Fruit Bats

The midwest, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnson hails from, is a largely flat expanse. Zipping through it on the highway, you’ll see cities and towns rise up in the distance, but blink and you’ll miss other man-made rejoinders to horizontal living dotting the landscape, hill after hill, 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, 2026 album from Merge Records, is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart.

Over the course of his now 25-year career under the moniker, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output as Fruit Bats has been the product of patience and fine-tuning. His songs, to borrow a phrase, are slow growers, given life on albums that encompass long stretches of time and memory. Baby Man changed that — he disallowed himself from referring to material he’d been working on before laying the album down, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-consciousness, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his afternoon recording sessions. It was both a breathtaking document of Johnson’s skill as a singer-songwriter and an unvarnished account of the two weeks in which he recorded the album.

All of these songs — most of the songs on The Landfill, in fact — mark themselves immediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expanding songbook, seekers and anthems alike. It’s the most daunting peak he’s scaled yet, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammers couldn’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.