During this eventful Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ll be looking at new albums from Sueño Púrpura and Goodbye Wudaokou, a career-spanning compilation from Generifus, and an EP or mini-LP or whatever from Left Tracks. Let’s go!
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.
Sueño Púrpura – Souvenir
Release date: September 26th Record label: Buh Genre: Shoegaze, art rock, dream pop, post-rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: La Niebla
Lima, Peru-based Buh Records has done an impressive amount of excavating both new and historical experimental music from Latin America in its two decades of activity–with that in mind, providing a home for contemporary South American shoegaze bands like Thank You Lord for Satan and Sexores to put out new material is just one of the services they’ve provided us, but it’s probably the most relevant one for this blog. Buh’s latest signee is a five-piece from Lima called Sueño Púrpura, co-founded in 2022 by two guitarists who’d played together in the instrumental band Parahelio (Rodolfo Ontaneda and Christian Ortega) and quickly joined by vocalist Jandy Torres, bassist José Andrés Lezma, and drummer Juan Camba. The first Sueño Púrpura album, Souvenir, is a sprawling forty-four minute, six-song shoegaze LP (it’s bookended by a nine-minute opening track and a thirteen-minute closing one) with pieces of post-rock, dream pop, and fuzz pop baked into their sound.
Souvenir’s opening track, “Sueño Púrpura”, may indeed stretch to nearly ten minutes, but it’s a go-ahead dream-pop-infused shoegaze masterpiece for nearly its entire runtime–after this relatively friendly opening, Souvenir gets thornier once we get into the meat of songs like “Granate” and “Luz Inerte”. For the most part, these are meandering, lost-sounding psychedelic post-rock pieces with bits of noisy reprieves flaring up whenever Sueño Púrpura threaten to stray too far from shoegaze. “La Niebla” brings a little “pop” more directly back to the surface, and “El Tiempo Es Una Flor” tempers its atmospheric first half with a surging fuzz rock conclusion. The frenetic dozen-minute closing track “Mora” starts with a few minutes of setup that lead towards Sueño Púrpura upping the ante with nearly krautrock-level percussion and amplifiers on the brink. “Mora” doesn’t really sound like the rest of Souvenir, but Sueño Púrpura leave enough chaos strewn about their beauty-seeking music that it’s not unclear how we got here. (Bandcamp link)
Goodbye Wudaokou – Anything of Us
Release date: October 1st Record label: Subjangle/YYZ Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, dream pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Glimmers
Last year’s Mirror Skies by Goodbye Wudaokou was a special thing–a lifelong musician finally makes a debut album, turning in an expansive record steeped in his influences (post-punk, new wave, college rock, C86) with a strong personal stamp on them. Manchester’s Mat Mills apparently decided not to wait long before continuing down this path, as the second Goodbye Wudakou album, Anything of Us, arrives scarcely a year after the first one did. If you liked Mirror Skies, you’ll probably like this one, though it’s clearly not a retread–it’s a more polished and propulsive listen, with Mills (still recording and performing all the instruments himself) pursuing a sound more clearly indebted to the jangly indie pop from his home city and country. In making a more recognizably “indie pop” record with a more traditional guitar-led sound, one might fret that Goodbye Wudaokou could lose the personal homespun touch of Mirror Skies, but that’s not the case here thanks to Mills’ vocals–still even-keeled, unassuming, and high in the mix. It’s not like the New Order synths and post-punk have disappeared from Anything of Us–Goodbye Wudaokou, impressively, is able to conjure up the same backwards-glancing melancholy with one of its strongest ingredients reduced a bit in the concoction. Presenting a winning formula is always welcome, and being able to tinker with it effectively just as much so. (Bandcamp link)
Generifus – Best Of
Release date: September 19th Record label: Perpetual Doom Genre: Folk rock, alt-country, singer-songwriter Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Good Graces
I’ve written about Generifus on this blog before–specifically, the Olympia, Washington-based project’s 2023 album Rearrangel–but that doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of the discography that Spencer Sult has amassed under the name over the past twenty years. Thankfully, Perpetual Doom (Lee Baggett, Austin Leonard Jones, Bill Baird) has given us an easy way in via Best Of, an hourlong cassette tape featuring songs from across the folk rock act’s two-decade career. I believe it’s in roughly chronological order–at the very least, we get early cuts like “And I Tried” and “Good Graces” (from 2011’s I Don’t Have to Worry) at the beginning and songs from Rearrangel and 2024’s Summerberrys (“Didn’t Even Look at the Mountain”, “Rearrangel”, “Charm”) bring up the rear. Best Of starts as a lo-fi, acoustic, slow-crawling Pacific Northwest indie folk rock act and ends as a confident, polished alt-country group, but it’s not such a linear progression–highlights from both the first (early rocker “Back and Time” and country rock breezer “Favorite Thing”) and second (the quiet contemplation of “On God” and the boisterous retro-party vibes of “I Love Music”) halves defy easy placement on such a spectrum. That’s the mark of a successful survey, and of a wealth of work from which to draw it. (Bandcamp link)
Left Tracks – LT2
Release date: September 26th Record label: Self-released Genre: Art pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop, synthpop Formats: Digital Pull Track: I’m Gone
I’ve written about Los Angeles-based musician Kabir Kumar thanks to their work as Sun Kin–their 2024 album Sunset World was one of my favorites of that year–so it’s nice to see them back again in some form with a record, this time as one-half of the duo Left Tracks. Left Tracks’ roots actually go back to around 2020, when Kumar and Phil Di Leo (DI LEO, Seemway) co-founded the group as a way to stay musically connected after the latter’s departure to SoCal from Oakland. The appropriately-titled LT2 is the second Left Tracks release, following a five-song EP in 2023 called End Times Hauling, and the record (it’s eight songs and sixteen minutes long, take your pick on “album” or “EP”) contains plenty of the vibrant, colorful indie pop that I’ve enjoyed via Sun Kin. LT2 is both more streamlined and weirder than Kumar’s solo project, somehow–I’m not sure how else to describe a record that opens with a minimal, sort of hip-hop spoken word experiment (“Conversation”) into a bright, sunny two-minute pop song (“I’m Gone”) into deconstructed dream folk (“Something from Last Night”). Perhaps Left Tracks could’ve elongated these songs and made a “proper” thirty-minute album, but I like the quick bursts of energy LT2 sprints towards instead. (Bandcamp link)
In this Thursday Pressing Concerns, we are looking at four records that come out tomorrow, October 17th. We’ve got new albums from Jeff Tobias, Good Luck, and Citric Dummies, plus a reissue from The Dream Syndicate. Whoa! And if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover, and Tuesday’s had The Ekphrastics, Fini Tribe, Marni, and Laveda), 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.
Jeff Tobias – One Hundredfold Now in This Age
Release date: October 17th Record label: Repeating Cloud Genre: Art rock, orchestral pop, experimental pop, jazz-pop, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Gimme Coherence
I do think that Jeff Tobias’ 2022 album Recurring Dream was the right experimental, political synthpop album for that particular moment–poking at the post-pandemic malaise that was the Biden era, Tobias (who also plays in art rock group Modern Nature and noise-jazz ensemble Sunwatchers) meditated on pinkwashing and lampooned nonprofit-industrial-complex grifters to the tune of offbeat but quite catchy synth-rock. Things are different now, though, and it’s time for something different. It’s time for One Hundredfold Now in This Age, Tobias’ second album of “songs” and first for Repeating Cloud (a partnership for which I can personally claim maybe about 5% of the credit). It’s time for an album whose first lyrics are “Burn the American flag / One hundred times a day,” set to smooth jazz-pop saxophones made by somebody who not only declines to attempt to view everything at a remove, but openly illustrates the futility of trying to do so at the moment.
Musically speaking, One Hundredfold Now in This Age is more orchestral and jazz-indebted than Recurring Dream was, but if you enjoyed that album’s smooth yet dense take on pop music, Tobias does it again here, more or less. With an impressive list of guest musicians in tow (members of Editrix, The Mountain Movers, Office Culture, and American Football, among others), Tobias turns these songs into a single chaotic, vibrant, and seething beast. Taking off from the aforementioned yacht-rock-soundtracked First Amendment exercise endorsed by opening track “END IT”, Tobias then very explicitly tells us “No one gets to go home” in “Gimme Coherence”, the exhilarating, deteriorating “hit” of One Hundredfold Now in This Age (“What’s the paperwork I gotta sign so I don’t die?”– straight and to the point, Mr. Tobias, I like it).
Tobias’ apocalyptic spoken-word narrative in “Arp (Burning Property)” is both absurd and the day-to-day reality of multiple American cities at the time of me writing this. Tobias dips out of a torture-kidnapping session to “deal with email stuff” and later remarks “I can see the place where I live, but it’s also Beirut. It’s also Johannesburg…It’s Greensboro, and it’s Warsaw. It’s home”. If that doesn’t wake you up, Tobias has reserved the most maximalist, noisiest, most insistent moment on the album for a song called “This Is Everybody Not Talking About It” (featuring a kind of dazed, frantic repetition that also really sells late-album highlight “I Feel Hated”). One Hundredfold Now in This Age ends with a long horn-laden, slow-moving pop song called “Don’t Quit the Band” in which Tobias encourages us to “stay alive” for each other and punctuating it with “Don’t quit the band / We need you around”. My irony-poisoned mind did indeed toy with the idea that this was a sardonic closing message, but no–it’s Jeff Tobias once again meeting the moment, in the most difficult and correct way. (Bandcamp link)
The Dream Syndicate – Medicine Show: I Know What You Like (Deluxe Edition)
Release date: October 17th Record label: Fire Genre: Paisley Underground, psychedelic rock, alternative rock, college rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: John Coltrane Stereo Blues
All four of The Dream Syndicate’s 1980s albums are behemoths as far as I’m concerned, and all of them were also, as it turns out, merely incomplete reflections of the high-power, constantly morphing rock band behind them at various points throughout the decade. Fire Records’ reissue series of these albums has been a thorough presentation of The Dream Syndicate and everything that they entailed until their 1989 breakup–over the past few years, we’ve gotten deeper looks at their classic 1982 debut album The Days of Wine and Roses and their undersung 1986 third LP, Out of the Grey. The Dream Syndicate have been praised plenty by critics over the past forty years, and while they may not have the cache in 2025 of several bands for which they helped pave the way, this has nothing to do with the music itself. What The Dream Syndicate accomplished over four LPs–injecting psychedelia, hard rock muscle, and electric Dylanesque rock-and-roll Americana into then-nascent “alternative rock”–is quite impressive, but what Medicine Show: I Know What You Like displays more than anything is that they’re a timeless classic rock band.
