Category: Video

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.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 65th Birthday, Andy Fletcher!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 65th anniversary of the birth of Depeche Mode co-founder Andy Fletcher’s birth.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: El Da Sensei Celebrates 20th Anniversary of “The Unusual” with Stylish Visual for Lush “Hold On”

El Da Sensei celebrates 20th anniversary of “The Unusual” with stylish visual for lush “Hold On.”