Bandleader: Coal, Pressure, Time 

For the past several months, Burlington-based rockers Bandleader have been hard at work on their debut LP, a crowd-funded effort recorded — as all indie records are now legally required to be in a post-Bon Iver world — at a cabin in the woods. That album, dubbed Coal, Pressure, Time, won’t reach our ears until October 1, reportedly with a Monkey House gig on or around that date.

In the meantime, the band recently released a single, “Return to Me,” to tide fans over for the next few weeks. Not to be confused with the Dean Martin classic of the same name, it’s a sneakily catchy, fat-bottomed little charmer seemingly informed by mid-1990s alt-rock and laced with just a touch of pop-punk precociousness — the latter especially in lead vocalist Patrick McCormack’s playfully casual delivery.  

  

Dan Bolles is a culture coeditor at Seven Days. He joined the paper in 2007 as its music editor, covering Vermont's robust music, comedy and nightlife scenes for a decade before deciding he was too old to be going to the Monkey House on weeknights to see rock shows for a living. He became assistant arts editor in 2017 and culture coeditor in 2021. Bolles has received numerous local and national awards for his writing on Vermont arts, sports and the occasional celebrity canine murder mystery. He loves...