This reissue of the band’s 1984 sophomore album is–like its predecessors–as exhaustive as anyone could want, with the CD edition spanning four discs of live recordings, rehearsals, and studio outtakes. Those curious about The Dream Syndicate need only to make their way to the first disc (and the entirety of the vinyl edition), containing the original album (remastered) plus a couple of bonus tracks. Not quite as streamlined as Out of the Grey but on its way, Medicine Show hits like a ton of bricks, and the sprawling track lengths don’t slow down the group’s probing, fuzzed-out rock explorations. An expanded version of the 1984 live album This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album…Live! is also vital for the history of the band, and the mostly-previously-unreleased rehearsals and live tapes appended onto the third and fourth discs are quality, too. It’s not really meant to be sat down and listened to in one sitting (hearing this many versions of “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” in short order probably isn’t good for you), but they’re all laid out for us to get whatever we can out of them. And that’s still a good deal in 2025. (Bandcamp link)
Good Luck – Big Dreams, Mister
Release date: October 17th Record label: Lauren/Specialist Subject Genre: Indie pop, pop punk, power pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: No T-Shirts
The Bloomington, Indiana trio Good Luck (Ginger Alford, Matt Tobey, and Mike Harpring) released two albums–2008’s Into Lake Griffy and 2011’s Without Hesitation–before breaking up the following year, quietly bowing out of the indie rock/punk underground right before the “scene” began to be dotted with bands making some similar combination of earnest Midwestern indie rock, pop punk, and power pop. I’ve only seen the band (and, in particular, Into Lake Griffy) grow in stature in their absence, but the first Good Luck album in fourteen years doesn’t really feel burdened with that (admittedly still relatively niche) weight. For all I know, Good Luck would’ve reformed and made Big Dreams, Mister as soon as their lives aligned to make another record together regardless of whether anyone remembered them.
But people did remember Good Luck. Hop Along member and producer extraordinaire Joe Reinhart (based in Philadelphia, where Harpring now lives, too) recorded Big Dreams, Mister in several sessions, Jeff Rosenstock wrote the biography accompanying the album, and longtime DIY chroniclers Specialist Subject and Lauren Records stepped up to release it. Opening track “Into the Void” arrives with communal flair, nonstop pop hooks, and sneakily impressive guitars like no time at all has passed, and the rest of Big Dreams, Mister ensures no letdowns follow. The lean power pop of the Alford-sung “No T-Shirts”, the swinging crunch of “Hold on We’re on the Way”, the rock and roll tug-of-war of “What Young Me Wanted”–these are self-evidently great songs, with no barriers or blockades between them and us whatsoever. This still works, and, though it certainly must take work to get these songs as intricate as Good Luck make them, Big Dreams, Mister doesn’t sound like there were any doubts about that among its creators. (Bandcamp link)
Citric Dummies – Split With Turnstile
Release date: October 17th Record label: Feel It Genre: Garage punk, punk rock, rock and roll, hardcore punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: I Don’t Like Anything
That’s right, everyone’s favorite garage punk/rock and roll trio from Minneapolis, the Citric Dummies, are back. Bassist/vocalist David Lunch, drummer D.V. Tinner, and guitarist David Cronutburger (replacing Patrick Dillon aka Blob Mould) are, I believe, on their fifth album now with the amusingly misleadingly-titled Split with Turnstile (considering that their previous LP’s name was a take on Hüsker Dü, the Baltimore pop-hardcore sensation alluded to via this album’s title should wear it as a badge of honor). Always goofy but serious about making fast-paced, gas-pedal-to-the-floor punk rock, Split with Turnstile continues the thread of 2023’s Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass and last year’s Trapped in a Parking Garage EP; maybe it’s just recency bias, but it feels like the riffs hit harder and smoke heavier than ever on this one. Songs like “I Don’t Like Anything” and “I Can’t Stand the Weekend” are the ideal Citric Dummies songs, positively melting into an explicable rage for ninety seconds at a time to deliver anti-social, anti-societal garage punk diatribes. Citric Dummies don’t slow down–certainly not on the heavy-ripping lead single “I Am Your Napkin”, not on the high-concept (I mean, for them) “Grant Richardson’s Burning Wreckage Welcome Home”, and not on the final track, which is appropriately titled “Ain’t Got Time (To Live)”. I suppose I should be glad that they found twenty minutes for Split With Turnstile anyway. (Bandcamp link)
Welcome to Pressing Concerns number two (of the week)! Today’s edition features new albums from The Ekphrastics and Laveda, a compilation from Fini Tribe, and an EP from Marni. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover), check that out here.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Ekphrastics – All of a Sudden, Pow!
Release date: October 1st Record label: Harriet Genre: Indie pop, folk-pop, twee Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Five Things Lynn Knows
Both Frank Boscoe (a Pittsburgh-originating singer-songwriter known for 90s indie rock bands like Wimp Factor 14 and The Vehicle Flips) and Harriet Records (the independent indie pop label who put out music from Boscoe’s bands as well as Tullycraft, Crayon, and Linda Smith) have been in the midst of a revival lately. After seemingly folding at the end of the 1990s, Harriet’s been quite active this decade, and Boscoe’s new band The Ekphrastics (based out of Camden, Maine) have been at the center of it all. All of a Sudden, Pow! is the third Ekphrastics album in as many years, and it contains a batch of songs in the same historical-record-digging vein as last year’s Make Your Own Snowboard.
Using the same comfortable laid-back, folk-y indie pop in which The Ekphrastics deal, Boscoe leads us through gripping tales like “I Am Going to Read You the Riot Act” (in which we are, in fact, read the 1715 British act that gave the expression its name), “This Month at the Roman Bros. Gallery” (which situates itself in a particularly refined money-laundering operation), and “My Character Was Killed Off in a Fiery Car Wreck” (self-explanatory). The phrase “too esoteric for its own good” was bouncing around my head listening to “The Wind Chill Factor? That Was Me” at first, but I’ve come around to that one, too–the song’s narrator, an anonymous Canadian soldier who will forever be unrecognized for his contributions to meteorology, is as good an avatar for The Ekphrastics as any. That’s Frank Boscoe’s talent–he can be going on and on, delivering a narrative that doesn’t seem remarkable in any way, but then he’ll sneak in a line or two that builds an entire world and character, and all of a sudden… (Bandcamp link)
Fini Tribe – The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987
Release date: October 10th Record label: Shipwrecked Industries/Finiflex Genre: Post-punk, art punk, industrial Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Splash Care
The Edinburgh-originating electronic/trance act Finitribe put out five albums (and considerably more singles and EPs) on labels like Wax Trax!, One Little Indian, and FFRR between 1988 and 1998 before disbanding. Before any of that, however, the sextet (Chris Connelly, Simon McGlynn, Andy McGregor, Davie Miller, Philip Pinsky, and John Vick) called themselves Fini Tribe (two words!) and had a much more post-punk sound. These early years didn’t seem to get the on-record representation that the later eras of Finitribe did, but The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe 1982-1987 does its best to make up for that. The definitive 3-CD edition of this compilation pulls together the singles Fini Tribe released contemporaneously, Peel and BBC Sessions, rehearsal tapes, and live recordings in a forty-seven song package (the vinyl edition selects nine from across the sprawl).
The Sheer Action of the Fini Tribe is an exciting look into a fertile time and place in rock music history through the lens of a band dabbling in a bit of all of it–given the presence of some more industrial/dance-influenced material, it’s not surprising where this group eventually ended up, but these recordings also capture a muscular six-piece rock band, a bunch of nervous post-punks, and a team of noisy experimenters. It’s hard to say whether, had they consolidated this era into a single LP at the time, Fini Tribe would have taken a place alongside some of their more canonized peers–but for any early post-punk fan, there’s more than enough here to recommend a deep dive. (Bandcamp link)
Marni – fml era
Release date: October 10th Record label: Self-released Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, alt-rock, slowcore, 90s indie rock Formats: Digital Pull Track: Washed Up
When I wrote about the band Marni briefly in 2023, they were the solo project of Palm Springs vocalist/guitarist Nicolas Lara (who was also playing in Garb around that time, I believe). Since their 2022 debut album Whiskey Girl (and the non-album single I highlighted that came out a couple of months later), they’ve developed into a full band also featuring vocalist/guitarist Michaela Gradstein, bassist Kai Zeleznik, guitarist Manny Trujillo, and drummer Joey Anderson. The Los Angeles-based group has settled in nicely with West Coast groups playing some mixture of slowcore, shoegaze, and fuzz-punk (they opened for Idaho last year, if that helps), and that’s what you’ll hear on their latest EP, fml era. It’s the best that Marni has sounded yet, even if (perhaps because) they’re still kind of hard to get a handle on. “Bee Stings” and “99¢” are both awesome heavy alt-rock rippers to open the EP, but fml era’s final three songs use Marni’s electricity for subtler, more slowcore-indebted, and (at least in the case of “Boozer”) alt-country ends. Lara namechecks the late great Ohioan Jason Molina in “Washed Up”, although the wide-open, star-filled indie rock of the track in question betrays Marni’s southwestern desert origins; maybe you’ll find a band seeing how their heroes play in new environments as worthwhile as I do. (Bandcamp link)
Laveda – Love, Darla
Release date: September 12th Record label: Bar/None Genre: Fuzz pop, noise rock, 90s indie rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Cellphone
Just what we all needed: another noisy indie rock band from the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. To be fair, Laveda are originally from Albany, but their third album, Love, Darla, clearly owes a debt to their adopted home city’s underground rock music from the 1980s and 90s. Band co-founders Jacob Brooks (who also makes music as Retail Drugs) and Ali Genevich have picked up a rhythm section (drummer Joe Taurone and bassist Dan Carr) somewhere between their 2020 debut album and Love, Darla, and the four-piece sounds fully ready to carry on the traditions of bands like Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead, and Poem Rocket on their latest LP. They hew towards the “pop” side of their favorite noisemakers, to be sure–there’s nice melodies and simply effective rhythms clearly marking could-be-hits like “Cellphone” (a toe-tapping petulant post-punk track) and “Heaven” (a gorgeous dream pop song), and it’s baked into the LP’s noisier numbers as well. I don’t mind hearing a band hopping around from playing at distortion-laden punks (most of “Care”) to oh-so-careful avant-garde-rock guitar whisperers (“Dig Me Out”, the rest of “Care”) when they sound like they have an equal appreciation for all of it. That’s because I do too. (Bandcamp link)
Hey, folks. It’s the first Pressing Concerns of the week. Thanks for joining us. We’ve got new albums from Charlie Kaplan, Aarktica, Friendship Commanders, and People Mover below, which I think you’ll enjoy.
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.
