered David Berman comparisons? Well, let’s just see about that. To be fair, National Photo Committee didn’t come out of nowhere–their first EP, Songs About Sticks & Rocks, came out in May 2021, back when MJ Lenderman was still a hidden blog-rock gem. Their debut LP, Red Hot Photo Committee, has been a while in the making–you can hear some of these songs in their initial forms in the 2023 live tape Live Nude Photo Committee–but I’m happy to report that the first proper album from the group (led by vocalist/guitarist Maxwell Bottner and featuring some combination of pedal steel player Henry Moskal, bassist Will Carr, and drummer Jason Shapiro) was worth the gestation time.
I’m doing my best not to crib entirely from the bio Reed Jackson penned for Ever/Never, but it’s not my fault that his main thesis–basically, what if Ryan Davis’ old band State Champion was led by a Calvin Johnson type instead of a more explicit Berman acolyte from Kentucky–is pretty accurate to what Red Hot Photo Committee sounds like. Bottner is compelling and clever, of course, but the reason I enjoyed this album at first is because so much of it (particularly early highlights “If I Wait”, “Before the Feeling’s Gone”, and “It’s Hard”) genuinely country-rocks. National Photo Committee use the momentum they build in the record’s first half to hurdle headfirst into twin behemoths in the eleven-minute Crazy Horse tribute “Gizzard” and “Adelaide”, a seven-minute song begging to be labeled as a “barnburner”, “ripper”, and so forth. It’s not often that a debut album is willing and able to take us to such places, but Red Hot Photo Committee isn’t precisely an ordinary debut album. (Bandcamp link)
Wade Easy – Sea of Night
Release date: May 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, lo-fi folk, psychedelia, Appalachian Gothic Formats: Digital Pull Track: Dead Moons
I don’t know much about Wade Easy beyond the singer-songwriter’s current whereabouts (Morgantown, West Virginia) and the few details he gives in this recent interview. Is “Wade Easy” even his real name? We can only hope so. Either way, Easy made his debut last year with an album called Sleeping with the Sun On, and the second Wade Easy album, Sea of Night, has arrived mere months after the first one. Everything on this eleven-song, thirty-eight minute album was recorded by Easy himself, and the entirety of Sea of Night is devoted to building a singular, striking ambience. Easy’s signature sound is a hushed, molasses-slow, Appalachian-shaded, “atmospheric” and “gothic” one. It’s electric, but I don’t know if I’d call it “rock” music. If early Songs: Ohia is “folk music” than I suppose that Sea of Night is too, but there’s a hazy, psychedelic side to Wade Easy that was never really the style of Jason Molina (Easy’s vocals, delivered in more or less a whisper, are another key difference). I don’t particularly feel like calling out specific tracks for this one, because it matters less here–from the moment the blurry “Where the River Sinks” starts to come into focus (but never fully doing so), Sea of Night is one, long, black piece. Sort of like the ocean at night. (Bandcamp link)
Chorus Truly – Is As Real As You Are
Release date: April 24th Record label: Gentle Reminder/Home Late Genre: Indie pop, power pop, jangle pop, college rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Your Name
Chorus Truly is a new project from Zo Talkin, a St. Louis-based musician who, in a different life, played in a bunch of underground Philadelphia bands like Mint, Dolly, Cabbage, Prob No, and Fire Roast. Resurfacing in the Midwest, Talkin assembled a supergroup of sorts with Martin Meyer (Lumpy and the Dumpers, Soup Activists, Rotten Apple Records) on drums, Pete Millar (BB Eye) and Mikey Crotty (Ratboys, Dowsing) on guitars, and TJ Pearson (Carte de Visite) on bass. On Chorus Truly’s first proper EP, Is As Real As You Are, Talkin and their collaborators make snappy, polished guitar pop with bits of college rock, jangle pop, and power pop in the mixture. Talkin’s confident, centered vocals separate Chorus Truly from a lot of modern college rock-influenced bands; there’s more than a bit of the classic Pretenders sound in these six songs. Everything on Is As Real As You Are is decidedly pop music, but the smooth-sailing jangly indie pop of opening track “Your Name” is the “hit” if I’ve ever heard one; the rest of the EP remains propulsive, but there’s a more melancholy streak to “Talk About It” and “Body” and more restraint is given to “Ways of a Child” and “Set Aside”. A very promising and likeable debut, all things considered. (Bandcamp link)
