Pressing Concerns: Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Williamson Brothers, Perfect 100

Hello, readers! This Monday brings us a very full Pressing Concerns, one featuring new albums from Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, and Williamson Brothers, and the debut EP from Perfect 100. Another great one!

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.

Karl Frog – Yes, Music

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Spoilsport
Genre: Synthpop, indie pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Legends of the Niche

Today, we have the latest album from an enigmatic musician named Karl Frog to look at on the blog. Yes, Music follows two previous LPs called I Love Music (2019) and Why Music? (2020), and the third installment of Frog’s apparent “music” series comes to us via Melbourne label Spoilsport Records. Spoilsport calls Frog “Canberrian/Estonian” and the musician’s Bandcamp page lists his current location as Sweden; as for the music itself, the label references Roxy Music and Brian Eno while Frog himself describes his latest album as “ambivalent digital boogie”. I’m new to the world of Karl Frog, but my impressions of Yes, Music are that of a wholly agreeable, odd, but understandable pop album. It’s indie pop music that cheerfully merges the “orchestral” and “digital” sides of it together; it’s “sophisti-pop” with virtually no hint of pretense. It took me a few listens to Yes, Music to fully get on board with it not because the pop songwriting isn’t immediate (it is), but because Frog delivers it in such a low-key manner that the album really benefits from a consciously-trained ear. If anybody remembers Robert Sotelo (the synth-y indie pop solo project of Dancer’s Andrew Doig), Yes, Music reminds me of that, but there’s a clear guitar pop side to Frog’s music here as well.

A bunch of Yes, Music’s core tenets are set up almost instantaneously in opening track “Colonial Hearts”–the triumphant digital strings (and, to a lesser degree, horns), the prominent bass groove, the passionately half-whispered vocals, the synth interjections, and, of course, pop hooks. “Dancing in a Tomb” adds a more subdued version of a Big Audio Dynamite piano riff and a beat that is indeed more or less danceable, “European Synthetic Country” introduces rubbery bass-led post-punk into the mix, and “Legends of the Niche” is the clearest foray into Aussie guitar pop, but all of these find their ways to fit under the Karl Frog umbrella effortlessly. “Groove” aside, Frog doesn’t overstay his welcome on any one of these songs–he wraps the album up at a little over a half-hour, and every track runs for just long enough to get the most of its ingredients. The opening of Yes, Music is strong enough that mid-to-late record highlights might not present themselves immediately, but the folk-y jangle pop of “What I’ve Plagiarised” and the minimal synthpop of “Hemlock or Hardware” are as good as any of the first three songs. Yes, Music is slippery and slick enough to pass anyone by if they aren’t on-guard enough; consider this a heads-up. (Bandcamp link)

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti – Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter

Release date: July 25th
Record label: We Are Time/Quindi
Genre: Soft rock, chamber pop, sophisti-pop, jazz-pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: A Perfect Pair

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti should be recognizable to regular readers of the blog–I wrote about the third album from the project of Italy-originating, Toronto-based Daniel Colussi, Eighth Waves in Search of an Ocean, in 2023, and I’ve touched on music from Coloussi’s collaborators like Energy Slime and stef.in in Pressing Concerns as well. Energy Slime’s Jay Arner and stef.in’s Stefan Hegerat are two of the many guest contributors to Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, the fourth Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album, and the first one to be co-released by Canadian label We Are Time (Tough Age, Motorists, Energy Slime). When I wrote about Eighth Waves in Search of an Ocean, I noted the distinct, leisurely sound concocted by Colussi featuring elements of sophisti-pop and soft jazz rock, and I even directly mentioned Destroyer’s Kaputt as an influence of the record. Despite this, listening to Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, I still found myself surprised at the Dan Bejar of it all. It’s actually less Kaputt-evoking–the more prominent synth-rock touches of the last Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album give way to a wider, more orchestral/string-based/jazz-rooted palette–but the infinite open space given to Colussi’s understated talk-singing vocals here allows the writer to fully indulge in refined, Canadian-Italian absurdity through and through.

Colussi apparently, tongue firmly in cheek, refers to his music as “poetic jazz rock”; it’s hard to think of a more effective demonstration of this thing than the beginning of opening track “Full of Fire”: Colussi’s spoken-word delivery of “You were full of fire / And I was in need of some heat”, and then the horns, drums, and guitars kick in. Such begins a uniquely meandering foray into polished, selectively-chosen orchestral/jazz-pop instrumentals and just-as-meandering observations from Colussi. Arner’s clavinet in “Beware” would steal the show on most records, but here it’s just another piece of the warm, close-up chamber pop tapestry. Even though “Do You Ever Think?” is one of the “lesser” songs on Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, it contains perhaps Colussi’s best one-liner (“Can you tell me – is that dog that’s drowning in your new painting / Supposed to look like me?”), and songs like the lighter-than-air orchestral pop of “Call Me the Author” and the synth-touched throwback “A Perfect Pair” keep the LP engaging as it walks leisurely forward. Either you’re capable of meeting Fortunato Durutti Marinetti on their chosen wavelength or you aren’t, but those open to this kind of music will find few that are more committed to thoroughly exploring it. (Bandcamp link)

Williamson Brothers – Aquila

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Dial Back Sound
Genre: Southern rock, country rock, fuzz rock, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Forgotten Generation

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the Williamson Brothers of Birmingham, Alabama. Adam and Blake Williamson are perhaps most well known thanks to their work as the rhythm section of cult southern punk rock group Lee Bains III + The Glory Fires, positions that certainly keep the both of them busy, but the siblings have their own project too, which they debuted in 2021 with a self-titled album. Released on Dial Back Sound and recorded with help from the Drive-By Truckers’ Matt Patton and Jay Gonzales, among others, Williamson Brothers was a refreshing version of garage rock made by two passionate everyman-style songwriters from Alabama, and I’m pleased that the Williamsons decided to make another album four years later called Aquila. Gonzales and Patton are once again in tow, and the Brothers have now added a full-time drummer in Model Citizen’s Mike Gault, and this group of Alabama “alt-country”/rock-and-roll professionals pick up right where their first LP left off. Bits and pieces of punk rock and power pop/college rock shade these dozen songs, but Aquila is first and foremost a ripping, roaring collection of fuzzed-out southern garage rock.

A pummeling march of a drumbeat and droning, smoking guitars introduce Aquila in “American Original”–the lyrics are, I believe, a fiery rebuke of American conservatism, but the most important thing about the song is that the Williamsons and Gault back up their fury with their playing. The blistering garage punk of “Medicine” rivals “American Original” in speedy energy, but Aquila has more to it than just adrenaline–on the “pop” end of the spectrum, “All These Years” (featuring some great keyboards from Gonzales) and the bottle-rocket “Forgotten Generation” both put everything they’ve got into massive hook-heavy choruses, creating a pair of amped-up southern power pop singalongs. And although the Williamson Brothers have never been an overtly “country” group, “Good Boy” adds some prominent harmonica (courtesy of John Calvin Abney) and casually strummed guitars to make an interesting, unhurried rootsy turn for the typically much more fast-paced group. Most of Aquila finds the Williamson Brothers in a sweet spot where there’s just a bit of pop hooks, garage rock fuzz, and southern atmosphere, turning songs like “Twenty First Century”, the title track, and “All Lit Up” (among others) into something more and more recognizable as their own style. The Williamson Brothers were getting along just fine making fun, classic-style southern rock and roll, but Aquila’s little bit of character development can’t hurt, either. (Bandcamp link)

Perfect 100 – Perfect 100

Release date: July 21st
Record label: Bloody Knuckles
Genre: Fuzz rock, fuzz pop, noise pop, shoegaze
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Missing Out

If you like a very specific subset of the kind of music I write about on Rosy Overdrive regularly, Perfect 100’s self-titled debut EP is a bullseye. The first release from the project of Brooklyn-based musician Andrew Madore is fuzzed-out, loud, and incredibly hooky indie rock made by someone who knows Guided by Voices, Dinosaur Jr., and the canonical shoegaze records like the back of their hand; bands like Ex Pilots, Gnawing, and Gaadge come to mind, and there’s a Dazy-esque 90s alt-dance vibe thrown into a couple of the songs for good measure, too. Madore played, wrote, and recorded most of Perfect 100 himself, so he deserves the bulk of the credit for how this EP sounds, but the contributions of drummer Adam Wanetik and prolific mixing/mastering engineer Justin Pizzoferrato shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Perfect 100 is a pitch-perfect introduction to Madore’s style, which is right in the middle between greyscale, grunge-y, shoegaze-influenced alt-rock and bright, vibrant, almost psychedelic guitar pop, a combination that sounds quite natural under the guidance of Madore’s high-energy but workmanlike approach to the music and his vocals.

Walls of fuzz and riffs greet us to begin the EP in “Sunday”; Madore has a great vocal hook sticking out just prominently enough in the mix, but the torrent of six strings is the real star of this song, and Perfect 100 gets by just fine by letting the distorted guitars rev their engines right up front. Since “Sunday” worked so well, Perfect 100 figure why not just try something like that again–that’s “Missing Out”, which similarly wields J. Mascis guitar solos and gaze-pop hooks in either hand. The clear black sheep on Perfect 100 is “Longway”, the one song that throws in a dance beat and aims for Madchester/alternative dance excellence without abandoning the fuzzed-out, guitar-blast pop music of the rest of the EP (did I mention it sounds like Dazy? It sounds like Dazy). A first statement of a record without any dull moments comes to a close with “New in Town”, reaching the roaring heights of the EP’s first couple of songs while being (maybe, just maybe) a tad more wistful about it. I’m certainly curious as to where Madore will take Perfect 100 in subsequent releases; it seems like there are few different sides of the project’s sound that could end up becoming future focal points. That’s probably an indication of a strong debut record. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Heavenly, Editrix, Pretty Bitter, Julian Cubillos

Hey there, everyone! The Thursday Pressing Concerns for this week is looking at four records coming out tomorrow, July 25th: new albums from Editrix, Pretty Bitter, and Julian Cubillos, and a reissue of Heavenly‘s final (for now) full-length album. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s Pressing Concerns looked at Dori, SleepMarks, Lammping & Bloodshot Bill, and Eaters Digest, and on Tuesday we looked at Pacing’s upcoming LP PL*NET F*TNESS), 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.

Heavenly – Operation Heavenly (Reissue)

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Twee, indie pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl
Pull Track: Space Manatee

In 2022, the cult British indie pop group Heavenly began a reissue campaign of their four LPs (originally released from 1991 to 1996) via some of the members’ current label, Skep Wax Records. Considering that I wrote about the first three re-releases, it’s no surprise that I am here on the blog yet again to talk about Operation Heavenly, the quintet’s fourth and final album before they abruptly disbanded after the death of drummer Matthew Fletcher (a few months before this LP even came out, in fact). It wasn’t intended as such, but Operation Heavenly became Heavenly’s final statement for nearly thirty years, and I’ve been anticipating that it’ll be the hardest of their albums for me to write about here. It’s impossible to divorce Operation Heavenly from its circumstances, but what I mean by the “hardest” goes beyond just that–Heavenly Vs. Satan, Le Jardin de Heavenly, and The Decline and Fall of Heavenly are all indisputable classics in the worlds of twee, indie pop, jangle pop, post-C86 guitar pop, whatever you’d like to call them. Operation Heavenly is still very good–possibly as good as the albums that came before it–but it’s also something else. 

Cleaner, bolder, and bigger than any of their previous albums, Operation Heavenly found Heavenly creeping towards a more mainstream, Britpop-evoking sound, although the band are still very recognizable as the “Heavenly of old” among these new angles. If Heavenly had been able to continue immediately after Operation Heavenly’s release, I suspect that we would’ve eventually come to view this album as a “transitional” one. With some of these songs, like “K-Klass Kisschase”, “Ben Sherman”, and “Snail Trail”, Heavenly sound like a souped-up, more higher-fidelity version of their old selves, the goofy and snappy twee attitudes (both instrumentally and vocally) blown up for the big screen. In particular, the extra-large production and presentation makes the excoriation of a pathetic partner in “Ben Sherman” feel even more brutal and nasty (not in an unearned way, obviously). This is one direction Heavenly could’ve found themselves headed after this album, but Operation Heavenly also contains a different–and arguably more intriguing–door.

