Category: Video

Video by William Ruben Helms

Lyric Video: BESVÄRJELSEN Shares an Anthemic Power Ballad

Acclaimed Swedish metal outfit BESVÄRJELSEN — currently co-founders Andreas Bajer (guitar) and Staffan Vinrot (guitar), along with Lea Annling Alazam (vocals), and Erik Bäckwell (drums) and Marcus Lindqvist (bass) — can trace their origins back to 2014 when its founding duo started the band based on concept of channeling the spirit and tradition of the Dalarna forests into a contemporary urban context. Dalarna is at the ancient crossroads of Norse and Finnish cultures, where the echoes of runes and gods, shamans and spirits still linger. While drawing heavy inspiration from local lore, mysticism and the dark, old musical traditions of their homeland, the band derives their name from the old Swedish word for “conjuring.”

Though the band’s story has its roots in Norway’s past the present came boldly knocking. Lea Anling Alazam can trace her passion for punk and stoner rock to being a 13 year-old, hanging out at the local skate park. When Bahjer and Vernon met Alazam, they were so impressed by her vocals that they were happy tor relegate their shared vocal duties to a backing role. Alazam, who had grown up with her feet in multiple worlds added a fresh approach by embracing the melodies of the grunge and emo sounds that defined her youth, as well as African and Middle Eastern music and bluesy undertones. They released their first two self-financed and self-released EP’s 2015’s Vullfarsler and 2016’s Exit, which saw the band expand into a quartet with the addition of DOZER‘s and Greenleaf‘s Erik Bäckwell as a full-time member. Both efforts received critical praise and airplay on Swedish national radio — with minimal promotion.

They went on to release their full-length debut 2018’s Vallmo. But their sophomore album, 2022’s Atlas put them on the international metal map: The album received critical praise from the global praise while earning a Swedish Manifestgalan Award for “Metal Album of the Year.””

The Swedish metal outfit’s third album Till Glömskan Ad Oblivionem is slated for an August 28, 2026 release through Magnetic Eye Records. The album derives its title for the Swedish and Latin for “Into Oblivion” and it reportedly sees BESVÄRJELSEN maintaining a long-held punk-infused attitude, but they’ve broadened their sound with the addition of elements of blues, ska, metal, jazz and everything else around and in between, as long as it fit the mood of the song.

Till Glömskan Ad Oblivionem‘s latest single “Drifters on a Quiet Stream” is slow-burning ballad that sees the band balancing bruising, power chord-driven riffs with piano-driven introspective verses and rousingly anthemic, arena rock friendly hooks and choruses. Fittingly, Alazam’s expressive, power house vocal serves as a lifeline in stormy waters. At its core is a much-needed message of resilience — and a reminder that difficult and anxious times are usually temporary setbacks. Tomorrow you can start over.

“‘Drifters on a Quiet Stream’ had the working title ‘Elton’ as Elton John was one of the musical inspirations for this song”, the band’s Erik Båckwell reveals. “The intro and main riff was originally intended to be a part of another song. When I got our former bass player Johan to listen to the riff, he rather advised me to create a completely new song from this part. I am really glad now that I did that.”

Lea Amling Alazam adds, “This track explores the ever-present companion of the self – the voice that follows you through life, both to comfort and to critique”, the vocalist explains. “It is the quiet presence on your shoulder. When writing those lyrics, I revisited an old notebook and found a phrase I had once scribbled down: ‘…my ghost and I’. I’m not sure where I first came across this idea, but it stayed with me. It felt like a beautiful and honest way to describe living alongside your own anxiety, and I knew from the start that I wanted to build something around it.”

The lyric video visualizer employs forest imagery, further emphasizing what they’ve dubbed “forest rock” their tongue-in-cheek answer to desert rock — but this forest features some dark, unsettling flowers and plants.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: TV Priest Shares Broodingly Atmospheric “Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)”

TV Priest — currently, Charlie Drinkwater (vocals) and Alex Sporgis (guitar) — will be releasing their third album Cartoons on November 5, 2026 through AMK/Kartel Music Group. With their first two album’s 2021’s Uppers and 2022’s My Other People, the British punk outfit have stood out as a probing, curious group with a talent for wrapping their arms around the existential, and connecting the disconnected.

Cartoons however, emerges from the wreckage of self-reckoning, with the band finding new ways of being — and writing music from a different starting point. The result is an album of material with shades of REM, Radiohead, The National and Foals. The fire and philosophizing of their previously released work is still there, but accompanied by a bigger sprawl of gentler instrumentation, including piano, fiddle, birdsong recordings sampled, then ruptured and pieced back together again to explore “the intersection between digtalism and nature.” As they began to complete rework their sound, everything was on the table.

The band’s Charlie Drinkwater says of the album, “Cartoons is a record about confusion. About the small, daily unspooling of the worlds we thought we knew, and the strange new ones being born in their slipstream. About heroes and villains and the increasingly thin and trembling line between them. About surveillance and sanctuary, and where, exactly, a person is allowed to disappear. About me, and sometimes about you.

“Cartoons began in slowing down. Alex Sprogis and I wrote it over two quiet years, and somewhere in that time we stopped guarding our front door. We let the room get crowded with collaborators, friends, and a wider cast of players. The songs grew louder and stranger and more tender for it. It is the most communal thing we’ve ever made, and the most exposed.

“It is also, somehow, our most direct record and our most expansive. The songs come for you quicker now; the choruses are not embarrassed to mean what they say. But underneath, the ground has shifted. American alt rock leans against electronic production. Alex’s guitars run into programmed drums, organic field recordings, digital data samples, and a low end that takes cues from dance production. And for the first time, I stopped being afraid to sing; to carry a melody out in the open, unguarded, without the old reflex to undercut or hide something. There is hiss and choir, machine and breath.

“If we used to point the lens outward, this time we turned it back on ourselves. Cartoons is more personally political: a record about how I try, and very often fail, to move through late capitalism, work, family, love and the long weather of my own interior. There is anger in it, but also tenderness; and grief that has stopped lying to itself. Not resolution. Just company, out in the noisy world.”

Cartoons will include the previously released “The Mud Never Dries,” and the album’s second and latest single “Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon).” “Love Song (A Good Kind of Weapon)” is a mediative, slow-burning song that seemingly channels Radiohead and The National with the song built around a gorgeous string arrangement, broodingly atmospheric and swirling electronics, what sounds like twinkling and darting synths beneath Drinkwater’s yearning baritone croon. Arguably one of the most unabashedly and unashamedly candid and vulnerable songs of the band’s catalog, “Love Song” is a both a contented sigh and earnest expression of gratitude, full of the recognition that love is often complicated, frustrating yet always deeply rewarding; that love is what makes us whole and sustains us in the most difficult, brutal times of our lives — and when everything is desperate, shitty and in flames.

“Love motivated us to form the band, yet we’d never written a song exploring romantic love or addressed it as a statement of love to our partners. This was a response to that: a shedding of any artifice and an expression of desire,” Charlie Drinkwater explains. “We wanted to explore how love is both domestic and extraordinary. It’s in the washing up done without asking, or the flowers bought on the way home from work but it’s also in the grand gestures, the late-night conversations, or the personal wonder when you learn something new about someone despite all those years together. And, after all, love is a weapon for righteous change and goodness. It’s a statement of resistance when the current world’s mood music seems to be hatred and violence (or at least we are led to believe).”

The accompanying video is a collection of surreal imagery including Drinkwater walking through a field with a heart-shaped balloon Other times, he’s on a landline phone with a long extension cord baring his soul on the phone, as well as the band’s core duo in a bare studio space.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 83rd Birthday, Christine McVie!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 83rd anniversary of Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Share Glitchy and Club Friendly “Level 5”

Wildly prolific Melbourne-based JOVM mainstays King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard — Stu Mackenzie (vocals, guitar), Ambrose Kenny-Smith (harmonica, vocals, keys), Cook Craig (guitar, vocals), Joey Walker (guitar, vocals), Lucas Harwood (bass) and Michael Cavanaugh (drums) — have a long-held reputation for being restlessly creative and never standing still musically, exploring everything from prog-tinged thrash metal, primitive synth-rock, down-home jam rock and on recent releases feel-good symphonic rock.

The Aussie outfit’s remarkable 28th album Alien Metal follows on from 2023’s The Silver Cord — and grew out of last year’s “rave shows,” in which traditional instruments were abandoned, with the band gathering around an expansive modular synthesizer setup they named “Nathan,” each member making their own manipulations to create a mind-altering whole. And what initially began as an experiment soon became an obsession, inspiring what may arguably be one of the band’s most ambitious albums to date. “It completely rewired my brain,” Gizz’s Stu Mackenzie says, having discovered the possibilities of the Eiurorack synthesizer format on the recommendation of bandmate and self-confessed “techno head of the group” Joey Walker. “I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch.”

The album was far from straightforward to make. Over the course of several years, the band scrapped countless recordings and abandoned entire creative directions while searching for the album’s identity. “We’ve never scrapped so much material as we have for this album,” Mackenzie says. “Entire albums, entire universes that were formulated, created, recorded, deleted and started again.”

The breakthrough finally arrived during a late night, improvisatory jam session that went over an hour. That spontaneous jam became the foundation for the entire record with every track on Alien Metal evolving from the same source performance. The result is a seamless, constantly shifting journey through techno, hardcore, house and jungle influences, filtered through King Gizzard’s unmistakable psychedelic lens. Pulsing rhythms, distorted textures and unexpected twists collide across material that’s at once futuristic and uniquely their own. “It sounds so crunchy, but also beautiful,” says Mackenzie.

“Alien Metal goes really hard, but it also goes to really interesting places,” adds Joey Walker. “And it feels unique – it feels like us, still.”

Alien Metal‘s first single “Level 5” sees Mackenzie’s heavily vocodered vocals beneath a mind-bending bit of industrial techno featuring glistening and glitchy synth textures paired with skittering, machine gun staccato beats that showcases how hard the band’s material typically goes while arguably being the most club friendly song they’ve released to date.

Directed by Hayden Somerville, the accompanying video places the viewer in a dystopian hellscape in which a collection of scientists perform a weird experiment on a humanoid mutant to hilariously weird effect. Not to spoil things too much, but it involves an autopsy and a connection to a modular synthesizer.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Nashville’s Hannah Cole Shares Bruising, “120 Minutes”-era MTV-like “MMA”

Covington, LA-born, Nashville-based artist Hannah Cole can trace the origins of her career to her childhood: She began writing songs and singing at six, despite the fact that there wasn’t much of a music scene in her hometown. After relocating to Nashville in 2019 for school, Cole was exposed to new sounds and possibilities — and given the permission to dream big. Much like Bully and Soccer Mommy, Cole found a way to merge a taste for heavier sounds with a studied sense of songwriting craftsmanship, juxtaposing brushing, distorted guitar with a cool, honey sweetened vocals and a punchy, melodic hooks.

Cole has released two EPs, 2023’s Big Bite and 2024’s Glisten. But her highly-anticipated full-length debut, the 10-song Switchbacks is reportedly a marked step in the Covington-born, Nashville-based artist’s development while showcasing her unique blend of style and technique. Slated for a September 4, 2026 release through Tight Knit, the album was recorded by Cole and her longtime collaborator and partner Joseph Kuhn in their home studio between 2024 and 2025, playing nearly every instrument. Aided by mixer Sonny Diperri, Switchbacks features a much wider and dense sonic palette than Cole’s previous releases with the material’s massive, cathartic splashes of sound specifically constructed with the live show in mind. Sonically, the album can be described as a blend of shoegaze and alternative rock with infectious pop melodies and strains of 90s nostalgia.

Thematically, the album’s material is a commentary on the pursuit of success and how to protect the pure joy and love that lives at our core. “Success is a moment that comes and goes,” Cole concludes, “but I think the joy and experience that comes with making music is something I can take with me forever.”

Switchbacks‘ lead single “MMA” features bruising wall of sound riffs and swirling shoegazer textures and thunderous drumming beneath Cole’s honeyed delivery, punchy melodic hooks and enormous choruses. Channeling Whip-Smart-era Liz Phair, L7‘s “Pretend We”re Dead,” and Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins, the song is a razor sharp take on the gamble of success, exploring the ugly side of the music industry through the image of Las Vegas: while being the so-called fight capital of the world, a rich and glamorous city with a seedy underbelly, surrounded by a void of sand.

After reading Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, which Didion explores the scummy underbelly of 1970s Hollywood, Cole began thinking about Nashville, often referred to “Nashveagas,” ”Reflecting on her experience in the industry, Cole says, “I’ve taught myself how to live outside of reality, how to put on a show.”

Fittingly, the video draws from 120 Minutes-era MTV and features edited footage of skateboarders wiping out hard, rodeos, people getting arrested and dreamily shot closeups of Cole among other imagery, It’s a fever dream that captures the strangeness of contemporary America.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 69th Birthday, Peter Murphy!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Peter Murphy’s 69th birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: sundayclub Shares Shimmering and Broodingly Conflicted “Corydon Ave (To Meet You)”

Winnipeg-based indie duo sundayclub — Courtney and Nikki — have quickly cemented a sound and approach that blends hazy indie pop and dreamy textures with unfiltered storytelling. The result is material that’s much like blurry photograph, grainy yet glowing, fleeting yet full of feeling and life. 

The duo’s nine-song, self-titled, full-length debut saw its official release today through Paper Bag Records. Their debut is deeply informed by the stillness of rural Manitoba, where the duo started the band as a way of processing the very strange limbo of early adulthood — that feeling of being caught between who you once were and who you’re slowly becoming. Fittingly, the album is rooted in place: in a romanticized, re-examined Winnipeg with its hard edges softened in the way that memory often soften things. Thematically, the album touches upon growing up, growing apart and growing into your own skin. 

The album includes the previously released “Camera Shy,” “Blue Wave,” and the album’s latest single “Corydon Ave (To Meet You).” “Corydon Ave (To Meet You)” is a shimmering tune that’s simultaneously brooding, tense, full of barely contained longing, and rousingly anthemic while capturing a narrator, who’s conflicted, guilt-ridden and obsessed with someone — and the narrator just can’t quite figure out what to do or if what they want from this person is even possible. You can sense the desire to tell the

“Corydon Ave (To Meet You)” can trace its origins to the neighborhood where the band’s Nikki grew up — Winnipeg’s Corydon, a culturally rich pocket of the city that Courtney came to know through him. Spending time there, she found herself unexpectedly and intensely struck by a new acquaintance, who happened to be from the same neighborhood.

“Along with being struck with the beauty of it, I became impossibly and unexpectedly struck by a new acquaintance who also happened to be from the area,” Courtney explains. “Realizing the intense feelings and infatuation that quickly developed, the song took a deeply personal turn. It became an opportunity to create this world in which the two of us could be together, despite it being so fragile in reality.”

At the time, Courtney was navigating her sexuality, and what followed was complicated, consuming guilt-ridden and heady. The song became a way to hold all of it. “I was starting to explore my sexuality around this time and so there were also a lot of confusing, guilt-ridden feelings that came with it as well,” Courtney adds. “The relationship felt almost hedonistic at times because it felt so forbidden and self-indulgent and yet felt like something I wasn’t supposed to want or enjoy. It was a constant gauging of mine and her physical and emotional boundaries and I found myself wrestling between wanting to preserve and yet cross them at the same time.”

The gorgeously shot visual captures the narrator’s feverish, barely contained desire for her love interest in the subtle and often confusing “did that mean what I desperately hope it means?” moments of our lives, when we love someone and aren’t sure if it’s reciprocated and are afraid to take a bold chance. And if you’re queer or exploring what your sexuality is, that moment can invite a crushing fear — of being outed against your will or worse.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, Neil Tennant!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Pet Shop Boys and Electronic frontman Neil Tennant’s 72nd birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: London’s Eleanor Moss Shares Gorgeous and Intimate “The Way It Feels”

London-based singer/songwriter Eleanor Moss will be releasing her full-length debut, The Knife, The Needle on August 21, 2026 through Merge Records. The nine-song album concerns itself with the way relationships between people are transformed, complicated and troubled by love. It’s a devastating work and a feat of tight lyrical construction that is simultaneously patient and vulnerable, opulently rendered and keenly felt. But interestingly, The Knife, The Needle emerged from a place of restraint with Moss — staying in a cabin near her parents’ house in the Scottish Highlands after initially recording an entirely different version of the album in New York (“a bit rollicking,” she notes) — feeling the pangs of the album she hadn’t recorded — “quieter, weirder, more English.”

Recording an album with a new ensemble and producer/engineer Pete Miles was a risk, but for Moss, setting aside an already completed effort was worth it. With the quieter, weirder, more English sound, Moss attempts to capture something fleeting, ephemeral and honest about the moments in which love, for better or worse, irrevocably changes someone.

The album will feature the previously released “Sarah Waiting in the Car,” and its latests single, the breathtakingly gorgeous and timeless “The Way It Feels.” Moss’ achingly yearning and expressive vocal is accompanied by birdsong and her strummed acoustic, classical guitar — and the result is an intimate, timeless picture of a universe created in the bond between two people with the unvarnished humility and honesty of a narrator, who says “the more I learn, the less I understand.”

“This was the last song written for the album, and feels to me like it sums up the spirit of the record. The more I learn about love the less I know, the more I know about someone, the more I know I don’t know them,” Moss explains. “It feels like an appropriate last song for an album about paradoxes; love asks us to hold contradiction without giving in to its discomfort. A song about not turning away, but turning towards.” 

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Matthew Thorne, the accompanying video for “The Way It Feels” was shot in the Greek Peloponnese on 16mm film with Director of Photography Tasos Chatzis — and fittingly is as gorgeous and mediative as the song.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sophia Bel Shares Atmospheric and World -Weary “Rat Race”

Montréal-based artist Sophia Bel exploded into the local and national scenes with her angsty full-length debut, 2022’s Anxious Avoidant, an effort released to praise from Le Devoir, Le Canal Auditif and EUPHORIA, and landed on the year-end lists of several media outlets, including RANGE Magazine, Exclaim! and CJLO.

Bel stepped away from the rat race to recuperate from tech fatigue and the relentless pressures of social media. After a few years away from the spotlight, the acclaimed Canadian artist will be releasing her highly-anticipated sophomore album, When The Cows Come Home on May 7, 2027 through Bonsound.

Drawn to the spaces between chaos and stillness, the Montréal-based singer/songwriter explores what it means to be human in an increasingly distracted, modern world. Pairing intimate songwriting with dreamy, organic soundscapes, Bel transforms seemingly mundane, everyday moments into quiet reflections on identity, connection and meaning. In a world driven by instant gratification, constant stimulation and productivity, her work is a gentle reminder that stillness, vulnerability and reflection are not indulgences — but are necessary to our humanity.

When The Cows Comes Home‘s first single “Rat Race” is a slow-burning tune that features an atmospheric arrangement of twinkling keys, gently padded drums and a supple bass line beneath Bel’s ethereal and world-weary delivery. And while subtly channeling A Storm in Heaven and No Come Down-era The Verve, “Rat Race” is anchored in an unvarnished honest, vulnerability, expressing a deep-seated exhaustion and a desperate desire to finally slow down.

Directed by Bel, the accompanying video for “Rat Race” follows the Montréal-based artist on top of what appears to be one of those double-decker tourist buses in a shirt, tie and trench coat through the city’s Central Business District –to my eyes, it looks like Boulevard Rene Levesque — with a briefcase and old-fashioned cell phone. But we see her get fed up with it all, throw the cell phone down, take the trench coat off and loosen her tie. Maybe some of us should do the same.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 67th Birthday, Jim Kerr!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr’s 67th birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Bon Scott!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 80th anniversary of the birth of AC/DC’s first frontman Bon Scott.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A Place to Bury Strangers Share Tense, Brooding and Atmospheric “Losing Time”

New York-based JOVM mainstays  A Place to Bury Strangers — currently Oliver Ackermann (vocals, guitar), John Fedowitz (bass) and Sandra Fedowitz (drums) — released a rarities album Rare and Deadly earlier this year through Dedstrange. 

Following 2024’s Synthesizer, Rare and Deadly sees the band cracking open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos. Spanning 2015-2025, this collection of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments and forgotten fragments reveals the band at their most unfiltered, frequently caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes. 

Pulled from Oliver Ackermann’s personal archive of late-night recordings, blown-out tapes and half-finished sessions, the collection’s tracks pulse with the unruly energy that ATPBS has long been known for, but more dangerous with more jagged edges — on purpose. 

Countless bands have opened up their vaults to fans and others, but Rare and Deadly is truly unprecedented: Every format is different — and as a result, tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl and digital editions each feature their own unique track listing. No single version features the “complete” album. Instead, each format is its own window into Ackermann’s archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links and parallel “what if” versions of the band’s inner life. It’s deliberately unstable with the album shifting depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation. 

Across the collection’s tracks, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restlessly creative mind. Some pieces feel like prototypes for future chaos, seeds that later bloomed on studio albums. Others are dead ends — ideas too volatile, too strange or too personal to ever fit the frame of a proper release. The tracks feature riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals, songs born from gear pushed past its limits, or delicate melodies overwhelmed by towering walls of feedback. 

Rare and Deadly includes the previously released, “Everyone’s The Same,” “Acid Rain” “Where Are We Now” “Song for Girl From Macedonia” and what was announced as the album’s then-final single “Time.” But the JOVM mainstays surprised folks with the surprise release of another single off the time album “Losing Time.” “Losing Time” is a brooding and tense song that features swirling and malevolent textures and a motorik pulse beneath Ackermann’s icy yet punchy delivery. Arguably, the most Suicide-like tracks in the band’s expansive catalog, the song is rooted in a brutally realistic acknowledgment– that forces beyond your control will drag you forward, that time and death wait for no one.

“‘Losing Time’ tackles the uneasy truth that life keeps moving whether we’re ready for it or not. Set against our signature storm of noise and tension, it’s a song about change, mortality and surrendering to the inevitable,” the band explains.

Directed by legendary horror movie director Travis Stevens, the accompanying video for “Losing Time” emphasizes the song’s themes with an uncanny precision.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Genesis Owusu Returns with Shimmering and Glitchy Surprise Single “HUMAN AGAIN”

Acclaimed multi-ARIA Award-winning Ghanian-born Canberra-based JOVM mainstay Genesis Owusu released his highly anticipated third album REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE earlier this year through OURNESS. 

REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE sees one of Australia’s most celebrated and visionary contemporary artists construct an exposed state-of-the-day record that’s experimental yet cohesive, desolate yet ecstatic, unflinching yet free. Duality is at the core of an album that sees the JOVM mainstay layering musings on an unsettled world with piercing reflections of his, and our own places within the world. Rich in lyricism and earnest in its message, REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE is a resolute effort that confronts a divisive era in which humanity and its institutions seem to be ripping apart at the seams and heeds a desperate need for unity. 

Sonically drawing from and meshing elements funk, neo-soul, Brit rock and alt pop the album’s overall sound feels both sprawling and deliberate. “The world hasn’t ended yet,” Owusu. says. “We’re still moving, we’re still jumping, we’re still living, and so we shall continue. Through rain, shine, exploitation and warfare. We, the people, will always stubbornly persist, and hopefully persist hand in hand.”

Today, the acclaimed JOVM mainstay shares “HUMAN AGAIN,” a surprise stand-alone single and video that comes on the heels of REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE and his Red Star Wu’s Pirate Radio Tour, which electrified crowds in Australia and included sold-out headline shows in London and Paris, and opening dates with IDLES. “HUMAN AGAIN exists in the same mindset as REDSTAR WU — emotionally raw and reflecting deeply on our divisive, mad times. Sonically, the new single features bubbling and warbling synth glitch and skittering beats beneath Owusu alternating between a ferocious, ODB-styled snarl for the song’s punchy verses and his imitable croon. His delivery evokes a man at conflict with himself, seeming propelled forward by the digitized world that surrounds us. And yet, the song’s narrator finds a hopeful resolve, resilience in community, and inspiration in the collective fight to hold on to our humanity.

Owusu says, “I wrote this song when I was thinking about apathy. Living in the digital age of misinformation is genuinely brain-frying sometimes. So much global gaslighting, so much to cry and scream about; it’s easier to just flip the switch off and sink into base hedonism to feel human again. But it’s really important to care. You can party too. Care about the rights and freedoms that let you party. Care about all the people around the world who wanna party just like you. Keep fighting, kicking and screaming so the party doesn’t die.”

Directed by Isaac Brown, the accompanying video is a baroque, Interview with the Vampire-styled fever dream of lust, decadence and violence that collides with modern-day European streets in a way that emphasizes the tensions at the core of the song in a visceral fashion.