Throwback: Happy 78th Birthday, James Taylor!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates James Taylor’s 78th birthday.

New Video: EYRE LLEW Shares Painterly “Miningsby”

Initially conceived as a studio project back in 2014, Nottingham, UK-based trio EYRE LLEW — Sam Heaton (vocals, guitar), Jack Clark (drums, piano) and Jack Bennett (guitar, piano) — have developed and honed a sound that meshes elements of shoegaze, post rock and dream pop and channels influences like Sigur Rós, Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver and The National into cinematic, emotionally overwhelming soundscapes.

2017’s debut album, Atelo was released to widespread critical acclaim with the album landing at #25 on Drowned in Sound‘s Top 100 Albums List of 2017.

And during that same period, the Nottingham-based trio have also established themselves as a compelling live act, playing over 300 independently booked shows across 23 countries, including sold-out shows across the UK, Europe, The Baltics (Latvia and Lithuania) and the Far East. The trio have also made the rounds of both the national and international festival circuit, playing sets at Glastonbury‘s John Peel Stage, The Great Escape, Dot to Dot, FOCUS Wales, Y Not Festival, Ritual Union, Rockaway Beach, Alternative Escape, Handmade, Glastonbury’s Shagrai La, Icebreaker, Perth Music Expo, 110 Above, Beat The Streets, Splendour, Riverside, On The Waterfront, Farm Fest, A Carefully Planned, Hockley Hustle, and others. Internationally, they’ve played sets at Singapore’s Music Matters, Taiwan’s Beastie Rock, South Korea’s Zandari Festa, Germany’s Umsonst Und Dresden, France’s FIMU, Belgium’s Fifty Lab, Sweden’s Future Echoes, Lithuania’s Zagare Fringe Festival and What’s Next In Music, Hungary’s HOTS Outbreakers Lab, Latvia’s Riga Music Week, Estonia’s POFF Shorts, Poland’s Seazone Music Festival and Conference and SpaceFest.

Building upon a growing profile, EYRE LLEW’s highly anticipated sophomore album Bloom is deeply informed and influenced by pandemic-enforced lockdowns. For the bulk of their history, the band defined themselves by seemingly constant motion: Cities blurred into one another. Border crossings were routine. Their lives revolved around airports, late night drives, ferry ports, backstage rooms, festival fields, hotel corridors and long-distance journeys.

As a touring band, success, such as it existed, was often measured in miles traveled, crowd size and momentum developed and sustained. The band kept moving because that’s just how it always was. Slowing down would mean — on some level, at least — slowed momentum. Stopping would mean accepting failure, when “making it” was just a little bit out of reach.

Like countless touring acts, the pandemic managed to dismantle their trajectory. That relentless forward motion that shaped their identity for the better part of a decade just suddenly stopped. Tours vanished. Plans dissolved. The result was an uneasy silence. Understandably, for the trio, it all felt devastating.

But in the stillness, something else emerged for the band — space: The space to rest, reflect, recover, feel and importantly, to make different choices. The band made a quieter, more human recalibration, shifting away from survival to towards sustainability. Rather than constantly feeling that they had to prove something, they moved towards building something — and choosing meaning over the endless chase of momentum.

The result was Bloom. Written during lockdown and the subsequent years, the album is about several things simultaneously: presence, the love that feels like home, stillness as strength, devotion without spectacle, grief without melodrama, healing without performative optimism, growth that happens slowly, privately and honestly.

Wher eas previously released material was frequently defined by scale and endurance, Bloom‘s material is defined by intimacy and grounding. Its songs are built from small moments rather than big, grand statements. It’s about choosing to stay. Not just in relationships but in places, in moments, in emotions and in identity.

The shift in the band’s approach, fittingly lead to a shift in their sound. While the album’s material continues to carry the vastness they’re known for, it lives alongside of a sense fragility and restraint. Instead of actively attempting to overwhelm the listener, the band is trying to meet the listener where they are right now.

The album’s first single “Miningsby” is a slow-burning and atmospheric tune that’s simultaneously cinematic and intimate, while evoking a loving, patient calmness. The track is about something that’s somehow both difficult and easy — being present when your loved one is struggling with anxiety, depression or something else.

“Rather than trying to dramatise that experience, ‘Miningsby’ is about something quieter and harder: staying, listening, and offering warmth,” the band explains. “It’s a love letter to emotional endurance, grounded in small moments and the hope of better days ahead.”

The song’s title came from a bit of serendipitous happenstance. When the original demo files were saved in an old, rural Lincolnshire studio, they were geolocated to Miningsby, a tiny nearby village. For the band, the title — and in turn, the town’s name — became an unintended marker for a place and time that no longer exists, but continues to resonate through the music, much like the fleeting yet beautiful moments the song memorializes.

The song’s origins manage to mirror its themes. The song was recorded on a baby grand piano that the band no longer owns, in a studio they’ve since left behind. The song captures something gone yet the feeling of being held through it all.

The song sees the band framing love through tangible, physical moments and sensations — breath, warm, light. But along with that, there’s a sense of calm, loving patience and the belief that things can get better with love and through time.

The accompanying video, shot in black and white features the band performing the song in studio.

New Audio: Lukka Shares Dreamy and Meditative “Fabric of the Cosmos”

New York-based indie trio LukkaBerlin-born, New York-based creative mastermind Franzi Syzmkowiak (guitar, vocals), Ashley Gonzalez (bass) and Simon “SiFi” Fishburn (drums) — have long operated at the crossroads of space rock, neo-psychedelia and synth-driven indie pop. The band’s sound is anchored around hypnotic grooves, immersive textures and melody-driven songwriting, frequently blending repetition with expansive, atmospheric arrangements featuring driving bass lines, propulsive rhythms, delay pedaled guitars and layered analogy synths, and equally atmospheric production.

Syzmkowiak has travelled across the globe, seeking a musical home that felt right. She had stints in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina before settling in New York. “New York City felt like the right place to meet like-minded people,” she says. “The reason I make music is that it serves as an escape from everyday reality and the problems of daily life. Songwriting helps me process what is happening around me. Music, and especially synthesizer sounds, takes me to another realm where I can feel at peace and experience emotions I have not felt elsewhere. Creating music almost feels like a religious act. Having a band and being an artist in this city has allowed me to meet so many other interesting people. Through these relationships, I feel that I am part of a larger creative community, which creates a strong and meaningful sense of connectedness.”

The trio’s third album, the Abe Seiferth-produced Wendekind is slated for a June 5, 2026 release. The band’s Syzmkowiak was born around the fall of the Berlin Wall. She explains that children, who were born in East Germany at that time were called wendekinder, a generation born into a new, free world. Her mom would always call her a wendekind. “It felt like the perfect title for the album,” she says.

Recorded at Brooklyn-based Transmitter Park Studios, Wendekind reportedly sees the band expanding upon the sound of 2022’s Something Human while pushing further into much more immersive, synth-driven territory.

Thematically, Wendekind sees the New York diving deeper into the metaphysical, tracing loss and memory, while questioning one’s place in an infinite and seemingly indifferent universe. For Syzmkowiak, the album is a deeply personal and reflective effort, moving between memories of the past, and hopes for the future while touring on space, time, chance and self-discovery.

“Over the past three years, a series of events pushed me to look inward and question what had been driving my choices and behavior,” Syzmkowiak says. “The album became a deeply personal and spiritual journey, leading me back to my roots and to memories of where I came from.”

Wendekind’s first single, “Fabric of the Cosmos” is a meditative slow-burn that features Syzmkowiak’s dreamily yearning delivery ethereally floating over glistening synths, boom bap-like drumming and phased out guitar. Seemingly channeling Pavo Pavo, the cinematic new single, as Syzmkowiak explains is “about trying to see beyond the three-dimensional world and being only able to-do that through e-motion (electric motion/vibrations), dreams or day visions. The song slips into the metaphysical world.”

New Audio: The Orielles Share Angular “Wasp”

Acclaimed, Manchester, UK-based JOVM mainstays The Orielles — Esmé Dee Hand-Halford (bass, vocals), Sidonie Dee Hand-Halford (drums, vocals) and Henry Carlyle Wade (guitar, vocals) — will be releasing their highly anticipated fourth album, the Joel Anthony Patchett-produced Only You Left through Heavenly Recordings on Friday.

Recorded last summer in two locations — the Greek Island of Hydra and Hamburg — the 11-song Only You Left reportedly sees the band consolidating the bold experimentation of 2022’s Tableau with the more stripped-back, song-driven approach of their earlier releases, channeling a return to the familiar. “There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece,” quips Henry, in reference to the band’s decision to return to their roots as a trio. 

The JOVM mainstays, who originally started out in Halifax first gained attention both nationally and internationally with the release of their full-length debut, 2018’s Silver Dollar Moment, which recently celebrated its eighth birthday. “These things come in like seven year cycles. So we’ve come in like a full circle back to a familiar place, just as different people,” the band says. 

As for the foundations of the forthcoming album, the band’s Henry Carlyle Wade says “You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums.” “It comes naturally, the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford adds, “it’s not something we consciously do.” Interestingly through this process of creative renewal, the JOVM mainstays have managed to weather a pandemic, the fickleness of a trend-driven music industry and somehow emerge with something that’s familiar yet completely different. 

According to Wade, the first ideas for the new album can be traced back to May 2023: Esmé Hand-Halford had purchased a freeze pedal, which allowed her to play around with sustained notes on her guitar. These heavy drones would later form the background of album tracks “Wasp” and “Three Halves.” 

In breaks between tours, the band began to meet up and record their practice room sessions, later analyzing the voice notes with a granular attention to detail. “We recorded everything on our phones, every snippet,” explains Henry Carlyle Wade. “We went so deep into what each song needed or what we wanted to hear from it.”

While the Tableau sessions were semi-improvisational and partially written in the recording studio, Only You Left was fleshed out through a series of intense writing sessions between May 2023 and last summer. Each of the album’s 11 songs were meticulously refined and became its own distinctive work. “It almost felt really novel for us to be writing as a three-piece and really, really crafting these songs,” the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford recalls. “But Tableau gave us that confidence to know we could go into a studio and pull things together in that setting under the time pressure.”

Producer and engineer Joel Anthony Patchett, whom Esmé Hand-Halford dubs the honorary fourth member of the band, has had a massive influence on the album’s sound and approach. “Joel brings an extra level of interpretation and deep listening,” Henry Carlyle Wade says, “and it’s always exciting to explore that.” Sidonie Hand-Halford adds, “He’s constantly talking us through every step of what he’s doing and getting really, really involved with that process as well. And we’re just kind of learning together and making these mistakes and discovering things together.” 

Only You Left will include the previously released “Three Halves,” the double single “You Are Eating Part of Yourself”/”To Undo the World Itself,Tears Are,” and the album’s latest single “Wasp.”

Anchored around a looping, buzzing and droning guitar line, an angular and propulsive bass line and skittering, off-kilter drumming and percussion, “Wasp” subtly channels In Rainbows while simultaneously evoking a wasp flying in figure 8s and circles higher and higher.

“Taking on another shift in perspective, the lyrics follow a [sic] miniscule wasp as it reaches the height of a mountain, one of nature’s grandest settings,” the band explains. “Inspired by the film Black Narcissus I wanted to capture this feeling of questioning faith, purpose and the self when confronted by such vastness, using a wasp to exaggerate this magnitude even further. In seeing through its perspective maybe we can relate to the plight of the wasp, but the real sting in the tale (hah!) is that ultimately it is nature itself that conditions the wasp to hurt us.”

New Audio: Sun Spots Shares Anthemic “Rocket”

Pacific Northwest-based indie rock outfit Sun Spots features members of essential regional punk and hardcore acts, including Criminal Code, Nudes and Bricklayer. With the release of their debut EP, 2022’s Loosey, Sun Spots quickly established a songwriting process that they’ve jokingly dubbed pop songs for hardcore fans — or hardcore songs for pop fans, depending on your perspective.

The Pacific Northwest-based outfit’s sophomore EP, Dog Is Calling is slated for a Friday release through Seattle-based indie label Den Tapes. Engineered and mixed in Seattle by Cameron Heck and mastered by Greg Obis, the EP features four upbeat and driving songs that sees the band pairing thick, crunchy guitar riffs with buoyant melodies, showcasing their love of the Big Muff pedal and big, catchy hooks.

Dog Is Calling‘s lead single “Rocket” will bring back warm and hazily nostalgic memories of 120 Minutes MTV-era grunge for all of you fellow olds as the song showcases the band’s penchant for pairing big, crunchy riffs with even bigger hooks with saccharine sweet, pop melodies. And of course, this is placed with a classic grunge song structure — alternating quiet verses and loud choruses. Play loud.