This is the Heavenly of “Space Manatee”, “By the Way”, and “Fat Lenny”, the one that takes full advantage of their new trappings to reinvent themselves to a degree and pursue giant wall-of-sound British power pop hooks and production. The steadily-building “Space Manatee” is probably my favorite Heavenly song of all-time–they certainly had never made anything as jaw-droppingly massive (but so coy about it, too) before, and there’s nothing else on the album exactly like it, either.  And then there’s everything in between, from the pop punk throwback of “Cut Off” to the album-closing bright indie pop balladry of “Pet Monkey” (one last duet between Amelia Fletcher and Calvin Johnson) to the record’s two bonus tracks, faithful and audibly reverent covers of The Flamin’ Groovies’ “You Tore Me Down” and The Jam’s “Art School”. Now, jumping forward to 2025, Heavenly have released a new single called “Portland Town” and may have more new material on the way. It was certainly possible to appreciate Operation Heavenly for what it is before these recent developments, but Heavenly’s belated moves to ensure that this album no longer has to be the final chapter in the band’s history will only help us to understand it. (Bandcamp link)

Editrix – The Big E

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Joyful Noise
Genre: Math rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: The Big E

It is nice to be once again talking about Editrix, one of the first bands I ever wrote about on Rosy Overdrive. Much has changed since the power trio formed in Easthampton, Massachusetts in the late 2010s and released their debut album, Tell Me I’m Bad, in 2021–for one, only one band member still lives in Massachusetts (that’d be drummer Josh Daniel, who performs the same role in Landowner). Vocalist/guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and bassist Steve Cameron are both based in New York City now; for the latter, the move was based on returning to school, while the former has immersed themself into the city’s avant-garde music scene via a steady stream of solo releases and work with legendary experimental guitarist Bill Orcutt. Despite all these moving parts, Editrix still seem to be going strong and were able to put together a new album called The Big E, adding a third LP to a discography of bonkers, topsy-turvy math rock. The Big E doesn’t precisely pick up where their previous album, 2022’s Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell, left off–Editrix still primarily sound like themselves, true, but The Big E is the album of theirs that’s the most comfortable being a “rock record”.

Classic rock guitar riffs, blistering solos, low-end-heavy noise rock rumbling–you’re gonna find all of this on The Big E. In fact, you’re going to hear it all on “The Big E”, the opening title track to Editrix LP3. In “The Queen”, Editrix tries out some Shellac-y start-stop material, and Eisenberg gets to really push their vocals into hard rock bravado territory instead of their typical slapdash sing-song cadence. The pounding, earthquaking “The Jackhammer” sounds pretty much like its title, but Editrix explore new realms of experimental but more restrained rock music with material like “Another World” (which grinds and creaks through a dingy cellar of cobwebbed guitar riffs) and “No” (a five-minute post-punk quiet-loud adventure that starts with basically a giant stoner rock/heavy metal riff). The spindly math rock guitars that marked the first two Editrix records continue to mark the third one, although the Talking Heads-like art punk of “Something Sweet” is a new way to deliver them, as is the chunky, drilling “Flesh Debt”. And then Editrix have one last surprise for us with the closing track, “Slight Return”–the first half of the song is all restraint and build-up, a crawling Slint-like thing that eventually roars into focus in the final three minutes. Editrix wrap up The Big E with one big, uncontainable final solo, burning down everything in sight before abruptly receding into thin air. This is the kind of thing that great rock bands do. (Bandcamp link)

Pretty Bitter – Pleaser

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Emo-y indie rock, folk rock, 2000s indie rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Thrill Eater

Pretty Bitter have been on a steady upward trajectory for a bit now–the Washington, D.C. quintet put out their debut album, Hinges, in 2022, made a collaborative EP with the similarly-minded Flowerbomb last year, bassist Miriam Tyler has found success in her other band, Ekko Astral, and now the group has signed to Tiny Engines for their sophomore album. The group (Tyler, vocalist/lyricist Mel Bleker, guitarist/keyboardist Zack Be, guitarist Drew Carter Thronton, and drummer Jason Hayes) recorded Pleaser with the same duo that recorded last year’s EP–Into It. Over It.’s Evan Weiss and Strawberry Boy’s Simon Small–and the album they’ve made together follows in a proud lineage of polished, “emo-adjacent” indie rock. Names like Rilo Kiley, Ratboys, Football Etc., Great Grandpa, and Hop Along come to mind, although Pretty Bitter avoid trying to sound too much like their influences both in terms of their music (which is just as likely to deploy a fluttering, wistful synth part as a surprise banjo) and in terms of the lyrics and vocals (that’s on Bleker, who proves themself to be an impressive and compelling frontperson who sometimes seems right at home and other times charmingly out of place helming a synth-y emo-rock band).

Pleaser feels like a real group effort, the result of a bunch of talented artists getting together and working towards something–not only does Weiss have a co-production credit, but he plays a bunch of miscellaneous instrumentals on the album, while Tyler, Thornton, and Be all have “arrangement” credits for individual songs, and Bleker’s writing manages to sound like someone pouring everything they’ve got into these words while at the same time managing to keep almost everything close to the vest. Take “Thrill Eater”, which begins with a strange banjo part and acoustic guitar strumming from Be and then Bleker’s first words are “My brother’s baking bread / The call to 911 dropped and I felt like a child again”. I could call either one of their contributions the centerpiece of the song, but I point them both out to emphasize the symbiosis going on here (perhaps “A dead kid owes me favor / And I’m younger when I’m sober” would’ve haunted me regardless, but the subtle synth touches that Be adds at the end of the line certainly help). Pretty much every song on Pleaser benefits from this fine-toothed-comb level of examination (and I hope someone who writes longer-form reviews takes up the mantle on this), and that’s where the polish of Pretty Bitter’s instrumentals and the strength of Bleker’s vocals (they really earn that “RIYL 10,000 Maniacs” tag that Tiny Engines gave them) come in handy. Pleaser just continues to be worth looking into. (Bandcamp link)

Julian Cubillos – Julian Cubillos

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk-pop, psychedelic pop, indie pop, soft rock, synthpop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Fruit Stripe

Julian Cubillos has been plenty busy this decade–the Queens-based musician is a frequent collaborator with Ivy Meissner of Little Mystery (he’s all over her project’s latest self-titled album), and he’s also contributed to records by everyone from Okkervil River and Joe Henry to Field Guides and Scree. Cubillos hasn’t been making solo albums for a bit, though–he put out three in the 2010s, but 2018’s In Heaven had remained his most recent one for seven years up until now. Julian Cubillos is largely the work of the singer-songwriter himself, with just a few guests popping up on the album–Meissner and Alena Spanger each contribute vocals to a few songs, Levon Henry (son of Joe) contributes saxophone, and Jason Burger (Office Culture, The Bird Calls) drums on one track. This record is just an absolute blast of pop music–it’s short and pretty straightforward in its instrumental choices, but Cubillos has jammed so much stuff into it nonetheless. Cubillos has the touch of a studio rat and auteur (Wilson, Rundgren, Prince, et cetera), and though he’s an understated frontperson, he has the material and attitude to justify a mini-whirlwind through funk, folk, psychedelia, and R&B (among other stops).

“Returning” kicks off Julian Cubillos with a two-minute acoustic folk-pop song that, while quite compelling in its own right, also kind of feels like it exists to set us up for “Talking to Myself”, a stunning 80s synth-funk pop creation that is just executed perfectly. “Flesh & Blood” features most guests than any other track on the album, and while its grounded folk rock is a little more “full”-sounding than the rest of the record, it’s hardly out of place alongside subtler songs like the chill lo-fi pop of “Does It Hurt You?” and “Price of Guilt”. Julian Cubillos finds an impressive second wind in its B-side between the Elliott Smith/Ty Segall/fuzz-folk curiosity of “I Used to Be Someone”, the bright, bouncy pop rock of “Haunted Paradise”, and something called “Fruit Stripe”, which is 60s pop sped up and slightly distorted to create something sugary and intoxicating out of nowhere. It’s a tight collection, wrapping its ten songs up in under thirty minutes with hardly a wasted moment. It’s a bit surprising that someone who sounds so natural on his own took this long to make another solo album, but regardless of how Julian Cubillos came about, I won’t be forgetting its architect any time soon. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Pacing, ‘PL*NET F*TNESS’

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Asian Man
Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The sophomore album from San Jose’s Pacing certainly qualifies as one of the most anticipated records of 2025 in Rosy Overdrive’s small corner of the music world. I would’ve said as much in the immediate aftermath of the project’s first album, 2023’s Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen, one of my favorite LPs of that year. Real Poetry… was a DIY affair whose visible seams did nothing but accentuate the brilliance of Pacing bandleader Katie McTigue, both in terms of her skill as a kitchen-sink indie pop/twee/“anti-folk” composer and as a writer with a truly staggering level of ambition strewn about her material. If that wasn’t enough, everything that Pacing’s done since Real Poetry… has upped the ante, from jumping to local stalwart Asian Man Records to creating an absurdly great stopgap “mini-album” called Songs to releasing a pair of singles that completely blew the entire idea of a “Pacing song” out of the water. 

Aside from the core Pacing band of McTigue, bassist/guitarist Ben Krock, and drummer Joe Sherman, there’s a real brain trust behind PL*NET F*TNESS–it’s a veritable who’s who of Pacing collaborators and associates, with everyone from Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar, Copeland James, Star 99, Career Woman’s Melody Caudill and Jackson Felton, bassist Noah Sanchez de Tagle, and producer Ryan Perras lending their talents to these songs. Between the lineup and the advance singles, I fully expected PL*NET F*TNESS to be “Pacing as we’d never heard them before”; the first thing I noticed from “Pl*net F*tness” and “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” is the absolutely professional, full-band power pop polish to both of them, exploring genres like “pop punk” and “surf-y guitar pop” that I’d consider to be completely uncharted territory for Pacing before now (McTigue, in the lead-up to Songs, joked about the new album leading to her “[having] opinions about guitar tone”, certainly a strange place for an anti-folk musician to find themself).

Not to say that the music evolution of those singles was a red herring (PL*NET F*TNESS sounds great and contains many more surprising moments beyond the aforementioned tracks), but it was actually the second thing I noticed about those advance tracks that turned out to be the most key one to understanding the album as a whole. I’d rather go spelunking alone in Nutty Putty Cave than unironically describe an album as an artist’s “most personal to date”, but Pacing’s evolution on PL*NET F*TNESS goes beyond the instrumental bells and whistles. PL*NET F*TNESS is just as thematically ambitious as Real Poetry…’s dissection of reality and art was, but McTigue seems more comfortable (or, at the very least, open to) drawing from personal experiences to construct these giant overarching structures this time. When it came out, I wrote extensively (for me) on the title track’s examination of the banal aftermath of the death of a family member, and “Uno” (the sneaky, quick “B-side” to “Nothing! (I Wanna Do)” is arguably an even rawer look at this extremely weird moment suspended in time. 

For all of its might and bluster, PL*NET F*TNESS features some of McTigue’s most confused and awkward (emotionally, not structurally) writing yet. McTigue writes that the album contains “several love songs…with no clear target”; “Disclaimer”, a jerky, sweaty acoustic song that opens the album, finds McTigue singing “You say you need space / Well I hate space … / So I don’t know what to do / With all this love I have for you / I’d give it to the thrift store / But they don’t take anger / And it’s hard to separate the two”; this sincere floundering ought to be the clearest distillation of what I have to assume McTigue meant by that quote, but that would be ignoring the impossible-to-ignore “Mastering Positional Chess”, a brilliant folk-pop parasocial anthem about American Chess Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky. Oblivious and practically leaking with desire (of what kind? Pretty hard to unblur the lines here), “Mastering Positional Chess” is almost too much–it’s not, but it’s certainly much.

