By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the devastating, grungy existentialism of Lily Seabird’s TRASH MOUNTAIN, out now via Lame-O, and the springy Midwest character centric songwriting of Case Oats’ LAST MISSOURI EXIT, out now via Merge!
Lilly Seabird – TRASH MOUNTAIN
Genre: Soft Grunge, Singer-Songwriter, Countrygaze
Favorite Tracks: “Trash Mountain (1pm),” “Arrow,” “Trash Mountain (1am)”
In the spirit of beginning to look back on 2025, I want to return to an album I should’ve made a Bandcamp Pick many times over throughout this year.
Lily Seabird’s been your favorite countrygazer’s favorite songwriter for some time now, a Forest Gump-type wistfully in the background of the genre’s rapid rise over the last few years. Her sophomore album ALAS, released in January of 2024, struck a balance between spiraling, grungy cries into the void and dutiful, approachable folk rock—you’ll be hard pressed to find a better song released last year than the suspensefully pleaful seven minute track at the middle of it, “Angel,” capturing a universal grief and reckoning with such percussive intensity.
But her latest, 2025’s TRASH MOUNTAIN, fully cements her as one of the scene’s most authorial voices, and perhaps the one best suited to meet fans of a particular subsect of mainstream singer-songwriter music in the middle of whatever cacophony of noise is coming out of either North Carolina or Vermont these days. The influence of Welch, Williams, and Harris can be felt throughout even more than previous records—Williams especially in the album’s two title tracks. Seabird is really locking in on a very specific type of dirty, loose, midtempo song and rarely deviating from that sonic idea; at times it reaches for something more distressingly ethereal sounding (“Sweepstake,” “Albany”), and other times it strips it all back and focuses in on just a piano and her angelically mortal voice (“How far away,” “The Fight”), but TRASH MOUNTAIN is always in the same shaggy pocket musically. There’s no “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road” here (or anywhere in her discography yet, but don’t worry, it’s coming). But by delivering a 35-minute album that’s just sitting in the same desperate, damaged, existential tone the whole time, you become locked in on Seabird’s judgement and wisdom.
The highlight of the album, like on ALAS, sits at the records center: “Arrow” is a fuzzy, fractured ballad, with slow motion guitar soloing and heartbreaking questions, Seabird mourning “Falling hard like a rock / I know it’ll hurt if I hit the bottom / What if we stayed here and soared?” It’s one of dozens of cutting lines whispered out through her exploration of TRASH MOUNTAIN. You can snag a copy over on Bandcamp.
Case Oats – LAST MISSOURI EXIT
Genre: Folk, Anti-Folk, Alt-Country
Favorite Tracks: “Nora,” “Bitter Root Lake,” “Seventeen”
Case Oats songwriting is springy. A bouncing ball floats over each of Casey Gomez Walker’s words, her playful delivery speeding up or slowing down each passage across the excellent debut LAST MISSOURI EXIT as she twists verses and choruses into ingenuous coming-of-age portraits. Produced by Spencer Tweedy helps capture a modern, updated version of the anti-folk sound that acted as an undercurrent to the early 2000s indie rock scene; the stirring, humdrum wit and heartfelt tone of acts like the Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis, the Mountain Goats, AJJ, and others feels spiritually revived throughout the Chicago outfits debut, though certainly much of the music here fits nicely next to current folk songwriters like Squirrel Flower or Haley Heynderickx.
The characters throughout LAST MISSOURI EXIT are easy to root for even as they meet their failure or demise, and Gomez Walker’s lyricism is a rush of colorful details and locations; Jesus loving moms, doomed lovers, the backseat of a Buick, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Milwaukee Avenue, the taste whiskey and coffee, Flathead County, Montana—this uniquely Midwest world is a vivid one both emotionally and narratively. The albums most direct character studies, “Nora” and “Bitter Root Lake,” are the immediate standouts, with quick-to-sing-along choruses and lively pop melodies. But when the band brings an aching alt country bend to the songs is when the stories hit hardest—in particular the sludgy, fiddle tipped barstool cut ”Hallelujah” and the organ backed outlaw waltz “Kentucky Cave.” LAST MISSOURI EXIT’s genius is how connected each song feels. No matter the perspective or story, Case Oats find worth and wisdom in it all. Give it a listen over on Bandcamp!
Comments