Charlie Kaplan – A Hat Upon the Bed
Release date: October 10th Record label: Glamour Gowns Genre: Art rock, folk rock, psychedelia Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: No More Mistakes
I introduced the blog to New York musician Charlie Kaplan with his 2024 LP Eternal Repeater. In addition to his work running Glamour Gowns Records and playing bass in sophisti-pop group Office Culture, he’s also a heady and accomplished folk-indie-rock singer-songwriter in his own right, and those who enjoyed Eternal Repeater should be overjoyed to learn that Kaplan is back less than a year later with a sprawling fourteen-song, fifty-minute album partially inspired by the 2013 death of his father. Well, maybe “overjoyed” isn’t the word, but A Hat Upon the Bed is an exciting leap forward for the already fairly ambitious musician, as Kaplan and his recognizable group of collaborators (including pianist Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture, bassist Julian Cubillos, guest guitarist Nico Hedley, and Nate Mendelsohn of Market in the engineer’s chair) trust us to keep up with a sneakily grandiose LP.
We’re kind of thrown right into it at the beginning between the stark orchestral folk of the title track, the noisy torrent masking “Halley”, and the five-minute, meandering “Transmission”. “Have a Nice Day”, while still fairly intense, is the first relatively sunny moment on A Hat Upon the Bed, and the six-minute “Is It Gonna Be Alright” is large enough to incorporate some of those moments, too. Stick with Kaplan and you’ll find a couple of strong pop songs hidden in the middle of A Hat Upon the Bed’s morass–the back-to-back “Top of the Tree” and “No More Mistakes” land somewhere between the polished studio pop of Office Culture and Wilco, another studio-wielding band I’ve compared Kaplan to in the past. If A Hat Upon the Bed comes across as a little more “challenging” overall than Eternal Repeater, it’s in an organic way. It’s where the material took Charlie Kaplan and his band, and we’ve come all this way with them. (Bandcamp link)
Aarktica – Ecstatic Lightsongs
Release date: October 3rd Record label: HanaqPacha Genre: Dream pop, slowcore, post-rock, post-punk, experimental Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Trick of the Light
I wrote about Aarktica in 2022, when the group (largely the project of Los Angeles’ Jon DeRosa) released a gigantic double album called We Will Find the Light. It followed a relatively quiet period for Aarktica, but it was far from their first release–they’ve been making records in the realms of post-rock, ambient, and slowcore since 1999. Aarktica has thankfully stayed active in the wake of We Will Find the Light–they released the instrumental album Paeans in 2023, and they’re back with another (loosely-speaking) “rock” album called Ecstatic Lightsongs this month. With the help of cellist Henrik Meierkord, drummer Mike Pride, bassist Lewis Pesacov, and vocalist Britt Warner, Ecstatic Lightsongs is DeRosa’s attempt to make an album inspired by “classic darkwave and art-rock”, naming uncategorizable iconoclasts like Hood, The Durutti Column, and (perhaps most importantly) Talk Talk as touchpoints.
Compared to We Will Find the Light, in which slow folk songs were (more or less) cleanly separated by ambient pieces, Ecstatic Lightsongs is a more holistic mix of folk, rock, post-rock, and ambient music. The record’s first two songs are both overwhelming pieces of slowcore/art rock, and while “Why Say Anything?” and “Ecstatic Light Transmission” can be described as folk and ambient music respectively, the cavernous acoustic sound of the former and the twinkling instrumental melodies of the latter muddy the waters just a little further. The slightly psychedelic swirl of the bleary-eyed orchestral folk rock “Laughing in the Rain” is a beautiful closer, although the “bonus track”–an Aarktica-fied version of The Chameleons’ “Second Skin”–works as a coda as well. There’s a weight to all of Ecstatic Lightsongs, but not one that makes it a chore to pick up. (Bandcamp link)
Friendship Commanders – BEAR
Release date: October 10th Record label: Magnetic Eye Genre: Hard rock, stoner rock, noise rock, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Dripping Silver
Buick Audra and Jerry Roe are plenty busy on their own (the former with a genre-spanning solo career, the latter as a prolific session drummer), but the work the Nashville duo do together as Friendship Commanders is for what they’re best-known (or it ought to be if it isn’t). The duo have evolved from a scrappy, punk-influenced alt-rock group to a heavy and melodic stoner/sludge rock band (something underscored by a recent remixed re-release of their 2018 sophomore album, BILL). Audra’s writing tends towards the opaque and vague, real emotions but without obvious receipts to their origins–this contrasts with her quite visceral and specific quotes about what inspired her lyrics on BEAR, the latest Friendship Commanders album. It’s effectively a furious concept album about women who devote themselves to upholding patriarchal societal norms at the expense of their own gender and a vow by Audra not to be “one of them”. It’s a heavy and complex subject that permeates some really great rock music from opening track “Keeping Score” (“I’m not seventeen anymore, but I’m keeping score” is, I imagine, a dispatch from a life of witnessing the kinds of actions that inspired BEAR) to closing song “Dead & Discarded Girls”, which is about as evocative as Friendship Commanders get. It’s something to reflect on and an antidote to the all-pervasive black-and-white mentality we’d all do well to challenge, but, just as importantly, it rocks. (Bandcamp link)
People Mover – Cane Trash
Release date: September 12th Record label: Little Lunch Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: James St
We’ve got some good news: they’re still making good indie pop down in Australia. People Mover are a trio from Brisbane made up of siblings Lu Sergiacomi (vocals/guitar) and Dan Sergiacomi (drums) along with “good mate” Billy McCulloch on bass; their first release was a three-song self-titled 7” back in 2021 on Little Lunch Records (Olivia’s World, Soft Covers, Pretty in Pink), and four years later we get Cane Trash, their first LP. Little Lunch refers to the album’s sound as “nonchalant Australian indie-punk”, which is accurate enough that I’m reprinting here; Lu’s vocals are droll but melodic, the instrumentals are capable, barebones, and just a little roughed-up, and the songwriting is subtle but sneakily quite strong. They’re not as “twee” as some of Little Lunch’s other bands, instead adding a garage-y propulsion to their music that reminds me of acts like The Small Intestines and The Courtneys (whom People Mover mention as an influence). Opening track “James St” is People Mover at their cleanest and most buttoned-up, but there’s plenty of “pop” in the sloppier, fuzzier material that follows it. Occasional slapdash vibes aside, though, I never believe that People Mover don’t know what they’re doing on Cane Trash. (Bandcamp link)
It’s time for Pressing Concerns of the week number three! We’ve got brand-new albums from The Telephone Numbers, Guitar, Giant Day, and Massage for you to peruse below. Mark my words, this one’s going down as a classic. Also, if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (on Monday, we looked at new ones from Kilkenny Cats, Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island, and on Tuesday it was Ambulanz, Creative Writing, Time Thief, and Nape Neck), 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.
The Telephone Numbers – Scarecrow II
Release date: October 10th Record label: Slumberland Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Telephone Numbers Theme
The San Francisco Bay Area is full of interesting, distinct singer-songwriters at the moment–Yea-Ming Chen, Michael Ramos, and Glenn Donaldson all come to me right off the dome–but The Telephone Numbers’ Thomas Rubenstein is remarkable in how he manages to carve out his own signature style while giving so much of himself over to the towering jangle pop, college rock, and power pop that’s shaped the entire scene around him. Andy Pastalaniec and Rob I. Miller have done it to some degree, but Rubenstein has been the king of it since 2021’s breakthrough LP The Ballad of Doug. The one-off singles and compilation appearances in the intervening four years have only increased my anticipation for Scarecrow II, the second Telephone Numbers LP and the first one for Slumberland Records. A lot of familiar faces have popped up on Telephone Numbers recordings over the years–Scarecrow II is no exception, but it’s worth noting that the band are now a solid quartet featuring Rubenstein’s longtime collaborator Charlie Ertola (The Love-Birds) on bass, mercenary Phil Lantz (Neutrals, The 1981, Chime School) on drums, and Umbrellas co-leader Morgan Stanley on guitar and vocals.
Scarecrow II may be The Telephone Numbers’ coming-out party, but the quartet sound pretty unhurried as they take the stage for the big show. “Goodbye Rock n Roll” is a minimal first statement, allowing us to take in Rubenstein’s striking, Scott Miller-esque vocals and a simple, brilliant jangle before lead single “Be Right Down” sweeps us all away. The mid-record ballad “Falling Dream” injects a bit of Tommy Keene into Rubenstein’s performance, and it gives way to a keyboard-infused rave-up called “Pulling Punchlines” (judging by the album credits, that one’s been in Rubenstein’s arsenal for a long time now). The beautiful music industry disillusionment anthem “This Job Is Killing Me”, originally the B-side to the 2023 “Weird Sisters” single, is re-recorded here, slowed down and given strings to draw out the titular expiration even more dramatically. The Telephone Numbers save one of their best tricks for the penultimate slot, giving Stanley the lead to sing “Telephone Numbers Theme”, a triumphant indie-power-pop track that’s every bit good enough to be the group’s theme song. Stanley’s voice is pretty far removed from Rubenstein’s vocals, but the trick of Scarecrow II, like all the Telephone Numbers numbers before it, is that it hangs together. (Bandcamp link)
Guitar – We’re Headed to the Lake
Release date: October 10th Record label: Julia’s War Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, fuzz pop, garage rock Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: A+ for the Rotting Team
Three Guitar records, three reinventions. And We’re Headed to the Lake might be the one that finally gets Portland musician Saia Kuli the notoriety he’s been due for a hot minute. The sophomore Guitar LP ditches both the lo-fi post-punk of the 2022 self-titled EP and the shoegaze-infused noise-fuzz assault of 2024’s Casting Spells on Turtlehead and embraces clarity and pop songwriting like never before. All of a sudden, Kuli and some familiar collaborators (drummer Nikhil Wadhwa and vocalist Jontajshae Smith) are making exquisite 90s-influenced indie rock that reminds me quite a bit of Guided by Voices, Pavement, and (maybe because I just saw them live) Silkworm.
These elements were there in Guitar’s earlier, more chaotic material, but it’s still a shock to the system when We’re Headed to the Lake opens with tinny but otherwise clearly-delivered Robert Pollard-level guitar pop in “A+ for the Rotting Team” (and if the instrumental veers into a weird ditch at one point–well, it’s not like Guided by Voices never did that, either). The Smith-sung “Chance to Win” is legit dreamy jangle-rock, and songs like “Cornerland”, “Every Day Without Fail”, and “A Toast to Tovarishch” may have some garage-punk roughness around the edges, but they’re clearly pop music. Almost as if to reassure us that Guitar is still a bizarre project at its core, We’re Headed to the Lake closes on a song that’s as melodically beautiful as it is headscratching (“The Chicks Just Showed Up”) and a multi-part rocker called “Counting on a Blowout”. If we’re lucky enough to see Guitar pick up some steam in 2025, it’ll be due to the same Saia Kuli instincts that got them to We’re Headed to the Lake in the first place. (Bandcamp link)
Giant Day – Alarm
Release date: October 10th Record label: Elephant 6 Genre: Art rock, art pop, psychedelia, synth-rock, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Out of Hand
Derek Almstead and Emily Growden are a pair of longtime Elephant 6 musicians who, upon leaving Athens for rural Pennsylvania and becoming “caretakers of a family farm”, started up a new project called Giant Day. The debut Giant Day album, last year’s Glass Narcissus, sported a “dense electronic, post-punk, and futuristic synth-rock” sound (as I said at the time) that wasn’t totally out of line with, say, the darker side of The Olivia Tremor Control (in which Almstead has played), but was still fairly distinct from the majority of “Elephant 6 bands”. Merely a year later, Giant Day are back with Alarm, a sophomore album that doubles down on dark synth-based indie rock music with copious electronic elements.
The pop moments are there, albeit often in unusual ways–“Out of Hand” kicks off the album with a jangly, college rock-style guitar riff, but the song that follows is a much more nervous post-punk creation. Almstead references Cocteau Twins as an inspiration for “Golden Times”, an influence I hear throughout the record (aside from the aforementioned song, perhaps most obviously in “Back to the Corner”). The funk-post-punk of “Devil Dog” and the minimal synthpop “Spite 28” are a little brighter, although the inspired groove-based instrumentals undergirding nearly all of Alarm help bridge the lighter and darker moments. Giant Day may not be plugging in and churning out “classic Elephant 6 music”, but they’re pushing boundaries decades after the label’s most canonical works, which seems even more appropriate. (Elephant 6 link)
Massage – Coaster
Release date: October 10th Record label: Mt.St.Mtn./Bobo Integral/Prefect Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, college rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: No North Star
It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the Los Angeles indie pop quintet Massage–specifically, the year 2021, in which they put out both an LP and an EP (though they did reissue their debut album, 2018’s Oh Boy, in 2022). They fit right into the current West Coast jangle pop revival (that impressive lineup of labels teaming together to put out Coaster should give that away), but Massage have gotten there by doing their own thing, one that pulls together pastoral folk rock, New Order-influenced melodicism, and plenty of “college rock”. On their third LP, Coaster, it’s apparent that the group (vocalist/guitarists Alex Naidus and Andrew Romano, vocalist/keyboardist Gabrielle Ferrer, bassist David Rager, and drummer Natalie de Almeida) have yet to miss a beat–Massage deliberately unfold their jangle pop flag on sprawling opener “No North Star” only to veer right into the synths and Peter Hook basslines of “Daffy Duck”. There are bands who’ll spend their entire career trying to nail the Teenage Fanclub guitar pop sound as neatly as Massage do on “Hang on to That Feeling”–and it’s not even one of my favorite tracks on Coaster. Not that it really matters–I’m equally likely to be impressed by the simple jangle of “Psychic”, the “big music” vibes of “Fading Out”, or the melancholy melodies of “We’re Existential” on any listen. (Bandcamp link)
The day is Tuesday. That means it’s time for the second Pressing Concerns of the week, featuring new albums from Ambulanz, Creative Writing, and Nape Neck, plus the debut EP from Time Thief. Check ’em out below, and if you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Kilkenny Cats, Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island), peep that here.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Ambulanz – III
Release date: September 26th Record label: It’s Eleven Genre: Garage punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Flowers
Call an Ambulanz! But not for me. Well, maybe for me after all–I first heard this Leipzig quartet in late 2023 thanks for their sophomore album II, and their spirited version of garage punk (“quite hooky, although it retains a post-punk edge…‘synthpunk’ but with a fairly guitar-forward sound…loose and unhinged on occasion, but never ‘sloppy’”, I said at the time) quickly made them my favorite act on upstart east Germany post-punk label It’s Eleven. The third Ambulanz album is called (of course) III, and the five-song album (half of which is taken up by a ten-minute closing track) picks up right where the band left off.
“Joy” and “Flowers” both come right out of the gate with catchy, kinetic, somewhat unpredictable post-punk/garage punk hybrid creations, and “Number” and “Repetition”–despite both leaning towards the darker ends of Ambulanz’s sound–still keep the immediately-hitting momentum going strong. Which leads us to the prog-punk epic (at least, by Ambulanz standards) “Slime”: four minutes of classic Ambulanz punk ripping, a few minutes of ambient scraping, and then surfy garage punk once again bubbles up into the mix (and fades in and out until closing time). The strange detours are a nice compliment to the main appeal of Ambulanz for me, and I don’t mind them tweaking their formula like this if they bring the right amount of energy to it. (Bandcamp link)
Creative Writing – Baby Did This
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Meritorio Genre: College rock, jangle pop, psychedelia Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Memory Light
Meritorio Records’ latest guitar pop procurement is a quartet from western Massachusetts made up of a bunch of indie rock veterans. Wes Nelson, Patrick Battleship, Jeffrey Morkeski, and Jedediah Smith have played in groups like Huevos II, Luxor Rentals, Sore Eros, Jeanines, and Estrogen Highs between the four of them, and Creative Writing is a chance for Nelson and Battleship to co-helm a group. Their debut album, Baby Did This, follows an EP called True 90s that came out in January, and continues a strong start that owes as much to the psychedelic and more classic rock-focused sides of “college rock” as the light and jangly ones. Fans of bands like The Vulgar Boatmen and fellow New Englanders Miracle Legion (not to mention the Paisley Underground) will find plenty to enjoy on Baby Did This, which starts with a four-minute meandering introduction called “I Love You” and continues into jangle pop hits like “Hallway” and “Sister” with a casual indifference. The haze attached to songs like “Can’t Thank You Enough” and “Glass Days” doesn’t diminish their pop appeal, though–it’s only when the clouds part for sunny power pop like “Memory Light” that Creative Writing’s greyscale streak appears in hindsight. And then you’re ready for the seven-minute psychedelic-Paisley-fog pop song called “Rain” that closes out Baby Did This. (Bandcamp link)
Time Thief – Time Thief
Release date: September 12th Record label: Musical Fanzine/Lost Sound Tapes Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital Pull Track: Mean Girls
Time Thief are a new band from Providence, Rhode Island made up of two familiar faces in Zoë Wyner and James Walsh. The latter previously played in the band Dump Him and currently runs Musical Fanzine Records (most recently seen releasing an album and an EP from the excellent Olympia group Wavers), while the former was in Halfsour and currently has a solo project named Zowy (and, apparently, was briefly in Dump Him with Walsh). The first Time Thief release is a self-titled 10” record and cassette tape that introduces an even-keeled duo with a clear, wide-ranging love of lo-fi indie rock and pop music. Over the course of fourteen minutes, Time Thief masters melancholic but wired Pacific Northwestern indie rock like that of their aforementioned labelmates (“Mean Girls”), unabashed jangly indie pop (“A Brief History of Ordinary Letdowns”), slightly psychedelic, 60s-ish folk-rock (“Baby Boy”), and choppy, bass-led, post-punk-influenced indie pop (“Field of Depth”). Compared to the most recent Zowy EP, Time Thief has a nice, full-band sound, but the instrumentals (recorded entirely by Wyner and Walsh themselves) are hardly overly polished or showy. The main draw of Time Thief is something a little trickier to pinpoint, but palpable nonetheless. (Bandcamp link)
Nape Neck – The Shallowest End
Release date: September 19th Record label: Dot Dash/OCCII, Amsterdam/Red Wig Genre: Noise rock, art punk, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: The Floor of the Forest
2025 appears to be the year of Nape Neck. The Leeds-based trio have been around for a few years, but this March saw the release of a self-titled LP compiling the group’s entire recorded output up until that point, June saw a live cassette called Live at Sonic Protest Festival 2023, and now September has brought The Shallowest End, the band’s first “proper” full-length studio album. A metallic, drilling art punk/noise rock band I was all too happy to compare to The Ex when I wrote about Nape Neck, the trio (bassist Claire Adams, drummer Kathy Gray, and guitarist Bobby Glew) haven’t slowed down a bit on The Shallowest End, a ten-song torrent of noisy, communal, and ferocious rock and roll music. The three instrumentalists of Nape Neck (they share lead vocal duties) remain equally important to the band’s sound–it’s a primal, active-listening endeavor where somebody is always taking command of something. The energy level of The Shallowest End is at a constant high, with pummeling rhythms, scratchy guitar attacks, and vocals that range from “sneer” to “dread” never flagging. 2025 won’t be the only year of Nape Neck if they’re able to keep this up. (Bandcamp link)
Rosy Overdrive is back this week with a full slate of new blog posts, and we’re starting today by looking at new albums from Matthew Smith Group, Why Bother?, and Novelty Island, plus an expanded reissue from the 1980s group Kilkenny Cats. Read on!
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.
Kilkenny Cats – Hammer + Echo
Release date: September 26th Record label: Propeller Sound Recordings Genre: College rock, alternative rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: To Speak To
Killkenny Cats were a key part of the Athens, Georgia alternative rock underground in the 1980s, releasing an album in 1984 and an EP in 1988 before eventually fading away sometime in the 1990s. Half of Kilkenny Cats’ “core” lineup (Tom Cheek and Allen Wagner) were previously in another Athens band that’s seen a reissue campaign recently, Is/Ought Gap–unlike that band, Kilkenny Cats did see a bit of press and notoriety in their heyday (their LP was released by Twin/Tone, after all), but given that they still remain absent from local retrospectives focusing on the likes of R.E.M., Pylon, and The B-52’s, Propeller Sound Recordings’ reissue series of their music seems like an important endeavor. Kilkenny Cats were a bit “heavier” than their contemporaries, mixing classic rock guitars with their southern “college rock” and post-punk, and it all peaked with Hammer, the 1988 EP that was their final release as an active band. Hammer + Echo collects the original EP’s five songs plus eight “outtakes, demos, and deep cuts” from across the group’s career (“Echo”).
