JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Giorgio Moroder’s 86th birthday.
Category: electronic music
New Audio: TOMORA Returns with Luminous and Euphoric “I DRINK THE LIGHT”
TOMORA is a collaborative project featuring:
- The Chemical Brothers‘ Tom Rowlands: As one-half of The Chemical Brothers, Rowlands has produced and recorded six widely acclaimed UK #1 albums and won six Grammy Awards.
- Norwegian artist AURORA: AURORA has released four studio albums and has quickly become one of Norway’s most influential and globally recognized contemporary artists. Her single “Runaway” has amassed over one-billion Spotify streams to date.
TOMORA builds upon a creative relationship that can be traced to the recording sessions for The Chemical Brothers’ 2019 album No Geography. AURORA contributed vocals to three tracks, including “Eve of Destruction.” Rowlands then went on to contribute to AURORA’s 2024 effort, What Happened to the Heart?, which landed on the UK Top 10.
Initially, speculation was rife as to who — or what — the then-mysterious TOMORA was or could be, after the name appeared on Coachella’s 2026 Festival lineup post without any additional information last year. Last December, the duo released their debut single “Ring The Alarm,” which received praise from Spin, BrooklynVegan, Stereogum and DJ Mag. “Ring The Alarm” also received DJ support from Erol Alkan, ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U and a long list of others.
The duo’s TOMORA debut single was then released on a very limited and collectible white label vinyl, alongside B-side “The Thing,” which showcases a glimpse of the tender and hauntingly beautiful downtempo tracks that appear on the duo’s full-length debut, COME CLOSER.
Officially released today through Capitol Records, COME CLOSER was written and produced jointly by Rowlands and AURORA. The 12-song album sees the duo pairing the Norwegian artist’s distinctive vocal with the acclaimed British producer’s unparalleled studio expertise. The album sees the duo creating their own unique space, somewhere they can produce the kind of magic that comes from flicking through a perfect record collection, flowing from wigged-out 1960s psychedelia to the hyper-futurism of sounds imagined for the 2060s.
The album is less about two separate and distinct artists finding a fertile middle ground and more the sound of two tenacious individuals connecting in the studio and hitting massive creative peaks together.
“This is our album COME CLOSER, it is everything we dreamt of. We made it without obligation or expectation, just a joy in creation,” the duo says. “It’s the sound where we meet, the landing zone of our musical escape pods. It is a special place to us. We hope you dig it as much as we do.”
The album also features the previously released “COME CLOSER” “SOMEWHERE ELSE” and its latest single “I DRINK THE LIGHT.” “I DRINK THE LIGHT” is a euphoric and luminous song featuring glistening synth arpeggios and skittering boom bap as a lush yet woozy bed for AURORA’s remarkably Björk-like delivery. Sonically nodding at a slick synthesis of Madonna‘s “Ray of Light,” Come with Us-era Chemical Brothers, “I DRINK THE LIGHT” evokes the otherworldly and almost childlike sense of awe and delight of seeing a natural wonder for the first time.
“We wrote ‘I DRINK THE LIGHT’ whilst watching the light glitter and dance off the shimmering fjord in Norway. We wanted to write a song that felt like witnessing the wonders of Earth for the very first time,” TOMORA explains. “The song is an exploration of light sensations and fluid dynamics. We taste the earth, we swallow the sun, we are one with the fabric of life, and most importantly of all, we drink the light.”
Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, Florian Schneider!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 79th anniversary of Florian Schneider’s birth.
New Audio: Public Circuit Shares Muscular Remix of “Damager”
Rising New York-based electro punks Public Circuit — Ethan Beaumont (vocals), Sean Holloway (drums) and Nelson Fisher (electronics) — exploded into the scene with 2024’s full-length debut Lamb, which they supported with sold-out shows across 30 states, including a run across the domestic festival circuit with sets at New Colossus Festival, Hopscotch and MACROCK.
The trio’s sophomore album Modern Church was released last September through Á La Carte Records. The album saw the band swapping the pretense of retro-revivalism for something much sharper, darker — and entirely their own. Sonically rooted in the trio’s newfound sense of collaboration between each other, the album’s material features angular electronic instrumentation and raw percussive rhythms bathed with the high gloss ache of sophsitipop.
Thematically, the material is overtly religious. But it’s used as an analogical tool to explore sexual identity, the fleeting faith of society and the illicit repercussions of unresolved trauma. And much like its immediate predecessor, the new album continues a run of material deeply influenced by New York’s constant feed of noise and relentless energy.
Today, the New York-based trio announced the April 28, 2026 release of Modern Church R//MIX//S. The trio recruited Brooklyn music scene friends Lip Critic, shower curtain, Grumpy, The Wants, smush, ideasforconversations and Crate to rework Modern Church album tracks. “We wanted to put out the remixes to not only highlight all our amazing friends who make amazing music, but also to revive these songs into all the different worlds we believe they belong to exist in,” the band explains.
Modern Church R//MIX//S‘ first single sees Public Circuit remixing their favorite song off Modern Church, “Damager.” Clocking in at 94 seconds, the original version is a punchy, club friendly bit of industrial synth pop. Their remix gives the song a muscular and swaggering thump that’s one-part old school hip hop-driven 808 and one-part 80s industrial club music.
New Audio: Los Pulpitos Share Hypnotic “Mola Mola”
Berlin-based electronic duo Los Pulpitos features two acclaimed electronic producers: The duo follow last year’s debut EP, Octopean Union with their latest single, “Mola Mola,” the first single of their forthcoming debut album. “Mola Mola” […]
Throwback: Happy 51st Birthday, Thomas Bangalter!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates French touch pioneer Thomas Bangalter’s 51st birthday.
New Video: Tinlicker Shares Defiant and Euphoric “I Want My Freedom”
Acclaimed Utrecht-based electronic music outfit Tinlicker — founding member Micha Heyboer, Jordi van Achthoven and their newest member Hero Baldwin — can trace their origins back to 2012, when the project was founded as a solo project of its founder Heyboer. As a solo project, Heyboer released Tinlicker’s debut EP, 2012’s My First Time Here and the 2012’s Remember The Future demo compilation through his own label, Zero Three Zero.
Jordi van Achthoven was introduced to Heyboer through a mutual contact in 2014. The pair bonded over their mutual inspirations of Paul Kalkbrenner, Trentemøller and Moderat, and at that point, Tinlicker expanded to a duo, releasing three EPs through Feed Me‘s Sotto Voce, 2014’s Like No Other, 2015’s Into The Open and The Space In Between, which featured “Oudegracht,” a track that amassed significant attention online.
2017 saw the duo releasing material through Anjunadep, Armada Music and deadmau5′s mau5trap before singing a record deal with Anjunadeep, who released their breakthrough full-length debut, 2019’s This Is Not Our Universe, which featured contributions from alt-J, Run Rivers, Thomas Oliver and Belle Doron. The album reached #1 on the dance charts in the US, Australia, India, Canada and Finland and #2 in the UK, The Netherlands and Poland.
The duo’s sophomore album In Another Life was released in February 2022. But by November 2023, the duo announced that the third album, last year’s Cold Enough for Snow would be released through [PIAS] Électronique. The album featured collaborations with Brian Molko, Editors‘ Tom Smith and Circa Waves. The Dutch duo supported the album with sets at Pinkpop Festival, CRSSD Festival, Crystal Palace Bowl, Coachella and Sziget Festival.
Back in 2020, as the Dutch duo were achieving commercial and critical success, they had started a successful collaboration with London-based signer/songwriter and producer Hero Baldwin that has continued through a series of singles including their most recent single “I Started A Fire,” which was released earlier this year. Heyboer and van Achthoven recently invited Baldwin to be a full-time member of the band. “Jordi and Micha seem to pull something out of me that resonates with my emotional landscape every time we make a song,” the London-based singer/songwriter and producer says. “I think it’s so important to feel creatively and emotionally secure, and Jordi and Micha always afford me that privilege.”
The act’s Melkweg Amsterdam show was their official debut as a trio. She also joined the duo for their biggest live show to date, Tinlicker In The Park at Crystal Palace Bowl.
Tinlicker’s highly-anticipated fourth album — and first as a trio — is slated for an early 2026 release. But in the meantime, the trio’s latest single “I Want My Freedom” showcases what has made the Dutch outfit a titan in electronic music: Beginning with a slow-burning piano intro that seemingly nods at Radiohead‘s “Everything In Its Right Place,” the track quickly morphs into a festival and club banger featuring skittering beats, glistening and melodic synth arpeggios, a string section sample-led bridge, and a euphoric bridge and hook, which serves as a slickly produced and lush bed for Baldwin’s defiant and resolute vocals.
Throughout the song’s runtime, Baldwin’s lyrics are especially pertinent right now, as many countries across the world seem to be sliding backwards into a brutally abusive, authoritarian hellscape that many of us don’t want — and will resist until death.
“These lyrics circled in my mind for a long time” Baldwin says. “I started writing from that feeling of disconnection as a woman in my mid-twenties with a sharp awareness of the world moving backwards. But over time, the song grew into something bigger. ‘I Want My Freedom’ isn’t just about me, it’s about all of us. The heartbreaking truth is that the abuse of freedoms reaches far beyond gender. I wanted to create a song of inclusion, with a nod to what I personally feel I’ve lost. Freedom is never handed to us, it’s something we fight for, and I no longer have that softness in me to apologize for that.”
The accompanying video for “I Want My Freedom” consists of footage shot from their Crystal Palace Bowl set.
New Audio: Swedish Instrumental Outfit Automatism Shares Languorous Cover of Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights”
Swedish instrumental psych rock outfit Automatism — Hans Hjelm (guitar), Gustav Nygren (guitar), Mikael Tuominen (bass) and Jonas Yrlid (drums) — will be releasing their long-awaited fourth album Sörmland Friday through German-based label Tonzonen Records.
Five years have passed since the release of 2020’s Immersion. The hiatus wasn’t completely voluntary, so when the band reconvened in September 2023 to begin the creative process for their fourth album, it felt like a special occasion for the band — much like a family reunion. Recorded in a former chapel in the Swedish rural county of Sörmland, the building’s high ceilings and open atmosphere helped set the overall tone of the soon-to-be-released album. As they were recording, they could see the verdant landscape from the building’s tall windows, which inspired them to name the album after the province.
Sörmland‘s latest single “Neon Lights” is an instrumental take on Kraftwerk‘s “Neon Lights.” Clocking in a roughly the same time as the original, which appeared on 1978’s The Man-Machine, the Automatism rendition slows both the tempo and melody down, giving the song a languorous and dreamy, psilocybin-fueled buzz.
“Another one of those occasions when the best stuff comes out when you stop trying,” the band’s Mikael Tuominen says. “We had been working on a version of ‘Neon Lights’ for a while, even played it live, that was much closer to the original in feel and tempo. We did a couple of recordings of that version and they were okay. Then, without deciding anything, we just fell into playing the theme really slowly and softly, and again, luckily enough I hit the red button. First it was almost as if we didn’t take it seriously, but soon we entered the zone, and listening to the versions back to back there was no question of which one to choose.”
New Audio: Lomotor Returns with Scorching “Second Sun”
Josh Rathburn is a Northern Massachusetts-based electronic music producer best known as Lomotor. Drawing comparisons to Boards of Canada and JOVM mainstay Rival Consoles, and inspired by the hills and valleys of his rural surroundings, Rathburn’s work sees him blending modular and analog synthesizers with found sounds and early childhood cassette recordings to create songs that often feel like a scratched and faded memory of a melody heard long ago.
The Northern Massachusetts-based producer’s latest single “Second Sun” is a broodingly hypnotic track built around a glitchy, growling and warped synth melody paired with skittering beats. While seemingly channeling Tobacco and Black Moth Super Rainbow, “Second Sun” evokes sun-scorched landscapes and grainy, analog fuzz, making the song sound as though it was a distant transmission from a malfunctioning satellite.
Throwback: Happy 60th Birthday, Trent Reznor!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Trent Reznor’s 60th birthday.
New Video: Kilo Kish Shares Surreal Visual for Yearning, Club Banging “enough”
Kilo Kish is an acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, creator director and designer working in music, film, installation and writing. 2022’s AMERICAN GURL was released to praise from Pitchfork, NPR, Teen Vogue, NYLON and The New York Times, and helped lead to features in Vogue, Cultured and others.
AMERICAN GURL expanded into a curational project in collaboration with Womxn in Windows founder and creator Zehra Zehra, which has been displayed in galleries and museums like the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art, Hauser & Wirth and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. She has collaborated with several brands including Bulgari, Levi’s, Rodarte and more.
Kish just wrapped up a residency with Womxn In Windows at MOCA, Los Angeles, which celebrated the launch of American Gurl: home-land, a presentation of six short films that negotiate themes on land, diaspora and displacement from Melvonna Ballenger, Shenny De Los Angeles, Ella Ezeike, Solange Knowles, Alima Lee and Cauleen Smith. Earlier this week Womxn In Windows announced their screening series at the Academy Museum, American Gurl: Seeking . . . guest programmer by Kish and Zehra. The films offer nuanced perspectives on how women of color navigate the complexities of systems and institutions.
Her highly-anticipated EP Negotiations is slated for a Friday release through Independent Co. The six-song EP reportedly sees the acclaimed interdisciplinary artist further amplifying her forward-thinking and advanced creative mind with a poignant effort, that’s a deep and thought-provoking dive into the nuances of technology and the large role it has within creativity.
Thematically, the EP explores the intricate interplay between the human body, technology and nuances of emotional and cognitive processing in a rapidly evolving world. By framing the body as a machine, Kish intentionally invites a dialogue about the transactional nature of energy expenditure, suggesting that our existence is defined by a constant exchange in which every output necessitates an input, ultimately leading to both depletion and potential renewal.
At the core of the EP is the notion of error and glitch — a reflection of contemporary life marked by instability, chaos and uncertainty. And as a result, Kish delves into the scripts we write into ourselves, questioning their efficacy in an era seemingly defined by incessant, rapid-fire change. How we are programmed shapes our responses to these incessant, rapid-fire changes, illustrating that we all inevitably fall prey to our programming and thought patterns. That introspective observation should resonate deeply with our collective experience of navigating a landscape rife with digital and emotional noise, global systems failure and environmental collapse prompting a need for the sort of manual resets needed when you reprogram a malfunctioning device.
Sonically, the EP’s creative process utilized a finite set of sonic parameters and instruments that would reflect the overall thematic core. Drawing from early hip-hop and electronic music techniques like skipping, scratching, vocal processing, vocoders and modular synthesizers, the result is a sound that balances the synthetic with moments of humanity, creating a machine-like atmosphere.
Negotiations EP‘s latest single “enough” is a slickly produced, hypnotic track featuring glistening and percussive synth arpeggios, skittering beats, and chopped up vocodered and processed vocal samples serving as a lush, club friendly yet creepily uneasy bed for Kish’s yearning, validation seeking delivery.
“This song is kind of about throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and the fantasy that we play out on the internet, how things are not always as they seem,” Kish explains. “Wanting the affection and love of complete strangers, but not really knowing why. The need for viewership and adoration that’s become a mainstay in the way we live nowadays, not just as artists but as everyday people.”
Co-directed by Kish and David Laven and produced by Even/Odd, the accompanying video for “enough” is part of a suite of interconnected films accompanying the Negotiations EP shot and based within the same immersive world. Calling back to the EP’s first video “reprogram,” where Kish danced alone in a stark, gray office, the video for “enough” is set in the same setting — but this time, we see an older businessman type, whose life at that moment sees him vacillating between listening to “enough” on his laptop and hearing it as a part of his own internal dialogue.
Understandably, the businessman is confused, intrigued and then somehow, instinctually moved to sway and dance to the song in the office. As the video pans out a bit, we see a completely unfazed Kish sitting on the floor, observing and writing notes.
Throwback: Happy 73rd Birthday, David Byrne!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates David Byrne’s 73rd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 74th Birthday, Chris Frantz!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Talking Heads’ and Tom Tom Club’s Chris Frantz’s 74th birthday.