Pressing Concerns: Jacob Perez, Salty Greyhound, Lake Ruth, FOND

On this Monday morning, we’re looking at four recent records: new albums from Jacob Perez, Salty Greyhound, and Lake Ruth, plus a new EP from FOND. Let’s get into it!

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

Jacob Perez – There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Young and Dumb

Hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio, Jacob Perez showed up in 2022 with an album called Get Well that was made in collaboration with producer and multi-instrumentalist Jonah Thornton (Kin & Company).  The partnership must’ve been fruitful, as Perez returned just a year later with another album made with Thornton called Signs, and for the third Perez LP in four years–There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life–he enlisted Thornton once again. Perez calls his music “alt-country”, although maybe it’s closer to “roots rock” or “Americana” depending on one’s perspective–it’s a plain and refreshing singer-songwriter album made by an artist who writes with a Midwestern earnestness and (unlike a lot of people working in these genres) doesn’t sound like he’s trying to sound like any one of his idols in particular. Perez also calls his music “bookish”–I think what he means by that is that there aren’t really any “rockers” on There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life. The quieter side of modern, geographically-near troubadours like Micah Schnabel, Tucker Riggleman, and Hello Emerson comes to mind, as well as at least one big alt-country name (Jason Isbell), but it’s the individual voice holding this well-worn sound together that makes this record stand out in a crowded field. 

Jacob Perez is not going to be the next Noah Kahan, and probably not even the next Conor Oberst either. Choosing to start your album with a chilly, somewhat atypical piano ballad like “Betting Man” is the work of somebody who’s focused on something more insular than “wide appeal”. Any momentum the eventual crescendo of “Betting Man” starts rolling is rolled back by the bleak acoustic folk ballad “115”–it’s not until track number three, “Young and Dumb”, that we learn that Perez is perfectly capable of writing a “heartland rock anthem”. The more upbeat side of There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life contains a few songs that could’ve been sharpened into “hits”–the gritted-teeth of “Ditch” (the closest thing to a real rock song on the album), the breezy folk-ish pop rock of “Daily Driver”, the interstate-traveling “U-Haul”–they’re even better as they are, though, delivered by an unassuming Ohioan lifer who, it slowly becomes more and more apparent, has nothing to lose in his writing. I don’t think that the quieter songs on There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life necessarily are a “truer” reflection of their author, but it’s a little easier to hear him in the pin-drop ambience of “Mercy”, “Part-Time Job”, and “Bill Withers”. The latter of those three songs is the finale of There’s So Many Ways to Live a Life, name-checking Vic Chesnutt and Lucinda Williams in addition to the titular singer. Perez sings all three names without sounding much like any of them, and the unresolved cadence with which he sings the final line (“For once I have the feeling that everything will be just fine”) ends with one last conundrum, one more indication that things aren’t quite as simple as they seem on the surface. (Bandcamp link)

Salty Greyhound – Alligators

Release date: June 21st
Record label: Dog’s Mouth
Genre: Folk rock, art rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Cherry Pit

I don’t know all that much about Salty Greyhound, a band from Allston, Massachusetts. According to this person’s Substack, they used to be called Brazil and the members are Alex Judd (guitar/vocals/banjo), Maria Cuneo (guitar/vocals), Susie Blair (bass), and Joel DeMelo (drums); according to Allston Pudding, Judd and Cuneo are the “co-leaders”; their Linktree page proclaims “We use musical saws and banjos”. They put out an EP called Birds in 2019, but, interestingly, they took a decade to follow up their sophomore album (2014’s Ghost Machine) with a third LP (last year’s self-titled album). Salty Greyhound clearly decided time wasn’t going to get away from them again, because a fourth Salty Greyhound LP, Alligators, has shown up hardly more than a year after their last one. It’s a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what Salty Greyhound “sound like” here–if I wanted to be not specific at all, I’d call them “folk-influenced New England indie rock”; in relation to their peers, they’re less rootsy than Hey I’m Outside and less medieval than The Croaks. Alligators does sound like an album made by a band with multiple creative heads–Salty Greyhound are just as likely to rip through an electric rocker as twist their way through an oddball folk track, or even occasionally just drop a solid, unfussy pop song.

