Video of the Day: The New Old-Fashioned – What In The Hell

There is something wonderfully disorienting about “What In The Hell.” The New Old-Fashioned has always occupied that sweet spot where power pop, garage rock, country, and indie sensibilities collide, and this latest single turns the amps up while keeping the hooks firmly intact. It’s a song that feels both urgent and effortlessly catchy, asking a question that sounds increasingly relevant in 2026: What in the hell is going on?

The band’s trademark vocal interplay gives the track its personality. Tom Blackbern, Kent Montgomery, Matt Oliver, and David Payne sound less like a traditional lead singer with backing vocals and more like four friends shouting observations from different corners of the same room. The result is energetic, lived-in, and refreshingly authentic.

Musically, the song leans into crunchy guitars, a relentlessly driving rhythm section, and melodic choruses that refuse to leave your head. David Payne’s engineering at Reel Love Recording Co. captures the band’s live chemistry, while Tim Pritchard’s mix and mastering at Great Horned Audio gives every instrument room to breathe without sanding away the grit that makes the performance so engaging. Great Horned Audio and Reel Love Recording both deserve a mention as fantastic contributors to the Dayton music scene. They provide essential recording, mixing, and mastering studios for the local indie and alternative music scene, acting as a key hub for bands and artists on Magnaphone Records. Spaces that allow artists to be themselves are invaluable in contemporary music.

The music video, directed, filmed, and animated through inventive stop-motion by writer, musician, and artist Brandon Berry (The Paint Splats), perfectly complements the song’s restless energy. Rather than simply documenting a performance, Berry creates a visual world that mirrors the track’s quirky humor and anxious momentum. The stop-motion aesthetic gives everything a handmade, tactile quality that fits the band’s DIY spirit, making every frame feel like a labor of love.

Taken together, “What In The Hell” is another reminder of why Dayton’s music scene continues to produce artists with a distinctive voice. The New Old-Fashioned doesn’t chase trends—they make guitar-driven rock with a nod to country music that feels timeless while still speaking directly to the confusion and absurdity of the present moment. It’s smart, spirited, and impossible not to enjoy.

Transmission from the Beautiful Midwestern Static

June 16, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Radio Show, WUDR, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative American Aquarium, and The Long Ryders, Bruce Hornsby, Cliff Hillis, Couchboy, Dayton, Dayton Music, Dayton Music Scene, Elephants and Star, Humbird, Joe Pernice, Kiwi Jr., music, New Music, Pere Ubu, Review, reviews, rock, Sonic Whip, Sports Boyfriend, The Laughing Chimes, The Linda Lindas, The Menzingers, The New Old-Fashioned, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

You know what I love about radio? One minute you’re getting your soul rattled by Elephants and Stars sounding like somebody spray-painted heartbreak across the side of a collapsing bowling alley, and the next minute The Linda Lindas come flying through the speakers like they just hijacked your older cousin’s garage band and turned it into a revolution. THAT’S radio, baby. Chaos with a heartbeat.

Sonic Whip’s “Survive” sounds like the inside of a jukebox after three cups of gas station coffee and a nervous breakdown somewhere outside Akron at 2 a.m. And I mean that as the highest compliment imaginable.

Cliff Hillis comes in with “The Square Route” like Big Star wandered into a neighborhood bar where somebody’s uncle still argues about whether power pop ever really died. Spoiler: it didn’t. It just learned how to drive at night with the windows down.

And then Bruce Hornsby shows up with Ezra Koenig like some kind of impossible musical blind date that SHOULD NOT WORK but absolutely does. It’s jazz-adjacent adult existentialism for people who still own concert ticket stubs from 1997 in a shoebox under the bed.

American Aquarium’s “History Repeats Itself” sounds like somebody reading tomorrow’s headlines through a busted neon sign in a Southern roadside diner. There’s dust on the boots, blood in the memory, and enough truth in there to make politicians nervous.

You hear a band name like Sports Boyfriend and think maybe you’re getting irony. Nope. You’re getting sharp little pop songs that ricochet around your skull like pinballs in a dive bar arcade nobody’s cleaned since the Clinton administration.

And then BOOM — Pere Ubu crashes into the set like a shopping cart full of sparks and loose wires. “Non-Alignment Pact” still sounds like the future arguing with itself in a Cleveland factory basement. Some songs age. That song mutates.

The Menzingers always sound like they know exactly how it feels to miss somebody while staring out the window of a moving car at 1:17 in the morning wondering where all your old friends went. Nobody writes working-class nostalgia with this much gasoline and heart.

Joe Pernice drops in with “Twenty-Thousand Times” sounding like a man who has quietly mastered the art of surviving disappointment beautifully. Some songs shout at you. Pernice just leans over and tells you the truth softly enough that you actually listen.

And The Laughing Chimes? Man, those songs sound like Midwest summers that disappeared before anybody realized they mattered. Jangling guitars, beautiful ache, tiny moments turned cosmic. Dayton understands that kind of music. Ohio INVENTED that emotional weather.

This is why we do this show. Because somewhere between Kiwi Jr., Humbird, Couchboy, The New Old-Fashioned, and The Long Ryders, somebody listening right now is hearing their new favorite song for the first time. And that little moment? That’s still magic.

Listen along at https://listen.streamon.fm/wudr

Dayton Favorites The New Old-Fashioned Return with New Music

June 2, 2026 your tuesday afternoon alternative Radio Show Classic Rock, Dayton, Dayton Music, Dayton Music Scene, Interview, music, New Music, radio, Radio Interview, reviews, rock, The New Old Fashioned, The New Old-Fashioned, writing, Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, YTAA

Today on YTAA, The New Old-Fashioned crashes into the studio, carrying the kind of anticipation that only comes when a band has been quietly building something behind the scenes instead of flooding the world with half-finished updates and social media breadcrumbs.

For fans of the Dayton scene, this is a notable moment. The band’s upcoming single, arriving June 6, marks the first new music released since the Big City EP. This record captured their knack for balancing heartland storytelling, jangling guitars, and the restless energy of musicians who understand that the best songs are often born somewhere between nostalgia and forward motion.

Listening to The New Old-Fashioned has always felt a little like finding a stack of well-worn records in a friend’s basement: familiar enough to immediately feel comforting, and alive enough to remind you why rock and roll keeps reinventing itself while recognizing where it came from in the first place. Their music pulls from the past without becoming trapped by it. That’s a difficult trick. Plenty of bands know how to imitate history; far fewer know how to converse with it.

And that’s what makes this new material intriguing. After the long stretch since Big City, the question isn’t whether the band can pick up where they left off. The question is what they’ve discovered in the meantime. What stories have accumulated? What rough edges have become sharper? What melodies have been waiting for the right moment to emerge?

Tune in this afternoon for a sneak peek at the new song and a conversation with the band about the road from Big City to this next chapter. If rock and roll is a continuing argument between who we were and who we’re trying to become, then The New Old-Fashioned sounds ready to pick that argument back up.

Listen here: WUDR YTAA Stream