Single Review by William Ruben HelmsMay 21, 202609:30

New Audio: Riga’s Les Attitudes Spectrales Return with Scorching “Absorbed”

Riga-based noise punks Les Attitudes Spectrales — co-founders French-born, Latvian-based Julien Stark (vocals, guitar) and his Latvian-born spouse Rūta Stark (bass, vocals), along with Adrians Grīns (guitar) and Mārtiņš Kuzmins (drums ) — was initially founded in 2014 as a duo featuring its co-founders Julien Stark and Rūta Stark. And as a duo, the band released two lo-fi albums 2014’s Floral Wreck and 2015’s Where’s My Ghost Milk?

Shortly after the release of Where’s My Ghost Milk?, the Riga-based outfit expanded into a quartet with the addition of Grīns and Kuzmins. As a quartet, the band released 2019’s Vampire in the Summer and 2022’s award-winning Songs For No One on vinyl through boutique French label Specific Recordings.

The quartet signed to Latvian underground tastemaker label I Love You Records, who will be releasing the band’s fifth album, Watch The Sword About To Drop on May 26, 2026. The 10-song album is reportedly one of the most fearless and heaviest albums they’ve written and recorded to date, while capturing a band on the verge of exploding into the global noise and rock scenes.

Watch The Sword About To Drop will feature the previously released, breakneck King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Osees-like “A Trip Down Memory Loss” and the album’s second and latest single, “Absorbed.” Arguably one of the more straightforward songs of the forthcoming album, “Absorbed” is a scorching ripper that seemingly channels Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, The Men and others. It’s two-and-a-half minutes of raw, forceful playing and mosh pit friendly vibes.

Single Review by William Ruben HelmsMay 21, 202607:00

New Audio: Remington Super 60 Shares Shimmering, Dance Floor Friendly “Time to breathe”

Remington Super 60 — currently founding member, primary songwriter and producer Christoffer Schou, Elisabeth Thorsen and longtime collaborator Magnus Abelsen — is a Fredrikstad, Norway-based indie pop outfit the can trace its origins back to 1998 when its founder, Christoffer Schou started the project as a Casio synth pop band. Over the course of the Norwegian outfit’s almost 30 year history, the band’s sound has frequently bounced back and forth between Casio synth pop and 60s-inspired bubblegum pop drawing from Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground, Stereolab, The High Llamas, Cornelius, Yo La Tengo, Eggstone, New Order, The Cure and Adore-era Smashing Pumpkins, while releasing a handful of albums, EPs and singles through a number of labels across the globe.

The Norwegian outfit’s latest single “Time to breathe” is a decided change in sonic direction. Featuring a disco-influenced bass line and shimmering synth arpeggios, the song’s upbeat, hook-driven, ABBA-meets-Comme dans un penthouse-era Le Couleur-like arrangement serves as a lush bed for Elisabeth Thorsen’s ethereal vocal.

“’Time to Breathe’ is a little more energetic than our usual dream‑pop leanings — built around a groovy bassline and our singer’s soft, airy vocals,” Remington Super 60 founder Christoffer Schou explains, It was recorded in my living‑room studio, surrounded by guitars, basses, and a pile of well‑worn 80s Casio and Yamaha toy keyboards that have quietly shaped our sound over the years.

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 21, 202601:30

New Video: Locust Teams Up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead and Natasha Morrow on Yearning “Long Distance Lover”

Mark Van Hoen is a London-born and based electronic music artist, who has written, recorded and released music with his best-known project Locust, as well as with Autocreation and under his own name. Originally influenced by Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream and others, Van Hoen’s music career started in earnest back in 1993 when he signed with Belgian-based label R&S. His initial releases as Locust saw him using vintage analog synthesizers and tape recorders. But as his sound moved towards an increasingly vocal orientated approach in the late 1990s, he also began releasing material under his own name.

Van Hoen also collaborated with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in Black Hearted Brother, a project that released their debut Stars Are Our Home in 2013.

The English electronic music artist’s latest Locust single “Long Distance” features Neil Halstead on guitar and vocals from Irish musician Natasha Morrow. The lush and dream-like collaboration came together over the past few years and features shimmering and pulsating, Giorgio Moroder-like synths, Halstead’s reverb drenched shoegazer textured riffs meticulously draped and sculpted over the synths while Morrow’s yearning delivery expresses a longing for intimacy despite a physical distance.

“The music was recorded back in 2020 originally as a collab between Neil Halstead and I,” Van Hoen recalls. “It sat around for a few years, and I had the idea to send it to Natasha to see if it inspired anything vocally. She came up with the idea of long-distance phone calls between lovers. It struck a chord with me as I had experienced a couple of relationships like that. The idea of repeating these expressions of desire and longing over and over, because you are aching to be together. I had actually never met Natasha, and generally, I find that remote collabs don’t work because there’s a connection missing somehow. But in Natasha’s case, I had several long phone calls with her, and I think we connected that way. Not in any romantic sense, but as musical collaborators, which has its own particular need for a personal connection and understanding. I found it interesting that it related to the song’s lyrics in that she and I established a different kind of personal bond over the phone.”

The accompanying video by Mark Van Hoen features the song’s collaborators in silhouette dipping in and out of the frame, which helps further accentuate the distance, longing and ephemeral nature of the song’s central relationship.

Single Review by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202623:00

New Audio: Index Shares a Bruising and Forceful Ripper

Formed last year, and currently split between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, Index — Alan Creedon (he/him) and Alex Lichtenauer (they/them) — is a subversive, electronics-influenced hardcore punk band featuring two close friends, who are also former members of Control Top, an act that I’ve covered here on this site. When Creedon and Lichtanauer started the band, it quickly became clear that their band’s sound would grow out of their friendship. Stripping away the dense orchestration of their previous band, Index sees the duo leaning into sweaty, visceral physicality with Creedon’s guitar intuitively locked into Lichtanauer’s drums, navigating complex rhythms. The result is music that feels as immediate as it does immediate — with the two longtime collaborators and friends reinvigorated by the act of creating something altogether new together.

Produced by Arthur Rizk, the duo’s debut single “Cellophane” was written across coasts, recorded at Show Me The Body‘s Corpus Studios and released through Lichtanaeur’s Get Better Records. The single is a bruising, eardrum shattering ripper that pairs snarling and roaring hardcore punk fury with pummeling rhythm and howled vocals. “Cellophane” captures someone barely holding it together in a brutal, absurdist hellscape. It’s the sort of song that would turn a room into a sweaty, moving mass of bodies.

“‘Cellophane’ is a song about self-deception and the rituals we perform to convince ourselves we’re holding it together,” the bicoastal based duo explain. “Musically, we wanted to move away from anything riff-based and write in a way that felt fluid and unstable. The two of us function as a single organism, threading through shifting time signatures rather than locking into them. We were interested in the physicality of electronic body music pushed through a hardcore framework. Something precise and controlled, but still capable of impact in a room.”

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202620:30

New Video: Truck Violence Returns with Bruising, Self-Aware “Your name, it’s walking”

Acclaimed and rising Montréal-based experimental act Truck Violence — founding duo Karysn Henderson (vocals) and Paul Lecours (guitar, banjo, production), along with Chris Clegg (bass, banjo) and Thomas Hart (drums and slide guitar) — can trace their origins back to its founding duo’s childhood: Henderson and Lecours grew up in a small, French Canadian town of 600 people, graduating in a class of nine. By the time they both turned 15, they were running a local studio and radio station. There was no industry support, no infrastructure, no template for what they were trying to do, only the work itself — and the conviction that it was worth doing.

When the pair turned 17, they relocated to Montréal, where they met Chris Clegg and Thomas Hart, who hail from different corners of the country and began building their band from the ground up.

The Canadian quartet’s highly anticipated sophomore album, The weathervane is my body is slated for a June 26, 2026 release through San Francisco-based label The Flenser and Montréal-based Mothland. Their sophomore album is reportedly a product of the process of building the band from the ground up. The album’s creative and writing process, the recording, the mixing and visuals were all produced employing a fiercely DIY process. This isn’t done as an aesthetic choice or a marketing angle, it’s because for the band, it’s the only honest option album.

The album’s cover art was shot on film by the band on Montréal’s Avenue du Parc. A figure perches atop a small Québécois-style house, hand built from reclaimed materials, spine curved, legs pulled in, bare-backed against a skyline that dwarfs everything beneath it. A rural thing dropped into the grit of a big city, small and out of place yet refusing to disappear. The body is naked and defenseless, open to the environment and every stimuli the world can deliver upon it.

Thematically, the album is a continuation and expansion of the angry statement of purpose of their debut, 2024’s Violence. Rooted in noise rock and post-hardcore traditions, the album is uncompromising in its refusal to be anything other than what is: immediate, self-determined and built entirely by the hands that imagined it.

The weathervane is my body will feature the previously released “New Jesus” and the album’s second and latest single, “Your name, it’s walking.” The album’s new single is a furious ripper that’s captures the brutally hurtful self-talk of a troubled young person maneuvering their relationship with themselves and a brutally cruel world. Much like its immediate predecessor, the new single is an urgent, desperate howl — with some gorgeous, meditative, banjo-driven sections.

“This song is a sort of compilation of thoughts; my relationship with my birth name after having a precarious journey with gender and identity in my early teens, my feelings of inadequacy and alienation growing up with intense ADHD and anxiety from an early age, my desires for anchorage in an uncertain future,” Truck Violence’s Karsyn Henderson explains. “The hook of the song always comes off as extremely cliche to me, maybe I am hitting the nail too precisely, with too blunt a face, but perhaps that is necessary, perhaps it reflects well the thoughts of myself as I was.

Directed by Kirill Sommer, the accompanying video for “Your name, it’s walking” is a surreal fever dream that captures the mundanity and boredom of rural life, while being one-part Samuel Beckett play, one-part psilocybin trip, one-part Ingmar Bergman film.