I’m not sure if Salty Greyhound intended Alligators as a companion to their previous album or something independent of it–it’s noticeably shorter than Salty Greyhound, but there’s plenty here for it to stand on its own nonetheless. The opening track, “Cherry Pit”, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s one of the best indie pop songs I’ve heard this year, nailing a certain subset of twee “disaffecting but bouncy” brilliance. Surprisingly, though, Salty Greyhound veer far away from “Cherry Pit” quickly–we get an acoustic guitar-led instrumental called “In All Seriousness”, the freaky banjo-folk-rock of the title track, and “Eyes in My Eyes in My Eyes in My Eyes”, which is very nearly a math rock song. There’s a creaky, Pacific Northwest indie rock kind of catchiness to plenty of the electric songs, though–“Fascinating” has a great hook to it, and “Your Tree” and “Honeybee” both have strong melodies in their centers (banjo explorations of the former and guitar wanderings of the latter aside). The closing track, “Monsters”, is positively crunchy, but the delicate touch that Salty Greyhound give most of these songs is present in the noise here, too. I still don’t know entirely what to make of Salty Greyhound, but whatever it is that they’re doing here is working pretty well. (Bandcamp link)

Lake Ruth – Hawking Radiation

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Feral Child/Dell’Orso
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jazz-pop, space pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: An Offering

First of all, I heard of this album due to Tracy Keats Wilson’s Turntable Report newsletter, so I want to acknowledge that right off the bat (it may not be very active any more, but, as you’re going to find out, it’s still worth reading every time an update does show up). Still, I find it fairly surprising that this New York psychedelic pop trio (multi-instrumentalist Hewson Chen of The New Lines, drummer Matt Schulz, and vocalist Allison Brice) hadn’t been on my radar until now–Schulz has played with important (to me) names like Savak and Enon, and the trio put out a 7” on Rosy Overdrive favorite Slumberland Records back in 2019. After releasing two albums in the late 2010s, Lake Ruth had been pretty quiet this decade (partially explaining my unfamiliarity with them), but Hawking Radiation is a great reintroduction (or, for me, introduction) to a high-quality indie rock band. Recorded by the band themselves with help from Savak’s Sohrab Habibion & Michael Jaworski, among others, Hawking Radiation is a sparkling example of “Turntable Report-core” music–adventurous, psychedelic, synth-led “space pop” with debts to Stereolab and many of the 60s pop albums from which Stereolab drew (Wilson’s own band, Outer World, does indeed fit this description, too).

Lake Ruth differentiate themselves from their like-minded peers on Hawking Radiation via a palpably-embraced jazz side. Plenty of bands like this dabble in “jazz-pop”, yes, but rarely is it so thoroughly a part of a record’s makeup as this–everything from Schulz’s tireless drumming to Brice’s striking vocals to, well, everything that Chen is doing is completely in tune with it. Although the big-screen synth-pop adventure of opening track “A Diamond on Its Side” is quite impressive, it’s the stopping and starting of “An Offering”, the second song on Hawking Radiation, that sets the tone for the album and starts the building of something intricate and long-lasting. The task Lake Ruth create for themselves is wrangling an expansive sound that ranges from perky synth farms like “Potalaka Listening Station” and “From Erika” to guitar-led jazz like “The Next Level” and “An Offering” and everything in between. Lake Ruth end up making dizzy jazzy indie pop (“To Erika”), groove-led chamber pop (“Angels of History”), and propulsive synth-rock glitz (the title track) before Hawking Radiation is all said and done, all of which go a long way in turning the album as a whole into a tuneful, confusing, but obviously well-designed maze. (Bandcamp link)

FOND – Complacent

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Slepping In
Genre: Punk rock, fuzz rock, power pop, slacker rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Dig

It seems like the coastal Southeastern United States has a nice little 90s alt-rock revival thing going on at the moment between the fuzzed-out 120 Minutes hooks of Late Bloomer and the Dinosaur Jr.-inspired assault of Gnawing (and, to a lesser degree, the Madchester-influenced power pop punk of Dazy and the ever-snappier emo-alt-rock punch of Downhaul). The newest addition to this scene is a little closer to the nation’s capital, a quartet from Alexandria, Virginia known simply as FOND. FOND are a bunch of D.C.-area musicians (guitarist/vocalists Chris Issa and Steve Grosso, bassist Matt Carrier, and drummer Rob Seaver) who debuted last year with a three-song EP called Black Sand and two-song single called True Blue; Complacent, at six songs and nearly fifteen minutes, is the band’s most substantial release yet. FOND are a little more melodic punk-influenced than their peers, based on this EP–they also reference names like Iron Chic, Tigers Jaw, and Drug Church as points of reference alongside the more traditional (and “respectable”) ones like Teenage Fanclub, Sugar, and Weezer. Too gruff and emotional to satisfy power pop purists (or even “slacker rock” devotees) but too slow and hooky to land in the garage punk camp, FOND are well on their way to locking down a sound that’s entirely their own.

