Category: post punk

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Psymon Spine Returns with Punchy and Groovy “Bored of Guitar”

Psymon Spine‘s third album Head Body Connector is slated for a February 23, 2024 release through Northern Spy Records. The album is reportedly a gritty, punchy, guitar-forward studio album from a band that’s long been obsessed with production. Perhaps more than their previous releases, Head Body Connector is explicitly informed and inspired by the band’s cathartic live show. “It’s more unhinged than anything we’ve made before,” Psymon Spine’s Noah Prebish says. “Throughout the writing process, we were always asking ourselves how we could make it really fun to play live.”  

Ironically, the album, though ready-made to be performed, was mostly written in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The band split their time between various home studios and friends’ back porches in Montauk, The Catskills, Boston and Brooklyn. It was fall and the crisp autumn air, and the political uncertainty and disquietude looming in the background lended itself to an undeniable longing for companionship. “It felt like we had collectively jumped from one timeline to another, more bizarre one,” Prebish says. 

The central theme of time being fractured, chopped and screwed is integral to the album’s material and its album art, which was designed by New York-based artist Bucky Boudreau and appears in the form of alternative measurements of passing seconds, minutes, days, lifetimes, tally marks on a chalkboard and infinity signs made of camp bracelets on a cracked egg.“Head Body Connector is our response to a world even more chaotic than usual,” says Peter Spears, “and an exploration of the little joys, anxieties, and absurdities that world has to offer.” While being an ode to the dissonance of temporality in our current moment, it’s also an elastic tribute to friendship and harmony in the face of that dissonance. 

So far I’ve written about two of Head Body Connector‘s singles:

“Boys,” a track that begins with a glistening New Wave-meets-post punk introduction before quickly morphing into a funky, synth-driven both with slashing guitars. The two seemingly disparate sections are held together with Sabine Holler’s dreamy delivery. But just under the infectious, danceable surface, is an introspective song that reveals a subtle sense of unease. 

“Wizard Acid,” a woozy bit of disco funk built around a punchy bass line, glistening synth arpeggios and thumping beats paired with lyrics about coming apart at the seams — both literally and metaphorically. Consumed with cabin fever, the song’s narrator is slowly losing their mind. 

Head Body Connector‘s third and latest single, the punchy and hook-driven “Bored of Guitar” is a mischievous tongue-in-cheek provocation built around guitar that sounds indebted to Gang of Four, Talking Heads, DEVO and others but full of scathing, self-deprecating, self-aware, self-criticism that’s seemingly informed by getting older, seeing your priorities shift and change — and perhaps hating it as much as you’re accepting it.

“‘Bored of Guitar’ was one of the earlier tracks we worked on for Head Body Connector. Like many of our songs, it started as two separate ideas that Peter, Michael, and I (Noah) smashed into one and then expanded upon,” the Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays explain. “The lyrics came to me piecemeal inspired by conversations I had been having with Michael about the kind of guitar-centric dude rock bands we were getting tired of seeing. The underlying fear for me, of course, was that we were one of those bands. Nothing disgusts a person like seeing in others what bothers them about themselves. The song is an amped-up meditation on (amongst other things) self-criticism, priorities shifting around, and the hilarious, painful, beautiful, humiliating, exhilarating experience of being in a band. It’s also about me working on my relationship with my younger self, the one who set most of my current life experiences into motion long ago. I love him and we’ve both got notes for each other.”   

Directed by Max Mainwood, the accompanying video for “Bored of Guitar” is a surreal, seemingly horror movie-inspired visual that features an adult and their younger self interacting with other, while being chased and haunted by menacing presences dressed in black and more. “I wanted to represent this song with a visual narrative that came from the band’s storytelling, but also pull from my personal interpretation of the song,” Mainwood explains. “This video plays as an energetic backdrop to a groovy tune, as well as an underlying story left for the audience to discover.”   

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Prague’s Nomad Disco Shares Hook-Driven and Anthemic “Napoli”

Led by their frontman, who was born in Far Eastern Russia and eventually relocated to Prague, who finds inspiration in conversations with nature and people, road trips to historical sights, escapism and psychology, Nomad Disco is a Prague-based post-punk outfit, whose sound features elements of post-punk, goth, alt rock and shoegaze.

The Czech Republic-based band released their full-length debut Pressure Island last year. The album’s latest single “Napoli,” is an anthemic and hook-driven bit of post punk that sounds indebted to post-punk’s beloved classic period — but with a subtly modern touch. The song, which was inspired by an escapism desire to see Naples, captures a deeply familiar and universal sentiment: the dream of packing up some of your possessions, going someplace new and being awed, confused and amused by everything you come across.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Seattle’s Weep Wave Shares Anthemic Meditation on Self-Evolution

Seattle-based post-punk outfit Weep Wave released their full-length debut, 2019’s S.A.D. to critical praise from KEXP, Seattle Music Insider, Raised by Cassettes and Dan’s Tunes among others.

In the five years since S.A.D.’s release, the band has been rather busy: They’ve gone through a lineup change, which has resulted in their current lineup: Dylan Fuentes (vocals, guitar), Mike Hubbard (drums, synth) and Mitch Midkiff (bass). They’ve released an EP and a handful of singles, one which was featured as KEXP’s Song of the Day that have gradually revealed an evolving and decided change in sonic direction. The band has shared stages with a handful of acclaimed and renowned acts including JOVM mainstays Los Bitchos, Blackwater Holylight, Gustaf, The Bobby Lees, Godcaster, Habibi, Reignwolf and Spirit Mother among others. They’ve made the rounds of the local and regional festival circuit, playing sets at Treefort Music Festival, Capitol Hill Block Party, South Sound Block Party and Off Beat Music Fest. And they’ve done multiple tours up and down the West Coast — and have played a few times here in NYC.

Slated for an April 5, 2024 release through Corporat Records, the 11-song Dylan Wall-produced sophomore album Speck was recorded at Seattle’s 7 Hills Studios and reportedly sees the trio embarking on a kaleidoscopic sonic odyssey through the diverse array of genres they proudly call home. Thematically Fuentes’ lyrics oscillate between two contrasting realms: outward to explore the effects of the perils of capitalism and climate change — and inward, to scrutinize the self, in particular dissecting the ego and self-identity.

Speck‘s first single is the Low Praise-meets-grunge-like “Rebirth Mantra.” Built around a pummeling mosh pit friendly riff, thunderous drumming and a supple yet propulsive bass line within a classic, alternating loud-quiet-loud song structure, “Rebirth Mantra,” captures Fuentes at his most introspective and neurotic, with the song’s narrator expressing his fears of falling into the same unhelpful — and perhaps even destructive — patterns that led to repeated failure and frustration. The song’s narrator envisions a transformed, evolved version of himself, a much more caring, courageous and empathetic self. Of course, are we able and willing to change and evolve? Or are we too stubborn, too blind to do what’s necessary to better ourselves?

 “‘Rebirth Mantra’ is a song about what kind of person you want to be if you had a chance to start things over again. A big theme in the album is that everything repeats and tries to manifest the version of life that you want to actually want to live within these cycles. Going into the studio, we didn’t expect this song to turn out to be one of the strongest songs on the album.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Don’t Get Lemon Shares Ironic “Say Something New For Once”

Currently split between Austin and Houston, Don’t Get Lemon — Austin Curtis (vocals), Bryan Walters (bass, percussion) and Nick Ross (synth, guitar, drum programming) — is a dance pop outfit with a glam-leaning, synth-driven sound that draws from 70s Berlin and 80s Manchester.

Don’t Get Lemon’s forthcoming sophomore album Have Some Shame is slated for an April 23, 2024 release through á La Carte Records. The nine-song album, which clocks in at 37 minutes reportedly sees the trio flittering between synth pop and stomping glam rock and crafting a sound that the band dubs heatwave. Have Some Shame‘s latest single “Say Something New For Once” is a hook-driven, decidedly 80s inspired bop built around glistening synths, angular guitars, skittering four-on-the-flour and icily delivered vocals and a New Order-like guitar solo. While being an anaemic bop, the trio explains that the song is an ironic commentary on the process of songwriting. “Most bands have the opportunity to say something unique about their lives but instead get lost in trivial cliché. Does this song say anything new to you? Is it supposed to?”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Whispering Sons Share Anthemic and Hook Driven “Walking, Flying”

Slated for a February 23, 2024 release through their longtime label home [PIAS] Recordings, the acclaimed Belgian post-punk outfit Whispering Sons‘ third album, The Great Calm reportedly represents both a reimagining and a rethinking that has produced a collection of songs that remain defiantly and uniquely true to the band.

First, the band went through a lineup reshuffle: The band’s original drummer Sanders Pelsmaekers had to drop out of playing music after suffering nerve danger. He took on the role of the band’s tour manager in the interim — but he has returned, taking up synth. Bassist Tuur Vandeborne has moved over to drums, and the band’s long-term engineer, and an experienced producer in his own right, Bert Vliegen has joined on bass. And while guitarist and songwriter Kobe Lijnen and frontperson and lyricist Fenne Kuppens have retained their roles, they have adapted and evolved for the album’s creative and recording processes.

From the perspective of an outsider, it may seem that the Belgian post-punk outfit was in upheaval but for the band, they believe that these changing currents have led them to an artistic place that feels comfortably their own. “I think the most important thing about us is that we met as a group of friends and started the band,” Whispering Sons’ Kuppens says. “This is something that came out of a love for music and an eagerness to play together. And now we’re 10 years further. Not that much has really changed. The dynamics are always the same. We’re very close to each other, we’re very good friends, so to switch things around was easy.” 

The album’s creation felt different in a way that has pleased and inspired its creators. With Vliegen’s production credentials and experience to call on, the band’s Lijnen was able to provide more fully formed pictures of potential new songs, rather than musical sketches that would be gradually fleshed out. “Before, the songs were finished in my head, but not in a way the group could grasp the full meaning of the idea,” the band’s Lijnen explains. “This time Bert and I worked on demos for a couple of months before we sent them to the rest of the band. Then Fenne could start writing lyrics.

A native Flemish and Dutch speaker (“although speaking isn’t my forte,” she suggests bashfully),” a study of literature at universally led Kuppens to adopt English as her songwriting tongue. “I’m not really a writer, per se, I find the idea of getting your thoughts onto paper really hard,” she confesses. “It can be a big struggle for me, but I start writing when I’ve got a deadline or something I have to do like a song, so I only write for the band really.” 

However, for Kuppens, the lyric writing process for The Great Calm proved to be not quite the expected struggle. With Lijnen’s fleshed out demos offering a strong and clear vision for the album’s overall sound, with a focus on of energetic guitars, Kuppens found herself immediately connected to the music. “It was really good to have these demos in a more mature form because it created an atmospheric whole, so it was easier for me to write lyrics,” Kuppens reveals. “I knew what Kobe’s songs were about straightaway, so the themes of my lyrics really clicked into the vibe of the music. The first song I wrote words for was ‘Cold City,’ and it was very clear from the start that it takes place in winter, immediately it had that sort of atmosphere around it. The album really started from there.” 

Encouragement came from the work of American poet Louise Glück. “The funny thing was that when I finished that first song, I took up a book of poetry by Louise Glück and there were exactly the same themes and images in those poems,” recalls Kuppens. “I was like, ‘this can’t be a coincidence’ so I started exploring that and I created a framework, a story for the whole record. Once I had a story figured out, I let go of it because I felt it also limited the writing, you don’t want to get stuck within a framework. But once I got through that process the ideas for each song just became very clear.” 

Recorded in four weeks — two at Eindhoven, The Netherlands-based Audioworkx before being finished at the start of last year, using a homemade set-up on Vlieland, a small Dutch island, just off the North Sea Coast, the power, beauty and energy of the surroundings is etched through the heart of the album’s material.

Recorded in four weeks – two in the Audioworkx studio near Eindhoven, Holland, before being finished at the start of 2023 using a homemade set-up on Vlieland, a small Dutch island just off the North Sea coast – the power, energy and beauty behind The Great Calm’s making is etched through the heart of each of its 12 songs. 

The creative connection to Glück went deeper, with the poet’s work inadvertently helping to name the album. “There was just one verse where she wrote about the great calm and I was like, ‘wow!’ It felt very cinematic,” Kuppens adds. “I like the sense of grandeur in a phrase like ‘The Great Calm.’ It just really describes what the characters in the songs are striving for, this sense of peace and calmness, but it’s also something that’s probably non-existent too because it sounds too much like a dream. It’s just too big a concept and I find that scale funny but in a serious way. So it fits the album because everything is about moving forward. The record is more hopeful, there’s more beauty in it. Our last album was very dark and always very destructive. I guess this one is still a bit destructive, but there’s hope in that destruction.” 

The Great Calm‘s last pre-release single “Walking, Flying,” may arguably be among the most optimistic, hopeful track of their growing catalog. Built around a forceful motorik groove, “Walking, Flying” features glistening bursts of synths, slashing guitars that carry the song’s verses until a rousingly anthemic chorus, perhaps one of the most anthemic choruses the band has ever recorded. The track sees the band lingering on a repetitive series of musical and lyrical ideas. Lyrically, the song’s narrator focuses on observing a slow-burning sense of contentedness — and the realization that there is beauty to be seen and experienced amidst the shit and muck.

“‘Walking, Flying’ was the first song we tried out live while still in the process of writing the album”, Kuppens explains, “as a result, it not only became a band’s favorite to perform, but also served as a reference point for the rest of the record.” 

Directed by Heleen Declercq, the incredibly cinematic visual for “Walking, Flying” follows the band’s Kuppens driving behind a collection of folks carrying pipes and piping towards a construction site of some sort, where it’ll be used to be build scaffolding. We see people pulling and handing over piping to someone else while they expressively dance and gesture before leaning against the structure they’ve built.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Brindisi, Italy-based post punk quartet Moonoises formed back in 2019. And since their formation, they’ve developed a sound that draws from death rock, post punk, classic doom metal and contemporary psychedelia to create something that they believe defies easy categorization.

Building upon the success of their critically applauded debut EP, Chasm, the Italian post-punk outfit’s full-length debut SHE– THE VOID will be released through dark music label These Hands Melt.

SHE — THE VOID ‘s latest single “Black Beyond” is a brooding and angular bit of post-punk that recalls Turn On The Bright Lights-era Interpol but much more goth and harder.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 62nd Birthday, Robin Guthrie!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie’s 62nd birthday.