BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//EventFinder//Add to Calendar//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT UID:evt_d63327ccc04a@eventfinder DTSTAMP:20260831T151311Z DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20261002T200000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20261002T220000 SUMMARY:Fruit Bats (with band) LOCATION:Rio Theatre\, 1205 Soquel Ave\, Santa Cruz\, CA 95062 DESCRIPTION:Fruit Batsplus:: Matthew Logan VasquezFruit Bats | The Landfill | MRG887The midwest\, particularly the part of the midwest Eric D. Johnso n hails from\, is a largely flat expanse. Zipping through it on the highwa y\, 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 l andscape\, hill after hill\, built from the refuse of the past: landfills. Some of these hills make for great sledding spots\, parks\, and trails. O thers turn organic waste into compost. The Landfill\, Fruit Bats’ June 1 2\, 2026 album from Merge Records\, is something else entirely: a mountain dominating the landscape of Johnson’s heart.This being a Fruit Bats rec ord\, one scales that mountain to take in the view\, to see the future spr ead out as wide and endless as the midwestern plains. “But the mountain that gives us this vantage point\,” Johnson says\, “is made out of the trash that we’ve created\, the collective weight of the past and where it’s taken us.” When he details that view on title track and lead sing le “The Landfill” — “a holy vision / of what could be / and couldn ’t be / and could have been” — it’s thrilling to hear him sent soa ring by a full complement of instruments. But what’s truly stunning is h ow\, in his recontouring from could to couldn’t to could have been\, he has lost none of the vulnerability that was brought to the foreground of h is songwriting by 2025’s solo outing\, Baby Man.Over the course of his n ow 25-year career under the moniker\, most of Eric D. Johnson’s output a s 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 encompa ss long stretches of time and memory. Baby Man changed that — he disallo wed himself from referring to material he’d been working on before layin g the album down\, utilizing the morning pages technique of stream-of-cons ciousness\, observational songwriting which flowed directly into his after noon 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.Baby Man’s closeness to Johnson’s hear t and the close attention to his voice and instrument its minimalist-maxim alist ethos required uncorked something in him as he wrote towards a new f ull band effort. “That session was over\,” he explains\, “but there was way more to explore. I liked the immediacy of it\, and I wanted to see how that would translate into a full-band Fruit Bats record.” Within we eks\, he was back in a studio\, this time with his band — David Dawda (b ass)\, Josh Mease (guitars\, synth)\, Frank LoCrasto (piano\, synth)\, and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums) — with whom Johnson has spent over a decade building Fruit Bats into one of the most in-demand live acts in indie rock . Listening to The Landfill\, it’s not hard to understand why: simply pu t\, this band smokes.Producing the initial recording sessions in Washingto n’s Bear Creek Studios\, Johnson set out to capture “the sound of this band I constantly marvel at\, the feeling of being in a room with musicia ns you love and trust enough to let them cook.” They laid most of it dow n on the floor — no click tracks\, no comped vocals\, and minimal overdu bs\, with frequent collaborator Thom Monahan returning to provide addition al production and The Landfill’s final mix. “It’s how we do things w ith my other band\, Bonny Light Horseman\, and I was curious to see how it would work with Fruit Bats\,” Johnson notes. “It’s both a very pers onal record\, and my most collaborative to date.”It’s also the most li ve a Fruit Bats record has been since 2009’s The Ruminant Band\, and in paring back the number of tracks that typically layer a full-band song\, t he psychedelic\, technicolor dreaminess of their sound is more vivid than ever. Time and space melt into the sublime as the band gels around Johnson ’s hazy croon on “That Goddamn Sun\,” stretching out to accommodate him as he trips from California to North Carolina. In striking a balance b etween ecstatic romance and melancholia\, “Think Aboutcha” occupies th e blissful-but-doomed intersection of the E Street Band and Paul McCartney \, playful but playing for stakes that are larger than life\, while “Per haps We’re a Storm” charges headlong into the unknown.All of these son gs — most of the songs on The Landfill\, in fact — mark themselves imm ediately as some of the best in Eric D. Johnson’s ever-expanding songboo k\, seekers and anthems alike. It’s the most daunting peak he’s scaled yet\, musically or lyrically: a swashbuckling set of full-band jammers co uldn’t be more honest and open-hearted about his hopes and anxieties\, h is dreams and failures\, what’s passed and what will come to pass\, were it just him\, his guitar\, and the listener.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\ n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\ n Show time: 8:00 PM\, doors\n\nhttps://www.riotheatre.com/events-2/2026/ 10/2/fruitbats URL:https://www.riotheatre.com/events-2/2026/10/2/fruitbats END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR