With their jaunty and jangly second album, Sideways To New Italy, it felt like Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever had struck gold. Though its inopportune timing meant a fractured touring cycle – the record dropped in June of 2020, after all – it was a critical darling, and debuted at #4 on the ARIA Charts. It’s clear to see why, too: while it retained the band’s loose and lax energy, it felt tight and considered in ways their debut, 2018’s Hope Downs, didn’t. It was a sharply written, summery indie-rock album soaked in good vibes: the kind of release we all needed in that chaotic middle chunk of 2020.
, by contrast, feels like it was informed by that chaos – it’s a little