New Audio: Thundercat Teams Up with WILLOW on Atmospheric, Quiet Storm-like “ThunderWave”

Acclaimed JOVM mainstay Thundercat will be releasing his fifth studio album — and first album in over six years — Distracted through Brainfeeder on April 3, 2026. Distracted was created in close collaboration with super producer Greg Kurstin with additional production from Flying LotusKenny Beats and The Lemon Twigs. The new album also features contributions from an all-star cast that includes A$AP RockyWILLOWTame Impala, Channel TresLil Yachty and a previously unreleased collaboration with Mac Miller

Thematically, the album vividly captures the uneasy tension between overstimulation and introspection. Thundercat is deeply skeptical of technological “progress,” especially the way it has narrowed our collective imagination instead of expanding it. He jokes about Star Trek and childhood dreams of space travel, then pivots to the horrible anticlimax of reality: drones without lasers, phones that only feature upgraded cameras, innovation reduced to spying and access. The disappointment isn’t about just gadgets; it’s about a vision of the world we were promised versus what we got right now. Sure, some forms of deep space travel may be difficult, if not impossible, but we don’t have flying cars or smart-alecky robots. We barely have high-speed trains or anything else. 

While the drawbacks of constant distraction are evident in today’s attention deficit economy, a true idiosyncratic like Thundercat can identity the ways in which it used to one’s advantage. You can’t spell “daydreams,” without dreams. “Sometimes you need to be distracted to focus in a different way,” Thundercat says. What the JOVM mainstay wants listeners to take from the album is remarkably, disarmingly simple: Just enjoy it and have fun and just know that the struggle is real and changes shape, but just to keep pushing forward.” 

Rather than instant and constant commentary, the JOVM mainstay offers something quieter, more radical, and maybe something more empathetic: The permission to be confused, tired and distracted — and yet still make something beautiful and necessary out of the noise. 

Distracted will include the previously released “I Did This To Myself,” feat. Lil Yachty “She Knows Too Much,” feat. Mac Miller, and the album’s latest single, “ThunderWave” feat. WILLOW. “ThunderWave” features Thundercat and WILLOW’s seamless harmonies floating and bobbing over Greg Kurstin’s ambient production, a slick synthesis of Peter Gabriel-like art pop, Jaco Pastorious-era jazz fusion/jazz funk and Quiet Storm soul, which includes the sound of waves lapping gently on the shore. The result is a moonlit-like scene between two seemingly doomed, endlessly yearning lovers.

Thundercat shared some thoughts about creating the track: “Willow, the weeping, the whimsy, the whispy, the wizard. Grateful for the opportunity to create and spend time with such a beautiful human. Our journey together has been quite a fun one. Creating this song together, felt very much like the real us. So happy to be able to share.”

New Video: Kim Gordon Shares Jazzy “PLAY ME”

The legendary Kim Gordon will be releasing her third solo album, the Justin Raisen-produced PLAY ME on Friday through Matador RecordsPLAY ME is reportedly distilled and immediate, and sees Gordon expanding on her sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautock. 

“We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says of her continued collaboration with acclaimed, Los Angeles-based producer Justin Raisen. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident. I always kind of work off of rhythms, and I knew I wanted it to be even more beat-oriented than the last one. Justin really gets my voice and my lyrics and he understands how I work—that came forth even more on this record.” 

PLAY ME is the follow-up to 2024’s critically applauded sophomore album The Collective, which featured the two-time Grammy-nominated single “BYE BYE.”  PLAY ME sees Gordon processing in her imitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times-like fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill vibes flattering of culture — where dark humor voices the absurdity of our moment. But despite its frequent outward gave, the album is essentially an interior effort, one in which heightened emotionality pulses through physical jams, while rejecting definitive statements in favor of an inquisitiveness and curiosity that keeps Gordon searching — and ever in process. 

Amid PLAY ME’s rabbit-hole reality bricolage, pitch-shifted vocals and shadowy layers of dissonance, the album’s material are clear-eyed about the attention they pay to a world that would rather you be distracted and rage-baited into oblivion. “I have to say, the thing that influenced me most was the news. We are in some kind of ‘post empire’ now, where people just disappear,” Gordon says, echoing the title of one of PLAY ME’s tracks.

PLAY ME will feature the previously released “NOT TODAY,” and “DIRTY TECH,” as well as the album’s third single, album title track “PLAY ME.” “PLAY ME” may arguably be the most hip-hop influenced track of the entire album with the song anchored around a swaggering DJ Premier-like production tweeter and woofer rattling beats paired with a meditative, modal jazz trumpet line. Gordon’s imitable croon takes on a subtle staccato, hipKhop like flow to match.

Directed by Barney Clay, the accompanying video for “PLAY ME” is grainy, security camera-like footage that follows a stylish Gordon in a mall. It’s a forceful and uneasy bit of commentary on our Big Brother-esque surveillance world.