A press baron barks at the beer-drinking kids next door, and within a minute I was on his side. That small, ridiculous miracle sits at the center of ‘Death of the Walden Newspaper Co.’, the Driveway Ceiling album that slipped out digitally in November 2023 and reaches physical mediums on October 30 through Independent Project Records. The timing feels right. A record about ink and newsprint ought to be something you can hold.
The band’s own story is half the charm. They formed in high school in Connecticut, grew into a real group mostly over the internet, and now live in different corners of the country, buried in college and everything after it. Somehow they converged on a house in Pennsylvania to make this thing, with Liam Mottolese and Colin Walsh handling the bulk of the writing and singing. The subject is a *Hearst*-style tycoon who gets talked into decency by rhythm and melody. Concept albums have a long record of embarrassing the people who attempt them, and nearly sixty years after ‘Pepper’ and ‘Village Green’ the form invites a raised eyebrow. Driveway Ceiling clearly didn’t get the memo, and we should all be glad for it.
“Sleepy River Dawn” opens on a sun-faded surf-pop sway, and “Leisure Time” flits past in about half a minute with the same salty shimmer. “Yellow Journalism” tips its hat to the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ era, all swirling flourishes and a straight face. “Impressive Distances,” a title that doubles as an in-joke about the miles between these four, kicks up garage-rock dust. “Beeline” wanders into psychedelia. Then “Disgust” and “Smoking Again” lean toward early-’90s grunge, the latter bending toward something stranger and more experimental.
The writing keeps pace with the sound. “Black Swan” and “Hair in the Drain” shrink the big media-mogul saga down to household scale. “Get a Load of This Guy” is a sketch of a track, barely a minute and a half. And “Mr. Walden” opens with the man himself ranting at the neighbor kids, a bit of comic theater that could have curdled into parody. Instead, once the band kicks in, he turns into someone you can’t quite dismiss. The song never pleads his case. It just lets a melody sit beside him until he starts to look like a person. Then comes “Obituary,” in which Walden is finished off by too many cigars. A piano note rings out and hangs there. After fourteen songs of mischief, that single sustained tone lands like a held breath, holding through the silence afterward instead of reaching for the next thing.
The band confess all four of them would rather be Ringo Starr than John Lennon or Paul McCartney, and you can hear it. Nobody grabs the wheel. Mottolese and Walsh trade the lead, and the playing stays in service of the song. Hopping between surf, garage, psychedelia, and grunge in barely forty minutes could easily read as a band unable to decide who it is. Here it reads as a band that loves too many records to pick one. The physical editions are small acts of devotion. They come with a fold-out newspaper called The Cherryfield Observer, published by the fictional Walden company, which claims its circulation soared once its owner had his change of heart and started covering music. A special edition CD along with Forest Green and Black vinyl pressing variations are all out the same day.
Releases October 30, 2026
To learn more and to pre-order, please visit: Independent Project Records | Bandcamp | Instagram