Hammer stands out today as a distorted, electronic take on college rock–opening track “To Speak To” is nearly proto-grunge, and “Nervous Neville” is the unlikely midpoint between glam and harmonious folk rock. The extra recordings paint a fuller picture of Kilkenny Cats, a band that could hop from lo-fi jangle pop to southern garage rock to moody post-punk with seeming ease. One of the most impressive things about Hammer + Echo is that it’s able to both present an unsung masterpiece in its original form (there’s no need for messing with the initial version of Hammer, no) as well as pull back the curtain and reveal something beyond the final product Kilkenny Cats released in 1988. That’s on Propeller Sound for putting Hammer + Echo together this way, as well as on Kilkenny Cats themselves for leaving plenty behind all those years ago. (Bandcamp link)
Matthew Smith Group – Matthew Smith Group
Release date: September 26th Record label: Tall Texan Genre: Psychedelic pop, indie pop, power pop, jangle pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Others
Beloved in the worlds of underground American guitar pop and Detroit indie rock, Outrageous Cherry put out over a dozen records of psychedelic pop, power pop, and all the detours entailed within those genres before the death of lead guitarist Larry Ray put an end to the band in 2017. Thankfully, vocalist/guitarist Matthew Smith has continued on via the aptly-named Matthew Smith Group and has taken the chance to bring some new faces into the fold–Outrageous Cherry’s rhythm section (drummer Maria Nuccilli and bassist Colleen Burke) are still here, but are now joined by new lead guitarist Ava East (of Shadow Show), Chris Pottinger on Moog synthesizer, and Molly Jones on saxophone. And if Matthew Smith Group still sounds quite a bit like Outrageous Cherry, that’s hardly a bad thing. Opening track “Others” is perfect guitar pop no matter what you call it, calling to mind the lighter side of The New Pornographers (who, it should be noted, once recorded a 7” of Outrageous Cherry covers) and the more Beach Boys-indebted side of Elephant 6. Pottinger’s Moog and Jones’ saxophone do push Matthew Smith Group into strange territory on occasion, but this album is eleven pop songs first and foremost–sometimes “jangly”, often psychedelic, occasionally offbeat, but clearly the work of professionals who know how to veer all over the place without losing the plot. (Bandcamp link)
Why Bother? – Case Studies
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Feel It Genre: Garage rock, garage punk, lo-fi punk Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: In Between the Distance
Mason, City Iowa basement rockers Why Bother? have been on a tear lately–Case Studies is the group’s third release in under twelve months, and all of them have been quality rock and roll records. After getting even weirder with April’s You Are Part of the ExperimentEP, vocalist/synth player Terry, guitarist Speck, bassist Pamela, and drummer Paul start Case Studies by mostly hewing to the classic dark, horror-infused Why Bother? garage-punk sound, although the LP’s dozen tracks allow plenty of odder moments as well. Believe it or not, Case Studies contains some of Why Bother?’s most outwardly pop moments yet–sure, “I Take Back” does it in a familiar garage rock and roll way, but “In Between the Distance” and “Destruction by Design” are straight-up tinny, hissing, lo-fi jangly/power pop (or, at least, as close to it as Why Bother? could reasonably ever get). To make up for it, Case Studies goes nuclear in its closing quarter–the workout “Indoctrination” and punk-furious closing track “Galaxy Eyes” border two of the wildest entries into the Why Bother? canon yet in the six-minute multi-part basement prog of “Still Remain / Back in Sleep Paralysis” and “The Past Makes Me Sad / Behold! The Great War of 12 Realms”, a rather disconcerting devolution into noise. Another successful creation from Why Bother?’s laboratory. (Bandcamp link)
Novelty Island – Jigsaw Causeway
Release date: October 3rd Record label: 9×9/Ripe Genre: Indie pop, folk rock, psychedelic pop, Britpop Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Jigsaw Causeway
Jigsaw Causeway is an interesting proposition–a British kid who grew up on The Beatles and Oasis attempts to make an album incorporating a more disparate collection of influences, including Grandaddy, Beck, and Boards of Canada. Liverpool musician Tom McConnell doesn’t seem like one to do things half-assed, if the painstakingly-created puzzle art of Jigsaw Causeway, the far-flung locales in which the album was recorded, and an accompanying gallery exhibition featuring “surreal papier-mâché props” and “handmade detritus” are any indication. And yet, musically speaking, Jigsaw Causeway is a fairly subtle listen–as far as these things go, anyway, I suppose. Its foundation is British guitar pop (if only there was a way to shorten that term) with bits of tasteful glam, synthetic touches, jangle pop, and folk rock baked into the mix in a very natural manner.The opening title track more or less does it all incredibly smoothly, and from there Jigsaw Causeway cleanly clears slightly synthetic indie pop (“Foam Animals”), slightly folky psychedelia (“I’m Glad It’s Not Sunny”), and bullseye-nailing Beatles-XTC-Britpop hits (“Rainy”). McConnell’s Jigsaw Causeway is an enjoyable jaunt regardless of which element of its patchwork it’s hewing towards at any given time. (Bandcamp link)
The Thursday Pressing Concerns is the first one of the week, featuring three albums coming out tomorrow (October 3rd) from Stay Inside, Prewn, and Rainwater, plus a Mythical Motors compilation from earlier this week. Earlier this week, we had the September 2025 playlist plus a rundown on the recent Silkworm reunion shows, so check those posts out if you haven’t yet.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Stay Inside – Lunger
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Tiny Engines Genre: Emo, art rock, alt-rock Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital Pull Track: Ain’t That a Daisy?
Stay Inside became one of the best emo bands currently active so naturally and quietly that I didn’t even notice until now. The quartet (guitarist/vocalist Chris Johns, bassist Bryn Nieboer, guitarist Chris Lawless, and drummer Vishnu Anantha, with saxophonist Shelley Washington and trumpet player Matt Hull now billed as “sometimes” members) put out a very good post-hardcore album in 2020 called Viewing and then followed it up four years later with the more polished alt-rock of the independently-released Ferried Away. I enjoyed Ferried Away and I know I wasn’t alone in doing so, but it now feels like it was a warm-up for Lunger, their third and best LP (coming merely months after their last album). Lunger is fourteen songs of Stay Inside delivering a emo-rock blow informed by heavy-gravity groups like mewithouYou and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, only chiseled down to punchy, poppy emo-rock songs. Stay Inside do their best to outrun a sense of decay through sweeping rockers like “Wish It Away”, “Monsieur Hawkweed”, and “Ain’t That a Daisy?” (the latter of which is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard this year in any genre)–really, just about every song on Lunger feels like it’s in motion in some form. Stay Inside’s progress had largely flown under radar until now, but I’m at least listening after Lunger. (Bandcamp link)
Mythical Motors – The Painted Unseen: Selected Singles and EPs
Release date: October 1st Record label: Subjangle Genre: Lo-fi power pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Alive in Wildness
Yes, we do need more Mythical Motors records, thank you very much. Matt Addison’s Chattanooga, Tennessee-based lo-fi power pop project is one of the most prolific bands to regularly appear on Rosy Overdrive; typically, we get multiple Mythical Motors albums a year. In addition to a plethora of CD and cassettes, however, there’ve been a ton of digital-only Mythical Motors EPs and singles over the years, and that’s where The Painted Unseen comes in, collecting five such releases on one CD courtesy of Subjangle Records. A couple of these songs (“Omega Highway”, “Shadow That Comes from Nothing”) ended up on proper albums, but the vast majority of these twenty-seven songs are making their physical debut on The Painted Unseen. Addison’s proper albums find him more often than not laser-focused on punchy Guided by Voices hooks and guitars, and this applies to much of The Painted Unseen (hard to believe “Alive in Wildness” got “left off” anything), but we also get oddities like the garage-junk “Pinpoint Nosedives” and psychedelic debris “Someone Has Been Eating the Red Ribbon” (both of which are from 2018’s Negative Eleven EP, arguably the highlight of the whole collection). Mythical Motors’ music has a crate-digging appeal, and, with that in mind, The Painted Unseen is as an enjoyable a listen as their “normal” albums. At the very least, it’ll keep us busy for a few months until the next one. (Bandcamp link)
Prewn – System
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Exploding in Sound Genre: Art rock, experimental rock, folk rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Dirty Dog
Exploding in Sound Records introduced us to Prewn in 2023 with Through the Window, the debut album from the Northampton, Massachusetts-based project of one Izzy Hagerup. On Through the Window, Hagerup’s intense and odd mixture of slow, electric indie and folk rock felt a bit hard to categorize, and she hasn’t made it any easier on me with the sophomore Prewn album, System. System feels nearly psychedelic in its construction, with a sound (played entirely by Hagerup once again) that feels both cavernous and uncomfortably up-close (a trick perfected by Prewn’s onetime labelmates Pile). Hagerup is pleading, nearly desperate in opening track “Easy”, a PJ Harvey-esque collision of strings, dread, and little else, but not even this scorcher prepares us for just how “widescreen” System is capable of getting. “Commotion” gets little more synthetic, “My Side” a little more string-heavy, “Dirty Dog” a little more deconstructed, but all of System is equally held together by Hagerup’s voice and her just-as-striking musical decisions. If a lot of System sounds like it’s being held together by little more than a thread, it should be pretty clear by now that that’s a feature of Prewn’s records. (Bandcamp link)
Rainwater – Yesturday & Tamarlow
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, 2000s indie rock, dream pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Shadow
Seattle’s Blake Luley has been making music as Rainwater since the mid-2010s, and the impression I’ve gotten of the project via releases like 2021’s In-Between and 2023’s Wave EP is that of a sleepy Pacific Northwest dream-folk act. Rainwater’s latest record, Yesturday & Tamarlow, is largely inspired by Luley becoming a new father, so we should expect the extremely gentle vibes to continue, right? Well, yes and no. Earlier this year, Rainwater put out an EP called A Tired Light featuring re-recorded versions of a young Luley’s more post-punk/alt-rock-influenced writing, and Yesturday & Tamarlow, picking up the thread to a degree,isn’t afraid to get a little loud and “sweeping” itself. There’s still plenty of dream pop and indie folk throughout Yesturday & Tamarlow, but wide-eyed 2000s indie-style rockers like “Baby’s Alright”, “Shadow”, and “Bluebelly” are now a central–perhaps the central–part of Rainwater’s sound. Opening track “Cottonwood Snow” clings to its acoustic guitar foundation even as Luley and his collaborators turn it into something larger, and songs like “Visiting” and “Goosebump Skin” are intricate, soaring ballads that feel like they’d be entirely different (and more insular) experiences had they been recorded for an earlier Rainwater record. Instead, though, Rainwater made something just a bit different with Yesturday & Tamarlow. (Bandcamp link)
Happy Tuesday! Time for the September 2025 Playlist. It’s yet another edition featuring two hours of mostly-new, all-great music. Of course.
Lawn, Miss Bones, and Golden Apples have two songs on this playlist. Silkworm and Liquid Mike have three.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal. 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.
“Youth Unit”, Pea Sea From A Pyke of Patina Slate (2025, Sea)
I don’t really know anything about whatever “Pea Sea” is, but this song rules. Well, after doing some research, I’ve learned that apparently Chris Rollen has been making music under the name since 1997, and A Pyke of Patina Slate is the third in a “trilogy” of LPs that began in 2013 with The Debatable Land. Rollen has some connections to Peter Brewis of the art-pop group Field Music (Brewis contributes production to this latest LP), and together with Maximo Park drummer Tom English, Pea Sea veer all over the place on A Pyke of Patina Slate. “Youth Unit” is some great polished anthemic power pop with just a bit of a new wave slant to it; whatever it is, Pea Sea have nailed it.
“Davie”, Lawn From God Made the Highway (2025, Exploding in Sound)
New Orleans’ Lawn remain one of the most interesting bands in indie rock today (it makes sense that they found a home at Exploding in Sound after their previous label, Born Yesterday, folded up). Nobody is as committed to veering between noisy, knucklehead post-punk and angelic jangly guitar pop as Rui DeMagalhaes and Mac Folger–I recommend listening to the entire of God Made the Highway to get the entire “Lawn experience”, but the jangle pop moments are perfect to cut and paste into this playlist (listen to “Davie” and try to tell me any different, I dare you).
