Talk Me Down
New music playlist, capsule reviews of indie rock, death metal, indietronica, power pop, poppy punk and so much more!
Morning y’all.
I wanted to get this post up on Friday to be more timely with the new music playlist, but here it is on Wednesday of the next week anyway. I’m back in another downswing—morale is low, as I am wont to say... and yes a Bomb The Music Industry! song made me cry before work yesterday—but I have at least been taking my stupid hikes for my stupid mental health. Nature, am I right?
And now, let’s get to the tunes.
Here’s my new music playlist followed by capsule reviews as always. What have you been stoked about lately? What hasn’t left your heavy rotation? Let me knowwww ok bye
New Music: Friday, October 24th / 2025
I had no idea cupcakKe had a new album, so that was a surprise on Friday morning. I have given it a single spin so far and it seems more consistent than their last one upon first glance. I continue to admire their adherence to the juxtaposition of the dirtiest of dirty raps and their calmer side. There’s also this, which is a big hell yeah:
Oruã from Brazil have been on my radar since they released Íngreme in 2021, and have been enjoying their latest. Review to come, at some point, but if you like a perfectly measured hodge podge of indie rock, psych rock, experimental rock and moments of jazz, you should check it out.
Gatsbys American Dream releasing new music in 2025 wasn’t on my bingo card, but I used it as an excuse to re-familiarize myself with some of my favs from their discography. New EP is nice too.
Don’t forget to wrap your ears around some new releases by Teenage Tom Petties, Major Stars, Tortoise, verity den, and more.
Emoji legend:
⛏️ denotes picks of the week, my favs.
🌱 seedling denotes albums like a lot and expect could grow on me over the year.
✨ albums I would recommend to fans of the genre (i.e. it might not convert new listeners, but you should check it out.)
✂ denotes favourite tracks from a given record.
As always, feel free to reach out over on BlueSky or join the Rosy Overdrive Discord server where I can be found now and again.
You can also find me in the corners of Rate Your Music scrounging for obscure emo, hardcore, indie rock and pop punk.
Don’t forget: if you’re reading this in your email it will be cut off.
Read on the web for the full list of reviews!
⛏️ Emily Yacina - Veilfall (2025)
Genres: Singer-Songwriter, Indie Pop
Fantastic stuff, immediately hit me in the gut on an emotion level, but the songs in general are really gorgeous too. Manages a good balance of indie pop and folk that dabbles in electronic elements without going full-on synth pop.
Sometimes shorter capsule reviews from me means “I don’t know what else to say about this album” and sometimes it means “I have no idea how to describe the ways in which I feel so strongly positive about this album” and in this case, it’s the latter. Beautiful record.
In some ways, this reminded me a lot of Kicking Every Day, which is a very high compliment if you know me.
⛏️ Fanclubwallet - Living While Dying (2025)
Genres: Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Pop Rock, Indietronica, Alternative Dance, Bedroom Pop
Was unfamiliar with Fanclubwallet‘s previous records, but happily had this put on my radar by Rosy Overdrive this morning. Bounces around a lot of related pop genres, with pulsing acoustic strums and motorik-esque percussion (”Gears”) or peppy indie rock guitar lines (”Cotton Mouth”) alongside synthpop features on dreamy tunes (”Know You Anymore”) or squiggly chiptune tones (”Me Time”). On the more upbeat, indie pop style songs they can bring to mind acts like Sobs. Really strong stuff all the way through, and totally in my wheelhouse so I didn’t have much to complain about here.
⛏️ Good Luck - Big Dreams, Mister (2025)
Genres: Midwest Emo, Pop Punk, Power Pop
Good Luck are back, and they released another great record. This sounds about what you would expect a reunion album for this specific band to sound like: it’s not phoned in, it sounds mostly like their last album with some light pushing of the boundaries of their genre. Feels as much as a change compared to Without Hesitation as that record did to Into Lake Griffy. Anyone wishing they would move back in the direction of fuzziness and super-high energy of their debut may be disappointed, but this is a great reunion album from a fantastic band and I’m happy to have them back.
It may be the third best Good Luck album, but that’s a pretty high bar to be honest.
