Fresh from KLOF’s coverage of the critically acclaimed solo outing Baby Man, Fruit Bats returns with news of The Landfill, a full-band album due June 12th via Merge Records. Where Baby Man found Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Eric D. Johnson alone with his songs, The Landfill captures the energy of his longtime touring band — bassist David Dawda, guitarist Josh Mease, keyboardist Frank LoCrasto and drummer Kosta Galanopoulos — playing together in the room.
The album’s title draws from a familiar feature of the Midwestern landscape where Johnson grew up: the undulating hills that rise from otherwise flat terrain, quietly concealing layers of discarded history beneath them. For Johnson, these became a potent metaphor. The Landfill imagines standing atop a towering pile of personal, emotional and cultural debris, and using that unlikely vantage point to survey what lies ahead.
The experience of making Baby Man — with its stream-of-consciousness writing and near-immediate captures — unlocked something in Johnson’s process. Within weeks of completing that solo album, he took the band to Bear Creek Studios in Washington to apply the same instinctive approach in a fully collaborative setting. The sessions prioritised chemistry over polish: few overdubs, no click tracks, performances captured largely in real time.
A conceptual video for the title track, directed by longtime collaborator Adam Willis, has also been shared. Johnson says of the clip: “The very first brainstorm session, we landed on Close Encounters of the Third Kind as an initial reference. Especially the notion of a man at a crossroads who is haunted by a mysterious shape. Later that morphed into the idea that, for some strange reason, I live a double life as a tortured art star in Europe. And that my music career there is completely unknown.”
He adds: “Silly and obscure as these concepts may be — the video still plays to the lyric and feeling of the song. The notions of memory and legacy and following signs that may or may not lead you down the right path.”
The Landfill is one of the most expansive statements in the Fruit Bats catalogue — a record that balances communal energy with deeply personal writing, and finds new ways forward from everything that came before.
Pre-Order/Save: https://lnk.to/thelandfill