01/05/2025
The Pennys EP is out today! Available on streaming and Bandcamp digital, physical copies held up in shipping but we'll have them in two weeks and will ship all pre-orders ASAP.
Nice write up in Rosy Overdrive!
The Pennys are the indie pop team-up that we didn’t know we needed. The band came together as a creative partnership between two San Francisco Bay Area titans in Michael Ramos and Ray Seraphin, later adding Yea-Ming Chen (Yea-Ming and the Rumors) on vocals, keyboards, and organ, Owen Adair Kelley (Sleepy Sun, R.E. Seraphin) on slide guitar, and Luke Robbins (R.E. Seraphin, Ryli, Yea-Ming and the Rumors) on vocals. Ramos and Seraphin have perhaps two of the most distinct styles of all the Bay Area pop revivalists–via his solo project Tony Jay (and to a lesser degree, his work as one half of Flowertown), Ramos embraces a slow-moving, unmoored, dreamy indie pop sound, while Seraphin’s quasi-solo project R.E. Seraphin embraces more full and grounded power pop/college rock (albeit tempered by his relatively gentle vocals). They’re clearly removed from one another, but compatible enough that it doesn’t surprise me that they blend well together on The Pennys, their new project’s debut 12-inch EP. Busier than Tony Jay but more subdued than R.E. Seraphin, The Pennys hit the jangle pop sweet spot for six songs and sixteen minutes on their first record (out via Mt.St.Mtn., which would be an indication of quality even if the co-bandleaders didn’t have plenty of work that speaks for itself).
Apparently The Pennys began with Seraphin asking Ramos to record an upcoming solo album of his, but their debut EP opens with a track that has Ramos’ creative input all over it in “Say Something”. It’s relatively lively for Ramos, yes, but that dream pop, Velvets-y ramshackleness and slowed-down pop charm all feel very Tony Jay-adjacent. “One Million Things” might as well be The Pennys’ “hit” (as if they’re not all hits); it’s very upfront with its jangly hooks and never falters from its strong start. The Pennys delve a little more into desert rootsiness with “Trilobytes” and 60s jangle-psych with “My World” while holding onto their direct pop instincts, while “Long in the Teeth”–an electric power pop tune destabilized and distorted by the recording and production–could be the most successful synthesis of the two bandleaders’ various styles on the EP. “No More Tears”, the song that closes The Pennys, might have something to say about that, though–the chorus (“Every time I tell myself ‘no more tears’ / The clouds above begin to unleash all my fears”, accompanied by sparkling guitars) is probably the single most gorgeous moment on the entire EP, its perfect guitar pop containing both shades of Seraphin’s lost-in-time power pop and Ramos’ “prehistorical pop music slowed down and reverb-ed all up”. They can’t keep getting away with this. (Bandcamp link)
We’ve got a nice and weird Thursday Pressing Concerns up at bat, featuring three albums coming out tomorrow, May 2nd: new LPs from Club Night, Eli Winter, and Milkweed. Plus, we get an EP fro…
