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Indie Rock, Post-Punk, Tracker Music, Progressive Electronic, Skate Punk, Power Pop, Melodic Hardcore and more!
Hello y’all!
Not a huge volume of reviews here, but it has been a couple weeks and so I realize I owe ya at least what has been rattling around between posts.
Did a week or so of camping at Restoule Provincial Park and it did wonders… who knew that floating on a calm lake had wildly restorative properties?! Oh wait… I did… from the last time I went camping. I’m already wishing I could teleport back there to float in a lake all over again.
Came across this YouTube channel with a lot of mostly complete (aside from some videos removed for copyright notices) MTV 120 Minutes. Now if only their aspect rations weren’t stretched (and their channel logo wasn’t AI 🤮)
Did you know that Showtime briefly had a “rock concert sitcom” in the 80s? I didn’t either until the always reliable KevTheRipper channel uploaded one of two surviving episodes. Meat Loaf and Jools Holland show up in scripted segments while comedy sketches and musical performances by A Flock of Seaguls, The Police are interspersed. Weird!
Otherwise, here’s some music reviews. Hope you enjoy ‘em!
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!
⛏️ Sweeping Promises - You Say I Romanticize (2026)
Genres: Indie Rock, Art Punk, Twee Pop, Post-Punk
Both continues the band's consistency in being one of the most interesting and hooky entries in the on-going post-punk/art-punk revival scene while also expanding their sound in a number of effective directions.
Maybe it's just that I haven't revisited their previous two albums that recently, but there's a snarl, bite and edge to this record that feels partially new (particularly on the A-Side with "Shooting Shadows" and "My Friend's an Entomologist" back-to-back). Not that the B-Side doesn't have it as well, but slinky, bass-forward mid-tempo barn-burners like "My Anchoress", "Cocoon" and "Accent" just remind me a little more of their established sound.
You might be able to call this one a bit transitional, but they've always established themselves as the kind of band that explores different corridors of sound on each record regardless of whether it all “fits together” perfectly (why bother?) so I'm happy to have 10 more tunes from 'em; all great ones, too.
⛏️ Dubmood - Lost Floppies Vol 3 (2026)
Genres: Tracker Music, Doskpop, Demostyle
Been craving some new chiptune/tracker music and boom, one of the best to ever do it drops another compilation of their cracktro/keygen tunes. Not much to say here other than if you like crunchy, upbeat, wildly melodic tracker music this is 47 minutes of the dope stuff.
⛏️ Carl Craig - Meditations (2026)
Genres: Progressive Electronic, Detroit Techno, Minimal Techno
According to a comment on Bandcamp, this appears to be a re-release of some material that was previously available as its own disc on the Masterpiece CD. It comprises of six lengthy, mostly beatless (though still rhythmic and a couple have what you might call beats tbh) compositions of layered synths and basslines. Very hypnotic stuff; incredibly luxurious and introspective. Perfectly suited for an hour of decompression or hyperfocus.
🌱 Making Friends - Home Is Where the Heart Was (2026)
Genres: Skate Punk, Melodic Hardcore, Pop Punk, Punk Rock
This band continues to release some of the most potent EpiFat throwback skate punk of recent memory. I said Fine Dying was RIYL Belvedere, Lagwagon, Strung Out etc. and they haven't updated their sound in many ways that buck those comparison points. They keep things fast, varied and technical with lots of stop-starts designed for maximum pogo efficiency, tons of dueling octave chords and the doubled vocal melodies remain slick and hooky. When they slow a song or two down to a mid-tempo churn ("Gut Feeling") with some power-pop hooks, it feels just like the bands who were doing that in the 90s (cough, Bracket) and less of a nod to modern revival punk. Worst thing you can say about this is that its downsides are the same as the bands they're aping; its potentially consistent to a fault and some of their influences show up rather literally (like the NOFX aping on "Blabber Blabber" or a nod to The Ataris from the bassist on "Anyway".) None of that really bothers me and this was a real blast of nostalgic energy for me on a Thursday morning.
✨ Plastic Tones - Can You Keep a Secret? (2026)
Genres: Power Pop
This was recommended to me as "Power Pop that sounds like Heart" by StrawberryDeluxe and that's a pretty good start. There's a lot of nice referential work going on in here ("Every now and then I fall apart" on "Dynamo") and I can appreciate some good power pop even if this feels a little lacking in the oomph territory. Probably a MP and may not be a YP but I would like this more if they had nudged their energy up a few notches on just about every single song here. But slick hooks with sparkling synths and crunchy guitars ("Change My World") will always appeal to me a certain amount.
✨ Cheekface - Podium (2026)
Genres: Geek Rock, Indie Rock
This is the first Cheekface album where the duds threaten to outweigh the hits; in the past, they proved always good for somewhere around 2 - 3 insanely catchy bangers per album and then the rest of the songs were usually OK to good. Here, I feel like the floor is inching a little lower.