It’s a Thursday Pressing Concerns! We have new albums from Styrofoam Winos, …or Does It Explode?, and The Pines of Rome, plus a retrospective compilation from Hypnolovewheel. Check them out below, and if you missed Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2026, So Far, which went up earlier this week, check that out too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Hypnolovewheel – Parallel Universe
Release date: June 19th Record label: Octopeace Genre: Fuzz pop, college rock, 90s indie rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Bridget Because
Hypnolovewheel were one of the great lost college rock bands of the late 1980s and early 90s; they formed in New York in 1986 and released five LPs before dissolving in 1993. Their music was pop with a healthy amount of distortion, psychedelia, and post-punk attitude–it would’ve fit in well with what was going on in New Zealand at the time, and it did fit in well with their sonic and geographical neighbors in Yo La Tengo. I gather that there was some kind of dispute over the rights to Hypnolovewheel’s music at some point, but bassist Dan Cuddy, guitarists Stephen Hunking and Dave Ramirez, and drummer Peter Walsh were able to release a vinyl-only retrospective compilation called Parallel Universe in 2020 (compiled by Yo La Tengo’s James McNew, in fact). Walsh unfortunately passed away the following year, but the rest of the band has finally secured the ability to release their discography digitally, which they’ve begun by re-releasing Parallel Universe with a bunch of previously-unreleased demos as bonus tracks.
The first fifteen songs on Parallel Universe are from the band’s five studio albums, presented in no particular order–well, no particular chronological order, I mean. The front end of Parallel Universe is stacked with could’ve-been-hits like “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bridget Because”, as well as the noise pop masterpiece “Peace of Mind”. There are plenty of hits in the second half of the record too (check out the garage-y “Nature’s Little Sunshine”, the desperate guitar pop of “Kiss Big”, and the hazy “What’s Going On”), and the demos (largely built from two sessions, one from the near the beginning of Hypnolovewheel’s career and one towards the end) reveal that they sounded nearly as great in a less formal setting. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a long-overdue revisitation of the Hypnolovewheel discography, but Parallel Universe is just the right collection to get us started. (Bandcamp link)
Styrofoam Winos – Any River
Release date: June 19th Record label: Dear Life Genre: Alt-country, country rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Somebody Wants to Send You a Message
If you’re a fan of modern alt-country music, you either know Styrofoam Winos or know somebody connected to them. The exploits of the Nashville-based supergroup and its members are numerous, spilling over into neighboring scenes in Louisville and Asheville and sharing members with both Ryan Davis and MJ Lenderman’s bands. And that’s not to mention Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel’s impressive solo careers, too. Still, albums like their 2021 self-titled one and 2024’s Real Timeshowed that there’s something special about when Turner, Nikrant, and Kenkel get together, swapping instruments, lead vocals, and song ideas to the tune of breezy but adventurous folk rock. Aside from a truly incredible bass clarinet solo from Equipment Pointed Ankh’s Jim Marlowe on “Somebody Wants to Send You a Message”, Any River is entirely the work of the three of them, and it sounds like a band still very in-tune with one another.
Any River is fun and meaty from the start of the chiming, meandering, Turner-sung opening track “Pearls”, and the lovely Neil Young/60s campfire folk journey of “BBQ” is a curveball and another fastball at the same time. The Winos are as quick as ever with a turn of phrase (Turner has one in “I Felt You” that ends with “I wanna meet you on the gastro-plane” that’s sticking out to me right now), and they stitch together a quilt made from sunny southern rock (“Swimmin’”), a particularly Kenkel-esque soft touch (“New Friend”), and good-old fashioned, gently-loping country-folk music (most of the rest of the album). Any River is “merely” another great album from a great band made up of great singer-songwriters; it is, now as ever, a great time to appreciate the Styrofoam Winos. (Bandcamp link)
…or Does It Explode? – Realities Disguised as Symbols
Release date: June 18th Record label: Middle-Man Genre: Emo, post-hardcore, post-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Do You Feel It Too?
