New Music From Fruit Bats
The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest from which Eric D. Johnson hails, 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. “But the mountain that gives us this vantage point,” Johnson says, “is made out of the trash that we’ve created, the collective weight of the past and where it’s taken us.”
He details that view on title track, “The Landfill” — “a holy vision / of what could be / and couldn’t be / and could have been.” Another highlight, “Think Aboutcha,” Johnson says, “is a song about a preoccupation that has made its way into many of my lyrics: the liminal space in a dream where memories and love and heartache blur into a psychedelic haze. It was recorded live at Bear Creek Studios on a rainy spring day in Washington State. It pretty much sounds like how we sounded playing in that beautiful barn that day, save for a few tiny overdubs and mix magic.” About “That Goddamn Sun,” the album’s third single, Johnson says, “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 Warning: Track #1 “The Saddest Part of the Song”
Label: Merge Records
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