✨ Citric Dummies - Split With Turnstile (2025)
Genres: Hardcore Punk, Garage Punk
Very solid revved up indie garage punk rock. I keep checking this band’s albums out and they’ve got the energy and the attitude but I’m not sure the songs themselves stick in my mind much longer than the 20 minute running time. Could grow on me, though, and also might be a MP not a YP so maybe check it out if you are into the genre overall.
🌱 Sadlands - Try to Have a Little Fun (2025)
Genre: Power Pop, Indie Rock
Getting a lot of mileage out of the word lately, but this is cromulent 90s buzzy power-pop indie rock. Think Clueless soundtrack-core. Resisting throwing a “-punk” in there because I don’t think this has too much pop punk in its DNA, all said. But if you’re a fiend for this kind of thing, it’s totally OK on a song-by-song basis.
Bandcamp bio says FFO: Discount, Upset, Swearin’, and Lemuria, which makes sense (though I’d mention the inclusion of Discount might be a bit of a stretch.)
🌱 Cusp - What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back (2025)
Genres: Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Power Pop, Slacker Rock
I keep checking in with this band, and they keep putting out very cromulent indie rock that makes me want to root for them, but they seem to have a 3-star rating ceiling for me. They are still playing a “kind of indie rock that I feel like has fallen a bit out of favor” as I said about Thanks So Much, by which I mean they jump around in micro-genres of indie rock (a synth here, a Doug Martsch-esque guitar line there, a country-tinged acoustic number, etc.) and keep things grounded with their kinda distant, not-so-bedroom-y production but it all feels... handcrafted... in a nice way.
Unfortunately it stops them from really feeling like they’ve nailed down exactly what they do best. There’s some very nice songs on here, and I enjoyed my 28 minutes, but I keep waiting for them to really knock it out of the park. Haven’t given up on them yet.
✂ Oh Man, In a Box, Extracurricular Hell
✨ Sanguisugabogg - Hideous Aftermath (2025)
Genres: Brutal Death Metal, Slam Death Metal, Dissonant Death Metal
This band seems divisive in the way a lot of the really hyped up bands across a variety of heavy genres generally are. Lots of people arguing about whether or not they’re true heads or whatever, plus tons of people hating on them probably explicitly because they’re popular, or since they’re on Century Media, etc. etc. I have absolutely no dog in that hunt but will say that some of the over-cranked ‘yooo sooo broootal’ bands these days that pop off on the internet generally don’t do a ton for me.
I didn’t mind this though, it’s brutal death metal with hardcore sensibility, dumb heavy riffs (though maybe not the most memorable ones in the world) and some good grooves. 47 minutes of it is maybe too much. Always weird to me when bands balloon their run times with every album from 33 minutes (nice!) on Tortured Whole to 45 (wait) on Homicidal Ecstasy and now almost 50 minutes. I think for that reason the B-side started to drag on for me, oddly since some of those songs are shorter than the opening stretch.
84 Tigers - Nothing Ends (2025)
Genres: Emo, Post-Hardcore, Alternative Rock
I have memory of listening to Time in the Lighthouse, but apparently I neither logged it on here or wrote about it in my newsletter so I have no idea if I just bounced off it, or if it was just so cromulent it didn’t stick in my mind.
Thinking the latter, based on their latest release. This is two members of Small Brown Bike and one member of The Swellers playing music that sounds a whole lot like “what if SBB kept putting out albums?”. This in particular sounds like an extension of the moody, angular emo they played on The River Bed. A bit hazier, and maybe with the gas stuck near-permanently on “mid-tempo”. Some of these scratch an itch effectively in the same way as that album (”Two Rivers”, “Everything You Love”) but mostly it’s just nice enough sounding that it seems to have a three star ceiling to my ears.
✂ Everything You Love, Two Rivers, The Crush of It All
Tribal Gaze - Inveighing Brilliance (2025)
Genres: Death Metal
I think I need to give this some more time, because my first listen kind of slid in one ear and out the other. It’s good though, I’m just not sure how good yet. It’s suitably heavy and hauls really good but in terms of how memorable it is to my ears and if it can hang with similar albums I’ve already grown close with over the course of the year? We’ll see. File under: give closer inspection.
