JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates Yeah Yean Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner’s 51st birthday.
Category: garage rock
New Video: Frankie and the Witch Fingers Shares Punchy and Grimy “Dead Silence”
Acclaimed Los Angeles-based psych punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers — currently founding duo Dylan Sizemore (vocals, guitar) and Josh Menashe (lead guitar, synth), along with Death Valley Girls‘ Nikki “Pickle” Smith (bass) and Mike Watt’s Nick Aguilar (drums) — have spent the past decade restlessly mutating their sound into bold, electrifying new forms with every new release.
Slated for a June 6, 2025 release through Greenway Records and The Reverberation Appreciation Society, the Los Angeles-based JOVM mainstay’s eighth album, the Maryam Qudus-produced Trash Classic reportedly sees the band plunging into a sewer-slick fusion of proto punk venom, fractured New Wave and industrial grime. Sonically brimming with wiry synths, angular melodies and squirming and biting grooves, the material is delivered with a sly, playful balance between smirk and sneer. The band layers playful unease while exploring themes of escapism, decay and overindulgence.
The songs were born in the grime of Vernon, Los Angeles — a wasteland littered with gutted RVs and rusting machinery, where the air tastes like asphalt and dog food. But the alchemy happed during recording sessions at Oakland‘s Tiny Telephone Studio, where producer Maryam Qudus helped transmute the tracks into the final forms with unhinged tones, unconventional recording experiments and wild sonic detours.
Each day of the recording sessions began with cartoons blaring at full volume — a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late night, sugar-fueled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery, spastic playfulness. The end result is a raw, twisted monument to rot and excess — and to toxic glamour and nihilistic salvation.
So far I’ve written about two of the album’s singles:
- “Economy,” which offered a glimpse of what to expect from the album: grimy synth pulse right at the front, alongside angular guitar fuzz and muscular yet mathematically precise drumming paired with punchily delivered vocals and mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, the result is a scuzzier and grimier take on Freedom of Choice-era DEVO — with a similar, tongue-in-cheek sensibility.
- “Total Reset,” a sweaty ripper that sees the band pairing angular guitar fuzz with squiggling synth pulse, mathematically precise drumming and Sizemore’s punchy delivery with the band’s penchant for mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Sonically, “Total Reset” strikes me as a being a synthesis of King Gizzard and Devo — but with a mischievous sense of menace and unease.
Trash Classic‘s third and latest single “Dead Silence” continues a run of grimy and mischievous DEVO-meets-garage rock rippers, anchored around the band’s unerring knack for rousing, mosh pit friendly hooks paired with Sizemore’s punchy delivery singing lyrics about existential dread and death. Oh, how fitting for our fucked up, dire time!
“This one’s got a nice little origin story,” the band explains. ““We played a festival in Boise with Spacemoth, Maryam Qudus’ brainchild, and met her for the first time there. Cut to a year later, and she’s deep in the guts of this record – producing, engineering, twisting knobs, and arranging sounds with us.
“On the flight home from that Boise show, Josh threw on the Spacemoth album for the first time and got his brain microwaved. He also recorded the plane taking off, just on a whim. That roar ended up in the bridge of ‘Dead Silence’. It’s a nice crusty texture, but it also weirdly bookmarks the start of it all.
Maryam’s all over this record. She sings, plays, distorts, haunts – leaving smudges on everything in the best way. She rules, and we were happy to accidentally mark the occasion sonically with a little jet-engine weirdness.”
The accompanying video is a mischievous and menacing psilocybin trip featuring cartoonishly bright, analog fuzz and crude, hand-drawn animation, and graffiti that pulses and undulates with the song.
Throwback: Happy 77th Birthday, Wayne Kramer!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 77th anniversary of Wayne Kramer’s birth.
New Audio: Crocodiles Side Project Psychic Pigs Share a Noisy and Gritty Ripper
San Diego-based singer/songwriter and musician Brandon Welchez is best known for being one-half of the grade psych pop duo Crocodiles. Over the past two decades, Welchez’s work has gravitated to the mid fi and melodic end of the sonic spectrum.
However, Welchez’s latest project Psychic Pigs shows a much different side of his work and sound, revealing that the raw and bleeding hardcore punk and power pop bands on the Killed by Death compilations have influenced his work as much as The Jesus and Mary Chain has been on him. The project can trace its origins to when Welchez started writing music he knew was too discordant for Crocodiles’ pop-leaning sound.
Slated for a May 23, 2025 release through Slovenly Recordings, Psychic Pigs’ self-titled, full-length debut was recorded last April in London over a breakneck four day recording session with Fucked Up‘s and Career Suicide‘s Jonah Falco handling production and drums. Once they were finished recording the album’s material, Welchez returned to the states with the goal of forming a live band that could replicate the aggressive, live-to-record sound capture on the recordings.
Connections made throughout Welchez’s two-plus decade music career proved fruitful with the band’s live lineup featuring members of Fake Fruits, Surfbort and Choir Boy, including Welchez (vocals, guitar), Bee Wright (lead guitar), Jeff Kleinman (bass) and John Hodge (drums).
The project will make its live debut on March 19, 2025 at Los Angeles‘ The Escondite and they’ll play their record release show at Permanent Records Roadhouse in late May. And from my understanding more live dates are to come. But in the meantime, the self-titled album’s first single and album title track “Psychic Pigs” is a breakneck and noisy ripper featuring scorching riffage, thunderous drumming paired with Welchez’s adopting an old school punk sneer. Of course, because Welchez has spent the past two decades as one-half of Crocodiles, “Psychic Pigs” will remind some fans of Crimes of Passion-era Crocodiles — think of a song like “Cockroach” — but with a gritty beer and sweat soaked vibe.
New Video: France’s The Flying Bones Shares a Bruising Ripper
The Flying Bones — Fabien Joffard (drums, vocals) and Thibault Talmont (guitar, vocals) — are a St. Malo, France-based garage rock duo, whose work draws from and seamlessly meshes several influences including Thee Oh Sees, Pneu and Francky Goes To Pointe-à-Pitre among others.
Equipped with just drums, guitar, some effects pedals, guitar and bass amps and two microphones for vocals, the duo pairs the wildness of garage punk with live looping of guitar and other instruments when necessary to create a sound that can easily vacillating between fast and fierce to trance-inducing and contemplative within a musical phrase.
The French duo spent several years refining their live show and they recently managed to compile the best tracks from their garage punk and math fuzz periods into a collection of nine muscular and abrasive tracks — the pair’s forthcoming album Who Are The Flying Bones.
Who Are The Flying Bones‘ latest single “Muscles” is a bruising and forceful ripper that brings DEVO, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, The Oh Sees and even Cinemechanica to mind while displaying the duo’s remarkable musicianship and penchants for motorik-lke groove paired with punchily delivered vocals.
Directed by Thibault Talmont, the accompanying video follows Arthur Boury, a nerdy and nebbishy sort of guy, desperate to turn into a muscle man through weights, exercise, powders and the like — until his dopplegänger shows up to wreck havoc.
Throwback: Happy 50th Birthday, Nick Zinner!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Nick Zinner’s 50th birthday.
New Audio: Iggy Pop Shares Live Version of “The Passenger” Recorded at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023
Last July, the legendary Iggy Pop returned to Montreux Jazz Festival backed by a seven-piece band and thrilled an at-capacity Stravinski Auditorium crowd with a career-spanning set that featured material from his time with The Stooges, solo albums like The Idiot, Lust for Life and New Values, leading up to the release of his most recent album, last year’s Every Loser.
The Montreux Jazz Festival set marked the legend’s third appearance at the festival and it was recorded and filmed by the festival team. The resulting live album Iggy Pop Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 is an essential Iggy Pop live album that celebrates a legendary career and catalog that remains as vital, forceful and inventive as ever while featuring beloved classics like “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “T.V. Eye,” “Lust for Life,” and “Nightclubbing,” as well as newer songs like “Modern Day Ripoff” and “Frenzy.” “Stravinsky Hall is special, like Carnegie or the Garden or Sydney Opera. I’ve dived in them all,”
says Iggy Pop.
Iggy Pop Live at Montreux Jazz Festival‘s second and latest single, is swaggering and roaring, live rendition of one of Iggy Pop’s most iconic and most streamed songs, “The Passenger.” The addition of a horn arrangement manages to add a muscular, ska-like coloring to the proceedings while retaining the familiar, chugging lurch of the recoded version.
The concert will be available as a Blu-ray + CD Digipak, 2LP gatefold and digital download on January 24, 2025 globally through earMusic.
New Video: San Francisco’s The Spyrals Share Forceful and Anthemic “Dream Believin'”
I’m in Philadelphia for the final edition of Asian Arts Initiative’s Sound Type Music Festival and Music Writers Workshop. It’s been an odd and very short trip. And it’s probably the last bit of traveling I’ll do this year. I wanted to travel more this year, and I definitely got that.
I head back home in a few hours but in the meantime, there’s still work to do. So let’s get to it, right?
Founded by Jeff Lewis back in 2009, the San Francisco-based garage psych rock outfit The Spyrals — currently, Lewis (vocals, guitar), Georgia Feroce (keys) and Dash Borinstein (drums) — quickly received attention for crating unapologetic garage rock and a loud, live show rooted in the band’s forceful stage presence.
The San Francisco-based outfit’s recently released fifth album Retrograde see the band paying homage to their earliest work while boldly stepping into the future. Retrograde‘s eight songs touch upon themes of isolation, heartache and self-assurance among others. The album’s material comes from several months of jamming and sees the band digging deep into their psych rock roots while continuing to serve up raw, gritty rock ‘n’ roll that gets straight to the point. After self-recording much of their earliest material in practice studios and garages, the band recorded the album earlier this year at Los Angeles-based Station House Studios with Mark Rains.
Retrograde‘s latest single “Dream Believin'” is an anthemic and loud bit of psych rock that brings Phosphene Dream-era The Black Angels to mind. And much like the acclaimed Austin-based JOVM mainstays work, “Dream Believin'” thematically focuses on the remarkably contemporary — capturing the unease and desperate desire to escape of our current moment.
The accompanying video for “Dream Believin'” features a mysterious black-clad figure wandering the beach. At one point we see the black-clad figure peering into a mysterious tablet.
New Audio: Miranda and the Beat Share Churning “Anxiety”
Formed back in 2018 here in NYC and now based in New Orleans, the rising rock outfit Miranda and the Beat — currently Miranda Zipse (vocals, guitar), Dylan Fernandez (Farfisa) and Alvin Jackson (bass) — have been renowned for their high-energy live shows and fearless punk approach.
After extensive touring to support last year’s self-titled full-length debut, the rising rock outfit will be releasing their highly-anticipated sophomore album Can’t Take it on October 25, 2024 through Ernest Jenning Record Co./Khannibalism across North America and Wild Honey in Europe.
Written and recorded in a five day burst at King Khan‘s Moon Studios Rock n Roll Vortex in a remote village on the German countryside, the album sees the band blending all the best flavors from pure punk anthems played at a eardrum shattering intensity, to grinding R&B, to hypnotic, edgy sci-fi alchemy and some heartbreaking balladry too. “If you need a soundtrack to an evening of Germs burns and mind-altering mayhem followed by warm heartfelt embraces and skid marks this is the band for you,” King Khan says. “The soundtrack to the real apocalypse has arrived and is waiting for you at your favorite record store. Real Rock n’ Roll is alive and well, the torches have been passed and the Molotov cocktails are being lit and thrown. Miranda and the Beat are the wild fire you have been waiting for to light under the collective asses to destroy patriarchies, topple kingdoms, smash colonies with a bold middle stink finger in place. Be forewarned…. And come find out what ‘Earthquake Water’ is, it may one day save your life.”
Last month, I wrote about “Manipulate Me,” a breakneck and bruising, mosh pit friendly ripper anchored around scorching riffs and Miranda Zipse’s take-no-shit delivery. It shouldn’t be surprising that the song brought back memories of sweaty, hardcore punk shows Coney Island High and The Continental.
“This song was probably the most fun to write for the album,” Miranda and the Beat’s Miranda Zipse says. “We were all in King Khan’s studio getting wine drunk and spitballing lines back and forth. We pretty much spent the whole time rolling on the floor dying of laughter, which ended up being very therapeutic and what we needed to do at the time. This song’s about some real shit and it felt really good to get it out of our system in the form of an absolute fuckin banger. Moral of the story: always be a weirdo but never be a manipulative creep.”
Can’t Take It‘s fourth and latest single “Anxiety” is a churning and chugging ripper that evokes the creeping dread, racing thoughts, racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, dry mouth and the lack of control of anxiety with an uncanny and seemingly lived in precision.
According to the band, these are the things that give them anxiety:
1. People who wear sandals on the subway
2. The accidental text on purpose
3. When Alvin can’t find Backwoods
4. Losing a tooth
“This song legit causes anxiety. This goddamn song has got me so stumped,” the band’s Miranda Zipse adds. “I shot two different ideas for music videos and pulled two all-nighters this past week at work trying to get them together between working this job and nothing was looking good enough to put out.”
New Video: Miranda and the Beat Shares Breakneck Ripper “Manipulate Me”
Formed back in 2018 here in NYC and now based in New Orleans, the rising rock outfit Miranda and the Beat — currently Miranda Zipse (vocals, guitar), Dylan Fernandez (Farfisa) and Alvin Jackson (bass) — have been renowned for their high-energy live shows and fearless punk approach.
After extensive touring to support last year’s self-titled full-length debut, the rising rock outfit will be releasing their highly-anticipated sophomore album Can’t Take it on October 25, 2024 through Ernest Jenning Record Co./Khannibalism across North America and Wild Honey in Europe.
Written and recorded in a five day burst at King Khan‘s Moon Studios Rock n Roll Vortex in a remote village on the German countryside, the album sees the band blending all the best flavors from pure punk anthems played at a eardrum shattering intensity, to grinding R&B, to hypnotic, edgy sci-fi alchemy and some heartbreaking balladry too. “If you need a soundtrack to an evening of Germs burns and mind-altering mayhem followed by warm heartfelt embraces and skid marks this is the band for you,” King Khan says. “The soundtrack to the real apocalypse has arrived and is waiting for you at your favorite record store. Real Rock n’ Roll is alive and well, the torches have been passed and the Molotov cocktails are being lit and thrown. Miranda and the Beat are the wild fire you have been waiting for to light under the collective asses to destroy patriarchies, topple kingdoms, smash colonies with a bold middle stink finger in place. Be forewarned…. And come find out what ‘Earthquake Water’ is, it may one day save your life.”
Can’t Take It’s third and latest single “Manipulate Me” is a breakneck and bruising, mosh pit friendly, punk rock ripper anchored around some scorching riffs. “Manipulate Me” brings back memories of sweaty, hardcore punk shows at Coney Island High and The Continental. So play as loud as humanly possible — and then open up that pit!
“This song was probably the most fun to write for the album,” Miranda and the Beat’s Miranda Zipse says. “We were all in King Khan’s studio getting wine drunk and spitballing lines back and forth. We pretty much spent the whole time rolling on the floor dying of laughter, which ended up being very therapeutic and what we needed to do at the time. This song’s about some real shit and it felt really good to get it out of our system in the form of an absolute fuckin banger. Moral of the story: always be a weirdo but never be a manipulative creep.”
Directed by Nazar Khamis and the band, the accompanying video was filmed by the band’s Dylan Fernandez and Nazar Khamis, and edited by the band’s Miranda Zipse and Dylan Fernandez. The video begins with the band hopping the turnstiles at the Morgan Avenue L train station, and following them being badasses around Bushwick.
New Video: Wine Lips Share Breakneck Ripper “Stimulation”
Toronto-based outfit Wine Lips started back in 2015 as a part-time project between its founding members Cam Hilborn (vocals, guitar) and Aurora Evans (drums). But with the release of 2017’s self-titled debut, the band quickly amassed international attention, which resulted in tours across North America, followed by an unexpected tour of Hong Kong and China in 2018.
2019’s sophomore album Stressor was released to critical praise. Multiple album tracks charted on North American and European radio, with several being featured in broadcast and Netflix series. Building upon a growing profile, the Canadian outfit embarked on some rather relentless touring.
Much like everyone else, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the band’s plans and aspirations. The Canadian band used the enforced downtime to fully dedicate themselves to crating and writing their third album 2021’s Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party, which was released to widespread critical praise across 35 countries. The album has amassed over 20 million streams on Spotify — and the vinyl release is currently in its seventh pressing with nine different color variants. The album’s lead track “Eyes” was licensed to a bevy of films, series and video games, including ABC’s The Rookie, Hockey Night in Canada (I guess stereotypes are true) Population 11 and a lengthy list of others. Much more relentless touring to support the album ensued, and the venues were the largest they ever played — and mostly sold-out.
The Toronto-based outfit’s latest album Super Mega Ultra was recorded by Simon Larochette at Ontario-based studio, The Sugar Shack. Super Mega Ultra is the band’s most ambitious album to date, and it sees the band exploring new thematic territory while firmly cementing a sound and approach that meshes psych rock, garage rock and punk rock.
“It’s tough writing a new record when you’re always on tour,” Wine Lips’ Cam Hilborn says in press notes. “The previous album seemed to be doing really well and at times I felt like I was hitting a wall creatively. Long story short, I think this album turned out great. Simon always brings a good vibe at the Sugar Shack and we were able to try some new ideas and capture the energy without straying too far from our roots. Excited to see where these songs take us in the future.”
Super Mega Ultra‘s latest single is a breakneck ripper anchored around scorching riffage, enormous mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses paired with punchily delivered vocals. Play loud, headbang with your friends — or better yet, open up that pit, y’all!
“I started writing ‘Stimulation’ during our break in 2020,” the band’s Cam Hilborn explains..”I might have put it on the shelf for a bit but one day the chorus just poured out of me and the rest of the song started to make more sense and came more naturally. It was the first song I demoed for the new record and it kind of became the benchmark.”
Direted by Ciarán Downes, the accompanying video for “Stimulation” starts with the band desperately seeking out a tambourine player. The first few tambourine players just don’t seem to work out for the band. They initially dismiss the third one they meet, but when he turns into a mix of The Incredible Hulk and Firestarter, inspired by the rejection and mockery of his closest ones, the band relents, partially out of fear — and partially because that fire thing is pretty fucking cool.
Throwback: Black History Month: Death
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tribute to Death.
