JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 82nd anniversary of the birth of The Doors frontman Jim Morrison.
Category: singer/songwriters
New Video: Saint Avangeline’s Lovingly Cinematic and Ethereal Cover of Madonna’s “Frozen”
Saint Avangeline is a rising Atlanta-based artist, who over the course of two albums and a collection of singles has crafted a body of work that’s deeply rooted in her personal journey with mental health struggles, domestic and growing up queer in the South, while offering an unabashedly honest exploration of inner turmoil, rage, hope and resilience. “Most songs are like a diary for me,” the Atlanta-based artist explains. “Exploring my mental health struggles. Trauma, intense feelings. Like sucking the poison out.”
Over the course of the past few years, she has amassed a rabid fan base, while amassing almost 80 million streams on Spotify, 2.3 million monthly Spotify listeners and almost 5.5 billion streams on TikTok.
Earlier this year, the rising Atlanta-based artist shared “Limerence,” a slow-burning track that seemingly nodded at a cinematic, fever-dream-like take on Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush.
Saint Avangeline closes out 2025 with a meditative, ethereal and lovingly faithful take on Madonna‘s 1998’s hit “Frozen,” which also serves a reminder of how spellbinding and remarkably cinematic the original song is. The Saint Avangeline “Frozen” cover is accompanied by a cinematic visual, shot in the Mojave Desert, much like the original, that lovingly draws from and nods at the original.
“A classic from a legend! I think this is one of Madonna’s most gorgeous pieces, and I wanted to pay tribute to her and her monumental impact on the music industry,” Saint Avangeline says. “She has influenced so many artists of this generation, including myself. I had no idea that she would revisit this album only a few weeks after I recorded this! We shot the video in May 2025 in the Mojave Desert in the same location Madonna shot her original music video back in 1998!”
Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, Frankie Beverly!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 79th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Frankie Beverly.
New Audio: SanikVibe shares Cinematic and Dance Floor Friendly “Speak Without Sound”
Created by an anonymous and enigmatic creative mastermind, SanikVibe is a narrative-driven recording project that sees its mysterious mastermind treating sound as storytelling.
Her work blends cinematic textures, electronic minimalism and introspective emotional pacing. And rather than sticking to one particular genre, each release is much like a book chapter — with a psychological or emotional moment translated into atmosphere, vibe, pulse and tone.
Released last month, Unseen Currents EP is a four-part story about what moves us — quietly and subconsciously. SanikVibe’s mysterious creative mastermind considers the EP not quite as Jung would consider ‘a journey through the unconscious” but more as a way to learn to “stop fighting your own tide.”
Unseen Currents EP‘s latest single “Speak Without Sound” is simultaneously a cinematic and dance floor friendly track that seemingly channels Tinlicker‘s most recent material, with the new single being a sleek and lush blend of electro pop, trip-hop and house anchored by stirringly emotional, pop star delivery.
“The song explores the moment when instinct speaks before language — the quiet shift in the body that happens a split second before thought,” SanikVibe explains. “Through pauses, breath and tension, it reflects how the pulse can reveal truth long before words do.”
It serves as the final chapter of the BodyTalk Trilogy, a conceptual arc shaped around somatic markers and the psychological space where instinct overtakes reason,” she continues.
Throwback: Happy 93rd Birthday, Little Richard!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Little Richard.
New Audio: St. Franck Shares a Buzzing, Christmas Season Original
Franck Lada is a Bordeaux-based producer, singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and creative mastermind behind the emerging psych pop, solo recording project St Franck. Now, if you’ve been frequenting this site for some time, you might recall that the French producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s career started in earnest through his participation in a number of UK-baed projects, including sitting in on bass with Saint Leonard’s Horses for a few shows.
Lada stepped out into the spotlight with his debut EP, 2018’s Gamma Wave and a handful of singles that saw him establish a DIY/bedroom pop-meets- electro pop-meets psych pop sound, which he developed with some barebones equipment during flat shares in London: a computer, an 808, an MS20 and Ableton.
Since his humble beginnings, the French artist has upgraded to a professional studio in Bordeaux’s bohemian La Bastide neighborhood, where he worked on his full-length debut, last year’s Hard Drive Oddities. The album showcased a producer and artist, who’s part of a new generation of producers and artists, who are searching for meaning in a mad, mad, mad world. Sonically, the album’s material is anchored around lush, sculpted arrangements paired lyrics that encourage the listener to explore the inner world of their dreams and the subconscious.
Hard Drive Oddities featured the MGMT and Tame Impala-like “Dream Trap,” a song that evoked the blissful nostalgia of a gorgeous summer afternoon — and the warm buzz of a half-remembered dream.
Lada’s latest single, the Christmastime/Holiday Season-themed song “It’s Christmas Time” is a slickly produced yet retro-feeling tune, anchored around buzzing bass synths, chiming bells, twinkling keys that simultaneously showcases the French artist’s uncanny knack for catchy hooks paired with earnest songwriting about the holiday season. At it core, the song warmly reminds the listener that the season is for loved ones who are here, and remembering the ones who aren’t — without resorting to the familiar, worn-out cliches.
New Video: Puma Blue Shares Surrealistic, Dream-like Visual for “Croak Dream”
London-based producer, singer/songwriter and Puma Blue creative mastermind Jacob Allen will be releasing his sixth studio album, Croak Dreams through Play It Again Sam on February 6, 2026.
Recorded straight to tape at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World Studios, Croak Dream reportedly sees Allen and co-producer and mixer Sam Petts-Davies expanding the project’s sonic world, channeling the project’s sultry, emotional and conceptual complexity with an instinct-led take on experimenting with Allen’s art to find its most evocative form.
Additionally, longtime collaborator Harvey Grant contributed to the textual quality and identity of the album. “Later at Real World Studios, the band and I recorded tape loops over a small fragment of the demo, none of them heard the finished song, and when Sam and I came back to London we cut those improvisations into this Frankenstein’s monster type collage,” Allen says. “We were really leaning into a mutual love for CAN, Aphex Twin and Queens of the Stone Age.”
Croak Dream‘s latest single, album title track “Croak Dream” is a broodingly cinematic and uneasy track that features Allen’s remarkably Thom Yorke-like falsetto croon singing over a hypnotic arrangement of angular, whirring instrumentation paired with industrial-meets-dub-like beats. Seemingly drawing from Bristol-era trip hop — i.e., Portishead, Massive Attack, etc. — and dub with an alt-pop sensibility, “Croak Dream” thematically focuses on an age-old philosophical question: “If you knew how and when you were going to die, how would it change how you decided to live?”
“A Croak Dream is a prophetic dream where you see a vision of how you die. Half the songs on this record allude to how you might decide to live, act, if you somehow knew your awaiting fate. Being daring, romantic… saying what you really mean.” Allen explains.
“‘Croak Dream’ is about someone I have dreamt of for years. Nightmares really, I just have not been able to shake them yet,” he continues. “I thought maybe what I needed was a sort of exorcism, so I wrote this song unpacking this strange bond that has haunted me, and then put it to bed, or death, at the end. It is a laying of a ghost to rest, I hope.”
Directed and edited by Allen and featuring animation by Quill, the accompanying video for “Croak Dream” further emphasizes the song’s surrealistic, dream-like logic, featuring Allen and his live bandmates in a PlayStation-inspired video game universe, traversing their individual subconscious in eerie, dream-meets-video game-like adventures.
“I wanted the video to evoke boyhood and be in conversation with the lyrics. The basic idea was to create a PlayStation style game paying homage to RHCP’s ‘Californication’ video, but in a way that carried deep meaning for the band,” Allen says of the video. “I searched high and low for the right person who could capture the nostalgia of games like Silent Hill, Tomb Raider and Pro Skater until I found Quill (@grabmypepsi). I wrote him a script, and he animated it all from scratch. Then it got run through VHS right at the end so that it felt truly like it would if you were playing it in the late 90’s. It felt like a way to honor these friends and, in a strange way, the children we were back then.”
Throwback: Happy 77th Birthday, Ozzy Osbourne!
JOVM’s Wiliam Ruben Helms celebrates the 77th anniversary of the birth of Ozzy Osbourne.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Montell Jordan!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Montell Jordan’s 57th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 47th Birthday, Nelly Furtado!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Nelly Furtado’s 47th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 92nd Birthday, Lou Rawls!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 92ned anniversary of the birth of the legendary Lou Rawls.
Throwback: Happy 70th Birthday, Billy Idol!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Billy Idol’s 70th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, Shuggie Otis!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Shuggie Otis’ 72nd birthday.