I Hate People Records will release Rat City Riot’s Highway Hymns.

When the Nervous Wreckords launch Let Them All Talk at the Casbah on June 30, frontman Brian Karscig promises “Surprises. We always have a couple up our sleeves that you’ll have to be there to see.” A limited edition of the new full-length will be on sale, unavailable anywhere else.

June 30 is also the day Rat City Riot debuts Highway Hymns at the Til-Two Club in City Heights. “We’ll probably cover Tina Turner’s ‘One of the Living,’ from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” says Noah Bricker, soon to embark with the band on a brief tour of Germany and the Netherlands lined up by their overseas label, I Hate People Records.

A release party for Ensemble Off ’N’ On’s self-titled debut full-length happens July 8 at 3rd Space on Park Boulevard, with a diverse bill that includes jazz vocalist Leonard Patton, percussion duo Harold’s Hobo, and ceramic artist Laura Hershey.

P.O.D.’s first studio full-length in four years, Murdered Love, drops on July 10; while July 17 will see the debut of the Drowning Men’s sophomore effort, All of the Unknown, and Pierce the Veil’s Collide with the Sky.

Former Warren Zevon collaborator Darius Degher, of local ’80s rockers Darius and the Magnets, returned to Leucadia after spending the past dozen years in Sweden. He’ll launch his first solo CD in eight years, Coyote Cantos, at the E Street Café in Encinitas on July 14. Says Degher, “I’ll be playing two acoustic sets, sort of an Evening with Darius kind of thing, doing songs from all four of my solo albums. My 20-year-old daughter, Cleopatra, who just released her own EP, will be singing and playing with me.”

Alisha Zalkin returns to her hometown on July 27 to debut a new EP, March to a Different Beat, at Humphrey’s Backstage. “The title track,” she says, “is dedicated to my father, who struggled as the son of two Holocaust survivors and as the first-generation American of his family.”

The reunited mods of Manual Scan have recorded the title track to Remember the Lightning: A Tribute to 20/20, as well as completing an EP of new music, their first since the late ’80s.

Forbidden Pigs are in the studio, and their song “Are You Going Back There Tonight” will be heard in the upcoming NC-17 William Friedkin film Killer Joe, starring Mathew McConaughey and hitting theaters on July 27.