The emotional heart of PL*NET F*TNESS is an almost completely acoustic track called “True Crime / Birthday Song”; like another central song to the album, “Love Island”, “True Crime” isn’t really about its titular subject, but rather it’s a jaw-dropping, guard-dropping piece about laborious love (“All your crinkles and your soft spots and your prickly thorns / I run straight into them / And I’m surprised when I hit something sharp / And you’re surprised when I yell out”–I truly never expected Pacing to write something like this). Perhaps tacking the hushed “Birthday Song” at the end of “True Crime” is supposed to soften the blow a little bit, but it just reminds me of every time I try to wipe up a dye stain at my job and end up creating an even bigger blue smear (oh, and also there’s a sound collage called “The TV” in the middle of PL*NET F*TNESS; if we’re talking “unexpected moments”, I wasn’t really expecting something that reminds me of “Back to Saturn X Radio Report” on a Pacing album, but here we are). 

Aside from the singles, my favorite song on PL*NET F*TNESS is called “Advertising”. Of all the album tracks, it’s the one that benefits the most from the expanded musical toolkit–it’s hard to imagine McTigue and company pulling something like this one off on Real Poetry…. The production forms itself around McTigue’s subdued but clear vocals, which deliver a desperately confused plea for some kind of meaning. “I guess I don’t mind / Being lied to / I don’t see what’s wrong with / Wanting everyone to like you,” McTigue confesses about the titular well-despised field, and then “I’m not so sure where / I’m supposed to get my cues / Now that I don’t believe in you”. There are no answers on PL*NET F*TNESS, only Things–charismatic professional chess players, bastardized Mr. Rogers quotes, reality television, true love, half-remembered advice from the dead, tickets for events you forgot to go to. And some pretty nice guitar tones, too. (Bandcamp link)

Pressing Concerns: Dori, SleepMarks, Lammping & Bloodshot Bill, Eaters Digest

Good morning, readers! Today’s Pressing Concerns is an odds-and-ends edition, collecting an archival live collection from Dori, a collaborative record between Lammping and Bloodshot Bill, a new album from SleepMarks, and a new EP from Eaters Digest. Check these out below!

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Dori – 11/4/2017

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, 90s indie rock, noise rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Fool’s Errand

Dori were a post-punk trio from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They released one album called Patchwork (recorded by the band’s drummer, Shane Freeman, “in a cabin in central Michigan”) in late 2017, played a few live shows around that time, and that was it. Bassist and vocalist Jacob Simons moved to Kalamazoo, started up a folk rock group called Moon Orchids, and currently lives in Colorado. Guitarist/vocalist Alaric Bloss ended up in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he co-runs a cassette label called Citronel Sounds with his partner Sidney and has pursued a solo career–his most recent solo record is an album from 2023 called Pensive, which was mastered by Freeman. Freeman, who had also moved to Kalamazoo in recent years, passed away suddenly on March 23rd of this year; he was thirty-one. In the wake of this tragedy, Bloss and Simons found themselves revisiting what they’d made with Freeman as Dori; Simons writes that there is “precious little live footage or audio” of the band, but Lex Valentine had recorded most of Dori’s set at Quinn & Tuite’s Irish Pub in Grand Rapids two days after the release of Patchwork. 11/4/2017 features five songs from Patchwork, three unreleased original Dori songs, and a closing cover of “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen (all proceeds from the set’s release will go towards MusiCares, per Simons).

11/4/2017 is appropriately murky–the vocals are buried and drift in and out of focus, but the instruments all sound great. The first half of 11/4/2017 is made up of the five Patchwork songs; perhaps unsurprisingly, this is where Dori sound most intricate and polished. I first knew of Simons as a fellow Silkworm superfan; I don’t know which songs on 11/4/2017 are written and/or sung by him, but I hear the influence both in his bass playing and in the structure of the recording’s more melodic songs (the almost-college rock-y “Fool’s Errand” and the rumbling but still somewhat sweet “Tangible”). The ferocious post-punk of “Mild Scene” captures the sheer strength of the power trio, a strength that’s apparent even in the more subtle moments on 11/4/2017. Songs six through eight are the previously-unreleased ones, and while I don’t know if Dori considered them “works in progress” at the time or not, there’s an openness to them that indicates they might not have reached their final forms yet. For one, “No Indigo” is an instrumental, and “Victorian Playwright” and “Inconclusive” are both on the shorter side, around two minutes long (of course, this isn’t that much shorter than some of the Patchwork selections, and neither track–particularly “Inconclusive”–feels incomplete). Dori’s “The Killing Moon” is a hurricane, a show-stopper in multiple senses, and it alone would justify the dredging up of 11/4/2017. Dori deserve a look beyond that, though, as the rest of the recording makes as clear as day. (Bandcamp link)

SleepMarks – Tension in the Air

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Inactive

No-fuss indie rock groups like SleepMarks are what keeps Rosy Overdrive alive. This group is a trio, made up of three Washington, D.C.-era music veterans–James Smith III previously played in Maple, Pierre Davis was in The Chance and We Capillaries, and Fred Burton played with NAYAN’s Nayan Bhula in the band Gist. The now-Arlington, Virginia-based band formed as an attempt to give all three members a chance to do something different than what they typically do–Smith and Davis have historically been guitarists, and Burton a drummer. Tension in the Air is the second SleepMarks record and their first full-length album, following a debut EP in 2020 called Evaporating Haze. The trio’s first LP is eight songs and about forty minutes of what I would call “indie rock and roll”–SleepMarks’ music is a torrent of post-punk, garage rock, punk rock, and 90s indie rock from across their home country. Parts of Tension in the Air remind me of Sonic Youth at their most direct, other times like early-to-mid-period Silkworm–among the bands that SleepMarks list under their “LIYL” section, I like the “Mudhoney” nod the best, as it explains the raw and sloppy garage-y element to their sound.

SleepMarks certainly have “punk” influences, but this doesn’t exactly translate to song lengths, as the majority of Tension in the Air is built up of lengthy garage-y indie rock journeys. “24 Hours a Day” opens up the LP with SleepMarks’ version of “pop music”–there are some surprisingly swelling keyboard parts, the guitars are loose but melodic, and the hooks are muscular and effective. “Walking Timebomb” thrashes and roils around for six minutes of noise-garage-punk assaulting, and even the “streamlined” classic rock throwback of “The Fire Burns” rides out its simple groove for a clean four minutes. Even though they’re D.C.-originating, Dischord Records post-hardcore isn’t the first thing that comes to mind listening to Tension in the Air, although I can hear plenty of 90s/00s Dischord bands in the construction of stuff like the post-punk stop-starting “Inactive” and the bouncy, anchoring bass guitar in closing track “Leave It All Behind”. Still, it’s pretty hard to categorize a band that can pull off both these aforementioned moves and songs like the six-minute Sonic Youth/Crazy Horse/Velvet Underground bastard child “Beet Red”. If the goal of SleepMarks was to provide a way for the three bandmembers to try something new, Tension in the Air is evidence that they’ve succeeded in more ways than one. (Bandcamp link)

Lammping & Bloodshot Bill – Never Never

Release date: June 67th
Record label: We Are Busy Bodies
Genre: Psychedelia, garage rock, hip hop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Never Never

This is an incredibly Canadian collection of musicians that I don’t know too much about yet, but I’m going to do my best to explain the players on Never Never here. In this corner we have Toronto’s Lammping, a psychedelic duo comprised of Mikhail Galkin and Jay Anderson–the former has collaborated with Boldy James and People Under The Stairs as a producer, while the latter has drummed for a ton of Toronto bands, including the very good experimental collective Badge Epoque Ensemble. Lammping showed up at the beginning of this decade, but Bloodshot Bill, their partner on their latest release, has been at it for significantly longer–this one-man rockabilly machine from Montreal has been reliably releasing albums since the late 2000s. Bill (aka Derek Rogers) has hopped around garage rock-associated labels like Goner and Hi-Tide (his most recent solo album, So Fed Up, came out on the former last month) before landing on We Are Busy Bodies (The Bug Club, Affiliate Links, Julie Doiron) with Lammping for Never Never, a bizarre fifteen-minute trip that is supposed to be the first of four Lammping-led records that are to be released over the next year.

Never Never has a really wild sound, but it’s a natural and pretty intuitive one, too–it really does feel like the synthesis of its three creators. It’s very psychedelic and experimental hip-hop-focused, a vibe that is equally due to Galkin’s rock-band-evoking samples and Anderson’s live-wire, shuffling drumbeats. Bloodshot Bill’s outsized personality obviously comes through on this record (pretty much every piece of writing associated with him mentions that John Waters once described him as “like Roy Orbison with a head wound”–which, to be fair, I’d be telling everyone if I’d been called that by John Waters, too), but he lets himself be dissolved and incorporated into Lammping’s soundscapes in a really open way. The freaky, muddy blues-funk of the title track kicks off Never Never with some pretty aggressive mood-setting between the cartoonishly warped instrumental and a Bill performance to match it. A lot of the songs on Never Never feel like brief snippets, but it seems like Lammping and Bloodshot Bill consistently clip the most interesting parts–songs like “Coconut” and “0 and 1” are curious pieces that sound like dispatches from some strange, corrupted radio station. Never Never may just be a quick glimpse into the worlds of Bloodshot Bill and Lammping, but it’s enough for me to want to see where they both go next in the aftermath. (Bandcamp link)

Eaters Digest – Charcuterie

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Pacing Tapes
Genre:  Math rock, post-punk, experimental rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Bubblegum Fluoride

Seattle’s Eaters Digest describe themselves as a “math-rock supergroup” built from parts of two other local bands–guitarist/vocalist Kurt Henry and drummer Matt Anderson made a couple of solid records earlier this decade as part of the New England-originating trio Supernowhere, and bassist/vocalist Miiko Valkonen and guitarist Aaron Kurzius go even further back to the late 2010s with their own group, Don Forgetti. Apparently both bands are (or at some point were) on hiatus, leading to the four of them linking up as Eaters Digest in late 2023, and a year and a half later we’ve gotten Charcuterie, the project’s debut EP. What I remember of Supernowhere placed them on the “languid” and “chill” sides of music that could reasonably be called “math rock”–some of Charcuterie plays in the same realm, while some of it decidedly does not. Recorded by Great Grandpa/Apples with Moya’s Dylan Hanwright, the band describe the EP as built from “a smorgasbord of ideas we had laying about”, and it certainly sounds like it–Charcuterie (oh, now I understand the title) is the sound of a collision, of some new collaborators throwing everything they’ve got against a wall and seeing what sticks and/or catches flame.

Eaters Digest’s first record is made up of four songs, each one of which is a wild self-contained math rock trip. Parts of Charcuterie will appeal to fans of “Devo-core” indie rock, the Exploding in Sound Records roster, and Palm, although (like a good math rock band), Eaters Digest never settle into a single rhythm or “groove”. “Bubblegum Fluoride” opens Charcuterie on the more unhinged side of things, a stop-start instrumental and theatrical vocals setting up an “anything goes” kind of vibe. “Color Trademark Infringement” is more Supernowhere-esque, maybe a little more “loose” but similarly built on subtle vocals and circular guitar riffs. The second half of Charcuterie, on its surface at least, repeats the setup of the first half, with a relatively bonkers track (the Dismemberment Plan-indebted “Sisyphean”) being followed up by a more peaceful and pastoral one (the almost meditative “Workplace Headspace”). The former of those two tracks has plenty of moments of zen, however, and the latter one increasingly gets more agitated and freaked out as it goes on, finally leading towards a (more or less) post-hardcore conclusion. Whether or not Eaters Digest becomes the main focus for all of its members is probably still an open question, but this combination’s early results have proven quite promising. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, Groceries!, Sudden Voices, Coral Grief

Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring four albums that are coming out tomorrow, July 18th: new LPs from Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, Groceries!, Sudden Voices, and Coral Grief. Read on, and if you missed either of the earlier blog posts from this week (on Monday, we looked at new ones from Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches, and Tuesday’s post featured Rip Van Winkle, Uniflora, West Coast Music Club, and Pat Hatt), 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.

Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra – Yikes Almighty

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Lauren/Making New Enemies
Genre: Folk pop, singer-songwriter, indie pop, twee, slacker pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: My Diving Board Game

There was a band from California called Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, and then there was one called Walter Etc. led by the same person (Dustin Hayes) and featuring, from what I understand, more or less the same people. Maybe they’re two different bands, or maybe they’re the same one “split into two identities” (as their bio puts it)–either way, after about a decade of Walter Etc., Hayes revived the project’s original name for the first time since 2014 for his latest album, Yikes Almighty. Hayes’ project(s) have always been “the band with the silly name(s)” in the periphery of my mind until I gave Yikes Almighty a shot; they get referred to as a “folk punk” act, and I can hear how they might’ve initially been one, but Yikes Almighty is in the realm of underground iconoclasts falling somewhere between “lo-fi pop” and anti-folk/folk punk (names like Diners, Fishboy, Emperor X, Okkervil River, and Mike Adams at His Honest Weight–several of which share a label with Walter Mitty–come to mind). Dubbed “a calming existential crisis set to children’s toy instruments”, Yikes Almighty is low-key folk-pop music that’s about as “relaxed” and “chill” as its creator could reasonably allow it to be. 

Like a lot of “cult”-ish-type bands, it’s hard to say what, exactly, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra is. Are they a vehicle for a uniquely talented singer-songwriter? A bunch of quirky, lo-fi, underground outcast punks (in attitude, if not in genre)? Classic pop music nerds tinkering away at their own personal Pet Sounds? The unassuming, unfamiliar mixture of all these sides of them make Yikes Almighty a one-of-a-kind album in 2025, the kind of album that’ll give you statuesque, studious pop queries like “Econoline” and “The Way She Said It”, folk-pop hand-clappers like “Naked Self Portrait #2” and “My Scratched CD of a Brain”, and the oddities anchoring stuff like “Fireworks on the Moon” (some kind of clinking bells), “Homesick Hour” (that sounds like a Speak & Spell), and “Triplet Daughters” (in which it is, finally, ukulele time). I’m not sure what the single greatest moment on Yikes Almighty is–at first I thought it was the striking, somewhat alarming slacker pop of “Omfg”, then I started gravitating towards the post-“adult alternative” party-acoustic-rock of “My Diving Board Game” (side note: this has been one of the most difficult albums for me to describe in the history of this blog, for some reason). After a brilliant aw-shucks chorus in the latter, Hayes declares “I don’t know what it is I’m trying to find / But I’m diving in, without a deep breath”–and then a kazoo rises up to meet him. (Bandcamp link)

Groceries! – Human Extinctions

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock, experimental rock, art rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Causing Time

The Los Angeles quartet Groceries! was co-founded last year by vocalist/guitarist Gabby Fiszman and drummer Ed Graveline, who were shortly joined by bassist Nate Ramer and guitarist Grant Gonzalez and then set to work recording their debut album. That would be Human Extinctions, which is anything but a soft launch for the young band. Groceries! call themselves “post-sleaze”, and while I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that, the points of influence for Human Extinctions are all over the underground rock music map–90s emo and lo-fi indie rock to be sure, collided with the psychedelic ambition of 2000s indie and the experimental kitchen-sink attitude of recent noise pop groups on labels like Julia’s War, Candlepin, and Trash Tape. I specifically mention Trash Tape as it’s one of their bands, Rain Recordings, that sounds the closest to Human Extinctions to me–it’s a wide array of indie rock warped, compacted, and reinterpreted by a generation that didn’t experience much of it in person, which perhaps helps Groceries! draw connections from Rainer Maria to Modest Mouse to Animal Collective to The Wrens to Neutral Milk Hotel that might be hard to have developed in real time. 

While there are certainly noisy and feedback-drenched moments on Human Extinctions, it almost feels revelatory that Groceries! aren’t a shoegaze band. They aren’t “emo-gaze” so much as a distorted emo-ish rock band whose interests beyond these key tentpoles rear up on a regular basis. Human Extinctions feels longer than its thirty-five minutes, presumably because every song on the album packs several tracks’ worth of ideas together–“Finding San Pedro” introduces Groceries! with a flat-out impressive five-minute multi-part emo odyssey, and neither the more “rock band”-forward “Causing Time” nor the dream pop-indebted “Angel Numbers” slow down Groceries!’s momentum. Because Human Extinctions doesn’t instinctively resort to walls of sound to kick things up a notch, one might call it a “lighter” version of this current wave of basement indie rock, but the flipside of that is that the mostly discernible instruments and Fiszman’s clean vocals make something like the seven-minute “Lullaby” even headier than a noisy freak-out would be. Stuff like “Alegria” and “Decompose” might be a little weirder than some of the other tracks, but there’s no single “out-there” moment on Human Extinctions; how Groceries! are able to make an album that bounces off some of the more well-worn aspects of their peers and constantly sounds fresh comes down to more subtle decision-making. Not that “subtle” is the first word that’ll come to mind listening to Human Extinctions, but you’ll want to listen to it enough to where it’ll start to apply. (Bandcamp link)

Sudden Voices – Scruples

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-rock, experimental rock, jazz-rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: I Knew You at Once (Slight Return)

After a fifteen-year hiatus from making records, the London musician Ben Morris (who previously led the band Union Wireless in the late 1990s and early 2000s) returned to the worlds of post-rock and experimental music in 2023 with a new project called Sudden Voices and a self-titled debut album. Sudden Voices was an adventurous, confusing mixture of post-punk, electronica, and chamber music, the latter of which Morris explored even further with the second Sudden Voices LP, last year’s Days and Nights. The resurgent musician has really made up for lost time at this point with the third Sudden Voices album in as many years, Scruples. Rather than continuing down the path at which Days and Nights had hinted, Scruples represents something of a left turn for Sudden Voices–the choral, chanting sections of the previous LP are gone entirely, and a synthetic, jazzy instrumental minimalism has taken its place. The project’s previously-named influences–CAN, Bitches Brew, Talk Talk–all still apply here, but the still-wide musical palette is applied more sparingly and carefully, finding more in common with post-rock groups like Tortoise or even The Necks than the post-punk/art rock that was (at least somewhat) part of Sudden Voices.

The future jazz of the title track greets us in a well-orchestrated but subdued manner, setting the stage for the understated instrumental explorations set to come in Scruples. The bass pushes “Ends and Means” forward, and while Sudden Voices take detours into sustained orchestral drone (“Coming Up for Air”) and minimal keyboard pieces (“There Will Be Two of Us”) after that, the light krautrock/TNT vibes eventually return again in “A Stand Against the Dark” (an excellent piece that divvies up horns, mallets, and keys in equal measure), “Small Myths” (featuring some of the best rhythmic moments on the entire record), and “They Do Not Speak”. The latter of those three songs is Scruples’ penultimate track, a relatively brief two-minute kaleidoscopic crescendo that paves the way for the eight minute finale, “I Knew You at Once (Slight Return)”. It’s perhaps Sudden Voices’ best single composition yet–the way it builds and builds stoically and intently, without ever offering up something that could cleanly be labeled a “payoff”, feels like exactly what Morris has been working up towards with Scruples. It is, more than ever before in Sudden Voices’ existence, about the journeys these songs take. (Bandcamp link)

Coral Grief – Air Between Us

Release date: July 18th
Record label: Suicide Squeeze/Den Tapes/Anxiety Blanket
Genre: Dream pop, fuzz pop, psychedelia, shoegaze
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Starboard

Even though they’re a fairly new band with a fairly small discography, Seattle dream pop trio Coral Grief already have the makings of a cult-favorite group to me. Vocalist/bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey and guitarist Sam Fason co-founded the group and released a self-titled debut EP in 2021, and drummer Cam Hancock came on board for the group’s second EP, 2023’s Daydrops. Daydrops didn’t shatter the world or anything, but it got a little bit of attention, and it seemed to me like the people who enjoyed it really seemed to enjoy it. I heard Daydrops when it came out–Seattle label Den Tapes put out a cassette featuring both EPs around this time–and while it kind of got lost in the shuffle for me, it made enough of an impression on a few record labels (specifically Anxiety Blanket and Suicide Squeeze) who’ve teamed up with Den Tapes to release Coral Grief’s debut LP, Air Between Us. Coral Grief’s latest record is clearly their best work yet, but, like their earlier EPs, Air Between Us (recorded by New Issue’s Nicholas Wilbur at Anacortes’ The Unknown) isn’t going to reach out and grab you. Coral Grief’s journey of psychedelic, droney indie rock and dream pop ambience requires some patience to start to congeal.

That’s not to say that Air Between Us isn’t a pop album–that much is pretty obvious between the lightly sweeping, lightly jangly opening statement “Starboard” and the dreamy, Stereolab-inspired propulsion of second song and advance single “Rockhounds”. Between Farr-Morrissey’s somewhat cold vocals and the perfunctory, greyscale guitar work, there’s something of a distant quality to Air Between Us, even when the trio are working their way through electric, alive-feeling rockers like “Avenue You”. Songs like this one and the whirring “Paint by Number” are in the same “shoegaze-inspired art rock” territory as groups like Aluminum and (early) Dummy, but Coral Grief do more traditionally pop-sounding dream pop between cuts like the title track and “Latitude”. Much of this I hadn’t really observed until I sat down to write about Air Between Us; unless one focuses very intently, this album is built to present itself as a single, hazy, all-encompassing cloud that doesn’t lift until the echoing indie pop of final song “Almost Everyday” comes to a close. It certainly works the way Coral Grief sculpt it, but Air Between Us holds up to advanced scrutiny, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Rip Van Winkle, Pat Hatt, Uniflora, West Coast Music Club

It’s a Tuesday Pressing Concerns! This issue features a lot of music that will probably appeal to people who enjoy the kind of music that typically shows up on Rosy Overdrive (I need a short, catchy term for this type of thing); read about albums from Rip Van Winkle, Uniflora, and West Coast Music Club and an EP from Pat Hatt below. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches), 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.

Rip Van Winkle – Blasphemy

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Splendid Research
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, experimental rock, post-punk, art rock, Guided by Voices
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Quiver and Quill

The past few years, Robert Pollard has been singularly focusing on Guided by Voices to a previously-unseen degree–two-to-three albums of muscular, prog-tinged rock music from his “main” project a year, and increasingly fewer side projects and oddities. I can tell that this other side of the legendary artist is still there and needs a workout every once in a while, though–there was an EP and LP from Cub Scout Bowling Pins in 2021, who made bubblegum pop in a murky haze, and Pollard even revived his infamously difficult Circus Devils project in 2023 for an album. Now we have Rip Van Winkle, made up of Pollard and members of the band Joseph Airport, who are the latest “weird” Guided by Voices offshoot. The lo-fi, clanging experimental EP The Grand Rapids introduced us to Rip Van Winkle last year with a brief but tantalizing offbeat teaser, and now the project’s first album, Blasphemy, is here to deliver on the promise. On the surface, Blasphemy has the same sloppy, surprising qualities of Pollard’s albums where he himself plays (nearly) everything–Vampire on Titus, Please Be Honest, Teenage Guitar–but despite this, there’s a secret polish to the playing of the rest of Rip Van Winkle that provides a link to Pollard’s more obviously pop-forward material. 

