Across 25 years as Fruit Bats, Eric D. Johnson has usually worked slowly, letting songs take shape over long arcs of memory and revision. His solo album Baby Man broke that pattern: written via morning-pages stream-of-consciousness and recorded each afternoon, it was an intimate snapshot of two weeks in Johnson’s life and a reminder of how immediate his songwriting could be. That experience cracked something open. Energised by the album’s closeness and the focus it placed on his voice and guitar, he walked straight back into the studio with the full band he has spent more than a decade shaping into one of indie rock’s most ferocious live units. At Washington’s Bear Creek Studios, Johnson set out to bottle that chemistry; there were no click tracks, no comped vocals, minimal overdubs, just the sound of players he trusts “cooking” in real time. David Dawda, Josh Mease, Frank LoCrasto, and Kosta Galanopoulos tracked most of The Landfill (June 12th, Merge Records) live on the floor, with longtime collaborator Thom Monahan later adding production touches and the final mix. The result is a document of a band in full flight and a songwriter discovering how immediacy translates when the whole room is burning bright. This is the most ‘live’ a Fruit Bats record has felt since The Ruminant Band (2009), and by stripping away the usual layers that crowd a full-band arrangement, the group somehow sounds even more psychedelic and technicolour.
We begin with The Saddest Part Of The Song in which a medium-paced verse structure stunningly blooms upon the arrival of the chorus, ascending lines that rise and then explode with the kind of glowing chord that is anything but sad. In an instant, the long-term mastery of Fruit Bats’ best music is blatantly flagged: that magical combination of natural beauty and optimism, peppered with just enough minor-key melancholy and introspection to realise that what we are dealing with here is real, not a flowery wall decoration. “Time heals all wounds or at least they say, but no I haven’t always found it to be that way”, sings Johnson on All Wounds, a line that underlines my point. It arrives after a section of long, distant harmonica fuel fades away, but before the train track rhythm pulls out of the station once more; this is a brief interlude to remind us that time can sometimes be a healer, but do not count on it. Think Aboutcha pulls a bit of Fruit Bats pop sheen off the shelf, those piano-chord-beats the kind of sound Supertramp would have happily served up, before the introductory sequence of That Goddamn Sun is suitably warm and sheltered. This is one of the album’s most unapologetically sentimental tunes, “still think about you in the morning and, to come to think about it, I also think about you in the evening time,” an audio study in heartache that is so heavily weighted you can feel the planet moving under your feet.
I do not overly associate Fruit Bats with seventies FM radio, at least I do not think I do, but there are a few classic songwriter brush-strokes from that era permeating their music. There is a piano chord change at the end of each verse in Silverfish In The Sink with strong Billy Joel vibes, a lesson in how one simple switch, if it is the right one, can add shafts of depth. Wild Pony Tower Moment has this same lush quality too, the song gently blowing across our faces like a summer breeze as clouds of piano rain down and a cinematic hue colours the sky. Fishin for a Vision has a lighter touch but still leans into the structural foundations of strong melody, pleasingly musical progressions and stylish delivery that enriches the whole album. Perhaps We’re A Storm ponders the musing in the title whilst easily proving this band has enough muscle to kick out whilst wondering, before Hummingbird Sage has easy-on-the-ear guitar strums and keys that beautifully backdrop the wildlife-populated scenic picture Eric is painting. This being 2026 though, a song of the natural world cannot be evoked without a sense of foreboding and a feeling of something that is lost. Finally, the title track is by far the most rousingly ecstatic arrangement of the whole record, although dig a little deeper and this feels more like one last hurrah at the end of the world. After all, the landfill in the lyric is piled so high that our narrator can look down on an old acquaintance’s neighbourhood. Either way, the strong big finish is in tune with the energy and ideas that free-flow across the entire album. The Landfill should rightfully be the record that firmly underlines the prominent place held by the Fruit Bats in the canon of modern, rootsy American song writing based music.
The Landfill (June 12th, 2026) Merge Records
Order/Save: https://lnk.to/thelandfill