Los Angeles-based artist Josh da Costa was a fixture in the early 2010s Brooklyn scene. Covering music back then, it seemed as though anyone could start a band or a project — and just about everyone did. And they all played at hundreds of now, long-shuttered venues like Cameo Art Gallery, Glasslands, 285 Kent, The Palisades, The Grand Victory, Trash Bar and countless others. da Costa’s first band Regal Degal toured with Real Estate and DIIV and opened for The Pop Group. (Unsurprisingly, I wrote about Regal Degal on this site back in 2013. Yes, this site’s early days y’all.)
When Regal Degal split up, da Costa relocated to Los Angeles. The old Craftsman house he shared with Geneva Jacuzzi, Shags Chamberlain, James Ferraro and Daryl Johns was a paradise for “freaks and friends,” as well as artists and musicians, who constantly wandered in for a jam session or for a hang. At the time, he played drums with Drugdealer and MGMT and he formed CMON, who released an album through Mexican Summer. (I saw CMON open for Jorge Elbrecht back in 2018! So I’m familiar with da Costa and his work.)
The party came to an abrupt end when the Craftsman burned down “in a blaze of glory,” set alight by a serial arsonist and the pandemic forced CMON, much like countless other acts, to cancel a big tour. da Costa’s serious relationship also ended. But for him, it wasn’t all disaster: his friends supported him after the fire, he met someone new and the pandemic meant that he finally had the time to revisit music from his adolescence and “get deep into some of the great I’d had lying around for years but overlooked.”
da Costa’s full-length debut, New Wave Graveyard is slated for a Friday July 24, 2026 release through Stones Throw Records. He imagined the album as a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality.” “Instead of trying to hone in on one specific vibe or sound, I went through my own taste and record collection and tried out different approaches — as if I were more than just one artist,” he explains. While drawing from different styles and genres, the album’s material is anchored in how he crystallizes these very different approaches into something singular distinct, crafting a stylish record that defies easy categorization.
If you’ve been lucky to catch da Costa DJ around Los Angeles or have caught his Confusing Mix radio show on NTS, the album’s album overall aesthetic won’t come as a surprise. As a DJ and radio host, he has an uncanny knack for finding curious records from all over the place — music from Brussels-based micro-labels, Flying Nun Records favorites and left field post punk — and blending them in a way that somehow makes perfect sense.
Written over the course of several years, New Wave Graveyard was written during a transition period, a time when da Costa was “getting close to people and getting torn between the types of pleasure and discomfort all of that brings. Breaking people’s hearts, but mostly your own. And remaining excited about not just falling in love, but staying in love.”
Much like countless others, da Costa was drawn to LA’s “movie magic, bizarre music, sleazy sexy glammy druggy outsiders, and this blown-out bad vibe flipside to the California dream” – which interestingly enough, also describers New Wave Graveyard in a nutshell. The titular new wave graveyard is both a literal place (da Costa sometimes drives by his old burned-down house, which is still vacant) and a vibe, an elegy to forgotten fantasies and faded memories.
Nothing lasts forever: Bands start and break up. Friends flame out and lovers leave. Treasured spaces vanish. But the album reportedly bottles the sensation of being there, where the magic and cool shit happened — even if that place is completely imagined. It’s a celebration of strange people met once, but never forgotten, of shows and parties you attended and those you wished you had, of being young and earnest, and a little bit weird.
New Wave Graveyard will include the previously released, shimmering electro pop ballad “96 Year Old Girl” and the album’s last pre-release single, “Shireen.” “Shireen” is a a bit of XTC and Flying Nun Records-like jangle pop, anchored around a shimmering 12 string guitar and da Costa’s unerring knack for crafting a remarkably catchy hook. Much like its immediate predecessor, “Shireen” sounds as though it could have been released in 1983 or so — but with a subtly modern production.
Directed by Ambar Navarro, the accompanying video for “Shireen” features da Costa as a sort of unseen narrator to an 80s teen movie that quickly turns into a campy horror movie featuring a blood-thirsty vampire/werewolf.