There are inspired lo-fi rockers and pop melodies throughout Blasphemy, just as there’s equally-as-inspired strangeness. Singles “Shitheel Man” and “By the Water” prove that Rip Van Winkle can be just as much of a “rock band” as GBV when they want to be, whether it’s by the snaking, smoldering freakout of the former or the post-punk/garage rock tightness of the latter. “Six Black Horses” builds to a classic rock conclusion from a spare acoustic foundation, and “Quiver and Quill” hides the best pop song on the record–a timeless jangle pop warbler–behind a psychedelic spoken-word introduction. The rest of Blasphemy is invariably quite freaky–sometimes (like with the harmonica-aided psych rock of “Pool Hall Tactics” or the basement post-rock of “St. George”) it’s not too far removed from the more friendly side of Rip Van Winkle, but others (from the chipmunk voice in “Union” to the album’s climax, a four minute multi-part suite called “This Is My Thriller”) are pretty off the rails. And the “off the rails” aspect of Blasphemy is what makes Rip Van Winkle an exciting project–not only do I have no idea where a song like “A Discussion Amongst Toads” is going to end up, but one gets the sense that Pollard and Joseph Airport aren’t so sure either. The pilot has to stay alert to land the plane, and he certainly does so. (Bandcamp link)

Pat Hatt – Pat Hatt

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Alt-country, heartland rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Drunk on Leaving

Does the world need another longtime underground musician resurfacing with a solo career inspired by Americana, alt-country, and “heartland rock”? Probably not, but I’m going to allow it in the case of one Pat Hatt. Hatt originally hails from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and apparently spent the early 2000s being quite active in the city’s music scene before taking a “a ten-year hiatus” pursuing a career as a professional barber. It was a cross-country move to California that spurred Hatt to pick up the guitar again–singles started showing up again, like 2023’s “High Is Gone” and this April’s “Catch a Serpent” (recorded by Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus at Tiny Telephone Oakland), leading to a self-titled five-track Pat Hatt EP of all-new songs. Hatt reached back to Lancaster to recruit a full band for his latest record, enlisting guitarist Andrew Burton and drummer Nick Lowry of the Pennsylvania alt-rock band Super Vehicle to back him on these songs, and he went down to Joshua Tree to record them with Alex Newport. Pat Hatt ends up landing in the rootsy, earnest, post-Replacements no-man’s land between punk and classic rock in which fellow Pennsylvanians The Menzingers also live, but there’s a jovial, focused aspect to it reflecting somebody who’s been newly reinspired. 

I don’t really know what Pat Hatt’s music sounded like before the barber/West Coast eras began, but he’s clearly a natural at this kind of thing. It’s certainly a team effort, as Burton and Lowry and Newport all help Pat Hatt sound like perfect summer windows-down guitar music, allowing their frontperson to indulge in some classic imagery of bars and deserts and nomadic behavior. The opening track is called “Drunk on Leaving”, and its huge sound does everything you’d want a song combining these motifs to do. The somewhat-desperate-sounding “Turn the Dial” perfectly continues the sublime roots rock hot streak of Pat Hatt, and the requisite slow number “Lyin’ to Yourself” right in the middle of the EP hardly does anything to stall the momentum. The back half of the EP kicks up the energy once again–“I’m Gonna Ride” is probably Hatt’s clearest foray into Menzingers/Japandroids-style bar rock, and its driven desire to advance forward helps it land among the best of this type of music (that guitar solo doesn’t hurt, either). “Whiskey Lens” closes out the EP with a tricky one; there’s a positivity to this EP, but Hatt doesn’t overdo it, and isn’t afraid to range into darker territory. It’s his first statement of a record in a while, so I suppose it isn’t surprising he has a lot to say. (Bandcamp link)

Uniflora – More Gums Than Teeth

Release date: June 20th
Record label: Charm Co-Op/Shuga
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: To My Zombie

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s a new experimental, noisy post-punk band from Chicago on this blog today? It’s true! Today I’m talking about Uniflora, a Windy City trio who are made up of vocalist/guitarist Quinn Dugan, drummer Ruby O’Brien, and bassist Theo Williams and who’ve played shows with Sharp Pins, Karate, and Sunshine Convention leading up to and surrounding the release of their debut album, More Gums Than Teeth. Uniflora’s first LP is crisp-sounding, guitar-forward Chicago indie rock through and through–if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was recorded by a group of unfashionable music lifers at Electrical Audio two decades or so ago. More Gums Than Teeth is a record made by people who’ve spent plenty of time with the spacier, jammier side of 90s indie rock as well as the “art rock”/punk groups who inspired them (Wire, Mission of Burma, The Fall). There are moments when the guitars or the vocals sound like Guided by Voices or Unwound or Sonic Youth or Silkworm, but these moments come in bits and pieces–these songs, which are dead-serious, laser-focused, ever-so-jazz/“math rock”-y post-punk dispatches, don’t really sound like a band trying to imitate their influences (in fact, I’m not sure what Uniflora are trying to do, exactly, which makes More Gums Than Teeth such an interesting listen).

Uniflora kick things off with the low-key, chugging indie rock of “To My Zombie”, a song that stubbornly refuses to tip its hand and sounds great while doing so. “Two or More” at the very least gives us a toe-tapping tempo to work with, and then we get “Fence”, a weird Dischord-y dubby concoction that cements Williams’ bass playing as perhaps the secret weapon of the entire album. As More Gums Than Teeth advances, Uniflora steadily unveil more sides to themselves, from the jittery grooves of “Dance” (they mention the band Cola as an influence on their music, and I heard it in this one) to the surprisingly stripped-down guitar ballad of “From the City Circle” to the clanging, motormouth garage-y post-punk of “I Was Made to Freeze”. The closest thing to a moment of excess on this highly streamlined collection is “Elongated Cat Fist”, a nearly six-minute recursive collection of melancholic guitar riffs and inconsistent tempos. More Gums Than Teeth, by its nature, doesn’t exactly ooze enthusiasm–but a closer listen to every carefully arranged guitar part, bass interjection, and structural shift tells another story. (Bandcamp link)

West Coast Music Club – Poppelganger

Release date: June 27th
Record label: 72rpm
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, fuzz rock, power pop, garage rock, psychedelic pop
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Still It’s News to Me

It’s been a busy 2025 for the West Kirby, England quartet West Coast Music Club. From January to May, the band (vocalist/guitarist Martin Adams, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Peter Madden, drummer/vocalist Iain Morton, and “multi-instrumentalist” Marc Joy) released four EPs, all of which were conceived as teasers for an eventual full-length LP. Poppelganger is that album, featuring four “A-sides” of the EPs and six new recordings, and it’s available as a double CD with the second disc comprised of all the songs from the EPs that didn’t make the proper album. If you’ve been keeping up with the West Coast Music Club EPs as I have, it won’t come as a surprise that Poppelganger is made up of enjoyably fuzzed-out, crunchy, quite British guitar pop music. What is a bit surprising is that Poppelganger isn’t necessarily the best of the recent West Coast Music Club material (my favorite song from the EPs, “Blue Seersucker”, didn’t make the cut, for instance), but the group put together a collection of meandering but electric fuzz-pop that hangs together very well as an album. Poppelganger runs the gamut from simple and straightforward to muddy and distorted, but the pop side of West Coast Music Club comes through crystal clear even at their muddiest.

West Coast Music Club make the inspired decision to kick off Poppelganger with arguably its least accessible song, the strange lo-fi Guided by Voices-esque deconstruction of “Lonely Boy”. It takes a minute to fully adjust to this skewed world, but once we’ve got our full attention trained on Poppelganger, we’re rewarded with a parade of hits like the classic garage-pop “I’ll Be Alright”, the 60s pop, distorted vibes of “You’re Not Fooling Me”, and the sugar-blast indie pop refrain of “Still It’s News to Me”. Like “Lonely Boy”, “1989” and “Crazy” are selections from the earlier EPs, but unlike the opening track, they’re two of the most immediate pop songs on Poppelganger–and they’re different examples of them, too, with the former settling on nostalgic jangly indie pop bliss and the latter cranking up the organs and surf-y vibes for a lo-fi, retro trip. Even without the bonus tracks, Poppelganger is an impressively full record, with the ten fully-developed songs reaching around forty minutes without overstaying any welcome at any point. If I were you I’d pick up that second CD just to be safe, but it’s hard to be disappointed with the final version of Poppelganger. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, Wenches

Hey, all! Welcome to the first Pressing Concerns of the week, a strong collection featuring new albums from Aunt Katrina, The Fruit Trees, Autocamper, and Wenches. Check ’em out below!

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Aunt Katrina – This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Crafted Sounds
Genre: Dream pop, psych pop, art pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Just a Game

Ryan Walchonski recorded the first EP from his Aunt Katrina project more or less on his own; at the time of Hot’s release (December 2023), Walchonski was still a part of the acclaimed noise pop group he co-founded, Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse, even as he’d recently moved to Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, however, Walchonski officially stepped away from Feeble Little Horse, and Aunt Katrina has started to look more and more like a “real” band in the meantime. They’re at least a six-piece now; Walchonski (now based in Baltimore) has welcomed multi-instrumentalist Alex Bass, drummer Ray Brown, guitarist Eric Zidar, lyricist/guitarist Laney Ackley, bassist Nick Miller, and lyricist/keyboardist Emma Banks into the group–the majority of them appear on the first Aunt Katrina full-length, as well as former member Connor Peters. The hotness of the band’s debut EP continues with This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me (a title apparently inspired by listening to the band This Heat in a car with no air conditioning in the midst of a Baltimore summer), but otherwise it’s a pretty big leap from the first Aunt Katrina release to this one.

Hot felt like a very low-stakes release, the work of somebody with a larger project just messing around and making experimental pop music–This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me is still a little bit “offbeat”, sure, but the psychedelic guitar pop of this album is much more fully-developed and labored-over. It’s not the Feeble Little Horse “wall of sound”–in fact, the first two songs on the album, “How Are You?” and “Peace of Mind”, are relatively streamlined pieces of dreamy indie pop that are open to the idea of minimalism and leaving a little space between the instruments. It’s a more thoughtful kind of obsessive pop music, but even so, I was still totally unprepared for the skipping, almost twee jangly indie pop of “Just a Game” that follows this opening duo. After nailing a few pop songs of varying levels of “pep”, the second half of This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me is admittedly a little weirder, but none of the final three songs (as disparate as they are) allow for any flagging to creep into the album’s home stretch. “Locked Me Up” is the dramatic one, a pretty harrowing lo-fi folk song that turns into a fuzzed-out mid-tempo grunge rocker, “Rhythm” is a flighty, electronic-tinged indie pop song, and “I Don’t Want to be Your Friend” closes This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me right about where it began, with a simple pop core visited by intermittent synths and orchestration. I liked what Walchonski did with Hot, but now it’s apparent that he’s built something larger. (Bandcamp link)

The Fruit Trees – An Opening

Release date: April 25th
Record label: Flower Sounds
Genre: Lo-fi folk, folk rock, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Right Back to That Place

I last wrote about The Fruit Trees around two years ago, on the occasion of their debut album, Weather. At the time, the “group” was effectively the solo project of southern California musician Johnny Rafter, who (with the help of plenty of guest musicians) made music in the realms of both sparse, lo-fi slowcore and fuzzy folk rock. The Fruit Trees have remained busy since Rosy Overdrive last checked in on them–they put out an EP called Leaving later in 2023, and 2024 brought a sprawling, hourlong sophomore album called We Could Lie Down in the Grass, but we rejoin them for an album that’s a little different than their past work. An Opening is a pure collaboration between Rafter and Hannah Ford-Monroe, a visual artist who, apparently, had never sang publicly before the making of this album. The core of An Opening was improvised over a single three-hour period with Ford-Monroe as the vocalist and lyricist and Rafter playing guitar (and some overdubs were added after the fact). I didn’t know any of this context until I decided that I wanted to write about An Opening–I just thought it was a normal folk rock album, as the partnership between Rafter and Ford-Monroe just sounds so natural.

Ford-Monroe rises to the challenge of being the focal point of these songs–because they’re relatively stripped down, her voice is even more centralized than Rafter’s was previously in the Fruit Trees albums that he’s fronted. There’s a delicate strength to Ford-Monroe’s singing, one that fits right in with the fractured but very human Microphones/Mount Eerie-inspired musicianship of Rafter. Ford-Monroe deals in a lot of bittersweet, talk-sung reminiscing from the past in her lyrics, pulling from the haze of childhood and the more clear and regrettable worlds of adulthood. An Opening is on the longer side (around fifty minutes), and a lot of the album’s strongest moments come in the first half (the pin-drop quiet opener “Marionette”, the wobbly folk of “Right Back to That Place”, and the rootsy “Hand Me Down” are quite the formidable trio to start the record). Stick with The Fruit Trees, though, and you’ll see why Ford-Monroe and Rafter decided to let the partnership continue to curious second half highlights like “A Thousand Dreams”, “A Door”, and the eight-minute penultimate track “Far Away”. The Fruit Trees have been a lot more things than your favorite lo-fi folk quasi-solo project has been over the past few years, and this record of a fruitful creative session between two friends is one of their best offerings. (Bandcamp link)

Autocamper – What Do You Do All Day?

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Slumberland/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Proper

I’d been hearing about an indie pop group from Manchester called Autocamper for nearly two years, even though the quartet’s discography up until now had only consisted of a trio of two-song singles. After releasing their debut single with Discontinuous Innovation in 2023, they contributed a song to a Prefect Records compilation the following year and linked up with their current homes of Safe Suburban Home and Slumberland for two more two-song singles, all the while playing local gigs with groups like Swansea Sound, Chime School, and The Umbrellas when they came to town. This all led to a decent amount of hype for a quartet (guitarist Jack Harkins and keyboardist Niamh Purtill, who share lead vocals, plus drummer Arthur Robinson and bassist Harry Williams) who’d yet to put out a full-length album (or even an EP!) until What Do You Do All Day?. “Not twee, not anorak, not lucky, just pop,” reads Autocamper’s Bandcamp bio, and I like this description–this is best described as “indie pop” music, to be sure, but it’s indie pop music made with the extra kick of a four-piece band with a strong rhythm section to boot.

Autocamper are classic indie pop acolytes, and a real who’s who of influences have been mentioned in the run-up to this album–Calvin Johnson! The Pastels! Felt! The Vaselines! The one reference that caught my attention is one that doesn’t necessarily reflect their sound so much as their attitude–The Feelies, specifically with regard to Robinson and Williams’ playing. At its best and most transcendent, What Do You Do All Day? effectively takes the crazy rhythms of motorik indie rock and collides them with C86-style indie pop, power pop, and the like. “Again”, “Map Like a Life”, “Foxes”–these are exciting, energetic pop songs made by a real-deal rock band (or, if you will, excellent rock and roll songs made by a pop group). Autocamper’s vocalists make their presence felt on What Do You Do All Day?, too, both as singers and musicians–take maybe my favorite song on the album, “Dogsitting”, an offbeat power pop shuffle whose strongest weapons are the bemused, conversational vocals (which are actually from Robinson, I learned post-publication) and Purtill’s worlds of keyboard hooks. The quick-paced thirty-four minute record feels like a proof of concept, the immediately-hitting Side A complimented by still-very-pop-forward but reaching-a-little-deeper B-side material like “Linnean” and “Somehow”. After building up to it for quite a while, What Do You Do All Day? is finally Autocamper’s moment, and they certainly know how to seize it. (Bandcamp link)

Wenches – Stupid Sick

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Master Kontrol Audio/Small Hand Factory/Sunken Temple/Tokyo Fist/The Ghost Is Clear/Already Dead
Genre: Noise rock, garage punk, hard rock, punk blues
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Buzzkiller

Well, here’s some good news: there’s a new album from a very loud hard rock/heavy metal/proto-punk revival group called Wenches. I couldn’t tell you too much about this band–there appear to be four of them (guitarist Jarod, bassist Mike, drummer Brad, and vocalist James; “feat. ex-members of other bands”, their Bandcamp page boasts), they seem to be originally from Bloomington, Indiana (not sure if they’re still there), and they put out an album called Effin’ Gnarly in 2021. Wenches’ second album is called Stupid Sick, and it comes to us via a half-dozen record labels and was largely recorded by Carl Byers at Clandestine Arts. Stupid Sick is a half-hour of rock and roll adrenaline, pure and simple–Wenches keep their foot firmly planted on the gas pedal for all eight of the album’s songs, following in a torrid lineage including Motorhead, the MC5, and Hot Snakes, among others. They do welcome a couple of guests into the fold (ALL’s Chad Price on “Kick It Down”, Brazil’s Jonathon Newby on “Like Lightnin’”), but Wenches’ mission is to rock out as dirtily and furiously as possible, and they seem to have only allowed people on board who also understand the assignment.

We meet our heroes just as they’ve begun their journey with a song called “Haulin’ Ass Fault” that more or less sounds how one would expect a song called that to sound (if you’ve kept up with modern Detroit garage punk groups like The Stools, that’s the kind of thing you’ll be hearing here). Blistering guitar riffs, chunky power chords, screamed-out vocals, and in-the-red distortion all come thundering down the line as Stupid Sick progresses through workouts such as “Buzzkiller” and “Boneless”, and there’s a little bit more metal-adjacent wizardry going on in the otherwise-fairly-recognizable “When I Died”. “Kick It Down” is another “sounds just like you’d expect based on the title” ones, and “Throw Me to the Wolves” flirts with something that I’m going to call “goblin punk”. It all leads up to the final two knockout punches of “Dearly Departed” (“We didn’t bury the bodies deep enough,” Wenches yell–uh oh) and “Like Lightnin’” (a five-minute blues-punk torpedo of a set-wrecker). Eventually, Stupid Sick stops pounding and bludgeoning, but only after Wenches seem to be satisfied with the extent of their destruction. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Mal Blum, Allo Darlin’, The Queen & I, The Wind-Ups

July 11th (which is tomorrow) is shaping up to be a big release week, and Pressing Concerns is on the scene documenting four of these imminent releases: new albums from Mal Blum, Allo Darlin’, The Queen & I, and The Wind-Ups. If you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond, and Tuesday’s featured Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, Lain Fallow, and Mob Wife), 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.

Mal Blum – The Villain

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz rock, pop punk, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Must Get Lonely

The New York-originating, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Mal Blum has been kicking around as a solo artist since the late 2000s. At first, they made charming, early Mountain Goats-inspired folk punk-adjacent pop music, and while I still like those records (2013’s Tempest in a Teacup in particular holds up), we all must grow up, and Blum eventually graduated to more electric indie rock with bits of pop punk and grunge-pop. The Villain continues this trend, but it’s also Blum’s first album in quite a while–their last LP, Pity Boy, was in 2019, with 2022’s Ain’t It Nice EP bridging the gap, so to speak. Blum’s always displayed flashes of brilliance, but The Villain is, for me, where they’ve finally “put it all together” and made a cohesive, potent, front-to-back classic album. It’s Blum’s first album made entirely with their “lower register after several years on testosterone”, and they’ve embraced their new voice’s ability to sell a specific kind of low-key, muttering darkness. The press release implies that The Villain isn’t entirely a break-up album, but there’s a lot of relationship ugliness in here, and the character that Blum adopts throughout the album–passively, sardonically observing one royal mess after another as if they aren’t even there at all–ends up being a very fascinating byproduct of a major personal transition. 

“I killed the previous tenant in my head, or so they said / I think that’s pretty reductive, but I’m tired, so whatever,” Blum memorably sings in “Killer”, perhaps the clearest moment of realization in a record full of them. As the rest of The Villain makes abundantly clear, though, awareness can only get one so far–there’s an inevitability, even a fatalism to stuff like “I’m So Bored” and “Gemini v. Cancer”, both of which shrug and continue down the pothole-filled paths they’ve been down before and will go down again. As understated as Blum’s direness comes off from their perspective, the Mal Blum band and producer Jessica Boudreaux don’t lay down with them–the opening track “A Small Request” builds from a simple, classic Blum beginning to a full on alt-rock cathartic finish, “Must Get Lonely” is as breezy as it is uncomfortable, and “Gemini v. Cancer” is basically a dance song (one that few people other than Blum could get away with, I think). The Villain is an incredibly rich text about perception and agency hidden in a messy queer breakup album featuring songs with choruses like “The truth is out there–what if I wanna lie instead?” (“Truth Is Out There”) and “If I don’t ever see you again, it’d be too soon” (“Too Soon”). I was drawn in by Mal Blum the cigarette-wielding, quick-witted trans-masculine non-binary bad boy, yes, but when they drop both the act and their voice to a whisper in the title track, The Villain finally locks into place as something more than a (quite compelling) clarity-weaponizing persona. (Bandcamp link)

Allo Darlin’ – Bright Nights

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Slumberland/Fika Recordings
Genre: Folk-pop, indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Tricky Questions

From 2008 to 2016, Allo Darlin’ was a quartet made up of two Australians (vocalist/guitarist/ukulele player Elizabeth Morris Innset and bassist/vocalist Bill Botting) and two Brits (drummer Michael Collins and guitarist Paul Rains) who met up in London and made twee-ish, folk-ish indie pop music together. After releasing three records that received just about as much attention and adoration that vintage-style indie pop music was capable of receiving in the early 2010s, Allo Darlin’ decided to hang it up, a decision that lasted for a few years until some reunion shows in 2023 led to the group fully reuniting and making another album together. Bright Nights arrives via their old home of Slumberland Records (given the label’s recent hot streak, it feels like the perfect time for a new Allo Darlin’ album) and via a new partnership with Fika Recordings (replacing their former British label, the now-defunct Fortuna Pop!). On their first album in more than a decade, Allo Darlin’ do indeed sound like an indie pop band who’ve allowed themselves to age–somewhere between the stalwart folk rock of The Innocence Mission and the elder-statespeople twee pop of The Catenary Wires, Bright Nights is the record that the four of them needed to take some time off to make.

Morris, who sings lead vocals on all but one of Bright Nights’ ten songs, retakes her place as frontperson with a kind of understated, fervent confidence that’s certainly the mark of somebody with a wealth of experience both inside and beyond “indie music”. The person who’s singing thoughtful, vibrant, slow-moving folk-pop songs like spare album opener “In the Spring” and the meandering “Northern Waters” is the same person who’s able to put on a show to the tune of busier but still unhurried indie pop hits like “My Love Will Bring Your Home” and “Tricky Questions”; it just takes time to develop this kind of subtle range. The rest of Allo Darlin’, of course, do exactly what Morris’ writing needs them to do, and guest musicians like mandolin player Michael Donovan, violinist Dan Mayfield, and vocalists Heather Larimer (Corvair), Hannah Winter, and Laura Kovic (Fortitude Valley) all make noticeable contributions to Bright Nights’ sound as well. One of the best songs on Bright Nights is the title track, which closes the record; Morris signs off with a poetic, devoted array of images, at one point sighing “Thank God summer is on its way,” in the chorus. Allo Darlin’ have a wealth of history to draw from now, but Bright Nights still has a lot it’s looking forward to as well. (Bandcamp link)

The Queen & I – At Peace

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Psychedelia, noise pop, fuzz rock, post-Britpop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Still I Wonder

At this point, it seems pretty rare for me to hear about a new band from the Bay Area and not recognize the various members from a half-dozen other projects. The Queen & I are a trio from Oakland who are, nonetheless, entirely new to me–the primary songwriter Andrew Ledford and Austin Gibbons have played in bands I don’t know called Tet Holiday (both of them) and The Pleasure Routine (just Ledford), while I can’t really tell you anything about the third member (or even who they are, exactly–on-record I believe it’s Brandon Farmer, who seems to have since been replaced by Greg Oertel). And yet, here we have At Peace, the project’s first album as a full band (Ledford apparently re-released a 2010s solo album called Statues under The Queen & I’s name last year), which is as strong a collection of guitar pop as any that I’ve heard from the Bay Area’s more familiar faces in recent memory. The Queen & I’s version of pop music is distorted and electric but immaculate and polished, with bits of psychedelic pop, shoegaze, and Britpop sneaking into material that could’ve just as easily been read as more traditional jangle pop and/or power pop.

