JOVM William Ruben Helms celebrates The Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s 74th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 55th Birthday, Ed Kowalczyk!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Live frontman Ed Kowalczyk’s 55th birthday.
New Audio: Nouvelle Vague and Flavia Coelho Tackle Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again”
Founded by Marc Collins and the late Olivier Libaux back in 2003, Nouvelle Vague was initially conceived as a one-off tribute to post-punk songwriting in a Bossa nova style. 2004’s self-titled debut, which saw them establish their unique fusion of melancholy post-punk, Bossa nova and French re-interpretational approach, unexpectedly achieved global acclaim. Since then, Nouveau Vague has become a global phenomenon.
Their 10th album, A Date with Depeche Mode is slated for an October 30, 2026 release through Kwaidan Records/[PIAS] Recordings. And as you can probably tell, the album sees the French outfit tackling the work of pioneering British electronic outfit Depeche Mode. The album’s second single, “Never Let Me Down Again” feat. Brazilian artist Flavia Coehlo was according to the a conscious risk, because her voice manages to carry the full light of Rio. The original version is a brooding and hypnotic tune built on an intertwined promise and threat.
Coehlo and Nouvelle Vague manage to craft a bold and unique interpretation of a beloved song that doesn’t betray the spirit and intention of the original. The summer breeze and sunshine of Nouveau Vague’s rendition is superficial; the song is underpinned by a tense, brooding unease. Goths at the beach, perhaps?
Seriously though, Nouveau Vague’s work points out the melancholy of English New Wave and Brazilian Bossa Nova are practically two sides of the same coin.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Linda Ronstadt!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Linda Ronstadt’s 80th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 70th Birthday, Ian Curtis!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 70th anniversary of the birth of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.
Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, Roky Erickson!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 79th anniversary of the birth of psych rock pioneer Roky Erickson.
Throwback: Happy 77th Birthday, Trevor Horn!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Trevor Horn’s 77th birthday.
New Audio: Sam Palladio Shares Sexy and Hypnotic “Burberry Jacket”
Sam Palladio is a Pembury, Kent, UK-born singer/songwriter and actor, who’s best known for his breakout fan favorite role as Gunnar Scott on ABC’s Nashville during the show’s six-season run. Since then, Palladio has carved out a musical identity that has seen him blend indie pop, Americana and folk influences.
Palladio’s full-length debut, 2024’s The Perfect Summer’s Day, Before We Lost the Light was created alongside New Politics‘ Søren Hansen and multi-Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Sardy. He followed that up with a couple of acclaimed singles, including “Tennessee,” which featured Foo Fighters‘ Chris Shiftett. The British-born singer/songwriter and actor has balanced his music career with roles in Netflix’s The Princess Switch trilogy, AMC’s Humans, Showtime’s Episodes, ABC’s Rebel, the Bob Marley biopic One Love, and the thriller series The Couple Next Door.
Last month, Palladio released “Glitter” to praise from The Tennessean and BBC Radio London. Building upon a growing profile as a solo artist, the British-born singer/songwriter recently released Sam Palladio, Phil Barnes and Kendall Goodman co-written “Burberry Jacket.” “Burberry Jacket” is a hook-driven bit of New Wave-inspired pop that features Palladio’s croon beneath strutting and shimmering guitar paired with a pulsing bass line. Set against the backdrop of London‘s Fleet Street, “Burberry Jacket” makes subtle nods to Sweeney Todd while painting a portrait of mesmerizing and cinematic femme fatale-type, who’s impossible to escape.
“I wanted the song to feel as hypnotic as its main character, with the pulsing bass and rhythm of the drums providing the backbone to build this sonic world,” shares Palladio. “The Dire Straits-inspired riff in the bridge, played by the amazing Joey McClennan, pushes that feeling even further, and I love it.”
New Audio: Everything But The Everything Shares Yearning “Hollow Heart”
Bay Area-based indie rock outfit Everything But The Everything originally started off as a collaborative recording project founded by producer, songwriter and bassist Izzy The Gent, recently expanded into a full-fledged band with the additions of Sophia Prise (vocals), Tobias Hawkins (vocals), Andy Lund (guitar), Ian Dowed (guitar) and Cody Rhodes (drums).