“Dig” kicks off Complacent with a giant alt-rock hook, establishing FOND as kin to Waiting-era Late Bloomer and plenty of other small bands who sought to make post-Paul Westerberg “heartland” power pop (albeit with a sharper edge). After that starting gun, FOND then try on a few different ideas between the “Say It Ain’t So”-esque tense mid-tempo alt-rock of the title track, the brisk-tempoed, pop punk-hinting “Hooking Up”, the drawn-out power pop twinkling of “Rosaline”, and the emo-y alt-rock of “Pulmonary”. “Shackled by Stoke” is a strange closing track, but the combination of audibly shrugging slacker rock vocals and sneakily polished instrumental work is a pretty solid summation of FOND’s whole deal thus far. “Would you check out my brand new song? / It’s not punk but not too long,” sings whichever guitarist is on the mic in the refrain of this one; if FOND themselves can’t pinpoint their sound better than that, then I’m not sure how helpful my meandering is going to be. They’re certainly trying on Complacent, though, so I’m giving it a shot, too. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: Beauty, Higher Selves Playdate, OK Cool, Josh Halper

This Thursday Pressing Concerns is taking a look at three albums that come out tomorrow, August 1st (new LPs from Beauty, OK Cool, and Josh Halper), plus a new album from Higher Selves Playdate that came out earlier this week. Check them out below, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday’s featured Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Williamson Brothers, and Perfect 100, and Tuesday’s had The Symptones, Anton Barbeau, Material Objects, and Beagle Scout), 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.

Beauty – I’d Do Almost Anything for You

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Power pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Polar Bear Ice Cream

This is a good one. I’d been in a bit of a new music rut for a few days before hearing this one and it kicked me right out of it. Who do I have to thank for providing such a service? Apparently, a power pop trio from Red Bank, New Jersey simply called Beauty. Guitarist/vocalist Deaglan Howlett, bassist/vocalist Nic Makoto Palermo, and drummer Owen Flanagan have been making music together for quite some time now–their first single came out all the way back in 2018–but I’d Do Almost Anything for You is the group’s first proper album, out on vinyl and cassette via Baltimore’s Strange View Records (Powerwasher, Robber Robber, 9Million). Beauty’s first LP is nothing less than some of the finest 90s power pop revivalism I’ve heard in recent memory, harkening back to a time where acts like Sloan, Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, and Fountains of Wayne were able to smuggle Cheap Trick/Beatles-level hooks and huge guitars onto the periphery of the mainstream of so-called “alternative rock”. Beauty don’t overthink it, but they don’t miss anything either: where there should be harmonies, there are harmonies, where there ought to be a nice big guitar riff, a sharp solo, or some well-placed handclaps, they’re all right on time. 

“I want to be with you tonight,” Beauty sing over and over again in “Alive Tonight”, I’d Do Almost Anything for You’s opening track, and the excitement and euphoria with which the trio imbue this line (and everything else about the song) make it the perfect setup. It turns out that Beauty have plenty to be excited about on I’d Do Almost Anything for You–I’d be ecstatic too if I had songs like “Acid Baby Girl” (a beautiful piece of Sweet/Fountains of Wayne-esque melodic brilliance drenched in just enough fuzz) and “Polar Bear Ice Cream” (a slam-dunk Sloan-style groovy rock-and-roll rave-up) sitting in the pocket ready to go. Beauty keep the momentum going even when they break out the acoustics for the requisite mid-record ballad “Cherry Red”–of course, it helps to have something like “You Always Take Me” to kick off your album’s second half, too. I can’t entirely put my finger on what exactly makes something like “Let It Ring!” (probably my favorite song on the B-side of I’d Do Almost Anything for You) work, other than that it’s a prime example of the tension that goes into all great power pop–cliche-risking lyrical (and musical) choices delivered with the passion to pull them off, an extremely tightly-constructed pop creation played with just enough looseness to make it feel off-the-cuff. (Strange View link) (Bandcamp link)

Higher Selves Playdate – The New Apocalyptic

Release date: July 30th
Record label: Olly Olly
Genre: Psychedelic pop, indie pop, synthpop, power pop, new wave
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Tiltawhirl

