JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 107th anniversary of the birth of Art Blakey.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Daryl Hall!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Daryl Hall’s 80th birthday.
New Audio: Sunnan Shares Wistful and Cinematic “Echoes in Time”
Swedish outfit Sunnan can trace their origins through a series of unlikely encounters, including pandemic-era change, a barn with panoramic windows in Sunnanhed and a meeting with a Stockholm rave legend. In many ways the band embodies creative serendipity — and unsurprisingly, their origin story, which feels both inevitable and improbable, echoes through their work.
The band quickly built a reputation with the release of a series of standout singles including “My Love For You,” “Wild Horses,” and “The Sound (Make It Come Back),” their collaboration with Titiyo. 2024’s debut studio album Cinema was released to widespread praise across the Nordics and earned two Swedish Grammy nominations.
Last year’s Cinema Sound System helped propel the Swedish outfit onto the global stage with its three singles receiving heavy radio rotation on Nordic radio stations, received strong DSP support and organic crossover into North American and European markets. The band supported their debut and EP with 20 sold-out dates across the Nordics and the European Union.
Building upon a growing profile, the Swedish outfit released their highly anticipated sophomore album, Spaghetti Soul last week. The album sees the band further cementing their critically applauded cinematic sound but while blending Italian Spaghetti Western soundtrack-styled grandeur with classic soul –filtered through a decidedly modern lens.
The album includes the previously released “Sail (Lady In Waiting)” and the album’s latest single “Echoes in Time” a widescreen, twangy bit of Morricone soundtrack-tinged soul anchored in a wistful, nostalgic ache while nodding at old timey ballads and Bossa Nova. Much like their previously released material, “Echoes in Time” showcases deft, incredibly gorgeous musicianship and songwriting.
New Audio: Brooklyn’s Marigny Returns with Punchy, Goth-like “I Grieve”
Marigny is post-punk/heavy rock/goth project of a mysterious Brooklyn-based artist, who blends coldwave textures, heavy analog distortion and dark atmospheres to craft material that’s simultaneously intimate and volatile. Their sound is intentionally analog and physical — loud, low end, corroded textures, cassette tape-like saturation and tension that feels more like a live room recording than a clean, polished digital mix. Thematically, the band’s work explores grief, obsession, addiction, masculinity and spiritual decay through a modern Afro-gothic lens.
Earlier this year, I wrote about “The Still,” which served as a bold introduction to the project and its sound. The project’s latest single “I Grieve” is a bruising blend of post-punk, industrial, dark wave and goth — with the song arguably being the most decidedly goth-leaning song from the act to date. And while rooted in raw, soulful emotion, “I Grieve,” continues to showcase the artist’s ability to craft punchy, hook-driven material.
New Audio: Umeå’s Mi Von Ahn Shares Atmospheric “Yet All Drifts”
Over the course of two albums and four EPs, Umeå, Sweden-based singer/songwriter, musician and self-described sound artist Mi von Ahn creates evocative, dreamlike indie rock with intensity and presence that carries a introspective melancholy and a bit of northern Swedish wistful within a lush, dynamic soundscape in which stark open spaces meet inland forests. Her debut album, 2018’s Signals earned a Swedish GAFFA Award nomination for Best Newcomer. And adding to a now-established national profile, she has toured as an opener for The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Ane Brun, Loney Dear, and Christian Kjelvander.
The Umeå-based artist’s third album Delta Veins is slated for a November 6, 2026 release. Co-written and produced alongside Martin Hederos and Anton Sundell, the album sees Von Ahn pushing her sound into a new territory — widescreen and sweeping indie rock with trip-hop and shoegaze-inspired textures. The album’s material moves constantly between the personal and the collective, often without drawing a clear line between them. A song about holding onto an unsustainable relationship is, at the same time, a song about standing beside a burning climate crisis without acting, even while knowing better. Whether a song is about a relationship, identity, or the climate crisis, there’s an undercurrent of searching beneath it.
Delta Veins also marks the first time in the Swedish artist’s career that she has written and sung lyrics in multiple languages with passages in English, Swedish and Sámi woven together throughout the album.
Album single “Yet All Drifts” is a slow-burning tune that eschews conventional verse-chorus-verse song structures in order to let the song’s atmospheric and painterly, shoegazer-inspired textures settle into its own shape, paired with trip-hop-like breakbeats and the Swedish artist’s sultry delivery. Sonically, the result is a song that to my ears seems like a blend of 90s singer/songwriter pop rock like Joan Osbourne‘s “What If God Is One of Us?,” Portishead, Radiohaed and a bit of a A Storm in Heaven-era The Verve to create a song that’s intimate yet expansive, peaceful yet deeply restless, evoking a change that’s felt before they’re seen.
“The song is written from a dreamlike state that can arise when, instead of fighting it, you manage to accept the inevitable change and let yourself drift with it,” says Von Ahn. “On the surface everything is still, but underneath a slow, almost invisible shift is taking place. A sense that we are not victims of the change, we are the change.”
Throwback: Happy 109th Birthday, Thelonious Monk!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 109th anniversary of the birth of Thelonious Monk.
Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, David Lee Roth!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates David Lee Roth’s 72nd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 86th Birthday, John Lennon!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 86th anniversary of the birth of John Lennon.