“Crop Circles”, Liquid Mike From Hell Is an Airport (2025)
If a tad less grandiose than last year’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, Hell Is an Airport is the smoother and tighter Liquid Mike album: fourteen songs of 90s-fuzz-laden, pop punk-baiting power pop in under thirty minutes. Everything on Hell Is an Airport feels like a hit, and the songs bleed and squeal into each other like the Marquette, Michigan group are running frantically from one idea to the next before the fire burns out. “Crop Circles” initially came out as a standalone single last year, but hearing it in the context of Hell Is an Airport is what sold me on it. Read more about Hell Is an Airport here.
“Double Dutch”, Liquid Mike From Hell Is an Airport (2025)
I like the transition between “Crop Circles” and “Double Dutch” so much that I decided to preserve it on this playlist. It’s a pretty stupid thing to try to pick favorite hooks on Hell Is an Airport, but bandleader Mike Maple and his associates (synthesizer player/backing vocalist Monica Nelson, drummer Cody Marecek, bassist Zack Alworden, and guitarist Dave Daignault) don’t let up at all throughout the massive “Double Dutch”. Read more about Hell Is an Airport here.
“Happy Halloween”, Dancer From More or Less (2025, Meritorio)
More or Less is Dancer’s first album with new drummer Luke Moran, but despite the lineup change, More or Less has the Glasgow quartet sounding more fluid and locked-in as a band than ever before. The jerky post-punk/offbeat indie pop structures from previous records are still part and parcel of More or Less, yes, but they’ve been more effectively ironed into a wider tapestry of expansive, exploratory art rock and (for Dancer, at least) more laid-back pursuits of pop music. There’s still boundless energy in songs like “Happy Halloween”, but this track’s almost late-period Sonic Youth-esque fuzz rock displays a bit of patience, too. Read more (or less) about More or Less here.
“Everyone Chicago”, BRNDA From Total Pain (2025, Crafted Sounds)
BRNDA’s Total Pain both re-ups the Baltimore group’s penchant for bizarre, groovy art-dance-punk-whatever stuff and expands their range beyond that. Even the hilarious and absurd “Everyone Chicago”, a post-punk rant-raver that sounds just like a slightly darker cut from 2021’s Do You Like Salt?, distinguishes itself thanks to what I can only call “blistering noise rock flute soloing” (credit Mike Gillispie, who also plays on the album’s “A Little Balloon”). Read more about Total Pain here.
“Fantasia”, Golden Apples From Shooting Star (2025, Lame-O)
Pieced together in a handful of different locales by bandleader Russell Edling with various contributors, Golden Apples’ Shooting Star pulls off the trick of sounding more like an insular folk-influenced record while at the same time retaining the bright, distorted, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic power pop of 2023’s Bananasugarfire. There are too many great pop moments on Shooting Star to highlight all of them, but if I had to choose just one, the roaring power pop of “Fantasia” would be my selection. Read more about Shooting Star here.
“Bad Feeling”, Absolute Losers From In the Crowd (2025, We Are Busy Bodies/Having Fun)
Many of us know about Canada’s rich tradition of power pop music, but I can’t think of much of it that came from Prince Edward Island (unless we count Alvvays, I suppose). Don’t tell that to Absolute Losers, though, a trio from Canada’s smallest province who’ve just dropped their sophomore LP, In the Crowd. Much like peers on the mainland Kiwi Jr. and Motorists, Absolute Losers (guitarist Josh Langille, bassist Sam Langille, and drummer Daniel Hartinger) have mixed post-punk into their jangly guitar pop before, but my favorite song on their newest album, “Bad Feeling”, is pure bubblegum. It’s half Spoon-Cola-Strokes-kinda indie garage rock, half chiming melodies–it won’t leave my head!
“Garden City Blues”, Silkworm From In the West (1994, C/Z/Comedy Minus One)
I saw my favorite band, Silkworm, three times last week. I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Silkworm ever since then, unsurprisingly, so there are a handful of Silkworm songs strewn throughout this playlist. All three songs on this playlist were played during their Chicago shows, and there’s one apiece from the band’s three lead vocalists (I had to have some kind of parameters, lest this just become “Silkworm: the playlist”). “Garden City Blues” was, I believe, the earliest Tim Midyett song to show up during the shows, but his Missoula-inspired opener to In the West is one of his best. Read more about those Silkworm shows here.
“Precious Coffee Moments”, Curling (2025, Royal Oakie)
It’s been about two years since guitar pop trio Curling’s most recent album, No Guitar(one of my favorites of 2023), but the bi-Pacific-Coastal group (co-founders Bernie Gelman & Joseph Brandel, now featuring drummer Kynwyn Sterling) have stayed active in the interim. Last year they signed to Royal Oakie Records, released a “deluxe version” of No Guitar, and remixed a few cuts from their 2018 album Definitely Band. Looks like we’re getting at least one brand-new Curling song this year, too, with the (thus-far) non-album single “Precious Coffee Moments”. It’s a Curling classic, combining their penchant for labored-over, prog/math-influenced “studio pop” music with an almost breezy jangly power pop attitude.
“I-93”, Miss Bones From Sap Green (2025)
“Ooh, shoulda taken care of that / Ooh, how’d you let it get so bad?” This is a song about car troubles, kind of. Miss Bones take several shapes throughout their debut LP, but one of the most rewarding moments on Sap Green is when the band (bandleader June Isenhart, Eugene Umlor on synths, Jasper Park on bass, Mat Bloomfield on drums, Melisande Pope on guitar, and Rachel Eber on vocals) go full roots-pop mode on “I-93”. The good news is that this song sounds great and Miss Bones has a bright future ahead of them if they’re already pulling something like this off, but the bad news is that I just remembered I need to get my brake pads replaced. Read more about Sap Green here.
“Townies”, Wednesday From Bleeds (2025, Dead Oceans)
Rosy Overdrive was an early MJ Lenderman adopter, but I have to confess that I’ve never loved Wednesday as much as the hype suggested I ought to have (a familiar story, yes). I like plenty of moments on Rat Saw God and (especially) Twin Plagues, but Bleeds is pretty easily their best one yet and the first one where I can fully see “it”. The band finally got their promising, inspired mix of Drive-By Truckers southern rock bravado, nu-shoegaze noiseiness, and Appalachian folk rock songwriting to the perfect levels. The proof of concept is called “Townies”, a relatively simple song in which Karly Hartzman sounds completely prepared to pull off her lofty ambitions as a frontperson and the band ready to shape themselves around someone who demands it.
“Why I Bought the House”, Asher White From 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living (2025, Joyful Noise)
Asher White’s 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living is one of the wildest albums I’ve heard this year. Do I like every second of this album, which is an unholy (actually, no, pretty holy) mixture of experimental electronica, industrial, heaviness, and pop music? Well, no, but quite a bit of it sounds brilliant to my ears, and that includes all of “Why I Bought the House”. White displays an aptitude for Beach Boys-y/Jon Brion-esque studio power pop throughout 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, but “Why I Bought the House” is the one song where she fully embraces it, 60s pop piano and power pop guitar meanderings doing heavy lifting (alongside her excellent, capable guidance as lead vocalist).
“Pulling Teeth”, Bones Shredder From Morbid Little Thing (2025, Sunken Teeth)
You’ll hear a bit of that darker Chicago pop punk sound–Smoking Popes and Alkaline Trio, the latter of which Bones Shredder’s Randy Moore has been linked to multiple times in the past–in Morbid Little Thing’s ten songs, but no amount of “dark cabaret” vibes can cover up the other source material: suburban Fountains of Wayne-esque power pop and big old Blue Album power chords. The ascendent power pop of “Pulling Teeth” is probably my favorite song on Morbid Little Thing, but it’s far from the only piece of evidence that Bones Shredder may possibly be the best new power pop band of 2025. Read more about Morbid Little Thing here.
“You-Shaped Forever”, Dan Darrah & The Rain From There’s a Place (2025, Sunday Drive)
There’s a Place features the same backing cast as the last Dan Darrah record (bassist/producer Scott Downes, guitarist Darian Palumbo, vocalist Danielle Clark, and drummer Jacob Hellas) and, much like 2023’s Rivers Bridges Trains, it’s nothing less than forty-six minutes of sprawling, unhurried, melancholic guitar pop. The record’s entire opening trio is a (relatively speaking) tight parade of pop hits, with first track “You-Shaped Forever” in particular standing out as a masterclass in jangly power pop from the Toronto group. Read more about There’s a Place here.
“October”, The Cords From The Cords (2025, Slumberland/Skep Wax)
A new indie pop band on Slumberland Records, huh? The Cords’ sound should be a recognizable one for guitar pop fans–it’s an amalgamation of groups like The Vaselines, Heavenly (who’ve signed The Cords to their label Skep Wax in the U.K.), and Tiger Trap. They fit right in with current labelmates like The Umbrellas and Jeanines, and (like these acts) they stick out on a crowded and well-traveled road due to unflagging energy and pretty unimpeachable songwriting. The Cords cram a baker’s dozen indie pop nuggets into their first impression–blink and you’ll miss “October”, a highlight in which The Cords crank up the electricity just a bit to rip through some quick indie-pop-punk. Read more about The Cords here.
“Treat the New Guy Right”, Silkworm From Lifestyle (2000, Touch & Go)
“Treat the New Guy Right” was probably the first Silkworm song that I heard, and it was definitely the first Silkworm song that I loved. It was a free mp3 on the Touch & Go Records website (as well as “(I Hope U) Don’t Survive” and maybe one other one I can’t remember). I think this is one of the few Silkworm songs that can be enjoyed casually (maybe even more than “Couldn’t You Wait?” or “Nerves”), although in hindsight I don’t know how someone could hear a song about how “Motorhead is coming for you” and not want to figure out exactly what this Andy Cohen guy’s whole deal is. I really loved Tim Midyett’s addition of a different inflection of “Ain’t you ever been alone in your life?” in the chorus when they played it all three nights that I saw them in Chicago. Read more about those Silkworm shows here.
“Angus Valley”, Thomas Dollbaum From Drive All Night (2025, Dear Life)
I hadn’t really connected with New Orleans singer-songwriter Thomas Dollbaum’s work in the past, but I’m glad I gave Drive All Night a shot–it’s very good! Drive All Night is more stripped-down than Dollbaum’s previous music, and its writing is quite personal, but the hushed folk music of the majority of the EP doesn’t feel any more intimate than the bombast of the album’s one rocker, “Angus Valley”. This impact is something Dollbaum and his collaborators pull off throughout the entirety of Drive All Night. Read more about Drive All Night here.
“Passenger Princess”, Cheerbleederz From (Prove Me Wrong) (2025, Alcopop!)
Fans of the uniquely British, Martha-ish style of “indie pop punk”/power pop will find Cheerbleederz’s latest EP (Prove Me Wrong) much to their liking, and no previous knowledge of the myriad other London bands in which the members have played is necessary to appreciate this loud, cathartic-sounding pop music. (Prove Me Wrong) skips along across four songs all too briefly but not without leaving a trail of bubblegum-flavored carnage in its wake. “Passenger Princess” might be the best one, a song about learning to drive as an adult that, I suspect, is about a little more than even that insurmountable-feeling topic. Read more about (Prove Me Wrong) here.
“Alta Vista”, Dragnet From Dragnet Reigns! (2025, Spoilsport/Idiotape)
I’ve enjoyed the stylings of Geelong, Australia garage punks Vintage Crop for a while now, but it’s taken me all too long to get around to checking out lead singer Jack Cherry’s other group, Dragnet. As it turns out, Dragnet sounds a lot like Vintage Crop: Aussie garage rock and thumping post-punk in the instrumentals, Cherry talk-singing like a madman on top of them. Dragnet Reigns! is less than twenty minutes of tension being hastily built up and then torn down ad nauseum–the garage rock joyride “Alta Vista” is just one piece of the chaotic tapestry, but it’s an incredible one. Read more about Dragnet Reigns! here.
“Quiet Storm King”, Fig Dish From That’s What Love Songs Often Do (1995/2025, Polydor/Forge Again)
Recorded by Lou Giordano and originally released on Polydor, Fig Dish’s 1995 debut album That’s What Love Songs Often Do is a mid-90s “alternative rock gold rush” classic, fifty minutes of “slacker” fuzzed-out power pop now available as a double LP for the first time thirty years later thanks to Forge Again Records. The 90s indie rock underground collides with Midwestern power pop a la Cheap Trick and Material Issue and post-grunge bluntness on That’s What Love Songs Often Do, but the Chicago group still found time for deviations like “Quiet Storm King”, a surprisingly baggage-free piece of garage-pop. Read more about That’s What Love Songs Often Do here.
“What’s the Story, Mother?”, Miss Bones From Sap Green (2025)
Miss Bones is part of a nice little indie folk/folk rock/pop rock scene in Boston alongside acts like James Ikeda’s longrunning project The Michael Character and Amanda Lozada’s Lonesome Joan. More pop-forward than the latter act, more laid-back than the former one, Miss Bones’ debut album Sap Green is a rock-solid coming-out party from the could’ve-been adult alternative/folk rock hit “What’s the Story, Mother?” (in which frontperson June Isenhart pleads “I’ll split my head wide open just to prove / That you and I share the same skull”) on down. Read more about Sap Green here.
“Force Fed”, Sunnyboyy From Sunnyboyy (2025, RTF)
Jersey City, New Jersey’s Sunnyboyy are a new practitioner of a genre that’s received plenty of shine on Rosy Overdrive in recent years. On their five song self-titled EP, band founder Patrick DeFrancisci and his crew (guitarist Robert Scheuerman, bassist Pete Wilderotter, and drummer Steve Cerri) adhere to the fuzzed-out, alt-rock inspired side of 90s power pop (names like Sugar, Superdrag, Matthew Sweet, and Weezer from then, acts like Dazy, New You, and Supercrush for now). Not only that, but Sunnyboyy have the “bitter and jaded” aspect of 90s power pop down too, as they sing an ode to being force-fed bullshit and a request to fuck off with incredible polish on “Force Fed”, the EP’s opening track.
“If I Ever Ever Needed You”, Grant Pavol From Save Some Time (2025, Sonder House)
Save Some Time is the third Grant Pavol EP of 2025, and it’s the hardest of the three to categorize thus far. Pavol names Yo La Tengo, The Velvet Underground and Women as influences for this EP, and that’s a pretty wide range of possible sounds–nonetheless, it’s a pretty accurate list of sources for Save Some Time’s opening track and “hit”, the fuzz-country-tinged pop song “If I Ever Ever Needed You”. Read more about Save Some Time here.
“Taxi2”, Understanding From The Joy of Living (2025, Cooked Raw)
Understanding may be fresh out of the gate, but the majority of the Toronto band has been featured on this blog as members of Westelaken and Cootie Catcher. The Joy of Living, for the most part, pursues a rambling, keyboard-heavy indie rock sound that streamlines the sprawling folk rock of the former associated band and/or mellows out the chaotic, electronic-tinged twee pop of the latter. Recorded by Squiggly Lines’ Rob McLay, The Joy of Living is six songs of Understanding locking into place and riding a low-key but fervent vibe to a memorable debut. The swiftly humming “Taxi2”, like the rest of the EP, keeps the ivories front and center. Read more about The Joy of Living here.
“Unreal Cities”, OUT From Billie (2020, Comedy Minus One)
I saw the band OUT from Kalamazoo open up the first night of Silkworm’s three-night stand in Chicago (read more about that here). Though I’d written about OUT-related acts Future Living and Wowza in Kalamazoo, I hadn’t gotten this quartet on the blog before now. I heard several good songs I could’ve put on this playlist on that Tuesday night (“Wound Up”, “Rashomon”), but I’m going with the exasperated garage rock of “Unreal Cities” from their 2020 sophomore album Billie. It seemed like the right performance to reintroduce Silkworm (and Ike Turner’s delivery of “I’m forty-two years old / With forty-one records sold / In the last ten years or so, I am told” is pretty unbeatable).
“Why Won’t You Let Me Keep It”, Léna Bartels From The Brightest Silver Fish (2025, Glamour Gowns)
I enjoyed Léna Bartels’ intimate bedroom folk-style half of It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year (her split EP with Nico Hedley) earlier this year, but as it turns out, they were hardly sufficient to prepare me for the full range of her sophomore LP, The Brightest Silver Fish. It’s (loosely speaking) a “folk rock” album that explores either end of that spectrum as well as other avenues entirely across its thirty-four minutes. On the rock side we have fuzzed-out, soaring alt-rock stuff like “Why Won’t You Let Me Keep It” that will appeal to fans of Lily Seabird’s Alas, or even Wednesday, but lo-fi bedroom pop, rootsy alt-country, and even synthpop have their moments on The Brightest Silver Fish too. Read more about The Brightest Silver Fish here.
“To Voicemail”, Big Cry Country From Something Blue (2025)
If you’ve enjoyed what fellow D.C. bands like Pretty Bitter and Flowerbomb have been doing (not to mention the 2010s Midwestern indie rock bands that inspired them like Remember Sports and Ratboys), the sophomore EP from the District’s Big Cry Country will be a satisfying and promising listen. Despite being a relatively barebones group, the pop punk bass and (relatively) subtle keyboard hook of Something Blue’s opening track, “To Voicemail”, feel as grand as the most polished arena “indie” rock could be. Read more about Something Blue here.
“Barroom Wonder”, Lawn From God Made the Highway (2025, Exploding in Sound)
Yes, a second Lawn song, because “Barroom Wonder” is neck-and-neck with “Davie” for the best Flying Nun-inspired jangle pop tune on God Made the Highway. To be clear, though, “Barroom Wonder” isn’t merely a repeat of the aforementioned other song–it’s a more distinctly American take on guitar pop music, as I can hear everything from Big Star to 80s southern college rock to 2010s “lo-fi”/“bedroom” pop stuff in its genesis. I kind of wish every Lawn song sounded like this, true, although one also must respect their devotion to doing the incredibly specific thing they do without flagging.
“The Days We Had Each Other”, Prathloons From Breadbox (2025)
Even for a Prathloons album, Breadbox is pretty hushed and low-key–it largely eschews the swooning crescendos in which 2022’s The Kansas Wind occasionally indulged and instead seeks to expand and open up the space around frontperson Colin Dall’s voice even further. The most upbeat song on the album, “The Days We Had Each Other”, is just a little perky in an early Death Cab for Cutie way, but it doesn’t derail Breadbox from pursuing some immaculate slowcore-infused vibes. Read more about Breadbox here.
“All Over Again”, Tanner York From Welcome to the Shower (2025, Trash Tape)
I’m deep into power pop subgenres you haven’t even dreamt of. “Jangly power pop with high-pitched chipmunk vocals” is a surprisingly prolific one (there’s one practitioner of it in particular who used to appear on this blog a lot)–I’m not sure what the appeal of it is for creators, exactly, but (like most other strange subsets of pop music) it hardly matters when the songs are good enough. Tanner York’s Welcome to the Shower, out via Trash Tape (Rain Recordings, Hill View #73, Tombstone Poetry), is a promising debut of such music, and my favorite song on the album, “All Over Again”, is a beautiful jangly chimer made by somebody who can trace a straight line from Big Star to Teenage Fanclub to Jon Brion to Sharp Pins.
“Grand Am”, Liquid Mike From Hell Is an Airport (2025)
A third Liquid Mike song, huh. Well, it’s a short one–around ninety seconds–so I think we’ve got room for “Grand Am”. While not a full-on lo-fi detour, “Grand Am” finds Liquid Mike channeling their inner Alien Lanes and seemingly dropping us right in the middle of a pop song from another universe. “Grand Am” is arguably a tease, never fully wringing everything it can out of its main hook and even cutting out mid-guitar-solo (?!), but what’s here is more than enough to make it one of the best tracks on Hell Is an Airport. Read more about Hell Is an Airport here.
“Dream Destroyer”, Sloan From Based on the Best Seller (2025, Two Minutes for Music/Yep Roc)
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, dream destroyer”. Aside from the obvious, has there been another band that’s been more dangerous with the “yeah, yeah, yeah”s than Sloan? Time will tell how the Nova Scotian power pop legends’ fourteenth album will stack up to the rest of their discography (including 2022’s late-career highlight Steady), but Based on the Best Seller sounds pretty good to me on first blush. “Dream Destroyer” is the early highlight for me, a swinging party penned by Patrick Pentland that struts onto the scene in the LP’s second slot.
“Downhill”, Carson McHone From Pentimento (2025, Merge)
I first heard of Carson McHone thanks to her work in the Canadian phenomenon Daniel Romano’s Outfit, but the Austin, Texas-originating, Ontario-based singer-songwriter has been making folk-country records under her own name for a decade as well. Carson McHone LP number four, Pentimento, is an album that could look intimidating from a distance (between the rambling, sixteen-track length and the spoken-word interludes which regularly crop up) but is quite friendly at its core. McHone’s music isn’t nearly as boisterous as Romano’s, but it’s “Americana”-tinged folk rock with a pulse and a more-than-passing interest in pop music. The electric jangle of “Downhill” in particular is a first-half winner. Read more about Pentimento here.
“Breeze”, Golden Apples From Shooting Star (2025, Lame-O)
I mentioned Sparklehorse two times when writing about Golden Apples’ Shooting Star, although no comparison I could make is as clear as the power of listening to “Breeze” with even a passing familiarity with Mark Linkous’ music. The point of comparison isn’t meant to imply that Russell Edling is just a homework-copier, to be clear–Sparklehorse didn’t invent this specific, wide-eyed combination of delicate and noisy, they’re just the most obvious example of it in our corner of the music world, and it’s useful for describing what, exactly, Golden Apples have tapped into throughout Shooting Star. But, I mean, that opening guitar riff is also pure Good Morning Spider, right? Read more about Shooting Star here.