At Peace feels like a classic rock album, in a way. It’s eight songs long and only a little over a half-hour, and bloated six-minute rockers sit right next to concise pop rock pieces because “rock music” can and should take us anywhere. “Everything Hurts” kicks things off on the more high-concept side of things–we get a nice, strong neo-psychedelia/alt-dance drumbeat and a wall of fuzzed-out guitars, and The Queen & I are able to smoothly move into a Brit-power-pop bliss-out in “Bitter” and a jangly fuzz-pop rave-up in “Still I Wonder” with little sweat. At The Queen & I’s punchier moments, they feel like a more overtly-psychedelic-indebted version of the Guided by Voices-influenced shoegaze-pop of Ex Pilots and Gaadge–hell, the exuberant penultimate track “We’re Still Here” is effectively a Mythical Motors song with more of a punk background. The more expansive songs on At Peace don’t sound like departures from this version of pop music so much as, well, expansions of it–the title track, the album’s centerpiece, doesn’t feel like a conscious attempt at making a six-minute song so much as “The Queen & I were able to get six great pop minutes out of it, so they did”. The Queen & I may be new to me, but they’ve already muscled their way near to the top of my “Oakland bands you ought to be keeping up with” list. (Bandcamp link)

The Wind-Ups – Confection

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Dandy Boy
Genre: Lo-fi punk, garage punk, fuzz rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: (That’s Just My) Dream Girl

The Wind-Ups are back! In a live setting, the Chico, California-based group is actually a full-on garage rock/power pop/punk rock band, but their records have effectively been the self-recorded domain of the project’s bandleader, Jake Sprecher. We last checked in with The Wind-Ups in 2023, dropping a 7” EP (Jonathan Says) and a full-length (Happy Like This) in quick succession; last year, they linked up with Dandy Boy Records to release a live album, and The Wind-Ups are back with the Oakland label for their latest LP, Confection. If you’ve enjoyed the incredibly lo-fi/fuzzed out sound, one-man-garage-band energy, and big hooks of previous Wind-Ups records, I’ve got good news with regards to what you’ll find on Confection. Sprecher hasn’t abandoned the world of self-recording, but he gets more help on this twenty-five-minute, eleven-track album than he had previously–vocalist/guitarist Connor Finnigan, vocalist Jason Wuestefeld, vocalist/lyricist Kerra Jessen, and cellist Jaed Garibaldi all make appearances here (not to mention a guitar part from Jonathan Richman, in whose band Sprecher plays, on “Little Boy Blue”, which initially appeared on the Jonathan Says EP). Confection still sounds as crunchy and clanging as ever, though, of course.

The pop songs start coming and they don’t stop landing blows. “A Fine Pink Mist” and “I Love Her” open up Confection with two Wind-Ups classics, mixes of no-fi scuzz, Ramones-y “oh-ohs”, and shambling power pop hooks. The garage punk side of The Wind-Ups never quite goes away on Confection, but single “(That’s Just My) Dream Girl” moves things closer to the world of straight-up jangle pop (through a hazy lens, of course), and then there’s “Cheer Up”, the song that features Jessen “narrating” the verses. Jessen’s stream-of-consciousness, nervous speaking is a departure from Sprecher’s typical fuzz pop, but he grafts one of those signature Wind-Ups choruses to it and it fits comfortably next to the rest of the record. There are a lot of little fun moments like the “Cheer Up” deviation on Confection–not quite as obvious, true, but the punk chanting of “Pain in Your Heart”, the noisy pummeling of “Flag Pin Theater”, and the steady, drum-beating march of “Ants on the Table” all ensure that Confections stays interesting in its second half, too. Not that The Wind-Ups’ primary means of communication was ever in all that much danger of becoming stale, but Confections goes the extra mile to put some more treats in the mix. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: 

Pressing Concerns: Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, Lain Fallow, Mob Wife

In the second Pressing Concerns of the week, EPs reign supreme: we’ve got new ones from Gauri Paighan, KD Surreal, and Mob Wife, as well as a physical re-release of Lain Fallow‘s debut EP from last year. If you’re looking for LPs, try yesterday’s blog post (featuring albums from Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond).

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.

Gauri Paighan – Teen Error

Release date: June 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, fuzz pop, dream pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: November

Gauri “Gory” Paighan doesn’t exactly style herself as mysterious–she seems pretty active on social media–but I’m not sure exactly where she’s based. She appears to have toured southeast Asia a fair amount, so I’d say somewhere in that part of the world, but I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. Paighan started self-releasing songs around 2022, leading up to what is her first EP (or multi-song release of any kind), Teen Error. Seven songs in around twenty-five minutes, Teen Error is nearly full-length size, giving us a wide and varied picture of a young, developing, but already quite compelling singer-songwriter. Loosely speaking, Paighan is making a familiar style of “indie rock” on Teen Error, one with a bit of fuzzy distortion, strong propulsion, and dreamy indie pop catchiness. Teen Error is nonetheless large enough to encompass quiet, chilly balladry, orchestral-tinged indie pop, and (in one memorable instance), reggae/hip-hop-inspired pop music as well. The different perspectives and roots visible throughout Teen Error make it a bit tricky to get a handle on the single figure responsible for all of these songs, but that’s hardly a problem for a debut release.

The first two songs on Teen Error are “November” and “Adventures of Us” (they’re swapped on Bandcamp vs. other streaming services), and they’re both wide-eyed, sweeping indie pop rock anthems that introduce us to the full extent of Gory’s range. “Adventures of Us”, perhaps appropriately given the title, is the more driving and forward-pushing one, while “November” is more content to revel in its massive fuzz-pop refrain–in both of them, I’m not entirely sure what Paighan’s words mean, but they both evoke an idealistic and excited writer grabbing ahold of the reins available to her. The rest of Teen Error doesn’t attempt to recreate the feelings of these two songs–Gory expands her sound and pursues a more thoughtful, pensive muse in the gentle ballad of “Behalf of Us” and the shaken, mournful “Rather Be a Tree”. The biggest black sheep on Teen Error by far is “Repeat It”, a reggae-infused pop-rock tune in which both Paighan and guest vocalist Alterno show off a completely different vocal style and attitude. It’s not my favorite song on the EP, but it’s a successful experiment, and helps ensure that nothing on Teen Error is forgettable or a throwaway–of the songs I have yet to mention, the orchestral-tinged closing track “Rare Nerine” is certainly a memorable one, and the dreamy indie rocker “Making Love” is the closest thing the second half of Teen Error comes to matching the gas-pedal vibes of the EP’s opening duo. With this first one neatly tied up, I do look forward to the next error of Gory. (Bandcamp link)

KD Surreal – In and Out of Torpor

Release date: July 4th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi folk, bedroom folk, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Me, at Arm’s Length

What would this world be without one-person bedroom folk projects from the Pacific Northwest? I’ve got one of them for you today–a musician who goes by the name KD Surreal and who hails from Abbotsford, British Columbia (it’s about an hour southeast of Vancouver, on the U.S.-Canada border). I don’t know much else about KD Surreal, but I can tell you that they’ve previously put out an album called If I Die Tonight, Bury Me in Song in 2021 and an EP called Footnotes to the Faultline in 2023. Their latest record is a four-song, twenty-minute EP called In and Out of Torpor (good title!) inspired by “the melody-driven fingerpicking styles of Elliott Smith or Nick Drake” and “melodramatic sensibility”, according to the author. While I wouldn’t compare Surreal’s songwriting structure to the tighter intricacies of Smith, I think that this description on the whole is pretty accurate–Surreal’s songs are sprawling, crawling, lengthy acoustic guitar-led folk pieces that I have no problem whatsoever calling “melodramatic”. Just about everything we hear on In and Out of Torpor is Surreal themself–this amounts to the aforementioned acoustic guitar, what sounds like a mandolin, some kind of bass, and some self-harmonies.

And that’s all that KD Surreal needs. The first song on In and Out of Torpor, “Pray Your Shot Stay True”, is the shortest by a fair margin, yet it’s anything but slight. Surreal’s performance is relatively intense, and their lyrics (“Still you wish to scour me from you / Well, take aim now and pray your shot stay true”) introduce the dramatic side of themself right off the bat. The rest of the EP is a little less outwardly confrontational, but the uncomfortable, up-close edge to In and Out of Torpor isn’t lost in these longer recordings. “Me, at Arm’s Length” and “Don’t Let Me Retreat” both approach seven minutes in length–the winding folky slowcore of the former is an immediate highlight, subbing the direct-hit emotion of the record’s first song for a more puzzling, refracted kind of hurt. “You Will Not Know Peace” is a little more musically bright (the album’s one guest musician, Alex Rake, goes to town on the mandolin on this one), but there’s only so much one can do to brighten a song that imparts the unflinching lesson that “Caring is cancer / Caring is sin / Caring’s a fish hook,” as it reaches its climax. “Don’t Let Me Retreat” closes things out by playing the long game again; the electric guitar that appears in the second half of the song might as well be a lightning bolt. Things start to sound different when you’re In and Out of Torpor. (Bandcamp link)

Lain Fallow – The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture

Release date: April 14th
Record label: Spleencore/Panique! Paniek!/Slow Down
Genre: Emo-punk, punk rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Absence / Presence

Last March, a Belgian emo-punk band called Lain Fallow released their first record, a four-song digital EP called The Path Less Chosen. Drummer Tommaso Capitello sings lead vocals in the Italian post-hardcore group Amalia Bloom, but it was coincidentally in Brussels where Capitello crossed paths with two more Italians (bassist/vocalist Lorenzo Conti, guitarist Lorenzo Leva), and the three of them linked up with French-Canadian guitarist/vocalist Charles Patterson to form Lain Fallow and record The Path Less Chosen, a record which showcases a group of musicians with a strong, firm grasp on dead-serious, heavy, emo-infused punk rock. A few different small labels throughout Europe took notice of Lain Fallow and teamed up to put out The Path Less Chosen on cassette earlier this year (Panique! Paniek! in Belgium, Spleencore in France, and Slow Down in Europe), a release that also includes the single “Winning Culture” the band put out in January. I’m not sure what exactly I’d expect from a bunch of Belgians (and Italians?) who self-describe their music as “emo punk”, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture is a fresh and earnest take on the genre(s). Too polished for emocore but not polished enough for “pop punk”, the songs on this cassette are infectious, emotional rock and roll before anything else.

Maybe I’m putting too much stock into a solid bass part and whoever’s singing lead vocals first’s Peter Garrett-esque timbre, but The Path Less Chosen // Winning Culture’s opening track, “Swerve”, has a post-punk undercurrent to it, although Lain Fallow’s “emo-punk” instinct are readily apparent from this song. This core of the band becomes more obvious in the next song, “Absence / Presence”, which recalls 90s emo-ish indie punk groups like Seaweed and Knapsack. The rest of the original The Path Less Chosen is made up of a pair of dark, lean, punk songs in “Negative Mirror” (probably the closest the EP comes to the current alt-rock/“nu-grunge-gaze” revival) and “Bottleneck” (the closest Lain Fallow get to “melodic punk”). The newer song appended to the cassette, “Winning Culture”, is evidence that Lain Fallow have already evolved beyond their debut EP–it’s the band’s heaviest and most dynamic recording yet, a larger and more ambitious sound slowly starting to replace the scrappy punk energy of the original EP. “Winning Culture” does raise the question of where, exactly, Lain Fallow will end up on their next more-substantial release, but those involved in this cassette were right to put the spotlight on a band that hit the ground running in Lain Fallow. (Bandcamp link)

Mob Wife – ROT

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Bullhead
Genre: Post-punk, post-hardcore, noise rock, garage punk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Thank God for Car Parks

Mob Wife are a noise-punk trio from Belfast (made up of vocalist/guitarist Chris Leckey, bassist Carl Small, and drummer Wilson Davidson) who’ve been kicking around since the late 2010s. After a steady stream of singles over a few years, 2022 saw the release of their debut album, Eat With Your Eyes; for the group’s next record, they’ve gone the EP route, putting together a five-song, twenty-minute collection simply titled ROT. The trio claim to be inspired by “American underground” rock groups like Metz, Fugazi, and Protomartyr in their music; leaving aside the fact that Metz was Canadian (but I get what they mean), I do think that they fit alongside a slew of British bands mining a similar mix of punk rock, post-hardcore, and noise rock as of late between Hairpin, Percy, and the recently-reunited Mclusky. ROT sounds a bit like a concept record to me–Mob Wife are drawing from the industrial confusion and collision of capital they witness every day in their home city, using ugly, angry, abrasive rock music to sketch visions of greed, growth at the expense of human destruction, and an inevitable march towards a cliff of soullessness. 