Dead Heat - Process of Elimination (2025)
Genres: Thrash Metal, Crossover Thrash, Crossover Thrash
I know my reviews of modern thrash are always ‘I feel like I shouldn’t like this’ type reviews, but the name and the album art for bands like this always makes me think I’m gonna get corny ass shit... but hey this is solid thrash metal with a bit of crossover appeal. Based on my limited exposure to this band’s previous material, it seems like they are dialing back the crossover / hardcore elements slightly in favor of just straight-forward, speedy thrash. As usual, this kind of thing only goes so far in terms of memorability, but this was certainly an OK way to spend 35 minutes on a Friday afternoon.
⛏️ Moneen - Are We Really Happy With Who We Are Right Now? (2003)
Genres: Indie Rock, Emo-Pop, Emo, Post-Hardcore, Post-Rock
Oddly, the album that is most tied up in my memory alongside this one would be De-Loused in the Comatorium. Not because the music relate to one another, but 2003 was the year that I graduated High School in the Spring and moved off to College in early-Fall. I’m sure I had more than 2 CDs at the time, but I have a memory of these albums being the only ones I had in the car as we drove sixteen hours from my hometown up to Thunder Bay. Probably much to the chagrin of my parents, as we alternated between emo-pop and pretentious progressive rock influenced post-hardcore/art rock. Actually, I guess there’s some overlap between these two albums in the way that they have progressive/atmospheric tendencies that stretch beyond the roots of their foundational sound to some degree.
Anyway, all this is to say that I listened to this album a lot when it first came out, and in particular throughout a big and important phase of my life. So I can’t really separate this and dive into the specifics of what does or does not work for me, because it too potently takes me back to a time and place. I could put on my critic hat and try to say that it’s too long, but then why do these 50 minutes fly by? Is it because of the strength of the material, or my familiarity with the melodies and vocal lines, the guitar heroics or the vaguely post-rock-esque textural excursions?
I’m not a good enough writer (see the millions of times I’ve said “textural excursions” in the past) nor critic to figure all that out, it just rips and it still rips now when I revisit it.
⛏️ Drawn and Quartered - Hail Infernal Darkness (2006)
Genres: Death Metal
Yup, this is consistently sick as hell. Sometimes I call death metal albums ‘meat and potatoes’ and it means that it’s all just good or average, but this does that sound in the best possible way. Elevated meats and starches. I love when they drop out of blast mode into little skronky thrash-esque dueling lead-riffs like on “Suffer a Traitor’s Fate”. When they are just hammering on tremolo-y death riffs and blasting beats, it’s like the complete inverse of the stuff I (assumed I) didn’t like about death metal when I wasn’t versed in the genre. It just totally works, mainly because of the riff quality. Totally hauls, sounds evil, and kicks a lot of ass.
⛏️ Dr. Dooom - First Come, First Served (1999)
Genres: Hardcore Hip Hop, Abstract Hip Hop, Horrorcore, Boom Bap, Experimental Hip Hop
We’re talking about a 70+ minute album from Kool Keith circa 1999, so of course this is way too long. Despite that, Keith takes his bonkers raps into a fun house cartoon ass version of horrorcore with great results. Some phenomenal nonsense raps here that are absolutely hilarious at times. Keith was really killing it around this era.
✨ Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing (2008)
Genres: Indie Pop, Indie Rock, Twee Pop, Pop Rock, Power Pop, Alternative Rock
At the time this came out, it was viewed as a bit of a disappointment in the wake of the hype that surrounded their debut album Broom. That album had a lot of highlights (”Pangea” and “Oregon Girl” in particular) so it’s easy to see why this was viewed as Broom one-point-five to some degree. Indie pop tunes like “Modern Mystery” and “Glue Girls” reveals gas in the tank still, though, and the breezy, subdued tone has aged well even when the songs aren’t grabbing you by the ears. “Think I Wanna Die” feels a bit of its time (kind of sounds like there’s a bit of a Vampire Weekend influence on that one, who also had just released their debut that year).
