Rocketship Announce New Album Hurt Feelings, Share “New Threats”

Rocketship have spent much of this year looking backward. The Portland band reissued their 1996 album A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness and played their first tour in eight years. That retrospective turn now comes with something new attached: Hurt Feelings, due October 30 on Darla, with “New Threats” as its first single.

The track stays inside the band’s established register. Guitars are fuzzed and pushed forward, vocals sit low and undramatic, and the melody drifts in rather than announcing itself. It is guitar pop made by people who have been making it for three decades and have learned what to leave out. The ten-song tracklist, running from “Lovers” to the closer “O Grande Amor,” suggests an album assembled from small shifts in texture rather than one grand gesture.

Rocketship’s early records belong to a mid-nineties indie-pop moment whose listeners have since been partly rebuilt through reissues and archival discovery, which is roughly what the anniversary edition demonstrated earlier this year. A new album asks a harder question: whether that hushed, slightly withdrawn approach still registers as a choice rather than a period detail. “New Threats” makes a reasonable case that it does.