Celebrated artist Fruit Bats announces the forthcoming release of the brand-new album The Landfill on June 12th via Merge Records. The new offering finds Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Eric D. Johnson (who performs under the Fruit Bats moniker) in a highly prolific period following 2025’s intimate solo outing, Baby Man. This album, however, is a full band experience by all accounts. The album can be preordered here.
The album title draws from a familiar feature of the Midwestern landscape where Johnson grew up: the quiet hills that rise unexpectedly from otherwise flat terrain. For Johnson, those sites became a powerful metaphor. The album imagines standing atop a towering pile of history: personal, emotional, and cultural, using that unlikely vantage point to survey what lies ahead. The result is concerned with memory, consequence, and possibility, where the debris of the past becomes the ground from which new visions emerge.
The conceptual video for the album’s title track was directed by Adam Willis. Johnson says of the clip, “This is my 6th video with the great Adam Willis, AKA Brother Willis. Another in our long line of collabs, which are often funny with cold opens and strange characters plumbing the depths of the human psyche. The very first brainstorm session, we landed on Close Encounters of the Third Kind as an initial reference. Especially the notion of a man at a crossroads who is haunted by a mysterious shape. Later, that morphed into the idea that, for some strange reason, I live a double life as a tortured art star in Europe. And that my music career there is completely unknown. Truth be told, Fruit Bats have had a strange journey as more or less a cult band for a long time. Things have gotten bigger in recent years in North America, but we ARE still quite obscure in Europe. This is a less than subtle nod to that fact.”
He concludes, “Silly and obscure as these concepts may be, the video still plays to the lyric and feeling of the song. The notions of memory and legacy, and following signs that may or may not lead you down the right path. Adam and I always like winking in these videos, but the concepts and stories are still kinda poignant at the end of the day.”
During the more than two decades of releasing music as Fruit Bats, Johnson has carefully shaped his songs over time. That process shifted following Baby Man, which embraced a stream-of-consciousness writing method and captured songs almost as quickly as they appeared. The experience seemingly has unlocked something in Johnson, which he carried directly into the creation of this album. So, within weeks of completing the solo record, he went to Bear Creek Studios in Washington, this time with his longtime touring band, featuring bassist David Dawda, guitarist Josh Mease, keyboardist Frank LoCrasto, and drummer Kosta Galanopoulos, to apply the process in a fully collaborative setting. The band tracked much of the album together in the room, prioritising instinct and chemistry over polish, with few overdubs, no click tracks, and performances captured largely in real time.
Here’s that video – enjoy it, it’s a trip:
