Fruit Bats has announced the forthcoming release of the brand-new album The Landfill, on June 12th via Merge Records with an extensive full-band US tour to follow (see dates below). 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 critically acclaimed, intimate Fruit Bats solo outing, Baby Man. The Landfill is one of the most vibrant, full-band albums in Fruit Bats beloved catalogue.
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 Landfill 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 an album concerned with memory, consequence, and possibility, where the debris of the past becomes the ground from which new visions emerge.
The clever new conceptual video for the album’s title track was directed Adam Willis. Johnson says of the witty 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.” Watch “The Landfill” video below….