“Yen + Janet Forever”, Silkworm From Libertine (1994, El Recordo/Comedy Minus One)
I never thought I’d hear “Yen + Janet Forever” live–or any of Joel Phelps’ songs from Libertine, for that matter. As much as I love “Pilot” and “Raised by Tigers” from In the West, Phelps’ greatest moment as a member of Silkworm to me was his three-song-stretch in the middle of Libertine: the six-minute, tortured “Yen + Janet Forever”, the uneasy breeze of “Oh How We Laughed”, the white-hot fury of “The Cigarette Lighters”. Silkworm played “Yen + Janet Forever” twice in Chicago, and each time Phelps’ simple, haunted lyrics in between an instrumental torrent (as well as the climax, of course, perhaps my favorite Joel Phelps moment in the entire Silkworm catalog) hit very hard. Read more about those Silkworm shows here.
“Hard to Love a Man”, Friendship From I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina (2025, Run for Cover)
Despite arguably shaping the current sound of “indie rock” more than any other indie musician, there’s a surprising lack of curiosity around huge swaths of Jason Molina’s work at this present moment. I Will Swim to You, a new Molina covers compilation from Run for Cover,isn’t equipped to change this, but it understands this, and it’s a good deal of how it stays interesting for its entirety. My favorite band who appears on the compilation, Friendship, are in particular up to the task with their choice of a relatively obscure Molina track: they offer up a hypnotic, dark version of the Magnolia Electric Co. song “Hard to Love a Man” that lands somewhere between the coverer and the covered, somehow. Read more about I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina here.
“Maldição”, Oruã From Reflectors, Vol. I (2025, Half Shell/Dead Currencies)
Nashville experimental label Dead Currencies have recently announced a split LP series called “Reflectors”, and they’ve kicked off this new project with two titans of modern psychedelic music in Seattle’s Reverse Death and Brazilian Built to Spill associates Oruã. For the latter band, they’ve offered up a handful of demos and outtakes from Oruã’s upcoming K Records debut, Slacker, featuring a more rock-focused psychedelia than their Pacific Northwest counterparts. Even so, the nine-minute electric guitar explosion of “Maldição” sticks out like a sore thumb–it’s worth the price of admission on its own. Read more about Reflectors, Vol. I here.
I saw the band Silkworm live in Chicago, Illinois. Three times, in fact. The first three shows of the group’s mini-tour from The Windy City to Tolono, Illinois (that’s Champaign-Urbana, effectively), and then Gonerfest in Memphis. Originally, they’d only announced one Chicago show, and my plan had been to hit Sleeping Village and then drive down to Matt Talbot of Hum’s bar in Tolono, the Loose Cobra, but after three Chicago shows eventually showed up (“Sorry about the Tuesday night,” Andy Cohen said on the first night at The Chop Shop, the final show of the three to be added, “…but, due to overwhelming demand…”), cooler heads prevailed (note: I’ve yet to see the Loose Cobra setlist at the time of this writing, so the regret factor has probably yet to fully kick in). I took off work and prepared myself for a three-night stand in the greatest city in the world with Tim Midyett, Andrew Cohen, Joel R.L. Phelps, and Jeff Panall.
There was a different opening act every night. Tuesday night brought OUT from Kalamazoo, made up of members of bands you might have read about on this blog like Wowza in Kalamazoo and Future Living (including Isaac Turner, who, like me, contributed a chapter to Lay It Down in Full View: Collected Writings on Silkworm and Their Music–but I’m getting ahead of myself). The “rocking in spite of themselves” vibe of OUT was markedly different from Pittsburgh’s The Gotobeds on Wednesday, who brought their renowned (in certain circles) sense of chaos to Sleeping Village (“They’ve cleaned their act up a little bit over the years,” Moon Orchids’ Jacob Simons told me after their set, implying that they must diligently rehearse their desecration of venue lighting fixtures and messing with the tuning on each others’ instruments). The Thursday opener, Dianogah, peers of the members of Silkworm for thirty years, brought to the table their two-bass guitar attack and something completely different: a Chicago post-rock (or math rock, whatever) stillness.
So: Silkworm. Aside from the four songs they played at Steve Albini’s memorial service (the entire impetus for this reunion), these were the first “Silkworm shows” in twenty years, and the first ones with Joel Phelps in (I believe) around thirty. They were as good as I could have hoped. Andy Cohen and Tim Midyett played songs from across their entire time as Silkworm co-leaders, and Phelps was there on second guitar for a bunch of songs he’d never played on before those shows. Phelps sang lead vocals on two of Midyett’s songs (“Swings” twice and “The Bones” every night) and two of Cohen’s (“White Lighting” and “Severance Pay” once apiece) over the course of the three nights, and while these were all chill-inducing, his guitar contributions were equally impressive (and despite all of the above, my favorite “Phelps on a later Silkworm song” moment might’ve been him standing up from his chair to shout “Whenever you might think it’s over” alongside Midyett during “‘Don’t Look Back’”).
(photos are by me; there are much better ones out there–plus whole videos of a lot of the shows!–if you look on social media)
The first night started with “Couldn’t You Wait?”, of course, and then “Treat the New Guy Right” and (in an inspired choice) “Insomnia”. Every song knocked my proverbial socks off: A show-stopping performance of “Raging Bull”. Andy giving his all to canonical Silkworm classics (“Don’t Make Plans This Friday”) and to songs that should be (fucking “The Old You”). Closing the non-encore set with an electric “Dirty Air” (jeez, Italian Platinum is so good), and breaking out the posthumously-released “Bar Ice” in the encore. Midyett dedicating “Clean’d Me Out” to Gerard Cosloy, who he admitted probably wasn’t there (“He’ll probably be at Gonerfest”).
They played at least one song from every album, including L’ajre (Phelps’ “Little Sister”, believe it or not). Every time Joel stepped up to the mic, the air changed and shit “got real”: this, unsurprisingly, happened with Silkworm’s performances of all three of his In the West songs, but it was no less palpable when he sang Midyett’s “Swings” (a song written in the aftermath of Phelps’ initial departure from Silkworm in the mid-90s, and the performance of that night seemed to bring something full circle). To Jeff Panall, tasked with the impossible, I bestow the highest possible compliment: he did it.
Night two at Sleeping Village couldn’t possibly top the rush of night one, right? If it could’ve though, it probably would’ve went something like how Wednesday night went. A solid third of the setlist (eight out of twenty-two songs) were songs that hadn’t been played the previous night, quite impressive given everything about the circumstances (I would’ve been happy with one or two new additions!). In the main set, we got “The City Glows” (holy shit), “Grotto of Miracles” (holy shit), and “Ritz Dance” (truly one of the last songs I would’ve expected them to pull out, good on them), among others. The first encore was almost entirely new additions, featuring two Lifestyle selections and perhaps the biggest treat of the entire night, Joel Phelps’ “Yen + Janet Forever”.
(As a sidebar: everyone seems to love Phelps’ In the West songs, and of course I do too, but I’ve always believed that his Libertine tracks were even better, even though I rarely hear anyone talk about them. Perhaps because he left the band around that time, I don’t think they were played live contemporaneously very much (certainly not in comparison to the In the West ones), and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hear any of them live. It was amazing, and if anyone from Silkworm is reading this, please learn “Oh How We Laughed” and/or “The Cigarette Lighters” and play them next time you play in Chicago. )
It’s night three and Silkworm are still pulling out surprises. It was a great night for those of use who love Italian Platinum (which, I would hope, included everybody in the room), as “The Third”, “LR72”, and “White Lightning” (as previously mentioned, with Joel singing) all made appearances. Cohen trotted out “Sheep Wait for Wolf” and “Tarnished Angel” for the first time this tour, but a lot of the highlights from night three were Silkworm’s performances of the run’s staples. I was listening to “‘Don’t Look Back’” before the show and had the thought that, despite hearing it two nights in a row, I would be disappointed if it didn’t show up the third night (I needn’t have worried). Ditto to “Treat the New Guy Right” (which they saved for the second encore that time), and repeat performances of “Yen + Janet Forever”, “Pilot”, and “The City Glows” all seemed to gain something.
And then there’s “The Bones”, which ended all three nights. It was actually one of the few Silkworm songs I’d seen live before this tour–it’s a staple of Midyett’s solo shows, along with “Young”–but given that it’s possibly my favorite Silkworm song, I was still very stoked to hear it every night. That’s not even taking into account the fact that Joel Phelps sang it: like “Swings”, there’s some incredible subtext to the performance (Midyett has said the song is “partially” about Phelps, as well as Midyett’s wife), but the emotions stirred out by the two of them singing “The Bones” together are of a different sort (the kind that unambiguously end the show–there’s nowhere to go after that).
At The Chop Shop, Phelps sang “The Bones” off-mic, and though the first half was marred by chatter from the bar and the shushing thereof, I didn’t find myself wanting him to move any closer to the microphone. The third night’s performance of “The Bones” was my favorite, though. Tuning issues threw the band for a loop, with Midyett informing Phelps and Cohen that they’d have to sing and play the song (respectively) higher than they’d previously been doing at the last minute. It turned into a duet between Midyett and Phelps–the former perhaps trying to guide the now-in-unfamiliar-territory song and the latter absolutely nailing the challenge with, if anything, even more flair (needless to say, the Hebrew Hendrix had no problem with his role either).
I’m leaving a bunch of stuff out, but I do want to acknowledge that it was nice to meet a bunch of people in person that I’d only talked to on the internet beforehand. Thanks to Paul and Jane Duffus for everything they did in putting Lay It Down in Full View together, a book I’m eager to read (finally!). Did you know they came all the way from England to see the shows (and hawk their book, I suppose, but still)? You can still purchase the book from Comedy Minus One in the States and from Jane Duffus herself in the U.K., by the way. Also, hello to Jon Solomon (who studiously refused to look at my real name when I was buying a T-shirt and tote bag so as to “not ruin the mystique”), Jacob from Moon Orchids and Dori, Galen from Repeating Cloud and Gum Parker, and Joni Elfers.
Slightly before this current run of shows commenced, Silkworm announced three more upcoming gigs in Louisville, Atlanta, and Columbia, South Carolina. As someone who grew up in Appalachia and currently lives in the Midwest, the locations of these shows warm my heart: fuck off, Coastal Elites. Hey New Yorkers, Philadelphians, Californians, etc–if you want to see Silkworm, you’re going to Kentucky or South Carolina (yes, I figure these show locations were chosen based on logistics more than anything else, I’m just having fun). The fact that these shows were announced before they’d even played the first run bodes well, I’d think. I hope to see everyone listed above (and some more of you) at a Silkworm show again sometime soon.
Rosy Overdrive 