I first heard the Madison, Wisconsin emo band …or Does It Explode? last year when they released Tales to Needed Outcomes, their third LP. Tales to Needed Outcomes found the band (guitarist/vocalist Shawn Bass, guitarist Brandon Boggess, bassist J Granberg, drummer Erik Rasmuson, and vocalist Katya Pierce) exploring post-rock, slowcore, and even orchestral music, which, as it turns out, was something of an outlier for the quintet. Their “normal” sound is much more indebted to the post-hardcore side of 1990s emo, and it’s to this genre they return on their fourth album, the Electrical Audio-recorded Realities Disguised as Symbols.
Like Tales to Needed Outcomes, Realities Disguised as Symbols is sprawling (thirteen songs and nearly an hour long for the CD and digital editions), but the endlessly floating ambience of the last LP has been replaced by something noisier and grittier. Fans of vintage Touch & Go noisy post-rock will enjoy the one-two opening punch of “Instincts” and “Do You Feel It Too?”; “Lucky Even Dead” is the first trace of Tales to Needed Outcomes on this album, but it of course builds to a distorted squall, too. Realities Disguised as Symbols covers plenty of ground, from relatively straightforward rockers like “Ground and Leaves”and “Weaker Gods” to messy post-hardcore like “Noise in the Quiet” and “Baby’s First Rorschach Test” to “big ones” like seven-minute closing track “Shelter”. I quite liked the sound of …or Does It Explode?’s last album, but I do not mind at all that they’ve returned to their roots on Realities Disguised as Symbols; their foundation is as strong as ever. (Bandcamp link)
The Pines of Rome – When You Are as Full as the Moon
Release date: June 19th Record label: Solid Brass Genre: Slowcore, 90s indie rock, alt-country Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Pawns
The Providence, Rhode Island band The Pines of Rome formed in the late 1990s, with the trio of vocalist/guitarist Matthew Derby, guitarist John Kolodij, and drummer Rick Prior releasing albums in 1999 and 2003 before a two-decade period of inactivity. They returned in 2023 with a new member (bassist Steven Kimura), a new label (Solid Brass, also home to Bondo, Convinced Friend, and The Black Heart Procession), and a new album called The Unstruck Bell. The fourth Pines of Rome album, and second of their second act, is called When You Are as Full as the Moon, and it sounds like an album made by a self-admitted slowcore band who toured with Songs: Ohia, June of 44, and Silkworm twenty years ago. The Pines of Rome aren’t “heavy” in the way some of their contemporaries were on When You Are as Full as the Moon (why, I’d even call opening track “New Zealand” a pop song), but the Jason Molina scholars among us know that “heavy” is a destination with many different roads. You can find it in long, alt-country-flecked, sprawling slowcore songs like “Pawns”, “Bad Timing”, and “Holler Gold”, each one of which is very nearly its own universe. It’s hovering around the edges of rockers like “Brass Knuckles”. It’s integral to The Pines of Rome, a band who’s exactly right where they should be right now. (Bandcamp link)
If you’re only just now joining us: this is part two of my list of my favorite forty albums/EPs of 2026 thus far, presented in alphabetical order by artist name. Thanks for reading!
Here are links to stream a playlist of these selections via Spotify and Tidal (Bandcamp links are provided below for all records).
Loto – _____
Release date: April 17th Record label: Self-released Genre: Art rock, soft rock, chamber pop, indie pop Formats: Digital
On the latest album from their project Loto, Montreal musician Lautaro Akira Martinez-Satoh and a rotating cast of musical guests throw themselves headfirst into art pop, chamber pop, and soft rock, bravely looking beyond “Bandcamp experimentalism” to “60s/70s studio-pop wizardry” for inspiration. The six-song album labeled “_____” (officially speaking, it’s untitled) only has two more songs than Loto’s 2024 A Year in Review EP, but the sprawling thirty-six minute record is a much grander-feeling affair. (Read more)
Miserable chillers – Innocent Victims
Release date: April 3rd Record label: Baby Blue Genre: Soft rock, indie pop, art pop, sophisti-pop, singer-songwriter Formats: CD, digital
