JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Sting’s 74th birthday.
Category: singer/songwriters
New Video: Black Polish Shares Bruising “Lush”
Black Polish mastermind Jayden “Jay” Binnix is a young, rising artist who spent their formative years split between Florida and Maryland, before later relocating to Los Angeles. Binnix, who says that they “popped out of the womb singing,” took piano lessons at five, and later picked up ukulele and guitar. After receiving encouragement from a vocal teacher, Binnix wrote their first song “Sophie,” inspired by their childhood girlfriend.
Released back in 2020, “Sophie” saw the young artist quickly establishing their own style of earnest, emotionally piercing lyricism and a dynamic sound blending alternative, electronic and pop music influences like Halsey, Twenty One Pilots and girl in red.
Binnix’s emotive and lived-in songwriting was sharpened through their 2021 Out of Place EP and last year’s full-length debut, Forest, which examined how their upbringing made it difficult for them to fully explore and express their identity — but eventually finding clarity through the other side. Their songs have landed on Spotify’s New Music Friday and All-New Indie playlists, and building upon a growing profile, they contributed “Armageddon,” to the acclaimed Hulu series, Love, Victor.
“I just want to make people feel less alone, to remind people that they don’t have to hate themselves, to inspire others to pursue creativeness and passion without embarrassment,” Binnix says. “I love hearing a listener respond to my music and say, ‘This is my comfort song.’ It makes me feel so sure about myself.
Binnix’s highly-anticipated Black Polish sophomore album YUNA is slated for an October 29, 2025 release through BMG. The album is a work of fiction and fantasy that centers around Black Polish’s alter-ego “Yuna,” a man-eating succubus, who allows Binnix to explore their most depraved instincts and hyperfeminine abilities to beguile and seduce.
Throughout the album, Binnix dives deep into the Yuna character’s psyche while presenting playful, dark-sided lyrics and ever-shifting sonics to relay the album’s intricate narrative. Ultimately, the album’s story suggests that some aspects of ourselves can never be fully banished or hidden, but must be understood and accepting. And at the core of the material, is the question: Can you learn to forgive and accept the darkest, most fucked up parts of yourself?
YUNA will feature the previously released singles “BONDAGE” AND “BE WITH YOU,” which received praise from Alternative Press, Paste Magazine, Out Magazine, Queerty and more, and the album’s third and latest single “LUSH.” Sonically channeling 90s grunge, Paramore and others, “LUSH” reveals an artist with an uncanny knack for pairing forceful rock bombast and arena rock friendly hooks with earnest, seemingly lived-in lyricism. The song also evokes the weird — and sometimes thrilling — push and pull of a dysfunctional relationship.
“I don’t talk to anyone, knowing I won’t hear what’s good for me,” Binnix says of the new single. “If dysfunction is all you know, naturally, you’ll gravitate towards the familiar. Ignoring the fact that this will ultimately fail creates the illusion of freedom so you can experience a relationship without feeling trapped.”
The accompanying video features the rising Los Angeles-based artist as both Black Polish and their alter-ego Yuna at the beach at night, alternating between seductiveness and unhinged fury.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Donny Hathaway!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 80th anniversary of the birth of Donny Hathaway.
Throwback: Happy 78th Birthday, Marc Bolan!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 79th anniversary of the birth of Marc Bolan.
Lyric Video: moondaddy Shares Lush and Hypnotic “Great Expansion”
Founded and led by producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cara Potiker, San Diego-based dream pop outfit moondaddy traces its origins to the eerily uneasy quiet of the COVID-19 pandemic. And fittingly, the band embraces the age-old maxim that the only certainty in life is uncertainty.
With the release of 2023’s full-length debut, Poet Lies, moondaddy sees Poticker and her collaborators attempting to meet the haze of existence with a kaleidoscopic sound that provides peace, especially when all else feels like complete chaos. The album also saw the band quickly establishing a sound that drew from shoegaze, dream pop and trip hop that featured glistening guitars, gauzy synths and dulcet vocals singing dreamily poetic observations.
Since the release of Poet Lies, the San Diego-based dream pop outfit has gone on a sold-out tout with DeVotchKa and opened for the likes of Beabadoobee, Peel Dream Magazine and King Hannah. Building upon a growing local and regional profile, the band has headlined some of their hometown’s tastemaking venues, including The Casbah and others.
The band’s sophomore album, the Manuel Calderon-produced Dove Tapes is slated for an October 31, 2025 release. Following upon last year’s Lightwave Lightwave EP, the San Diego-based outfit’s sophomore album may arguably be their most immersive and expressive effort to date.
Recorded at Tornillo, TX-based Sonic Ranch live to tape and mastered directly to lacquer by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering. While the core of the band is Potiker, Dove Tapes reportedly documents a maturing of the roles of her backing band — Patrick Heaney (drums), Robert Wren (bass), Gabriel Poissant (guitar) and Eric Coughanor (cello).
The album will feature the previously released, Beach House-like “Bystander,” which was released earlier this year, and the album’s second and latest single “Great Expansion.” Anchored around a propulsive rhythm section and a shimmering and looping guitar figure, “Great Expansion” continues to showcase the album’s overall gorgeous and hypnotic sound while serving as a lush bed for Potiker’s expressive, Victoria Legrand-like vocal. And much like its immediate predecessor, the new single also continues the album’s overarching thematic concern, with Potiker working to make sense of heavy forces both internal and external, including confrontations with a former friend, a brutal breakup and global events. But more specifically, the song serves as a universal love song, that sees its narrator looking back on a relationship lost to time.
“When I thought of the title, I pictured a dove carrying an olive branch,” Cara Potiker explains. ““I’m committed to creating little microcosms of love, despite what’s happening in the world. That’s what art facilitates, and what we all need to keep doing.”
New Audio: Florida’s Jbryan Shares Meditative “Roads Not Taken”
Jbryan is a Midwest-born, Florida-based self-taught singer/songwriter and musician, whose creative career started fairly humbly: He picked up the drums and guitar and started writing songs during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then started producing songs — mainly because he really enjoyed it.
Now, pursuing music as a career, the Florida-based singer/songwriter and musician describes his work as mixing creative yet relatable lyrics with fun, laid-back melodies meant to connect with a wide range of listeners.
Released earlier this year, “Roads Not Taken,” is a mid-tempo, reflective song that showcases a songwriter, who can pair earnest, lived-in lyricism with a remarkable ability to craft a catchy hook. While seemingly channeling SANDS‘ “When It Stars to Rain” and JOVM mainstays Ten Fé, “Roads Not Taken,” as the Florida-based artist explains is about the paths in life we didn’t take and the memories that stay with us. And as a result, the song is rooted in mix of regret, wonder and acceptance of where you are right now — and how those experiences shape you.
Live Footage: MHUD Performs “Toucher le Sol” at Mastoïd Studio
The mysterious Strasbourg-born, Paris–based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, publicly known as MHUD initially began his creative career as a painter before turning to music as a creative outlet relatively recently. And within a relatively short period of time, the Strasbourg-born, Paris-based artist quickly established a genre-defying approach to his music that thematically touches upon humankind’s spiritual, emotional and intellectual split from itself.
The French artist’s forthcoming sophomore album NONO was largely conceived in the morning and at home with co-writer Felipe Sierra (guitar, synths). The pair wrote with the album’s material with the common thread of giving all their musical influences a chance to shine. Thematically, the album touches on consciousness and the unconscious, the chaotic noise of information overload, the lack of nuance, the inability to find a quiet moment to think or to process anything, and how easy it is to lose the thin thread of time that seems to barely hold everything to together.
NONO‘s first single “Toucher le sol,” is reportedly the album’s most straightforward rocker. Sonically resembling acclaimed, Montréal-based JOVM mainstays Population II, OSees, and Milan‘s The Gluts, “Toucher le sol’ is a bruising punk-meets-psych rock tune rooted in sociopolitical concerns. As the French artist explains, the song asks two questions: What happens to the people left on the sidelines of our society, some of whom are nevertheless endowed with certain qualities? Conversely, do those who have big platforms and influence still connected to everyday life to give insightful thoughts on our society?
The accompanying live footage, filmed at Mastoïd Studio by Nicolas Giraldo sees MHUD with a backing band featuring Felipa Sierra, Pedro Barrios (percussion), Biscuit (saxophone), Thomas Chalindar (drums) and Paul Dussaux (bass, modular synth).
Throwback: Happy 90th Birthday, Jerry Lee Lewis!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Jerry Lee Lewis.
New Audio: Juana Molina Shares Atmospheric “Siestas ahí”
Acclaimed Argentine-born and-based singer/songwriter and musician and JOVM mainstay Juana Molina‘s highly-anticipated and long-awaited eighth album, DOGA is also her first album of new material in eight years. The album took six years to complete.
As the Argentine-born and-based JOVM mainstay suggests, DOGA‘s creative process was much like preparing a meal for six but with enough ingredients to feed an army. The overwhelming amount of recordings had Molina paralyzed to the point that at one moment, she thought there was no way to make an album.
“Whenever I finish making an album there’s an inertia that makes me keep recording,” the Argentine-born and-based JOVM mainstay says. But the origin of DOGA‘s material can be traced back to 2019, during the preparation for a series of concerts called “Improviset,” which Molina performed with keyboardist Odin Schwartz.
“The idea was to play as if I were at home, that is, to improvise,” Molina says. “It was a duo mostly of analog synthesizers and sequencers. We recorded everything—so many hours—because there was no way to reproduce what we did; both rehearsals and shows were unique. Some of those ideas were later picked up again.”
As the world was about to ground to a halt as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the acclaimed JOVM mainstay was finishing a set at March 2020’s NRMAL Festival in Mexico City. That festival set wound up comprising her first ever live album, ANRMAL, a live set that featured material from 2013’s Wed 21, 2017’s Halo and 2019’s Forfun EP.
The end of the pandemic saw several new developments in Molina’s career: Along with her producer and current manager Mario Agustín de Jesús González, a.k.a. Marito, founded her own label, Sonamos, which released a handful of anniversary reissues such as 1971’s Musicasión 4 ½, a foundation Uruguayan candombe-beat album and Molina’s 2000 effort, Segundo, a key record in her own growing discography. She returned to performing in several different iterations, including solo sets, “Improviset,” which Ordin Schwartz or a duo with drummer Diego López de Arcuate across the States, Europe and Asia.
She also several contractual ties with the various record companies that had previously released her work in different regions across the globe. In doing so, Molina finally became her own artist — and on her own terms.
Simultaneously, she was busy writing new material and in spring 2022, the JOVM mainstay booked ten days at Córdoba, Argentina‘s Sonorámrica Studios. “We brought a preselection of the Improviset recordings, and there the ideas for new songs appeared more clearly,” she says.
Building upon the momentum of the Córdoba momentum, her home studio in the Buenos Aires suburbs became the home for long, sprawling recording sessions. By mid last year, five songs were sketched out. And there were a trove of recordings for Molina and her collaborator to dive into and try to work into an album. “After Sonorámica I spent two more years composing; I felt I had nothing,” Molina says. “Until one day Marito started organizing what I had and we saw we’d reached 30 hours of ideas. That sparked enthusiasm but at the same time it paralyzed me having to decide which direction to take, because there were very dissimilar things. We even fantasized about making a triple album, one of them instrumental.”
Early last year, Marito proposed the idea of working with an external producer, someone with fresh ears for the new material to help the acclaimed Argentine finish the album. Around that time, Emilio Haro, best known for his work on Carolo’s 2023 full-length debut was enlisted to produce the album. And as it turned out, Haro’s influence was decisive: “He got very excited from the start, and I could say he got more out of me than anyone before,” Molina recalls. “I would record a guitar and he’d tell me to record more—different sounds, different arrangements, different ideas. Then he would take the recordings and program things on his own; many of those elements ended up on the record. I like his overall sense of the songs, the aesthetic of the mixes. I’m more of a straightforward person; I don’t usually use post-recording effects, and I thought Emilio had great command for creating spaces around things.”
Slated for a November 5, 2025 release through Molina’s Sonamos Records, DOGA reportedly sees the JOVM mainstay concentrating all the qualities that have long defined her work while going a step further in her constant pursuit for the singular. The album amy arguably be among the most genuinely original and unlike anything else of her entire career. Sonically, the album’ material features unexpected melodies, ethereal, organic songs, minimalist and subtle gestures, austere seemingly static harmonies, lyrics as concentric layers while anchored around repetition.
DOGA‘s first single “Siestas ahí,” features Molina’s processed and distorted vocals ethereally floating earound a looping guitar figure and glitchy electronics. Simultaneously intimate and cinematic, “Siestas ahí,” showcases `the acclaimed JOVM mainstays unerring knack for crafting material that’s unflinchingly difficult to pigeonhole yet remarkably accessible.
New Video: Saint Avangeline Shares Ethereal and Yearning “Limerence”
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.
The rising Atlanta-based artist’s latest single “Limerence,” is a slow-burning and ethereal track anchored around ambient electronics and Saint Avangeline’s yearning and achingly tender vocal. Sonically nodding at a cinematic, fever dream-like take on Stevie Nicks, Kate Bush and others, the song tackles themes of obsessively devotion and love leading to ruin, and the intoxicating pull between desire and self-destruction.
“I feel hazy listening to it. Dreamlike state. Written in a bad time of my life and so my subconscious wrote it,” Saint Avangeline says. “The lyrics were written at a Starbucks in 2022 – I thought I was writing a love song, but was in an abusive relationship.”
“Inspiration is fueled by an intense emotion that I cannot shake,” she continues. “Lyrics are written in a stream of consciousness within a very short sitting – 20 minutes. The composition and vocals are not different, and usually are completed within a day. I have chromesthesia and all of my songs work within a color palette in my head. These upcoming releases all have a nostalgic yearning, but in the order they are written, they go from this place of dreamland delusion, to starting to wake up to having a hazy recollection, to facing the future and having genuine change, eyes open.”
The accompanying video captures a feverishly swooning and Gothic-era sapphic love affair, that emphasizes the desperate yearning at the core of the song.
New Video: Tame Impala Returns with Yearning, Club Friendly “Dracula”
Acclaimed Aussie JOVM mainstay Tame Impala‘s highly-anticipated fifth album, Deadbeat is slated for an October 17, 2025 release through Columbia Records.
Deeply inspired by bush door culture and the Western Australia rave scene, Deadbeat sees Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker recasting himself as a sort of future primitive rave act. Conceived in various locations over the last handful of years, the album was largely galvanized between Parker’s hometown of Fremantle and his Inijidup, Western Australia-based studio Wave House during the first half of this year.
Renowned for being a perfectionist, Parker’s fifth Tame Impala album reportedly showcases an artist with a leveled-up mastery of songwriting but crafted with a newfound embrace of spontaneity. The result is a collection of remarkably catchy, hook-driven, club-friendly psych pop while being some of Parker’s most direct songwriting of his career to date. Sonically, there are timbres and textures that add new dimension to the material’s overall sound paired with a much richer, more playful vocal range.
Lyrically, the album finds Parker channeling an endless bummer with a self-deprecating fuck-up of a narrator stuck in a hopelessly negative feedback loop, when he should have long had his shit together. We all know this kind of dude — and in some cases, he is us. Thematically, the album suggests raving as self-inquiry, self-medication in lieu of self-care and the kick-on as domestic bliss. Dance and sweat your troubles, stresses and concerns away on the dance floor, y’all. Reality can wait another day or two — hell, fuck it, another three.
Deadbeat will feature the previously released “End of Summer,” the recently released “Loser,” and the album’s third and latest single “Dracula.” “Dracula” continues a run of club friendly bops, anchored around euphoric hooks — but while arguably being the funkiest song off the album to date. Lyrically, the new single is arguably one of the playfully self-deprecating and self-referential tunes of Parker’s growing catalog, while simultaneously expressing the swooning yearning that he’s long been known for.
Directed by multi-disciplinary artist Julian Klincewicz, the accompanying video for “Deadbeat” follows Parker and a big rig carrying a house, as the acclaimed Aussie artist struts his way to and through a rave in the rural Australia.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Bryan Ferry!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Bryan Ferry’s 80th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 77th Birthday, Olivia Newton-John!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 77th anniversary of Olivia Newton-John’s birth.
New Video: Rafa Tena Teams Up With Sandra Carrasco on Elegant “Gitano soy”
Madrid-born singer/songwriter, composer and music producer Rafa Tena‘s career started behind the scenes as a lyricist and composer, who wrote a number of internationally recognized hits performed by other artists. Tena has also spent time working as a producer, a musical director for TV, and interestingly enough as an apprentice poet. Talk about a renaissance man, right?
Deeply enamored with Cuban music and culture, Tena has spent lengthy stints residing in Havana, where he collaborated with some of the country’s most prominent artists, before stepping out into the spotlight as a ember of Son DOS, with whom he has plans to release an album inspired by Cuba’s beloved son music.
If you were frequenting this site earlier this year, you might recall that I wrote about “Morcilla,” a collaboration with gypsy band Las Negris, a rowdy and raucous party starting tune, which saw the Madrid-born artist and Las Negris meshing elements of flamenco, tango and Cuban guagancó that featured mischievous lyrics referring morcilla (blood sausage), a beloved delicacy across the Spanish speaking world — with some regional differences in ingredients and how its prepared. The song also is peppered with references to Tena’s travels between Spain and Cuba, making a point of how much food
The Madrid-born artist’s latest single “Gitano soy,” is a collaboration with Sandra Carrasco, a highly sought-after flamenco artist, who has worked with musicians across jazz, classical and contemporary music. The song is an elegant and sophisticated blend of flamenco bolero and pop rock with a gorgeous string arrangement that feels simultaneously old world and contemporary, while rooted in earnest, seemingly lived-in lyricism and performances from Tena and Carrasco.
Directed by Lorena Flores, the accompanying video for “Gitano soy,” is a gorgeous and elegantly shot visual that feels a bit like a travel film-meets-pop music video.