Throwback: Happy 82nd Birthday, John Entwistle!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 82nd anniversary of the birth of The Who bassist John Entwistle.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, PJ Harvey!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates PJ Harvey’s 57th birthday.
New Audio: Rhythm Scholar Remixes Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood”
Over the course of this site’s 16+ year history, I’ve managed to spill a lot of virtual ink covering the ridiculously prolific New York-based producer, DJ, remixer and JOVM mainstay Rhythm Scholar. During that period, the long-time JOVM mainstay has carefully built a nationally and internationally recognized profile for slickly produced, crowd-pleasing mashups and remixes of some of the most beloved songs ever written and recorded.
So do y’all want to feel extremely old? Gorillaz’s landmark self-titled album was released 25 years ago. And to celebrate the occasion, the JOVM mainstay has given the Damon Albarn-led project’s breakthrough single “Clint Eastwood,” his unique remix treatment. The Rhythm Scholar Beatslinger remix places Albarn and Del The Funky Homosapien‘s vocals within a dizzying and mind-bending array of samples including Ice Cube and Da Lench Mob.
Visually, the accompanying video features footage from Clint Eastwood-era Spaghetti Westerns, Yo Gabba Gabba, The Kinks, footage of a young Jane Goodall in the field, Donkey Kong, the original video for “Clint Eastwood,” Dirty Harry, old-timey cartoons and a lot more.
Throwback: Happy 76th Birthday Robert “Kool” Bell!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Kool and the Gang founder Robert “Kool” Bell’s 76th birthday.
New Audio: Twin Temple Shares Breathtakingly Gorgeous “Nothing Matters”
Formed back in 2017, Twin Temple — married couple Alexandra and Zachary James — are an acclaimed Los Angeles-based duo, who specialize in a new sub-genre and style that they’ve dubbed “Satanic Doo Wop,” which blends their practice of Satanism with a sound that’s influenced by The Platters, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and the like.
The Los Angeles-based duo have developed for being one of the contemporary scene’s most talked about crossover acts, earning widespread coverage from media outlets like Rolling Stone, NME, Billboard, American Songwriter, Stereogum, Consequence, Revolver, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Loudwire, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and a long list of others, and for being one of the most provocative acts out there right now. Their uncompromising artistic vision routinely sparks much larger and more serious conversations about artistic freedom, religious freedom, freedom of expression, censorship, the role of controversy in art, and on a broader sense, the wider role of art within the cultural landscape.
Now, some of y’all heard of the acclaimed Los Angeles-based duo after Charley Crockett abruptly dropped the band from his tour earlier this year — specifically because of their usage of Satanic imagery. That led to Jack White publicly inviting the band to open for his Los Angeles show back in September. And serendipitously, the duo’s highly-anticipated third album Doomed Lovers will come right on the heels of their latest, and arguably biggest controversy to date.
Slated for an October 9, 2026 release through their own Pentagrammation Records, the Shooter Jennings-produced Doomed Lovers was recorded at Hollywood-based Sunset Sound‘s iconic Studio 3 and marks the acclaimed duo’s boldest chapter to date.
Born from one of the darkest periods of their personal lives, Doomed Lovers is reportedly their most intimate and emotionally revealing work to date. Expanding upon the cinematic scope of the sound that has won them acclaim while remaining rooted in the timeless sound and traditions of early rock ‘n’ roll, the album is their most ambitious and fully realized artistic statement so far. The album continues the band’s commitment to analog recording while expanding upon their sound with lush orchestral arrangements performed by a 37-member orchestra. Yes, 37!
“We poured everything into this new record that we made with Shooter,” says the acclaimed and controversial duo. “We wanted to push ourselves creatively and expand the production further than we have before, drawing inspiration from the lush orchestral productions of Roy Orbison, The Ronettes, and The Shangri-Las, and added in some Countrypolitan flair. We brought in some incredible musicians like Matt Chamberlain and Jay Bellerose, and a 37-piece orchestra. We wanted to make something as beautiful as we possibly could – of course with our dark spin on things.”
The truth is, this album was made during one of the darkest periods of our lives. We had been struggling with grief, health issues, addiction, and depression. But day by day, going into Sunset Sound, making music with incredible people who believed in us, and being surrounded by that creativity slowly brought us back to life. We started smiling and laughing again. I was becoming alive again. It connected us to why we fell in love with music in the first place and became our most personal album yet.”
The album will include the previously released, “Doomed Lovers,” and “Haunt Me,” as well as the album’s last pre-release single “Nothing Matters.” “Nothing Matters” continues a remarkable run of breathtakingly gorgeous and cinematic material that to my ears at least, sounds a bit like a blend of Patsy Cline with Roy Orbison, anchored by a similar aching sense of loss and grief.
“‘Nothing Matters’ was born out of the bleakest, lowest point of depression and apathy following a devastating loss, functioning as a modern day Gothic lament for a love that refuses to die,” Twin Temple’s Alexandra and Zachary James say. “Channeling a kind of Nihilistic and Byronic romanticism, the song tackles the abject feelings of hopelessness, disorientation, and loss of self that profound grief evokes. We wanted to make something beautiful out of that experience, pairing the tragic narrative weight with the lush, cinematic sweep of a 37-piece orchestra.”