Fruit Bats

The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flatexpanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you’ll see cities and towns rise up in the distance, butblink and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape, hill afterhill, 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, 2026album from Merge Records, is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape ofJohnson’s heart.This being a Fruit Bats record, one scales that mountain to take in the view, to see the future spreadout as wide and endless as the midwestern plains. “But the mountain that gives us this vantagepoint,” Johnson says, “is made out of the trash that we’ve created, the collective weight of the pastand where it’s taken us.” When he details that view on title track and lead single “The Landfill” —“a holy vision / of what could be / and couldn’t be / and could have been” — it’s thrilling to hearhim sent soaring by a full complement of instruments. But what’s truly stunning is how, in hisrecontouring from could to couldn’t to could have been, he has lost none of the vulnerability thatwas brought to the foreground of his songwriting by 2025’s solo outing, Baby Man.

Over the course of his now 25-year career under the moniker, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output asFruit Bats has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs, to borrow a phrase, are slowgrowers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time and memory. Baby Manchanged that — he disallowed himself from referring to material he’d been working on beforelaying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-consciousness,observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoon recording sessions. It was botha breathtaking document of Johnson’s skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account ofthe two weeks in which he recorded the album.Baby Man’s closeness to Johnson’s heart and the close attention to his voice and instrument itsminimalist-maximalist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote towards a new fullband effort.

“That session was over,” he explains, “but there was way more to explore. I liked theimmediacy of it, and I wanted to see how that would translate into a full-band Fruit Bats record.”

Within weeks, he was back in a studio, this time with his band — David Dawda (bass), Josh Mease(guitars, synth), Frank LoCrasto (piano, synth), and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums) — with whomJohnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of the most in-demand live acts inindie rock. Listening to The Landfill, it’s not hard to understand why: simply put, this band smokes.Producing the initial recording sessions in Washington’s Bear Creek Studios, Johnson set out tocapture “the sound of this band I constantly marvel at, the feeling of being in a room with musiciansyou love and trust enough to let them cook.” They laid most of it down on the floor — no clicktracks, no comped vocals, and minimal overdubs, with frequent collaborator Thom Monahan returning to provide additional production and The Landfill’s final mix. “It’s how we do things withmy other band, Bonny Light Horseman, and I was curious to see how it would work with FruitBats,” Johnson notes. “It’s both a very personal record, and my most collaborative to date.”

It’s also the most live a Fruit Bats record has been since 2009’s The Ruminant Band, and in paringback the number of tracks that typically layer a full-band song, the psychedelic, technicolordreaminess of their sound is more vivid than ever. Time and space melt into the sublime as theband gels around Johnson’s hazy croon on “That Goddamn Sun,” stretching out to accommodatehim as he trips from California to North Carolina. In striking a balance between ecstatic romanceand melancholia, “Think Aboutcha” occupies the blissful-but-doomed intersection of the E StreetBand and Paul McCartney, playful but playing for stakes that are larger than life, while “PerhapsWe’re a Storm” charges headlong into the unknown.All of these songs — most of the songs on The Landfill, in fact — mark themselves immediately assome of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expanding songbook, seekers and anthems alike. It’s themost daunting peak he’s scaled yet, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammerscouldn’t be more honest and open-hearted about his hopes and anxieties, his dreams and failures,what’s passed and what will come to pass, were it just him, his guitar, and the listener.