The A-side in particular feels weak (aside from "Hostile Street" and "MFT"). "Rent is Down" expands their ouvre into borderline slowcore-power-pop well though, and kicks off a nice run that includes "No Fly Zone" (easily this album's big-time chorus highlight.)
At this point, it's unavoidably kind of clear they are an EP band stuck in an LP band's release cadence. In the past, the great songs propped up their merely alright material, but it's beginning to wear thin—frustratingly so, because the songs here that work are still great ones! The amount of times I’ve listened to “No Fly Zone” in the past couple weeks only proves they’re still great at it.
✂ Hostile Street, MFT, Rent is Down, No Fly Zone
Rufio - From the Outside (2026)
Genres: Pop Punk, Skate Punk, Easycore
When Rufio released some singles from this EP (their first material in 16 years) I found the production off-putting; not sure why all legacy pop punk / emo etc. acts feel like their new material needs to sound insanely compressed and brick walled or if that's just a side-effect of Travis Barker's production influence across the genre these days?
Anyway, these are five pretty alright songs from the band, but ones that kind of misunderstand the appeal of their earlier work a little. Everything about Rufio's best work was "what if the whiniest pop punk / emo-pop band you ever heard liked to shred sick riffs?". Here, "From the Outside" gets pretty close to nailing that equation, but there's a lack of definition to their riffing here. It's all flash and spark, but a little low on the memorability of the riffs. They're getting closer to NFG-esque pseudo-easycore ("Another Letdown") but why would I listen to just OK songs that sound like that when there's a really good NFG album that came out this year? "The Worst" also whips up a bit of energy, but there the hooks are lacking.
MCMLXXXV (1985) managed to blend their tendencies for big hooks with a lightly sanded down approach to their riffing well, and this EP is trying something similar but it just lands as "hey, good for them, they returned after 16 years and it's not embarrassing!" more than anything I would want to listen to again and again.
✨ Strike Anywhere - Change Is a Sound (2001)
Genres: Melodic Hardcore
I know the numbers on RYM don't always mean much, but for an album that seemed to detonate upon landing, I expected this to have a lot more than 443 ratings. For a lot of people my age at the time, their mix of Lifetime's melodic hardcore and Anti-Flag's one-note no-brainer (yet accessible) political sentiment was pretty major. Maybe it's because I listened to the hell out of this in 2001 but weird to see people say it's not melodic or is "hookless" because I feel like these songs are overflowing with melodies in every corner. By the last couple songs, it's clear that they're mostly writing the same song again and again but who wasn't around this era? I liked Exit English well enough at the time, but in hindsight it feels a lot more homogeneous in comparison.
Oddly, none of their other releases really hit me again until the Nightmares of the West EP.
✂ Refusal, Sunset on 32nd, Detonation, S.S.T., My Design
✨ Good Riddance - Ballads From the Revolution (1998)
Genres: Melodic Hardcore, Punk Rock, Hardcore Punk, Skate Punk
An album I've certainly listened to over the years, but today I gave it some closer inspection which revealed some diversity that I likely overlooked previously. There's some bluesy rock and roll riffs ("I.S.Y.L.") alongside the usual blistering Fat Wreck style melodic hardcore ("Without Anger") they're known for. "Slowly", "Jeannie" and "Salt" continue the super-melodic strain of song that they really dialed in on songs like "Steps" from A Comprehensive Guide to Moderne Rebellion. Despite this feeling a bit transitory (not as well remembered as Comprehensive or as angry as Operation Phoenix) this is a very solid and well rounded entry in their discography.
✨ Weezer - Van Weezer (2021)
Genres: Power Pop, Alternative Rock, Hard Rock
I hated this when it came out, and felt like it signaled another backslide into dreck for the band in the wake of the legitimately great (aside from a moment or two) Weezer [White Album] and the interesting chamber pop detour of OK Human (the less said about Weezer [Black Album] and Pacific Daydream the better.)
Revisiting this one, hey it's pretty good? It is basically the band asking "What if the simplicity of Weezer [Green Album]'s pop tunes were filtered through 80s radio rock?" and answering themselves in kind. "The End of the Game" was probably on Rivers' spreadsheet as =CONCATENATE(The Cars, Van Halen, Weezer) which, hey not bad? Enormous chorus on that song. "Hero" is a bit of a bad choice for album opener imo, as it is a weaker tune, but thankfully the best run of the album isn't too far off ("The End of the Game", "I Need Some of That", "Beginning of the End"). I can understand why the metal rip offs ("Blue Dream", "1 More Hit") could read as embarrassing but it's all fun and games to me.
Honestly? Pretty strong album if you are not allergic to Rivers' lyrics (if you're a Weezer fan, you have thick skin when it comes to bad lyrics anyway.)
That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.