In 2018, Ovlov came out of sorta-retirement with Tru, their first full-length in five years at that point. The band’s ringleader Steve Hartlett put out another album as Stove not long after that, but otherwise the cultishly beloved Connecticut band has been pretty quiet since then. (Though some of its members have other projects and Hartlett’s put out some music on his own.) But today Ovlov are announcing a new album, Buds, which will be out in November. Its lead single “Land Of Steve-O” is the sort of itchy and insistent rocker with the sort of slicing guitar work that one has come to expect from the band.

Here’s Hartlett with a statement about the track:

I wrote this song after I got in some stupid argument with my father in the car, and once we got home I decided to go for a walk but ended up walking for about 2 hours and stopping to sit on a bench at the police station in the center of Newtown, Ct, where my parents raised me and still live today. I texted my friend Steve-O who I had been hanging out with a lot at the time. Basically anytime I was feeling like I wanted to hang out with someone, whether I was in need of someone to confide in or just wanted to chill, Steve-O was always down. He’s been an extremely important and close friend of mine since we met in the 6th grade when basically we both wrote down that Papa Roach was our favorite band on a personality questionnaire our teacher wrote for us in order to more easily make friends with the weirdos from all the other elementary school. The song is basically just about how good a guy I think Steve-O is.

Listen to “Land Of Steve-O” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Baby Shea”
02 “Eat More”
03 “Land Of Steve-O”
04 “The Wishing Well”
05 “Strokes”
06 “Cheer Up, Chihiro”
07 “Moron Pt. 2”
08 “Feel The Pain”

Buds is out 11/19 via Exploding In Sound. Pre-order it here.