The spirit of Hot Snakes is alive in ROT’s opening track “Heard & Resented”, a shit-kicking garage punk song that adds an Irish tint to great noise punk groups like Meat Wave and Big Ups. Leckey’s characters are detestable types, not only delighting in their misdeeds but also going out of their way to pay tribute to the sociopathic universe that allows them to thrive. “Thank God for Car Parks” is probably ROT at its purest–you can hear the creepy, unfeeling grin as Leckey revels in “leveling old folks’ homes” to create the titular eyesore. After a post-punk workout in “Echo Chamber”, ROT closes out with two scorchers in “Burn the Former Things” and “Make You Rich” that bring the EP full-circle. The former song once again brings ROT into the world of real estate, a dark meditation on the pressure cooker that people are put through in order to “own” a place to live, and “Make You Rich” is one last trip down the mind of a champion of capitalism. This is, of course, the exact right kind of music for taking a stroll down these gold-plated roads, and Mob Wife certainly sound like they’re fed up enough with the world around them to pull it off. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, The Pond

The Monday Pressing Concerns is a nice big one, featuring new albums from Hannah Marcus, Abel, Jacob Freddy, and The Pond. Three out of four of these acts have appeared in Pressing Concerns before (and the one that hasn’t features at least one person who has with a different project), so it’s nice to take the week after a (U.S.) holiday to catch up with some familiar faces.

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.

Hannah Marcus – Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Bar None
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk, slowcore, sadcore
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Eric

I wrote a fair amount about the New York/San Francisco singer-songwriter Hannah Marcus last year–that was thanks to her longtime record label, Bar None Records, who released a career-spanning compilation pulled from Marcus’ six solo records called The Hannah Marcus Years: 1993-2004. The Hannah Marcus Years chronicled an impressive and undersung music career, one in which the titular musician collaborated with members of American Music Club, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Red House Painters (among others) to pursue her heady, drawn-out version of folk-ish slowcore songwriting. 2004’s Desert Farmers proved to be her final solo album for twenty years–it seemed like Marcus had moved on to other pursuits, playing in experimental groups like The Wingdale Community Singers and Wintersea Playboy and being an “olfactory artist”. However, Marcus had actually been working on another solo album in the years after Desert Farmers–Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard was recorded over a period of six years (2004-2010) in Montreal with Godspeed You! Black Emperor members Thierry Amar and Efrim Menuck. I don’t know why Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard took another decade and a half after its completion to see the right of day, but in 2025 it sounds like a worthy companion to The Hannah Marcus Years, continuing the singer-songwriter’s mission to stretch out and slow down the folk music upon which she bases her songs.

Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard reaches towards orchestral and chamber music more boldly than Marcus’ earlier work did, although it’s a fairly natural-sounding progression (I’m sure it helped that the album features many of the same musicians from her earlier albums, including Amar and Menuck). The two opening tracks on Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard–the leisurely instrumental “Ten Bones and a Screwdriver” and the whirlwind art-chamber pop of “Affirmative Infinity”–hint at a total departure for Marcus, but the folk storyteller of previous records comes into the frame soon enough with songs like “Bury Me Under the Elbow Room” and “A Virgin Graveyard” (the minimal epic crawl of the latter in particular feels like the “full Hannah Marcus experience”). From “Hey, Mister Goldminer” to sparse closing track “From English Planes”, there are plenty of more subtle, folk-inspired moments on Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard, but you never know when Marcus and her collaborators are going to sweep us all off our collective feet with something like the boisterous, horn-heavy piano ballad/sing-along “Eric”. Supposedly Marcus has been working on a new new album that’s slated to be released by the end of this year–perhaps the most chaotic decision involved in Ten Bones from a Virgin Graveyard by Marcus is to make something this immersive, hold onto it for twenty years, and then barely give us any time after it’s finally released before moving onto the next thing. (Bandcamp link)

Abel – How to Get Away with Nothing

Release date: May 28th
Record label: Julia’s War/Candlepin/Pleasure Tapes
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, experimental rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Grass

Last year, the band Abel first appeared on my radar thanks to Candlepin and Julia’s War Record’s co-release of an album called Dizzy Spell. It was far from the first release from the Columbus act–the band’s frontperson, Isaac Kauffman, has been releasing music under the name since the late 2010s–but Dizzy Spell appeared to be the first Abel album recorded by a proper full band. The shoegaze-inspired basement rockers have returned less than a calendar year later with another new album called How to Get Away with Nothing, once again released by Julia’s War and Candlepin (with Pleasure Tapes getting in on the fun this time, too)–the three-guitar quintet lineup from the previous LP has been pared down to a quartet, but Kauffman, guitarist John Martino, drummer Ethan Donaldson, and bassist Noah Fisher are still rolling full steam ahead. At least, as “full steam” as this kind of music can be–inspired by slowcore, noisy indie rock, and 90s emo, How to Get Away with Nothing is frequently loud but even more consistently insular and introverted. The album’s dozen tracks and forty-five minutes are an overwhelming, greyscale listen, more adventurous and sprawling than Dizzy Spell yet with that record’s scattered moments of beauty still intact.

Abel make the bold choice to start How to Get Away with Nothing with what’s easily the catchiest and most accessible song in “Grass”–and it’s also a red herring, as the slightly twangy (reminiscent of fellow Columbus act and previous collaborator Villagerrr) country rock of the opener doesn’t really come up again for the rest of the album. The next song on How to Get Away with Nothing is called “Daunting”, and that’s a good way to describe the five-minute track, which meanders its way from a light-touch, simple-guitar instrumental to a full-force wall-of-sound fuzz rock song that burns bright for the rest of its length. The broken ballad “Lung” and the acoustic/drum-machine lo-fi experiment “Loathe” provide a bit of a respite, relaxing in the margins of How to Get Away with Nothing’s sound and finding a little peace. The second half of How to Get Away with Nothing is even spacier–even the “rock” songs on the B-side (like “Parasympathetic”, “Scarecrow”, and “Six”) feel distant and lost, to say nothing of oddities like “Dusk” and “Talk”. Abel have continued making music in the way that makes sense to them with How to Get Away with Nothing, leading to an album that isn’t always legible to us but clearly always pushing towards something.  (Bandcamp link)

Jacob Freddy – Sports Announcer

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, jangle pop, power pop, folk-pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: If Only

Last year, I introduced Rosy Overdrive to Jacob Frericks, a promising new guitar pop singer-songwriter originally from Orange County, California. Upon moving across the country to Brooklyn to attend school, he began a solo project called Jacob Freddy, and his debut album under the name, Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, was a “pleasingly lively and pop-forward” version of bedroom indie rock (as I called it at the time) that wore its Teenage Fanclub, Big Star, and Elliott Smith influences on its sleeve. It took Frericks a little over one year to return with a second Jacob Freddy album, this time a self-released cassette called Sports Announcer. Like Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, it’s a brief listen (eight songs, twenty minutes), and it continues Frericks’ pursuit of wistful, diamond-in-the-rough guitar pop music. The main difference this time around is that Frericks has put together a quieter, more subdued, and more melancholic collection of songs compared to the more upbeat Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland. It’s not as immediate as Jacob Freddy’s debut, but there’s no sophomore slump here, either–I’ve started to view Sports Announcer as a more insular, thoughtful companion to the project’s initial burst of energy of a first LP.

Not that the first song on Songs from a Quiet Aliso Viejo Wasteland, “All Along”, was a punk track exactly, but its power pop is a lot more surging and upbeat than the rainy day indie pop of “I Don’t Want to Know”, the song Frericks tasks with opening Sports Announcer. If you’re looking for more straightforward jangle pop “hits”, there are still a few of them here–Jacob Freddy’s first attempt at it here is via the wobbly, daydreaming “If Only”, and “From the Start” and “All I Can Do” are electric numbers that more or less qualify as well. Otherwise, Frericks is in a more foggy, obscured mood on his latest album, as exemplified by the percussionless, dreamy folk-slowcore-pop track “Point of View” (which is effectively a Tony Jay song), the cavernous, echoing acoustic balladry of the title track (which could also be a Tony Jay song, I suppose), the confusing, almost psychedelic snippet song “Front Lines”, and the dream-folk closing track “Given Time”. All of these tracks have some kind of hook baked into their cores, because that’s how Frericks writes songs, but Sports Announcer, as brief and (relatively) barebones as it is, is an album with aims beyond merely delivering said hooks without anything extra attached. (Bandcamp link)

The Pond – A Year As a Cloud

Release date: May 9th
Record label: Anything Bagel/Hidden Bay/Wood of Heart
Genre: Folk rock, slowcore, lo-fi indie rock, 2000s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Burnt Plant

I’ve written about a handful of releases that have come out via the Butte, Montana DIY label Anything Bagel over the years, but this time around, the person who’s (co-)responsible for releasing all those albums is the one who’s stepping up to the mic. Anything Bagel co-leader Jon Cardiello previously made music under the name Bombshell Nightlight; for his latest album, A Year As a Cloud, he’s rechristened himself The Pond and put together a firm quartet rounded out by Sanders Smith on bass, Kale Huseby on drums, and Noelle Huser (of Bluest) on vocals. Montana may be a landlocked state, but The Pond are able to recall the rainy indie rock of the Pacific Northwest throughout their somewhat fuzzy, somewhat folky, somewhat slowcore debut album (I’m thinking specifically of The Microphones and Mount Eerie), but mixed together with a certain kind of East Coast lo-fi indie rock reminiscent of the spacier sides of LVL UP (and associated projects), Greg Mendez, and Friendship. There’s a tension between Cardiello’s downtrodden, low vocals and the expansive indie rock the four of them make to accompany it, and it helps A Year As a Cloud feel a lot more gripping than your average greyscale indie rock record.

The Pond’s Year As a Cloud begins more or less in media res with “Cup of Lilacs”, a mid-tempo slowcore-informed song that starts off as a low hum and steadily builds to something larger (or at least to a hint of something larger). The Pond’s version of fuzz rock is rumbling and electric–“Burnt Plant” is rousing, and while “Translucent” and “When a Song Dies” as a whole don’t reach this energy level, they certainly have their overwhelming moments. Although A Year As a Cloud is a relatively quick thirty-four minutes long, it feels larger than it is thanks to mood-setting interludes like “(The Stream)”, “(The Clouds)”, and “(The Lake)”, more than providing the space for stuff like the synth-folk psychedelic odyssey of “More Time” and mid-record slow-burn centerpiece “All the Dogs” to tower ever higher. Huser’s vocals drop in and out throughout the album, trading the lead with Cardiello or simply backing him up–while this alone doesn’t make The Pond feel like a “band”, it certainly leads to A Year As a Cloud sounding like something much more than a solo project. And that’s a good thing, because A Year As a Cloud wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t a group effort. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable: