CVC’S UNDERGROUND RUNDOWN 003: My Pitbull Lucifer, GOLLYLAGGING, A BRIEF MEMOIR & ANALOG DREAM
There's a certain kind of music that seems to exist slightly outside the grid.
Hidden gems you won't find streaming neatly inside a genre algorithm. These sounds might crawl out of a basement in Boston, leak through the walls of a San Francisco practice space, or arrive in the mail from Croatia. You may have to go digging or be in the right space at the right time.
For Rundown 003, we're following four different paths through the underground: My Pitbull Lucifer, Gollylagging, A Brief Memoir, and Analog Dream.
Four separate scenes. Four reminders that independent music still has plenty of weird corners left to explore.
My Pitbull Lucifer creates a shade of heavy music that doesn't seem particularly interested in choosing between crushing and hypnotizing you. The quartet with Dina on guitar, Vedran on vocals, Luže on drums, and Loris on bass, pulls from neo-doom, sludge, stoner rock, psych, punk, prog, and noise, but the interesting part's what happens when all those elements stop following any rules.
Their newest album, Welcome To New Earth, is a five-track, 32-minute descent into that collision. Released in March through Pula's independent No Profit Recordings, the record opens with “Gushing River,” moves through “Mountains," before eventually arriving at the eleven-minute “Analog Man.”
The album's heaviness isn't simply about stacking distortion until the speakers surrender. “Gushing River” establishes the band's doom and stoner foundation before the record starts wandering into stranger territory. “Mountains” pushes through shifting rhythms and unexpected turns, while “Mindfood” introduces synthesizer work from Dmitri Koshkin. By the time “Analog Man” stretches beyond eleven minutes, the band's opened the door wider than most traditional doom bands, beckoning listener's to venture further.
The group's independent roots matter here, too. My Pitbull Lucifer formed in 2021 from members of Croatian bands Mighty Zazuum and Bolesno Grinje, and the band's continued operating within a broader network of independent musicians and spaces.
Their connection to No Profit Recordings is part of that same ecosystem. While operating out of Pula, No Profit Recordings, reflects the kind of small-scale infrastructure that keeps underground music moving: local releases, bookings, promotion, physical records, and connections between scenes that may otherwise never cross paths.
The physical album itself follows that DIY instinct: Welcome To New Earth exists on black vinyl, CD, and cassette, with the vinyl limited to 200 copies and the cassette to 50.
My Pitbull Lucifer have spent the years fostering their own network through live shows and collaborations. Sharing stages with Cro-Mags, Black Lungs and Hippie Death Cult and releasing a split LP with American doom band Ommnus have further propelled them into a DIY spotlight. Their music exists in an underground web where a record can travel farther than the band that made it. Heavy music's always been good at imagining and building bridges to alternate worlds. Luckily, Croatia's another auditory destination to get yourself immersed in.
FFO: SLIFT, Clutch
Gollylagging - What're you Waiting For, the Scene's Out the Front Door?
If you want to understand Gollylagging, don't start with the genre tags or any pig latin. Start with the cookout.
Their video for “Comet” doesn't construct some elaborate alternate universe for the group. Instead, it shares a raw and authentic view of the Boston DIY scene straight on VHS.
The four-piece: Jake Regulbuto, Jules Skiffington, Andrew Garas, and Joey Lorant, have spent years moving through the Boston and greater New England's DIY ecosystem, accumulating splits, singles, shows, festivals, friendships, and all the other invisible infrastructure that eventually becomes a scene. Their forthcoming debut album, Real Life, grows out of that history.
The songs deal with dissatisfaction, damaged relationships, recurring patterns, and the uncomfortable realization that sometimes changing your life's harder than recognizing that something needs to change. Yet there's a strange warmth underneath all of it. Right off the bat, “Comet,” deals with the collapse of a long-term friendship and then the band makes a wholesome video about friendship. They really touch on those bittersweet truths that keep us all pounding the pavement for something to relate with.
Gollylagging taps into shoegaze, punk, midwest emo, and indie rock pockets without sounding particularly interested in defending those boundaries. The immediate melodies, lo-fi fuzziness, and overall emotional depth of their discography really sets the record straight. This group truly knows how to whip up ear candy that's as nutritious for the soul as a cross country roadtrip. Cue up the single "Red Fish" or their 2023 split with going222jail and Dino Gala, and thank yourself later.
Gollylagging aren't just playing music about real life. They're writing a soundtrack for the real one's living it with them.
FFO: Alex G, Whitney, Weezer
A Brief Memoir - North Texas Emo, Written in the Aftermath
Most bands recognize the journey to the land of music's more of a marathon than a sprint to success. A Brief Memoir, a five-piece emo outfit from Denton, Texas, spent its early years navigating shifting lineups, gaps between shows, fill-in members, and the growing pains that come with trying to keep a band alive. Since emerging with a self-released demo in 2022, the group has put out "Night Night", the Ode to Raul EP, and Two Songs in 2026, building its identity one release at a time.
Now, with a steadier lineup and a self-titled album released through Rite Field Records on June 12, 2026, the band sounds less interested in chasing a scene's expectations than in figuring out what it actually wants to say.
Their new record returns to the fundamentals: chiming guitars, familiar emo tunings, soft-to-crunchy dynamics, and the kind of loose, imperfect playing that leaves fingerprints all over the finished product.
While screamo seeped into their earlier sound, A Brief Memoir has gradually loosened its grip on that framework, allowing quieter passages and more spacious arrangements to carry their own weight. The result isn't a polished reinvention so much as a band learning when to let a song breathe. The writing circles absence, grief, old friendships, distance, and the strange gratitude that can arrive after something has already fallen apart. These aren't abstract exercises in melancholy; they're the ordinary wreckage of growing up, watching people drift away, and trying to make peace with places and versions of yourself that no longer exist.
A Brief Memoir's story belongs to the North Texas underground, where emo, post-hardcore, screamo, and slowcore overlap through shared bills, small venues, and bands that keep showing up even when momentum isn't guaranteed. The group's uneven early history is part of that reality, not a hurdle to hide behind a comeback narrative. No grand resurrection myth required. Just five friends, a history of persisting, and seven songs that showcase life isn't made meaningful by avoiding the difficult parts. Sometimes you have to sit with what's left long enough to hear something in it.
FFO: Duster, Cap'n Jazz, Modest Mouse
Analog Dream - Through the Static, SF Shoegaze
Sometimes creativity strikes like a cosmic collision. Analog Dream began with Rich Cannon and Jorge Sandoval in San Francisco, building indie-rock guitars around electronic textures before the project gradually grew into a five-piece with Caleb Dolister on drums, Kevin Fayle on synth, and Sarah Reinke on bass and vocals.
After releasing earlier singles and EPs as a duo, the band spent years writing, recording, and collaborating before arriving at its current, heavier form, full of shoegaze haze, driving rhythms, layered harmonies, and guitars that know when to get loud.
This shift comes into focus on The Shape Of Us, a five-song EP released August 20, 2026, through New York’s Soundvsystem Records. The record pulls from the band's hardcore and punk roots without getting stuck in nostalgia, using atmospheric synths and thick guitar layers to stretch its songs out between tension and release.
The opening track, “Dystopian,” faces our present day social and political wreckage without surrendering to it. Its message isn't that everything will be fine, but that giving up isn't the only option. The title track turns inward, tracing the outlines of relationships changed by time, while “Velvet Knives” takes betrayal and flips it into a reckoning with the people we let close. “By A Thread” and “8.13” round out a record preoccupied with the moments that change us, often before we realize we're being changed.
Rather than treating shoegaze as an excuse to bury everything under reverb, Analog Dream uses that atmosphere to give its heavier passages somewhere to go. The band has described the EP as an attempt to capture a feeling, and that intention comes through in the push and pull between melodic release and emotional unease. These songs don't pretend that cynicism and hope cancel each other out. Sometimes they're happening at the same time.
The Shape Of Us doesn't offer a clean escape from the world's ugliness or the fallout of personal history. It makes room for both the damage and the possibility of moving through it. In a scene sustained by people who keep writing, playing shows, and building something outside the industry's usual machinery, that balance feels worth paying attention to. Analog Dream isn't trying to pretend the static will disappear. They're learning how to make something out of it.
FFO: Slowdive, Dinosaur Jr., DIIV
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