Fruit Bats Find New Routes on ‘The Landfill’

The latest Fruit Bats album arrives with a characteristic lack of fanfare. The Landfill, out now on Merge Records, marks Eric D. Johnson’s return to full-band arrangements after last year’s stripped-down Baby Man. The shift isn’t dramatic—Johnson’s songwriting never hinges on volume—but it restores a textured warmth to songs that already feel lived-in.

Johnson remains a melodic pragmatist, crafting hooks that settle in without demanding attention. His voice, crisp and slightly reedy, does the heavy lifting: a line like “wildfire ash on the window sill” (from “Silverfish in the Sink”) lands because his delivery treats it as fact, not poetry. Throughout the record, he circles familiar preoccupations—wonder, loss, homes left behind—with an easy, unsentimental clarity.

The album’s opening track, “The Saddest Part of the Song,” borrows a phrase Johnson has used before: “Some say sometimes a cloud is just a cloud is just a cloud.” It nods to his 2019 song “Cazadera” and later became the title of a 2022 rarities compilation. Here, it functions as a kind of thesis. Johnson isn’t after grand symbols. He’s interested in the way ordinary things accrue weight simply by being noticed. That a cloud could be just a cloud is, in his hands, its own quiet revelation.