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202618:00

New Video: Wings of Desire Share Nostalgia-Inducing, Madchester-like “Your Twenties”

Stroud, UK-based duo Wings of Desire — Chloe Little and James Taylor — released their full-length debut, 2023’s Life Is Infinite to critical praise from The Independent, Dork, Clash, The Line of Best Fit, Stereogum, Paste, BrooklynVegan, Under The Radar and a lengthy list of others. The band has received airplay from BBC 6 Music‘s Steve Lamacq and Lauren Laverne, NME Radio and Radio X’s John Kennedy.

Building upon a growing profile in the UK and elsewhere, the duo toured with Editors, Nation of Language and Bleach Lab as an opener, as well as opening for The Cribs at London’s The Roundhouse.

2024’s Shut Up & Listen raised funds for Stroud-based community project The Long Table, a Pay-What-You-Can restaurant, which was at risk of eviction from its home. They followed up with 2025’s standalone “a few more years.”

The duo’s highly-anticipated sophomore album, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird is slated for a December 9, 2026 release. The album will feature their ongoing song cycle in which they release a new track and accompanying video on every new moon of this year’s lunar cycle. Sonically, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird is a continuation of the sound they established on their debut, a mix of gritty dream pop and krautrock.

Thematically, the album’s material touches on the natural rituals of daily life and continually moving through creation and destruction. Throughout the album, there’s references to life and birth, as well as folklore and wonder in the accompanying visuals.

Stand Still Like The Hummingbird will include the previously released “Nothing Left To Give,” and the album’s latest single “Your Twenties.” “Your Twenties” is a hazy, nostalgia-inducing tune that sonically seems to draw from the Madchester scene and early shoegaze: Taylor’s dreamy delivery ethereally floats over boom-bap beats, a relentless motorik groove and swirling wall of sound-meets-Storm in Heaven-like guitar textures. Thematically, the song is a wistful, rose-colored view of one’s youth — from the prospective of someone who’s about to leave their 20s.

“Your twenties explores the reality of living through what’s seen as being your peak when in reality can often be the opposite, filled with learning curves and hard lessons,” the Stroud-based duo explain. “A nostalgic look at an era gone by and a hopeful outlook on what’s to come. Some say these are the best years of your life.”

Directed by Amber Little, the accompanying visual for “Your Twenties” employs a simple conceit: an old tape player in the grass playing the song.

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202614:30

Throwback: Happy 82nd Birthday, Joe Cocker!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 82nd anniversary of the birth of Joe Cocker.

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202610:00

Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Cher!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Cher’s 80th birthday.

Video by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202607:00

Throwback: Happy 54th Birthday, Busta Rhymes!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Busta Rhymes’ 54th birthday.

Single Review by William Ruben HelmsMay 20, 202600:30

New Audio: Tricky Returns with Brooding and Atmospheric “Because I Don’t Know”

Trip hop pioneer Tricky will be releasing his 15th studio album, Different When It’s Silent July 17, 2026 through his own label, False Idols. The new album is the first full-length effort from the legendary and influential artist and producer under his own name in six years.

Different When It’s Silent came about during a rather prolific period of activity. Since 2020’s Fall to Pieces, Tricky has released material under several different guises including, Lonely Guest‘s 2021 self-titled effort, a collaboration with Mike Theis, called Theis Thaws, which released 2024’s Fifteen Days and last year’s collaborative album with Marta Złakowska, Out The Way.

Returning to releasing an album under his own name took on a different shape. Recored between Tricky’s home in France and sessions in Bristol, the album is reportedly a direct, focused batch of material that reconnects with the distinct sonic language that has defined the legendary artist and producer’s work since 1995’s iconic Maxinquaye. And he does by drawing deeply on the musical community that has shaped him and his work. Central to the album’s sound is Bristol-based vocalist Mitch Sanders, whose soulful falsetto is featured through such of the album’s songs. Their deep connection reflects a shared musical background and an instinctive chemistry between the pair.

“In my mind it was another side project” Tricky explains. But after hearing the material, his manager Alan McGee felt the songs clearly belonged to a Tricky record.

The 14-song Different When It’s Silent sonically sees Tricky blending skeletal blues, brooding electronics, distorted guitars and stark hip-hop rhythms into a sound that’s simultaneously stripped-back and expansive. The album moves fluidly across different styles while rooted in the restless experimentation that has long defined Tricky’s work over the past three-plus decades.

“I just love making music” Tricky says. “I’m grateful I’ve had the chance to live this life and keep creating.”

The album will include the previously released “Out of Place,” feat. Marta Złakowska and the album’s second and latest single, “Because I Don’t Know.” Featuring Bristol-based vocalist Mitch Sanders’ yearning falsetto delivering the haunting refrain “Can you feel my pain? Do you feel the same? Just let me know” over a pulsing and shadowy synth figure and blasts of scorching guitars. Tricky’s murmured vocal lurk in the background. The song is a tense, uneasy and probing examination of vulnerability, heartache and menace.