New Music From Fruit Bats

The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flat expanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you’ll see cities and towns rise up in the distance, but blink and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape, hill after hill, built from the refuse of the past: landfills. Some of these hills make for great sledding spots, parks, and trails. Others turn organic waste into compost. The Landfill, Fruit Bats’ June 12, 2026 album from Merge Records, is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart. This being a Fruit Bats record, one scales that mountain to take in the view, to see the future spread out as wide and endless as the midwestern plains.

Available now, “That Goddamn Sun” is the album’s third single. “Sometimes words don’t suffice, and a chorus ends up with none of them,” Johnson says about the song. “This “ooooh” melody existed as a voice memo on my phone for a couple of years. It came to me in a large echo-y backstage tiled bathroom somewhere and then languished for a while. The rest of the song was developed during a writing session with my bandmates Kosta Galanopoulos and Josh Mease -we were playing and this old melody just slotted right in there. The lyrics are about something many have written about over the years -the ol’ ‘waiting for the sun to shine’story.”

FCC Caution on “That Goddamn Sun”

Label: Merge Records

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