While previous releases features a rotating cast of collaborators, the project’s latest singlem the Rex Shelverton-produced “Hollow Heart” marks a new chapter — a recording project becoming a full-fledged band. Sophia Price and Tobias Hawkins trade achingly yearning vocals beneath a driving bass line, dramatic drumming, and shimmering post punk-meets-New Wave atmospherics. Channeling Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen and the like, “Hollow Heart” features a towering wall of sound-like approach that showcases the simpatico between the members of the lineup.
And at its core, “Hollow Heart” is rooted in earnest performances and even more earnest songwriting. “This feels like the natural evolution of Everything But The Everything,” says Izzy The Gent. “What started as a collaborative project has grown into a real band with a shared creative vision. Sophia and Tobias bring so much personality and emotion to the music, and this song reflects what happens when everyone contributes their voice to the process.”
New Audio: Deep Sea Diver Tackles Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”
Seattle-based JOVM mainstays Deep Sea Diver fourth album, last year’s Billboard Heart, which featured “Shovel,” “Let Me Go” feat. Madison Cunningham and “What Do I Know” was released to critical applause internationally. The JOVM mainstays […]
New Audio: New Age Healers Share Atmospheric, Politically Charged “Moored”
Seattle-based psych rockers/shoegazers New Age Healers will be releasing their fifth album, Blowing Smoke Through the Choir is slated for an August 19, 2026 release. The album is a reportedly an expansive evolution of the shoegaze-psych hybrid they developed and sharpened on 2024’s The Spin Out that sees the band pushing their sound further sonically and structurally while brining new collaborators into their dense, dreamlike orbit, including Film School’s Greg Bertens and Karate Guns & Training‘s Valerie Green.
For the first time in their history, the new album sees frontman Owen Murphy sharing songwriting duties with guitarist Jeramy Koepping, whose ideas form the backbone of four tracks. The addition of vocalist Elisa Notthingham helps to deepen their already immersive sound while threading new textures through their signature swell of ethereal guitars, luminous synth work and muscular rhythm section. “It was amazing to have someone present ideas and get to sing over them,” Murphy says of co-writing with Koepping.
While the music opens up, the lyric remain characteristically oblique. “These are political songs hidden within love songs,” Murphy explains. “There’s no possible way someone like me can make a record right now and not, in some way, shape, or form have what’s happening in the world affect it thematically.”
The album also marks the band’s first collaboration with producer and mixer John Goodmason, “It was really interesting working with John, because besides being an outrageously great guy and extraordinarily talented, his resume blasts out of the pages,”says Murphy. “He’s the guy that mixed or recorded the likes of Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Blonde Redhead, and he’s worked with a local band here called Suzzallo that is incredible. So I was just so grateful that we got to work with him, hear his ideas, and have the opportunity to trust him to help us make something great.”
Thematically, Blowing Smoke Through the Choir is about emotional accumulation — how personal and collective anxieties bleeding into one another. Murphy credits his work producing KEXP’s The Morning Show with John Richards as a major influence on the album. “It’s a different kind of radio show in which John, through music, is communicating emotions of all types, and the audience responds to us, often calling to share birthdays or to tell us of loved one’s passing,” Murphy explains. “It’s incredibly powerful. We’ve been doing this five days a week amidst the last ten years of pure chaos, and all of that experience, probably more than anything, is infused into this record.”
Blowing Smoke Through the Choir‘s latest single “Moored” is a shimmering and slow-burning shoegaze track featuring Murphy’s urgent yet melodic croon beneath skittering drums, swirling and atmospheric guitars. shimmering synths and a supple bass line. Seemingly channeling a blend of Luminous-era The Horrors, A Storm in Heaven-era The Verve and others, “Moored” is ethereal yet grounded, suggesting that we remain tethered to something — whether it’s hope, faith or something less easily named and more difficult to describe.
Murphy explains that the central characters of the song are a bit of a reflection of the voting public, and how over the past decade or so, everyone just wants to throw Molotov cocktails into the system, not caring about the results and without any thought towards the future, ““Like the couple in the song, they’re just along for the ride. And so, the next part of the lyric says, “Leave them out in the sun like you want to burn them,” just let everything burn. And we’ll see what happens, for better or worse.”
New Audio: Julia Jacklin Teams Up with The Maes on Introspective “I Wish”
Acclaimed Melbourne-based singer/songwriter and musician Julia Jacklin will be releasing her highly-anticipated fourth album, the Robert Muiños and Jacklin co-produced, 10-song album The Gem through 4AD Records digitally and on CD, cassette and vinyl on September 25, 2026. Exclusive color vinyl editions with retailers will include turquoise, green opal, ruby and rose quartz. Pre-order information can be found here.
When Jacklin first moved to Melbourne from Sydney back in 2017, she discovered a little bar on a back street in Collingwood, a suburb just outside of downtown, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor. She didn’t know anyone in town, but knew she wanted to make the city home, so she started hanging out there, facing herself out of her comfort zone. That pub was named The Gem.
Eight years later, Jacklin had released three acclaimed albums, 2016’s Don’t Let The Kids Win, 2019’s Crushing and 2022’s PRE PLEASURE — and was looking to write and record her fourth. Her contract with her previous label had ended. She was searching for a manager. And with time on her hands, she decided that she would make her fourth album in Melbourne, something she’d never done before.
She called up an old drinking buddy Robert Muiños, owner of Rat Shack Studios, which is just above The Gem and brought in her friends Jacob Diamond (guitar), Mimi Gilbert (bass) and Jess Elwood (drums). Recording happened in close quarter, in converted hotel room accommodation upstairs at the pub. Because The Gem was in a residential neighborhood, they couldn’t record late into the night for fear of bothering neighbors and sound bleed was a glorious constant: foot traffic to the hairdressers and lotto parlor next door and loud music from the bands and the kitchen staff downstairs. But if anyone needed a break during the sessions, they would head downstairs and watch a local band play. Jacklin and her friends even played two unannounced shows there to try out the album’s material before recording them.
They originally thought they’d be able to finish the album in two weeks, like she’d always done previously, but this time that wasn’t the case. In fact, it took nearly a year of tinkering to arrive at something Jacklin could get behind, “The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was doing it almost in the dark, just trusting I was going to find something,” Jacklin says. While conjuring images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile, the album documents the songwriter’s journey back to herself.
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” says Jacklin. That theme underpins the album’s material.
The album will include the previously released “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You)” and the album’s latest single, the album closer “I Wish” feat, Aussie folk sibling duo The Maes. Channeling Crosby, Stills, and Nash, “I Wish” features Jacklin’s gorgeous and expressive vocal and the Elsie and Maggie Rigby’s impeccable harmonies beneath strummed acoustic guitar. The song is an introspective and a bit melancholy note from one’s older, wiser self to their younger self, essentially saying “girl, if you knew then what you know now . . . ” There’s quite a bit of awe, forgiveness and love for the narrator’s younger self, full of the recognition of the things she experienced and survived made her into who she is now.
New Audio: George Aletras Returns with Brooding and Heartbroken “Γιορτή”(“Celebration”)
George Aletras is a Greek singer/songwriter and musician, whose work sees him moving between indie rock, post rock and cinematic soundscapes, frequently blurring the boundaries between them. At times, his work leans into experimental territories, not as a statement of style, but a a natural consequence of exploration, where form isn’t followed but discovered.
This year, Aletras has released a couple of singles that have caught my attention, including “Τώρα,” a tune that seemingly channeled Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen and contemporaries like PLOHO, and “Όπως Παλιά” (“Like the Old Times”) a nostalgia-inducing tune that sounded as though it could have been released back in 1983.
The Greek artist’s latest single “Γιορτή”(“Celebration”) is built around an angular post punk pulse that’s simultaneously groovy, cinematic and theatrical paired with melancholic vocals. While the song may arguably be among the most danceable of Aletras’ catalog, it’s underpinned by a bittersweet, almost fatalistic irony that’s familiar to the lovelorn and brokenhearted out there.
Aletras explains that the song follows a narrator watching the woman he loves marry someone else. an event that reads as a celebration for everyone else, but as a funeral for him and his love. While the wedding ceremony unfolds through traditional rituals of joy, our narrator experiences as a sort of emotional erase, with the realization that the only way he can be the groom to his love again would be at his own funeral. For him, the happiness of the event is a showcase of painful, unending absence — and of devastating failure. Dramatic? Of course; but it’s also rooted in psychological realism.
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.