Landowner

Landowner is a band from Holyoke, Massachusetts, formed in 2016 around songwriter and vocalist Dan Shaw. The current lineup includes guitarists Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin, bassist and backup vocalist Josh Owsley, and drummer Josh Daniel, who have played together since 2017.

Their records, including Blatant and Consultant, are built on a deliberately unusual set of restrictions: guitars are played clean, with no distortion, over rigid, fast drumming, leaving the arrangements skeletal and sharply defined. Listeners have reached for The Fall, Lungfish or Uranium Club as reference points, though the band's sound remains its own.

Shaw delivers the lyrics in a flat, hectoring shout, often addressing development, land use, work and the texture of daily life in small post-industrial cities. The result sits somewhere between post-punk and minimal hardcore, and the tension comes from precision and repetition rather than volume or noise.

Assumption, released in February 2026 on Exploding in Sound, is the band's fifth album. Its twelve songs were honed over a year or two of live shows before the group recorded in rural Bradford, Vermont with Brett Nagafuchi at Mt Din studio. Nagafuchi also mixed the record, and Carl Saff handled mastering.

The album's title plays on assumptions made amid daily information overload, on artificial intelligence doing people's thinking for them, and on the word's religious sense. By its end, Shaw turns the anxious focus inward, arriving at the thought that his own fears may rest on assumptions as unfounded as any other.