Category: Shoegaze

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Los Angeles’ Steel Wool Shares “120 Minutes” era MTV-like “Eyes Closed”

Los Angeles-based shoegazers Steel Wool — Sean Lissner (vocals, guitar), Jaden Amjadi (bass, screaming), Evan Landi (drums) and Sam Schlesinger (guitar) — sonically find themselves splitting the difference between drawing from early post punk and sheogaze revival, blending ethereal synths and fuzzed out guitars to create soft yet abrasive anthems for sitting in traffic on the 101.

The quartet’s debut single, “Eyes Closed” features atmospheric synths, fuzzy and swirling guitar textures, reverb-soaked boom bap-like drums paired with plaintive and earnest vocals and big hooks. While seemingly indebted to the 120 Minutes era MTV alt rock-like sound that many of us love and remember, the Los Angeles-based outfit’s debut single sees the them subtly pushing the boundaries of shoegaze in a way that reminds me of BLACKSTONE RNGRS and others.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A Place to Bury Strangers Shares Pulsating Synth Punk Ripper “Fear Of Transformation”

New York-based JOVM mainstays A Place to Bury Strangers — currently Oliver Ackermann (vocals, guitar), John Fedowitz (bass) and Sandra Fedowitz (drums) — will be releasing their seventh album Synthesizer on October 4, 2024 (digital) and October 25, 2024 (vinyl) through Dedstrange.

While Synthesizer is the album’s title, it’s also a physical entity, a synthesizer specifically made for the album — and a synthesizer that you too, can own (in part), if you buy the record on vinyl. The album’s cover art doubles as a circuit board and functional synth for curious and enterprising fans. “It’s pretty messed up, chaotic. But it feels really human,” the band’s Oliver Ackermann says. 

In an era of making music where so little is DIY and so much is left up to AI, never setting foot in a practice room or a home studio, making something that feels deliberately chaotic, messy, and human, is entirely the point. The album celebrates sounds that are spontaneous and natural, the kind of music that can only come from collaboration and community. 

The writing sessions for Synthesizer started in the band’s Queens studio, shortly after the release of 2022’s See Through You. The new lineup which featured Ackermann and his friends John and Sandra Fedowitz was especially inspiring for Ackermann. “It felt like a fresh new thing,” he says. “I wanted to write songs everyone was excited about playing.” 

The album captures the band at a place of reinvention, where they take a carefully honed sound and approach and crack it wide open to gut its then reimagine it. And of course, to ever so slightly reinvent one’s sound, one must also built a new instrument — the synthesizer at the core of the album’s overall sound. 

Reportedly, Synthesizer is arguably one of the band’s most live-sounding albums to date, accurately capturing the rawness and explosiveness of the band in a live setting, which is a fitting for a band that is best in a live setting, where the material takes on a new energy in the presence of a crowd. “We’re artists,” Ackermann says, “Going to shows and bringing that imperfect and beautiful DIY ethos is important.” 

In the lead-up to the album’s digital release on Friday, I’ve written about two of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “Disgust,” an eardrum shattering aural assault, anchored around explosive wailing feedback and distortion pedaled guitar lines paired with a relentles motorik groove featuring an arpeggiated bass line weaving in and out. But there’s subtle refinements, including some of the most rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly choruses and hooks I’ve heard from the band in some time. “‘Disgust’ is a song I wrote that was inspired by the way I used to perform ‘Got That Feeling,’ a song by my old band Skywave,” Ackermann explains. “There was a long riding open note on the bass that enabled me to play the whole part with my fist in the air.  I wrote this song just on open strings so it could be played with just one hand: dumb and fun.” 

  • “Bad Idea,” a track anchored around a simple yet hypnotically looping drum beat and woozily oscillating feedback-driven guitar lines. John Fedowitz’s plaintive yet punchy delivery weaves in and out of the stormy and soundscape, which helps to evoke the vacillating, almost nauseating unease of self-doubt. “Bad Idea” showcases the raw creativity of the band’s bassist John Fedowitz. “He came to the studio with a simple looping drum beat, thinking he didn’t have any good ideas — thus, this song was his ‘bad idea,’” the band’s frontman Oliver Ackermann says. “We each penned some lines on paper, and he sang the ones that resonated. After a few instrumental passes, the recording was complete. The result is an innovative track born from spontaneous collaboration and a touch of self-doubt, turned into something uniquely captivating.” 

Synthesizer‘s latest single “Fear Of Transformation” is a snarling and scuzzy New Wave/goth punk synth-driven ripper featuring layers of oscillating synths, a relentless motorik groove, explosive bursts of feedback paired with the band’s long-held penchant for rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly hooks and Ackermann’s punchy delivery.

Thematically, the track focuses and delves into the struggle of overcoming internal barriers. As the band’s frontman Oliver Ackermann explains, “Sometimes fear builds up and pins you in a cage. A conversation occurs in my head where I have to convince myself to just fucking do something to break out of it.” The song embodies that internal dialogue, capturing the battle between the compulsion to avoid fear and the push to confront it. And as a result, the song is a raw, uneasy and intense conversation with the devil within.

Created and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle, the accompanying video for “Fear Of Transformation” follows a teenage boy, who sneaks out from his parents’ house to go to his first furry party — but he has a deep secret: he’s a werewolf. And he winds up going on a bloody rampage.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: High. Shares Stormy and Cathartic “In A Hole”

Boonton, NJ-based shoegazers High. can trace their origins back to 2021 when Christian Castan (vocals, guitar) and Bridget Bakie (bass, vocals) met while playing across the Garden State’s DIY and college circuit, building Bakie’s reputation as “The Queen of The Quarter Note” and Castan’s profile as an unforgettable guitarist. After the pair played in a band together, they longed fora project that would be their sole creative focus and could tour as far and wide as possible. A few weeks and two weeks after their proper formation with the addition of Jack Miller (drums) and Danny Zavala (guitar), the quartet made their live debut at Saint Vitus. They followed that up with shows across the Tristate DIY circuit.

The New Jersey-based quartet’s highly-anticipated Matthew Molnar-produced sophomore EP Come Back Down is slated for a January 24, 2025 release digitally and on vinyl through Kanine Records. The EP’s first sessions started last June when the band, along with Molnar went to Chairlift‘s Patrick Wimberly‘s Greenpoint studio to test new material with engineer Sam Darwish. They also brought tracks to Shane Furst and his Cloud Factory Recording to review their recent work and begin the next stages of completion.

Come Back Down marks the beginning of the band’s partnership with Kanine Records — and a key period in the band’s development. With a greater expression of sonic range, the EP sees the band offering more noise, more hooks, more heaviness and much more emotion: The sad is much sadder and the love is more swooningly in love. There are more song about loss and being lost. For the band, it’s the culmination of their growth after the release of their well-received debut EP Bomber, which was released through Julia’s War and Suburban Creep.

Last fall, the band took a break from the sessions to do a week-long tour with Austin-based outfit STAB, as well as opening slots for DIIV, Glare, Lowertown, A Place To Bury Strangers, as well as a Midwest run with Chicago’s Smut. After touring across the nation, the band finished the EP with Jeff Ziegler at his Philadelphia-based Uniform Recording. Zeigler’s work on Nothing.’s Guilty of Everything has been a major inspiration for the New Jersey-based group.

Come Back Down‘s lead single “In A Hole” is a decidedly 120 Minutes MTV-era take on shoegaze anchored around a towering wall of stormy guitars, thunderous drumming and ethereal boy-girl harmonies. The song’s brooding soundscape evokes the stormy emotions, trauma and unease that inspired it — but also the comfort of finding friendship and a community that truly understands where you’re coming from.

“’In A Hole’ is inspired by meeting our group of friends,” High.’s Christian Castan explains. “It’s about being depressed and the people close to you dragging you out of it. It’s about the peace and belonging I used to dream about during childhood trauma and finally finding it. There’s a lyric – ‘These are the new stars, they burst alive.’  It’s about living life at its best and never wanting that feeling to end.”

Directed by Aleko Syntelis, the accompanying video for “In A Hole” was shot and is set in Brooklyn and features the band playing a rooftop show and hanging out with their crew. The video captures the feeling of being young, of seemingly infinite possibilities ahead of you, of the pure joy of hanging out with your dearest ones, who will hold you down when you need them most.

“We shot this video during a rooftop show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the first night of our tour with Birthday Girl,” the band’s Castan recalls. “It was the last weekend of summer with hella New Jersey heads, some new friends, Keg stands, and the New York Skyline. Sh*t was nuts, someone downstairs tried to shut us down. Aleko captured our live set and we hope anyone who sees this gets what that night felt like.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A Place To Bury Strangers Share Woozy “Bad Idea”

New York-based JOVM mainstays A Place to Bury Strangers — currently Oliver Ackermann (vocals, guitar), John Fedowitz (bass) and Sandra Fedowitz (drums) — will be releasing their seventh album Synthesizer on October 4, 2024 through Dedstrange records. 

While Synthesizer is the album’s title, it’s also a physical entity, a synthesizer specifically made for the album — and a synthesizer that you too, can own (in part), if you buy the record on vinyl. The album’s cover art doubles as a circuit board and functional synth for curious and enterprising fans. “It’s pretty messed up, chaotic. But it feels really human,” the band’s Oliver Ackermann says. 

In an era of making music where so little is DIY and so much is left up to AI, never setting foot in a practice room or a home studio, making something that feels deliberately chaotic, messy, and human, is entirely the point. The album celebrates sounds that are spontaneous and natural, the kind of music that can only come from collaboration and community. 

The writing sessions for Synthesizer started in the band’s Queens studio, shortly after the release of 2022’s See Through You. The new lineup which featured Ackermann and his friends John and Sandra Fedowitz was especially inspiring for Ackermann. “It felt like a fresh new thing,” he says. “I wanted to write songs everyone was excited about playing.” 

The album captures the band at a place of reinvention, where they take a carefully honed sound and approach and crack it wide open to gut its then reimagine it. And of course, to ever so slightly reinvent one’s sound, one must also built a new instrument — the synthesizer at the core of the album’s overall sound. 

Reportedly, Synthesizer is arguably one of the band’s most live-sounding albums to date, accurately capturing the rawness and explosiveness of the band in a live setting, which is a fitting for a band that is best in a live setting, where the material takes on a new energy in the presence of a crowd. “We’re artists,” Ackermann says, “Going to shows and bringing that imperfect and beautiful DIY ethos is important.” 

Earlier this year, I wrote about album single “Disgust,” a classic bit of APTBS. Or in other words, an eardrum shattering aural assault, anchored around explosive wailing feedback and distortion pedaled guitar lines paired with a relentles motorik groove featuring an arpeggiated bass line weaving in and out. But there’s subtle refinements, including some of the most rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly choruses and hooks I’ve heard from the band in some time.

“‘Disgust’ is a song I wrote that was inspired by the way I used to perform ‘Got That Feeling,’ a song by my old band Skywave,” Ackermann explains. “There was a long riding open note on the bass that enabled me to play the whole part with my fist in the air.  I wrote this song just on open strings so it could be played with just one hand: dumb and fun.” 

Synthesizer‘s latest single “Bad Idea” is anchored around a simple yet hypnotically looping drum beat, woozily oscillating feedback-driven guitar lines. John Fedowitz’s plaintive yet punchy delivery weaves in and out of the stormy and soundscape, which helps to evoke the vacillating, almost nauseating unease of self-doubt.

“Bad Idea” showcases the raw creativity of the band’s bassist John Fedowitz. “He came to the studio with a simple looping drum beat, thinking he didn’t have any good ideas — thus, this song was his ‘bad idea,'” the band’s frontman Oliver Ackermann says. “We each penned some lines on paper, and he sang the ones that resonated. After a few instrumental passes, the recording was complete. The result is an innovative track born from spontaneous collaboration and a touch of self-doubt, turned into something uniquely captivating.”

Shot and edited by Nick Kulp with additional filming by Mathilde Cartoux, the accompanying video for “Bad Idea” was shot during various live performances by the band between 2023-2024 on a Sony Hi8 video camera, and was edited through various analog glitch processors.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Eterna Shares Murky and Uneasy “Whatever Reason”

Rising Barcelona-born, London-based artist Eterna follows his attention grabbing section1 label debut “Perfect Comms,” with “Whatever Reason,” an eerily goth-like take on post punk/shoegazey take on goth that sees him weaving murky, reverb-soaked guitar distortion with lyrical themes that touch upon modern isolation apathy and ephemeral romance — with a frustration and despair that feels all too familiar.

New Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Seafoam Walls Share Woozily Meditative “Humanitarian Pt. II”

Formed back in 2016, the acclaimed Miami-based quartet Seafoam Walls — Jayan Bertrand (vocals, guitar), Josh Ewers (bass), Josue Vargas (electronic drums) and Dion Kerr (guitar) — quickly caught the attention of undgeround music and art communities across South Florida a unique sound that they dubbed “Caribbean Jazzgaze,” a mesh of jazz, showcase, rock, hip-hop and Afro-Caribbean rhythms.

The Miami- based outfit exploded into the larger, international scene following a secret, all-ages matinee show with DC-based hardcore photographer Susie J. and Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore. Building upon a rapidly growing profile, the band released 2018’s R-E-F-L-E-C-T EP and 2019’s one-off “Root.”

2021’s full-length debut, XVI, which featured the A Storm in Heaven-meets-TV on the Radio-like “Program” was released through Thurston Moore’s The Daydream Library Series.

The Miami-based outfit’s sophomore album Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room is slated for an October 18, 2024 release through Dion Dia. The album’s title is partially derived for a metaphor for the often overlooked but significant challenges and complexes that people face in their lives. But it also is a warning about getting caught up in the details — at the risk of missing the bigger picture. “Everyone has an elephant in the room; an obvious problem in their life that everyone, including the person affected, knowingly looks past,” the band’s frontman Jayan Bertrand explains. “BUT, I say that one is standing too close, because the problem is more complex and their vision is too obstructed to see the bigger picture. So viewers are providing their skewed perspectives of the same problem. It’s an illustration of the areas in which intersectionality fails to meet.”

Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room reportedly represents a new chapter for the band: The album’s material not only showcases the band’s evolution as musicians, but it also solidifies their reputation as bounding-pushing artists, inviting the listener to a Technicolor mist of experimental influences and instrumentation. Continuing their commitment to full artistic autonomy, the band’s members took production duties, shaping an album that will reward those who will revel in its sweeping soundscapes, as thematically the material delves deeper into questioning the trappings of modern society and all of its contradictions.

The album’s latest single “Humanitarian Pt. II” is anchored around glistening guitar melodies and a relentless motorik-like groove and bursts of whirring synths. The arrangement serves as a lush and dreamy bed for Bertrand’s meditative vocal to sing philosophical lyrics that examines the motivation that makes us choose our paths — and how we go about those paths. Some people are drawn to the attention or superficial perks of an occupation, without understanding what it really entails. Through the song, the listener must face the very shitty reality that only certain efforts, from certain people get rewarded. Certainly, whether as a musician, a writer or a photographer, these observations are familiar, especially when you see others seemingly being much more successful at what you do, than you are.

“Before I picked up a guitar, I was simply a fan of music,” the band’s Bertrand explains. “Then, I began learning about the oppressive tactics of governments worldwide, and my world shattered. The entities of authority that assured me that everything they did was just were actually a key part of the problem. I started to believe that art was the only safe space in this cruel world. ‘Humanitarian Pt. II’ is about disillusionment. 
 
“I jumped into the music scene headfirst without realizing that the same tactics would exist. I then made it my mission to call out such tactics and question our societal norms like my favorite artists before me.
 
I’m still looking for an answer to all of my pressing questions, but it helps to be grouped with people with a similar mindset who have practical solutions. I gravitated towards Dion Dia records for our latest and upcoming releases because while everyone I admired raised great questions and awareness, Dion Dia presented a hopeful alternative.”

Shot on VHS, the accompanying video is a lo-fi, goofy and surrealistic romp that features the elaborately costumed band members playing different instruments in the studio — and it includes the group sing-a-along, clap-a-long montage.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 52nd Birthday, Richard Ashcroft!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates The Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft’s 52nd birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Spaceface Share Woozy Cover of “Bittersweet Symphony”

Spaceface — co-founders Jake Ignalls and Eric Martin, along with touring members Marina Aguirre (bass) and Garet Powell (drums) — formed back in 2012. And since their formation, the self-professed “retro-futuristic dream rock outfit” have […]

singer/songwriters by William Ruben Helms
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Live Concert Photography: The New Colossus Festival, Super Bock and 18th Ward Brewing Presents Summer Saturdays at 18th Ward Brewing 7/27/24 feat. Sue Your Landlord, Ava Raiin, Kira Skye, Minaxi and Hit

Live concert photography of The New Colossus Festival, Super Bock and 18th Ward Brewing Presents Summer Saturdays at 18th Ward Brewing 7/27/24.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Night Swimming Shares Yearning and Heartbroken “Five-Year Plan”

Currently split between Bath and Bristol, Night Swimming — Meg Jones (vocals), Sam Allen (guitar), Jesse Roache (guitar), Josh Nottle (bass) and Torin Moore (drums) — are a rising British dream pop quintet, whose remarkably cinematic sound draws from their collective love of film and scores, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Radiohead, Wolf Alice, Just Mustard, Warpaint and a lengthy list of others. Meg Jones’ lyrics are often semi-veiled autobiography that draw from her own experiences and those close to her while also being influenced by Joni Mitchell, Laura Marling, Ben Howard, Daughter‘s Elena Tonra, The Cure‘s Robert Smith and Lana Del Rey. 

Unlike their contemporaries, the rising British outfit has patiently taken the necessary steps to hone both their sound and live show, while landing support slots with acts like Coach Party, L’Objectif, JOVM mainstays The Orielles, The Blinders, Sad Night Dynamite, Automotion, Home Counties and a list of others. The rising British outfit played an opening set on the Dot To Dot Festival‘s SWX stage ahead of  Picture Parlor, Mary in the Junkyard, Hovvdy and Wunderhouse.

The members of Night Swimming have have also been covered by The Line of Best Fit, Dork Magazine, Rough Trade, The Rodeo and Notion Magazine while receiving airplay from BBC Radio 6’s Emily Pilbeam and landing on Radio X’s X-Posure playlist.

Adding to a ver busy year, Night Swimming’s debut EP No Place To Land is slated for a September 27, 2024 release. Recorded at Devon, UK‘s Middle Farm Studios last year, the Peter Miles-produced EP was recorded live to tape and features industrial rhythms set against an atmospheric soundscape, deeply influenced by Beach House‘s and Slowdive’s live shows, which the band noted combined sensory elements and a deep emotional response. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about EP single “Let That Be Enough,” a song that features propulsive and thumping percussion, shimmering and reverb soaked guitars and a rousingly anthemic and cathartic chorus as a lush and cinematic bed for Meg Jones’ bewitchingly ethereal delivery. Seemingly bridging Thank Your Lucky Stars and Depression Cherry-era Beach House with Once Twice Melody-era Beach House sonically, “Let That Be Enough” thematically touches on perfectionism and obsessive thoughts with the sort of novelistic attention to psychological detail of either someone who has lived it — or has personally seen it in others. Throughout there’s a sense of aching and vacillating doubt, confusion, bargaining and then a gradually begrudging acceptance and even a sort of trust. 

“‘Let That Be Enough’ is about moving on from past experiences,” Night Swimming’s Meg Jones explains, ” as well as learning to trust yourself and accepting the choices that you’ve made.”

The EP’s final single, EP closing track “Five-Year Plan” is a slow-burning and painterly-like shoegazer take on dream pop built around a shimmering wall of sound featuring swirling and shimmering guitar textures and thunderous drumming serving as a dreamily lush bed for Jones’ to sing about the loss of a close relationship with the bitterly yearning ache of someone who’s been unexpectedly dropped.

“‘Five-Year Plan’ is about the feeling of being dropped suddenly, without much explanation, by someone you were really close to,” Night Swimming’s Meg Jones explains. “The words were written quickly and without a lot of conscious thought, compared with our other songs. I think this captured the honesty of the difficult emotions I was experiencing at the time.”

“Like all of the tracks on the EP, ‘Five-Year Plan’ was recorded as a live performance to analogue tape,” Jones continues. “We recorded the songs this way to give them their own energy and movement akin to our live shows. There were minimal overdubs on ‘Five-Year Plan,’ however we did experiment with layers such as double tracked vocals/harmonies, a synth bass and even some acoustic guitar to thicken the mix. In terms of the writing process, the track was started by Jesse bringing an arpeggio melody to rehearsal that he’d be working on, and it was fleshed out by the rest of the band to create the wall of sound that is heard in the recording. A few of us were coincidentally experiencing similar life events at the same time, in the middle of winter, which definitely impacted the writing process. The song switches metre from 7/8 to 4/4 which we felt provided a cathartic release to end the song.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: GIFT Shares Euphoric “Light Runner”

Earlier this year, Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays GIFT — TJ Freda (vocals, guitar), multi-instrumentalist Jessica Gurewitz, Kallan Campbell (bass), multi-instrumentalist Justin Hrabovsky and Gabe Camarano (drums) — signed to Captured Tracks, who will be releasing their highly-anticipated sophomore, 11-song album Illuminator on August 23, 2024.

Illuminator reportedly sees the JOVM mainstays firmly cementing their sound with a remarkably mature, self-assuredness for a relatively young band.
Professionally, the members of the rising Brooklyn-based outfit are firmly enmeshed in the local scene as talent buyers, photographers, DJs, audio engineers, art directors, and in the case of Campbell, the owner of Bushwick-based DIY venue Alphaville. The continued melting pot of their combined skills and experiences helps to make the album an even more cohesive listening experience while seeing increasing contributions from each of the band’s members: Gurewitz, a relative newcomer to making music, contributed a host of lyrics and vocal melodies. Hrabovsky, who previously engineered at Asheville, NC-based Drop of Sun Studios and Echo Mountain Recording shared production duties with Freda. And Camarano’s drumming provided the crucial rhythmic underpinning of the album’s material. 

“We had a lot more confidence going in,” Freda says. “The main goal was to take a big swing, embrace the pop sounds we love and clear the mist and clouds surrounding the last record to make it a lot punchier.”

Illuminator will feature the previously released:

“Wish Me Away,” a track anchored around a dreamy and hook-driven shoegazer soundscape of glistening, reverb-drenched guitars, woozy synths and a motorik groove paired with propulsive rhythms serving as a lush bed for Freda’s plaintive falsetto, “Wish Me Away” is continuation of the overall aesthetic they established on Momentary Presence and a decided sonic push forward, showcasing where the band is going next. The song also sees the band exploring and expressing a complex array of emotions with a lived-in specificity. 

“‘Wish Me Away’ is about giving into the feeling of everything slipping away,” GIFT’s TJ Freda explains. “Just take it all away, put me out of my misery, wish me away. While this all seems daunting and sad, there’s a feeling of optimism in this song, holding on for dear life and refusing to give up hope.”

After nearly losing a loved one, Freda found himself grappling with the fleeting nature of life, and understandably with the inevitability of mortality. “‘Wish Me Away,’ ruminates on the fear and freedom that can come knowing it can all slip away. The line ‘wish me away’ kept coming up, as in ‘take me, not them,’” Freda adds. 

“Going In Circles,” an Evil Heat-era Primal Scream take on shoegaze, built around a motorik groove, glistening and atmospheric synths, swirling reverb-soaked guitar textures and Freda’s dreamily plaintive delivery paired with the quintet’s unerring knack for rousingly anthemic hooks and chorus. But underneath the euphoria-inducing nature of the song is a bitter lament of a relationship gone a bit awry. 

“This was the first song I wrote for Illuminator that helped me realize the direction of the album,” GIFT’s TJ Freda says. “I wrote the chorus while passively playing guitar and rushed to record the idea. At that moment, something clicked and I realized where the album was going. At our shows from the Momentary Presence tour, people would stand in the crowd wide-eyed without moving. We wanted to get people moving with the new album, so we were really inspired by bands like Primal Scream, Oasis, and Massive Attack. It’s our psych-rock tribute to U.K. rave culture in the ‘90s.

“The song is about the endless cycle of a relationship,” Freda adds, “the back and forth in both euphoria and doubt. The chorus ‘I never told you why’ is about never being able to say how you really feel, not having closure and the cycle continuing.” 

The Jessica Gurewitz and TJ Freda co-written “Later,” which may arguably be one of the most brooding and uneasy song of the band’s growing catalog — while also being the most straightforward shoegazer track of the album. Anchored around a swaggering motorik groove, the track finds the band pairing glistening and reverb drenched guitars with Freda’s plaintive falsetto and the band’s unerring knack for rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses.

“While writing Illuminator I found myself clinging to intense emotions, reluctant to release them. ‘Later’ stands out as one of the darkest songs I’ve made,” Freda explains. “Making it was cathartic, diving into darker themes. The song explores surrendering to the overwhelming sensation of life slipping away before my eyes.” 

“Light Runner,” Illuminator‘s fourth and latest single sounds — to my ears, at least — like a mind-bending and slickly produced synthesis of Madchester scene, breakbeats, Ray of Light-era Madonna and shoegaze anchored around enormous, buzzy and euphoria inducing hooks and choruses. “Light Runner” also sees the band crafting a hook-driven sound that’s simultaneously dance club and arena rock friendly while retaining the widescreen quality that has won them accolades.

The accompanying video for “Light Runner” was directed by the band’s TJ Freda. “The album and song ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna was a massive inspiration while recording Illuminator – I wanted to pay homage to the brilliant music video directed by one of my favorite directors Jonas Åkerlund. ‘Light Runner’ celebrates the triumph of emerging from a dark time while acknowledging the transformative power of overcoming it. It’s a testament to the euphoria of personal achievement.In 2023, during our first European tour, we were enthralled by the origins of 90s UK bands like Primal Scream, Massive Attack, and Oasis. Following a show in Glasgow, the promoters treated us to an underground Jungle/DnB rave, blowing our minds wide open.”

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Live Concert Photography: Silversun Pickups with Hello Mary at Brooklyn Steel 6/27/24

Live concert photography of SIlversun Pickups and Hello Mary at Brooklyn Steel last month.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Rising Dutch-born, British-based Artist Dutch Mustard Shares Cathartic and Urgent “Loser”

Dutch-born, London-based artist Sarah-Jayne “SJ” Riedel is the creative mastermind behind the rising indie recording project Dutch Mustard. And with Dutch Mustard, Riedel blends ethereal dream pop, 90s alt-rock with shoegaze touches to create a soundscape that features painterly and swirling guitar textures while the Dutch-born artist’s vocals drift between a near whisper and yearning, heavenly arching shouts.

Riedel and Dutch Mustard exploded into the British scene with the release of 2022’s debut EP An Interpretation of Depersonalisation, an effort that was featured by the BBC while receiving airplay on BBC Radio 1’s Future Artists with Jack Saunders and a co-sign from the legendary Iggy Pop. Last year’s sophomore EP, Beauty received airplay from BBC Radio 6’s Lauren Laverne and co-signs from Don Letts and Amy Lamé. Adding to a growing profile, The Independent, The Line of Best Fit, Clash, Dork and Notion have all covered her — and The Grammy Awards selected her a one of 6 Female Fronted Acts Reviving Rock, along with Wet Leg.

SJ’s latest single, the Bill Ryder-Jones and Riedel co-written and co-produced “Loser,” is a catharsis-inducing, 120 Minutes MTV alt rock-era anthem built around swirling shoegazer guitar textures, rousingly anthemic, shout along worthy hooks and chorus serving as a lush and downright perfect vehicle for the rising Dutch-born, London-based artist’s vulnerable, yet equally enormous vocal.

Creatively, the song was fueled by a bold tale of chutzpah: SJ dropped her demos into the DMs of big-name producers she admired with the hopes that they would be willing to work with her. But at its core, the song as the rising Dutch-born artist explains is about resilience: “‘Loser’ is about making peace with heartbreak. We move on by accepting our feelings and understanding that not everyone speaks the truth. This doesn’t mean we stop being truthful, just more careful with who we trust.”

“I love working with SJ….she’s fucking hard to keep up with like. She has this knack of coming up with great ideas when I’m still admiring the last one,” Bill Ryder-Jones adds.

Directed by Josiah Newbolt, the accompanying video for “Loser” is shot in black and white, and follows the rising Dutch-born, British-based artist in a dizzying close up that evokes the swooning urgency of the song.