The album art reveals a lot about the album, which feels perfect for the fall weather. Some of this dips into twee, bet never so much that it becomes sickly sweet or overly cute, and that’s where this balances well. Sure some of these songs threaten to slip through your fingers, but it kinda doesn’t matter.
✨ Writhing Shadows - Writhing Shadows (2022)
Genres: Death Metal
Hauls ass, sounds dope (good snare!) and is straight-n-to-the-point. dewtaylo is right about this partially being Bolt Thrower worship, but not insofar that it makes you just want to listen to the real deal. They have a pinch of their own thing going on and it just so happens to be wrapped up in a bit of a love letter to an existing band’s style of metal. Highly enjoyable.
✨ Stress Eater - Everybody Eats! (2024)
Genres: Boom Bap, Abstract Hip Hop, Hardcore Hip Hop, Jazz Rap
Rap project inception finds Czarface teaming up with Kool Keith. I listened to this in its entirety (a nice and digestible 33 minutes) yesterday and forgot to log it. That probably speaks to its memorability, but also that it went down smooth. As far as modern Keith projects go, this is very solid and well rounded and is helped by the above average collaborators in Czarface. Likely the best beats Keith has had since working with Real Bad Man on Serpent.
✨ Mi-Sex - Space Race (1980)
Grabbed this at the flea market based on the album art (and in particular the back of the vinyl where the band is hanging out with some aliens.) Also saw it had a sub tag of AOR but main tag New Wave and that sounded right up my alley. Well... it is!
This is kind of quirky, geeky new wave synthy rock, and while it’s not going to blow you away I dug what’s going on here. Will have to check their debut out, as people seem to say they dialed back a little on this one. Sometimes they give a bit of a The Monks vibe, with the kinda humourous/satiric tone they often strike. “It Only Hurts When I’m Laughing” was a stand out, and closer “Ice Cold Dead” is a great new wave rave up. Nice five dollar find in the vinyl bins!
Mi-Sex - Shanghaied (1981)
Decided to move in the other direction after listening to Space Race, for no reason really other than being in the mood for seeing where they took that sound rather than where they were at beforehand.
As RYM user geoff_hollow mentioned in their review, this sounds like the band attempting something of a more ‘sophisticated’ sound on for size, while still retaining their synth-focused new wave sound. This record is a little less herky-jerky and reminds me a little bit like the band is reaching for some of what Japan was doing with art pop in the early 80s on certain songs (like “Water”).
That said, they still are a little all over the place, bouncing from the really slick and intriguing sound of “Water” into more standard new wave-y guitar-focused tunes like “Talking to Myself” or “Missing Person”.
They still got some strong tunes in here, despite some of them coming in at shorter track lengths which makes it feel like maybe they were a bit rushed on this one. Enjoyable, though.
Squirtgun - Squirtgun (1995)
Genres: Pop Punk
Mass Giorgini is someone who looms so large in the canon of pop punk that I’m surprised there’s not any reviews on Rate Your Music for their work with Squirtgun. Probably a couple reasons for this: a) Giorgini is more known for their production work on seminal Lookout! Records-era acts like Screeching Weasel (of which he was a member for a stretch), The Queers, Groovie Ghoulies as well as releases for Honest Don’s, Johann’s Face Records and even a few Fat Wreck Chords, Asian Man Records or Hopeless Records records... and b) because the early Squirtgun records haven’t been available on streaming until this one was recently re-mastered.
Needless to say, Mass was a big name particularly in the Weasel-core circles of 90s poppy punk rock. If I had to describe Squirtgun’s debut record (produced by Weasel’s Ben Weasel) is that on this album they sound like the sunny fip-side to Screeching Weasel’s bitchy, complain-y Ramonescore. This is peppy, poppy punk with pretty much no frills whatsoever. Repetitive to a fault, even at 25 minutes long, but not awful or anything. Weird of them to randomly decide to try ska upstrokes on the 11th track of 12? There’s a couple songs here that are fairly memorable. Some of the melodies in “Giddy and Glum” almost remind me of Too Late... No Friends-era Gob.
Overall, not bad, not too memorable, about par for this era of pop punk to be honest.
That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.
Always appreciate the recommendations! Especially looking forward to that Dead Heat album. 🤘