On the first proper song-based Miserable chillers album since 2020, Miguel Gallego continues to mine soft rock, art pop, and 60s/70s studio-auteur-type music for inspiration, and his referencing of Paul Simon, Judee Sill, and Burt Bacharach checks out (it goes well with the album that happened to land just above it on this list!). Innocent Victims is a more muted, pensive version of it than previous Miserable chillers records, though, a feeling inseparable from the tragedy and personal loss behind its creation. Innocent Victims took shape slowly over the next five years, finally presented to us here as a forty-five-minute, thirteen-track package that gives an ironic twinge to the term “easy listening”. (Read more)
Missed Dunks at Summer League – Fared Well
Release date: March 13th Record label: Machine Duplication Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock Formats: Cassette, digital
Jordan Petersen-Kamp began Missed Dunks at Summer League not long after landing in Memphis from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his debut album under the name, Fared Well, is largely a solo effort. Compared to the garage punk bands around them in their adopted hometown, Missed Dunks at Summer League’s influences are a bit more…esoteric? The dominant sound of Fared Well is greyscale, chilly, introverted 90s indie rock–their label, Machine Duplication, mentions Built to Spill and the Mountain Goats as ingredients, though they don’t particularly sound like either one of those acts. (Read more)
Morningstar – Juvenalia
Release date: February 23rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Alt-country, 90s indie rock, Crazy Horse stuff, folk rock, garage rock Formats: Digital
Morningstar are a Maine-based group whose debut album was recorded last February at Prism Analog by Joni Elfers, who compared Juvenalia’s sound to Neil Young and post-punk. I don’t take any issue with that, although it doesn’t quite do justice to this massive eight-song, fifty-four minute rock journey. Morningstar have absolutely inherited a disregard for punctuality from Crazy Horse, both in terms of song length and in tempo. There are a few indie rock bands Juvenalia reminds me of from time to time–Silkworm, Lungfish, and, of course Magnolia Electric Co.–although Morningstar’s sprawling, messy, occasionally rootsy electric sound isn’t overly indebted to anyone in particular. (Read more)
The Most Distant Object – Volition
Release date: May 4th Record label: Landland Colportage Genre: Indie pop, art rock, post-punk, synthpop, post-rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
The Most Distant Object are a Chicago trio founded by a couple of Windy City indie rock veterans in C-Clamp’s Tom Fitzgerald and Dianogah’s Jason Harvey during the pandemic, and joined by C-Clamp drummer Frantz Etienne sometime after their 2022 debut album. Volition, the band’s second LP, is a sublime and intriguing collection of electronic-tinged rock music (“Post-punk atmosphere and melodic precision. Synthesizers and bass and the space between notes,” writes Landland Colportage, their current label). There’s “Chicago post-rock” in Volition’s DNA, but most of Volition is pop music at its core.
Peaer – Doppelgänger
Release date: January 16th Record label: Danger Collective Genre: Math rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, slowcore Formats: Digital
The SUNY Purchase-originating trio Peaer were one of the great indie rock bands to emerge from the American Northeast in the mid-2010s (fitting right in with the “Exploding in Sound math rock sound” heyday), and though they 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. 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. (Read more)
PONY – Clearly Cursed
Release date: February 13th Record label: Take This to Heart Genre: Indie pop, power pop, pop punk, grunge-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
It’s been a little under two years since Toronto group PONY released Velveteen, which I called a “monster of a pop album” with the hooks to back up its 90s-alt-pop-rock worship. On Clearly Cursed, the band’s founding duo of vocalist Sam Bielanski and guitarist Matty Morand (aka Pretty Matty) are joined by bassist Christian Beale and drummer Joey Ginaldi, though the alternatively dreamy and grungy power pop that’s resulted is in lockstep with PONY’s previous output. Perhaps the extra help is what pushed Clearly Cursed into some of PONY’s best territory, maybe it’s something Bielanski and Morand have been working towards for some time, but it’s a strong whirlwind nonetheless.
The Pretty Flowers – Never Felt Bitter
Release date: March 27th Record label: Forge Again Genre: Power pop, college rock, heartland rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Never Felt Bitter, The Pretty Flowers’ third full-length and first for Forge Again Records, finds the southern California power pop group back in their Paul Westerberg- and Lemonheads-influenced element. Bandleader Noah Green writes that he was inspired by moving out of Los Angeles to the more spacious and quiet town of Sierra Madre, but Never Felt Bitter doesn’t abandon what The Pretty Flowers started in the city–it’s just more. The sprawling, fifty-minute Never Felt Bitter is “larger” for The Pretty Flowers in a strictly literal sense, but the songs really do feel like they are able to take up more space and stretch out more than the band had done so previously. (Read more)
Prism Shores – Softest Attack
Release date: April 10th Record label: Meritorio/Having Fun Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
With last year’s Out from Underneath, Prism Shores revealed themselves as strong practitioners of fuzz-drenched indie pop and college rock, claiming a spot for themselves at a Montreal guitar pop table that’s been impressively crowded as of late. Their latest album, Softest Attack, is a classic leveling-up moment, taking the spirited energy of their last LP and marrying it with larger, more confident hooks and a studio polish designed to accentuate them. Softest Attack is once again stuffed with C86 and Flying Nun-influenced power pop and “fuzz pop” and contains no shortage of top-notch examples of the form. (Read more)
Remember Sports – The Refrigerator
Release date: February 13th Record label: Get Better Genre: Pop punk, power pop, alt-alt-country Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Remember Sports have been in Philadelphia for nearly a decade now, and their members are solidly enmeshed in the city’s indie rock scene. The Refrigerator is the album where the quartet confirm that the power pop and alt-country regularly being exported from Philly (and which has always been in Remember Sports’ sound to some degree) really is intertwined in their own music, too. Remember Sports’ approachability, for lack of a better word, sets them apart from other long-running indie rock bands: they’re just four people who happen to make perfect albums. Sometimes sounding just like their last LP, Like a Stone, sometimes getting noticeably “weird”, The Refrigerator is what you want a great band to make in their second decade as a unit. (Read more)
Sacred Heart Academy – Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP
Release date: March 17th Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop, indie pop, bedroom pop, folk rock, lo-fi pop Formats: CD, digital
Eilee and Evren Centeno are a sibling duo from North Carolina who’ve appeared on the blog before thanks to the record label they co-run, Trash Tape Records. Lately, both of them have moved from Chapel Hill to Chicago and started making music together as Sacred Heart Academy. Oh Good! Sacred Heart Academy Made an EP is an instantly likeable six-song introduction to their new project, establishing the Centenos as compelling bandleaders: Evren is the “slacker”-adjacent alt-country/folk rocker, and they’re countered nicely by a more openly expressive/heart-on-sleeve performance from Eilee. (Read more)
Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman – The Great Degradation
Release date: March 11th Record label: Self-released Genre: Country punk, cowpunk, alt-country, singer-songwriter, Americana Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Two Cow Garage co-leader and central Ohio cowpunk poet laureate Micah Schnabel is about two years removed from The Clown Watches the Clock, a smart, catchy, and funny opus of Midwestern desperation, poverty, and general ambience that stands as one of the long-running musician’s best works. The cult alt-country lifer is back with a record called The Great Degradation, made with his partner, poet and musician Vanessa Jean Speckman, and partially spurred on by the two of them getting priced out of their Columbus apartment. They assembled a group who bashed out The Great Degradation over “2.5 days in two separate basements in Columbus”, and the result is an ornery, more laser-focused sequel to Schnabel’s last LP. (Read more)
The Sleeves – The Sleeves
Release date: May 8th Record label: 12XU Genre: Post-rock, slowcore, folk Formats: Vinyl, digital
London musician Jack Cooper has spent the better part of the last decade leading Modern Nature, a group who’ve explored post-rock, psychedelic folk, and chamber music over the course of several LPs. On their most recent album, last year’s The Heat Warps, Modern Nature became a quartet with new member Tara Cunningham joining Cooper on guitar, and now the two of them are The Sleeves. The Sleeves’ self-titled debut album is, loosely speaking, a song-based folk album; Cunningham and Cooper both sing and play guitar, and these songs thrive in a glacial, stark, wide-open emptiness. (Read more)
Sluice – Companion
Release date: March 27th Record label: Mtn Laurel Recording Co. Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, singer-songwriter Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
It’s hard for me not to compare North Carolina’s Sluice to the Asheville alt-country group Fust, as there’s nearly complete overlap in the two group’s members. Fust seized the little “moment” that their scene is having last year with a polished, vibrant, immediately-grabbing country rock album called Big Ugly–Sluice’s Companion is, conversely, a different beast. It’s a more challenging, wide-ranging “folk rock” album, with plenty of accessible moments and just as many I would hardly describe as such. Nonetheless, I’ve sat with Companion long enough to view it as a moment-seizing record in its own right, too. (Read more)
Star Moles – Highway to Hell
Release date: February 26th Record label: Historic New Jersey Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, piano pop Formats: Digital
Star Moles is Emily Moales, a prolific Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting out music under the name since 2017 and as of late has been averaging at least one record per year. Moales has described Star Moles’ music as “medieval-via-1960s folk-troubadour” before, and that’s not far off from the offbeat, transcendent, marching-to-the-beat-of-her-own-drum singer-songwriter I hear on Highway to Hell. It’s a well-executed and disciplined album, but the vision that Moales and producer Kevin Basko have in mind with these songs is something beautiful in a more challenging way than most “indie folk”. (Read more)
Status/Non Status – Big Changes
Release date: March 6th Record label: You’ve Changed Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, art rock, psychedelia, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Anishinaabe indie rocker Adam Sturgeon exploded onto the scene in 2021 with an EP called 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years that introduced his Status/Non Status project. Over the next three years, another Status/Non Status EP, an LP, and two albums from OMBIIGIZI (Sturgeon’s duo with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman) followed, and the chaotic, all-over-the-place energy of 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years began to congeal into a recognizable sound combining 90s indie and alt-rock, psychedelia, and folk. Big Changes is nonetheless the first Status/Non Status album since 2022, and Sturgeon takes the opportunity to make an overwhelming, emotional Canadian rock album. (Read more)
Timeout Room – Celebration Station
Release date: February 20th Record label: Tough Gum Genre: Garage rock, lo-fi pop, pop punk, power pop Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Night Eye
Timeout Room LP2, Celebration Station,is a fantastically frayed collection of jangle pop, power pop, and garage punk that meets the high bar set by the Baton Rouge, Louisiana project’s 2023 debut album, Tight-Ass Goku Pictures. S.T. McCrary gets some more help this time around and some of the more overtly silly aspects of their debut are absent, leading to a tighter, more rocking collection of tracks that is nonetheless still very fun. After the excitement of Tight-Ass Goku Pictures, Celebration Station feels like Timeout Room settling down just a little bit and confirming that they’ve got more up their sleeves yet. (Read more)
Touch Girl Apple Blossom – Graceful
Release date: May 15th Record label: K/Perennial Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, twee Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
A couple of years ago, an indie pop quartet from Austin called Touch Girl Apple Blossom started gaining some buzz on the strength of their debut record; perhaps it was due to that EP or perhaps due to Beat Happening reference in their name, but K Records (alongside their sibling label Perennial) then signed the band to put out their debut LP, Graceful. I’ve long since given up on trying to guess whether or not any given act will “get big”, but those who do check Touch Girl Apple Blossom out will find a confident, infectious, and more-than-ready-for-primetime collection of indie pop songs. (Read more)
True Green – Hail Disaster
Release date: March 24th Record label: Spacecase Genre: Lo-fi pop, singer-songwriter, lo-fi indie rock, folk rock, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
One of my favorite albums of 2024 was My Lost Decade, the debut LP from Minneapolis musician and novelist Dan Hornsby’s project True Green. My Lost Decade was an inspired combination of Hornsby’s sharp storytelling with Beatles-esque kitchen-sink lo-fi pop cooked up by Hornsby and multi-instrumentalist Tailer Ransom. The quieter, more pensive side of True Green displayed in last year’s singles “Consider the Priesthood” and “Falconry” turned out to be an apt preview of the band’s second album; not everything on Hail Disaster is such a clear turn into sparse, spacey folk-rock, but there’s a subdued, adrift nature throughout the entire album spurred by both Hornsby’s delivery and True Green’s musical choices. (Read more)
Vesuvian – Vesuvian
Release date: May 29th Record label: Worry Bead Genre: Punk rock, noise rock, garage rock, post-hardcore, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
I first heard the Philadelphia group Vesuvian thanks to a song on a Gaza benefit compilation, which led me to their 2023 debut album, More Treble. At the time, they were more or less a Joey DeGrado solo project, and the name of their game was fuzzy, lo-fi alt-country. Now a solid quartet, Vesuvian appear to have completely reinvented themselves on their self-titled sophomore album: there’s still a slight twang, but Vesuvian is a mesmerizing mixture of riff-forward classic rock as filtered through abrasive underground indie/noise rock and lyrics preoccupied with mythology, history, and other esoteric subjects that sound particularly gripping coming from DeGrado’s deadpan, almost Albini-esque mouth. Vesuvian’s hard-left turn makes it less likely that this band will become the toast of Philadelphia anytime soon, but it’s resulted in their best work yet.
