Fruit Bats’ ‘The Landfill’ Locates Beauty in Tall Trash Heaps

Eric D. Johnson has spent 25 years as Fruit Bats, building a steady catalog that rarely feels padded. “The Landfill,” his eleventh album, arrives after the bare solo experiment “Baby Man” divided listeners. This time, Johnson opts for a full-band sound, wide and detailed, inspired by the man-made hills that interrupt the otherwise flat American Midwest.

The album’s central metaphor is literal: the landfills that dot Johnson’s native landscape become a vantage point built from collective waste. “The mountain that gives us this vantage point,” he says, “is made out of the trash that we’ve created.” That tension between intimate reflection and expansive arrangement plays out across tracks like the soul-leaning opener “The Saddest Part of The Song,” the country-tinged “Fishin’ for a Vision,” and the acoustic-electric combination of “Perhaps We’re a Storm.” The title track closes on a sweeping, ambivalent note: “a holy vision / of what could be / and couldn’t be / and could have been.”

The album doesn’t announce itself with a bold, immediate statement. It moves slowly, layering Johnson’s conversational vocals over patient arrangements. The result is a record that rewards attention without demanding it, a summer companion that unfolds with each listen. “The Landfill” doesn’t try to outrun the past; it builds something sturdy on top of it.