Jessica Kallista and Steve Fitzpatrick are a pair of musicians based in Fairfax, Virginia who make music together as Higher Selves Playdate. Higher Selves Playdate has been around and steadily releasing singles since 2020, but, as far as I can tell, The New Apocalyptic is the duo’s first full-length album. Glancing at the artwork for their various singles reveals a band whose name, image, and music are all in sync–images of toys and dolls presented in bright, garish, psychedelic hues certainly seems in line with the name they gave their project, and The New Apocalyptic sounds like how those pictures feel, too. The New Apocalyptic is a colorful and glitzy pop album, equally anchored by sparkling synthesizers, taut and rhythmic basslines, and delirious sugar-high tempos. The duo name Devo, Grace Jones, and the B-52s as some of their favorite acts, and while The New Apocalyptic doesn’t precisely sound like any of those artists, it certainly sounds like an album made by people with a deep understanding of the freakier sides of dance music, the transformative power of new wave, and the rich inner mythologies suggested by those names (and it’s spiritually “Athens, Georgia”, even if Higher Selves Playdate call the D.C. metro area their home).

The New Apocalyptic is a glorious mess of glitter, danceable beats, and great pop smarts–it has the same bonkers, unhinged pop rock quality of bands like The Apples in Stereo and The Mae Shi, but with a more obvious post-punk-influenced sense of rhythm. “Tiltawhirl” and the title track are a pair of pedal-flooring hooks and infinite energy–the former is pure cotton candy, while the verses of the latter sound like a sped-up mid-period Pere Ubu song grafted onto a twee-noise-pop-punk chorus. Going through the tracklist, it kind of feels like all of The New Apocalyptic deserves a shout-out–the psychedelic rumble of “Orion’s Belt” finds the duo mastering a different kind of music entirely, the spoken-word new wave Sonic Youth vibes of “Another Fake Rebellion” ought to make it a throwaway but it isn’t, and “Even Stephen Adventures in the Ludic Realm” is the closest thing that Higher Selves Playdate have to a straight-ahead pop rock track (so, of course, I hear some dub influence in it, too). Higher Selves Playdate shake and vibrate their way through “Keeping Things Sunny”, “Keep Me Lite Brite”, and “The Million Year Picnic”, while the fuzzed-out noise pop of “Cafe Baudrillard” offers up the unofficial motto of The New Apocalyptic: “Our simulacrum’s better than your simulacrum”. When Higher Selves Playdate put it that way, it’s hard to argue with them. (Bandcamp link)

OK Cool – Chit Chat

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Take a Hike/Klepto Phase
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz pop, math rock, noise pop, emo-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Safety Car

Chit Chat is OK Cool’s debut album, but I feel like I’ve been hearing updates about the Chicago-based duo ever since I started this blog at the beginning of the decade. Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist Waller put out their first release (a three-song EP called Anomia) in 2020, and they’ve been regularly active ever since–two more EPs followed in 2021 and 2023, and they released a two-song single in 2022, too. In addition to that, the duo co-run Take a Hike Records, which has put out music by good Windy City bands like Nora Marks in addition to all of OK Cool’s records. With all that in mind, Chit Chat is a “debut” by a pair of musicians with plenty of experience under the belt already, and it sounds like it–OK Cool confidently take their place in the middle of a very specifically “Chicago” style of indie rock that’s equal parts “folky” and “Exploding in Sound-inspired guitar explorations”, somewhere in between Ratboys, Moontype, Patter (and Seth Engel’s other bands), and Morpho, among others. OK Cool have always had a bit of a “playful” side to their music, and while it’s still there in Chit Chat, the duo sound locked-in and focused on making a palpable step forward in the form of a coherent long-player.

“Intro” (despite the name, it’s a full-on song, if only a ninety-second one) captures the spirit of OK Cool in miniature–a spare, chilly, folky opening moves into a wistful acoustic rocker which then finishes in the realm of huge electric catharsis. It’s not emo, precisely, but it feels emo. Chit Chat’s lead single, “Waawooweewaa” (yeah, I know), is positively grandiose, reminding me of the “widescreen”-style indie rock of earlier Wild Pink and a bunch of other Tiny Engines bands, while the other single, “Safety Car”, shrinks OK Cool down to the world of a more personal, grounded style of guitar pop (which, as it turns out, sounds good when practiced by the duo, too). Whether OK Cool are busting out the jagged, revved-up indie rock of “Splitting”, the delicate, piano-shaded folk-pop balladry of “Loop”, or the mid-tempo, early Strange Ranger alt-rock chugging of “Sledding”, everything on Chit Chat has a similar feel, which I attribute to the strength of the personalities that built the album (and the merging thereof on-record). Perhaps Chit Chat will win the Midwest indie-emo lottery, perhaps not, but it’s built to last regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Josh Halper – Schlemiel

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Glamour Gowns
Genre: Folk rock, folk, alt-country
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Use a Friend

Josh Halper’s debut album, Alrightnik, came out back in 2020, an early release on the ever-increasingly-powerful Dear Life Records. The Nashville-originating guitarist has been busy in the five years between solo albums playing with everyone from Lilly Hiatt to Tommy Prine to MJ Lenderman, but Schlemiel finds the sideman returning to the mic once again for an intriguing collection of curious, skewed folk rock and “Americana”. Now based in New York and linked up with local imprint Glamour Gowns, Halper gathered a ton of like-minded talents together–Cameron Carruss (Rich Ruth, Nicki Bluhm) on bass, Simon Knudtson (Oginalii, Olivia Jean) on drums, Ross Collier (Katy Kirby, Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant) on “gong”, and many more. Schlemiel is a charmingly freewheeling listen–sometimes, Halper sounds like spacey, jazz-influenced, “cosmic Americana” guitar explorers like William Tyler, Ryley Walker, and Steve Gunn, other times like he just wants to make offbeat alt-country like fellow Dear Life-associated acts Styrofoam Winos, Ryan Davis, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary. The common denominator is Halper himself, taking a break from playing lead guitar for hire to make–well, pretty much whatever kind of music he wants to make at any given moment, it seems.

The beginning of Schlemiel should be catnip for those who love their folk and Americana music weird, with the jaunty, jazzy instrumental “For Chavah” and the slightly jammy, slightly psychedelic, jazz-folk-pop creation “And How” subverting what you’d expect from a Nashville hired gun’s solo album. Halper and his players aren’t above embracing a great alt-country tune every now and again, though–there’s certainly nothing wrong with the fluttering folk rock pick-me-up of “Use a Friend”, and while the meandering “Paul and Jane” is a little less in-one’s-face with it, it has the same mix of country-rock drama and pensive inner monologue that recent music from Friendship has nailed so well. Halper doesn’t abandon the sun-drenched, trippy side of folk music (see “Schlemiel” and “Schlimazel”, among others), but Schlemiel works as well as it does because he isn’t afraid to veer from this kind of material to songs like “Sorry in B Major”, a song that manages to capture the brilliance of “traditional” folk and country music without being overly reverent towards either. “Sorry in B Major” is cleverly-written (I don’t mean, like, it winks at you every once in a while–it’s like actually clever), as is the rest of Schlemiel; it doesn’t fit itself together for us neatly on first listen, but the pieces are all laid out for us. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

Pressing Concerns: The Symptones, Anton Barbeau, Material Objects, Beagle Scout

We’re still getting three Pressing Concerns a week for the time being! I’ve been pretty busy outside of the blog as of late, but today we’re still taking the time to look at new albums from Anton Barbeau and Material Objects and new EPs from The Symptones and Beagle Scout. If you missed yesterday’s blog post (featuring Karl Frog, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Williamson Brothers, and Perfect 100), check that one out too.

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

The Symptones – Ricardo Papaya

Release date: July 8th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Roots rock, power pop, pop rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: MRI

I first heard the Minneapolis five-piece group The Symptones in 2023 via their self-titled sophomore album. Highlighting my favorite song from The Symptones (“Is It in My Head”) in a monthly playlist, I wrote that the band’s second LP incorporates “power pop, soul, R&B, and Springsteenian heartland rock” and that, while “not everything on [it] is ‘up my alley’”, “when it hits…it’s undeniable”. The group (vocalist/guitarist Taylor Tuomie, drummer Steven George, guitarist Andrew Polski, bassist Jeremy Gullikson, and trumpet player/percussionist Jake Nemec) are back a little under two years later with a new record called Ricardo Papaya–the four-song EP may be a smaller statement from The Symptones, but it does a great job of highlighting the group’s strengths and pulling a front-to-back rock-solid record together out of them. In my experience, a lot of modern rock groups who try to graft soul and R&B into their music come off gimmicky and/or totally unequipped to do so, but The Symptones make it sound easy and natural on Ricardo Papaya, an obvious-in-hindsight extension of their foundational power pop reminiscent of formative acts like Big Star and NRBQ (see also The Tisburys, the modern band that seems to understand this linkage the most thoroughly). 

