Fruit Bats

Fruit Bats is the longtime project of Grammy-nominated Eric D. Johnson (Bonny Light Horseman, The Shins, Califone). Produced by Johnson and his Gold Past Life album collaborator Thom Monahan, the band returns to release The Landfill via Merge Records on June 12, 2026. 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. Fruit Bats fans seeking to climb to the peak of The Landfill and take in those new visions for themselves, take heart: the full Fruit Bats band is embarking on their largest ever tour of North America, beginning this June.