Fruit Bats Find New Routes On ‘the Landfill’

Eric D. Johnson has one of those voices – distinctive yet endearing, and capable of elevating deceptively simple three-minute pop songs into brainworms whose melodies you can’t stop humming for days. He’s been steadily building an impressive indie canon as Fruit Bats for the better part of this century, and the latest entry on Merge Records, The Landfill, finds him back in full-band mode after 2025’s stripped-down Baby Man.

Johnson is a melodic savant, with a knack for knowing just how often to add seductive flourishes like a wordless, cooing chorus. His vocals anchor the songs with the smooth sharpness of a well-honed knife cutting through the textured arrangements, especially when lingering on descriptive details like “wildfire ash on the window sill” (“Silverfish in the Sink”) or delivering a poignant and witty turn of phrase.

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Throughout, favored themes include taking life as it comes, keeping wonder in your heart and missing old homes and loved ones. On opener “The Saddest Part of the Song,” Johnson turns self-referential, nodding to his 2019 track “Cazadera” with the line “Some say sometimes a cloud is just a cloud is just a cloud.” He seems enamored with this phrase, having also used it to title a 2022 rarities comp, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s emblematic of his talent for finding new routes down well-trodden paths.

Ostensibly, he’s subverting the cliché of the poet who sees symbols in everything. That cloud isn’t “sadness” or “impermanence” – it’s just an actual cloud. Yet, in making that Zen-like observation, he invites a celebration both of the mundane and the profundity of life’s everyday details. It seems we really are looking at clouds from both sides, now.

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