That being said, Ricardo Papaya isn’t exactly beating the “first song is the best one” allegations. I can’t really fault The Symptones for putting “MRI” right at the top of the EP, though–when you have a pop rock song this strong and triumphant, there’s no point in trying to bury it. There are bits of The Replacements and even Wilco in the slightly rootsy Midwestern power pop of “MRI”, although neither act ever really made something this cleanly, unreservedly big and retro-polished. “Wind Up Toy” is the only song on Ricardo Papaya that’s under three minutes long, and it’s the other unrestrained power pop hit single on the EP. The Symptones kick up the tempo a little more than normal–it’s effectively a more buttoned-up Telethon song, just as Midwestern and earnest in its construction. The rest of Ricardo Papaya indulges the other sides of pop music that The Symptones have been known to explore–I have to give it up for the closing track, “Palace of Straw”, in particular, which introduces guest musician David Klein on saxophone to complete the maximalist combination of jazz-y pop bass grooves, yacht rock polish, and Springsteenian excess. It all amounts to a brief, shiny record that has enough going on underneath the glitz to make sure The Symptones stand out in the crowd. (Bandcamp link)

Anton Barbeau – Glitch Wizard / Dig the Light

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Think Like a Key
Genre: Psychedelic pop, art pop, pop rock, post-punk
Formats: CD, digital
Pull Track: Nightcrawler / Dogstar

Did somebody order two new Anton Barbeau albums? Well, if you did–first of all, you probably didn’t need to formally request them, as the California-originating, Berlin-dwelling pop oddball has made it clear over and over again that he’s going to continue to release records at a furious clip (said clip being the only thing about Barbeau’s music that could realistically be called “furious”). Ever since the monster 2023 double album Morgenmusik/Nachtschlager, Barbeau has still been active but working more informally–records like Ras!, Ambient 1: Music for Entities, and In His Own Image found the artist reimagining/re-recording his old material and embarking on unusual genre excursions. It was high time for all-new Anton Barbeu pop music, and Glitch Wizard and Dig the Light are two new albums of it, released on the same day by Think Like a Key. Receiving help from notable names like XTC’s Dave Gregory, The Soft Boys’ Andy Metcalfe, and Julian Cope collaborator Donald Ross Skinner, Barbeau sculpts two different moods on his latest two LPs: Glitch Wizard is moodier and more meditative, inspired by the death of Barbeau’s father, while Dig the Light seeks–as the name implies–something brighter.

Glitch Wizard is my favorite of the two, and the one more likely to stick out in Barbeau’s vast discography. The album’s Bandcamp page calls it “krautfolk”, and that’s pretty accurate to what this album sounds like: Metcalfe’s bass is the glue holding everything together, leading everyone else on a post-punk psychedelic journey that somehow feels low-key and (occasionally) somber nonetheless. “Nightcrawler” lodges itself into our brains with its practically danceable groove, and “Off the Hook” gets a little showy with Barbeau’s prog-pop smarts, but Glitch Wizard is best experienced as a steady, deliberate wave washing over us. Listening to Dig the Light, I’m struck by Barbeau’s ability to sound like the same old Barbeau while making self-evidently different music; he’s like Mark E. Smith or Robert Pollard in that way, I suppose. There’s nothing on Glitch Wizard like the electric strut of “Dogstar”, for instance, but it sounds just as much like an “Anton Barbeau song” as the best ones on Glitch Wizard do. Dig the Light’s surrealist Barbeau-isms of “Come the Hummingbird”, “Mushroom Madness”, and “Life Gives You Lemons” are more obviously “him” than the ones on Glitch Wizard, but you’ll hear him say sentences that have never before been uttered on both albums. In this way, there’s really no wrong way to enter Barbeau’s world; every record seems to offer the same full experience, just different takes on it. (Bandcamp link)

Material Objects – In Revision

Release date: June 1st
Record label: Resident Recordings
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-punk, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Dreaming Outside

Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that Ithaca, New York is something of a sanctuary city for modern 90s noise rock-inspired underground bands. In the past year or two, I’ve written about new albums from Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death and Chimes of Bayonets, and now we can add Material Objects to the list. This power trio (guitarist/vocalist Domenic Gagliano, drummer Tre Berney, and a different bassist each time) formed in 2019 and introduced themselves with EPs in 2022 and 2023 (which were collected together on one CD earlier this year)–In Revision is their first full-length album. Like a good noise rock-influenced band, In Revision was partially recorded at Electrical Audio with Greg Norman (the rest of it was recorded closer to home, by Chris Ploss at Sunwood Recording in Trumansburg, New York), and it also serves as the introduction to their latest bass player, Matt Gordon. Cellist Gabriella Evergreen is the only outside musician to play on In Revision, though former bassists Elsy Murphy and Adam Southard receive composition credits–reflecting how long Material Objects have been working on this long-form debut. 

In Revision is anything but the caveman, low-end-worshipping style of “noise rock”; more post-punk-influenced and dynamic, Material Objects have a sound much more reminiscent of Silkworm or even electric slowcore groups like Bedhead and Idaho than Shellac or The Jesus Lizard. Opening track “Wakes and Cells” is effectively a more sturdy version of a vintage Lou Barlow rocker, opening up an album that is equally comfortable veering into drilling, harrowing post-punk seethers (“Working on My Act”), capital I-Indie rock noise pop tunes (“Dreaming Outside”), and sprawling, multi-part odysseys (“Easy Out”). I wouldn’t precisely call Material Objects “post-rock”, but they’re not overly constrained by “normal” song lengths and structures, letting “Making the Case” chime and creak to six minutes in length and allowing the last two songs in particular to turn into towering, sprawling, rock music. “Stay Seated”, the penultimate one, has a perfectly gripping climax, but Material Objects save their full might for closing eight-minute track “Augment Center”–it’s a build-up and then it’s a burn-down, long mazes of confusing but scorching psychedelic rock riffs and surprisingly intricate corners. “Augment Center” kind of “fades away” as the thick, meaty, torrential rock and roll fades to a cello-touched, parachute-deployed finale, but Berney’s continually energetic playing even as In Revision rides off into the horizon is a good sense of Material Objects’ level of commitment. (Bandcamp link)

Beagle Scout – Beagle Scout

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, slacker rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Alien

What’s that? A debut EP from a 90s indie rock-inspired power trio from New York City? Alright, let’s check Beagle Scout out. The band is Alex Anastos on vocals and guitar, Justin Tramonti on bass, and Zach McCollum on drums, and they played their first show earlier this year–Beagle Scout follows just a few months later. When they sent me their EP, Anastos mentioned learning about Rosy Overdrive through Ian Donohue of Slake/Thirst, a band with similar influences. Slake/Thirst’s debut EP was crystal-clear both in its exploration of pop music and spacey indie rock, but Beagle Scout is a muddier affair. On these four songs, Beagle Scout mix everything together: noisy, stumbling guitars, gentle, almost whispered vocals, and diamond-in-the-rough melodies all present as one. There’s a bit of an early Built to Spill (or even early Modest Mouse) thing going on in Beagle Scout’s writing, with its casual, kind of shy version of lo-fi guitar pop/weirdness; the trio mention being influenced by shoegaze, and while Beagle Scout is plenty noisy, I’d say that the downward-staring attitude of the name of the genre is a better fit for them than the bands most prominently associated with it.

Look, it’s four songs of catchy, slacker-y golden-era indie rock, what more do you want? Everything sounds good on Beagle Scout–Anastos’ voice is low-key, high-pitched, and always with just the right amount of emotion injected into it, the guitars have just as many smart, secretly-brilliant melodies hidden in them, the rhythm section holds the show together by the skin of its teeth. “Alien” is, for Beagle Scout, pretty dramatic, steadily-creeping guitars and quite sad-sounding vocals nonetheless sending the track on an exciting, sprawling journey. “Sneeze” takes a second to get rolling but when it finally reveals itself as a brisk, intent lo-fi Pavement-ish pop song, it feels like the “hit” of the EP.  That is, until we get to “Marbles”, which is very nearly “jangle pop” between its chiming guitars and jump-rope drumbeat (at the very least, it sounds a hell of a lot like something from 90s K Records). “Codeine Dustbowl” is the big conclusion, one last trip to the fuzz rock/noise pop comfort zone that finds Beagle Scout losing themselves in a way that they hadn’t really done up until that point. Seems like a band to keep an eye on! (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

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: