Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Tokyo Tea Room Shares Mesmerizing and Shimmering “Eyes Off You”

Last year’s full-length debut, No Rush saw the rising Margate, UK-based outfit Tokyo Tea Room quickly establishing a sound and approach that takes listeners on a journey within a tender, comfortable bubble. Their music is inspired by lived-in, human emotions while thematically exploring longing and the ephemeral nature of existence. The album eventually led to millions of monthly listeners across the DSPs and a sold-out North American tour, helping the band amass a rapidly growing global audience.

The Margate-based act have new music coming that will reportedly see them entering a new chapter that sees an evolution of their sound that remains rooted in the emotional depth that the band has begun to be known for. The rising British act will return to North America for a fall tour, supporting their new material. The tour includes two NYC area dates — October 13, 2026 at Music Hall of Williamsburg and October 14, 2026 at Bowery Ballroom. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.

In the meantime, the rising outfit’s latest single, the Daniel James Elliott-penned “Eyes Off You” is an atmospheric, mesmerizing and hook-driven, sophitispop-inspired bop that features Beth Dunn’s yearning vocal ethereally floating over shimmering synths, Nile Rodgers-like guitar and a supple yet propulsive bass line. “Eyes Off You” captures the desperation and delusion of an all-consuming obsession, describing the inability to let go, even when it hurts.

Directed by Jacek Zmarz and starring Anders Hayward, the accompanying video for “Eyes Off You” is a cinematically shot fever dream that follows Hayward as he expressively dances in series of surreal yet gorgeous locales.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Mouth Ulcers Return with Shimmering, Hook-Driven “Space”

Formed last year, London-based outfit Mouth Ulcers — Zak Watson (vocals, guitar), Josephine Rose (guitar, vocals), Jamie Lee Culver (bass) and David Zbirka (drums) — are part of a new generation of dark post-punk that’s actively reshaping the genre into something urgent, youthful and intoxicating.

With the release of last year’s “Western Horror Story” and “A Perfect End” the British quartet quickly developed a sound that they’ve playfully dubbed as “music for vampires to dance to” — i.e. brooding, groove-driven and irresistibly cool.

Recently, the rising British outfit made their live debut with sold-outs the UK and The Netherlands, And building upon a growing profile, the band signed to LAB Records, who will be releasing the quartet’s highly-anticipated debut EP, Silent Pictures on July 10, 2026. The EP reportedly sees the band firmly cementing the sound that has received praise from The Line of Best Fit, So Young, Rough Trade and Louder Than War, as well as airplay from BBC 6 Music‘s Lauren Laverne, Chris Hawkins and Steve Lamacq, BBC Radio 1‘s Daniel P. Carter, KEXP and Radio X, a blend of Joy Division, The Cure and Bauhaus, built on melodic bass lines, wiry guitars and cavernous baritone vocals.

The EP will feature the previously released “Prevail” and its latest single, “Space.” “Space” is a brooding yet hook-driven and dance floor friendly bit of goth-inspired post punk that sounds like it draws from Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure. The band explains that, “‘Space’ explores how nostalgia can feel like both a physical presence and a permanent loss. Something that’s a common theme across the whole EP, seeing how the past is a part of you but you have to leave it behind to survive.”

Directed by the band, the accompanying video for “Space” continues a run of visuals that seem indebted to 120 Minutes-era MTV. complete with footage of the band playing the song is a haunted and extremely British forest at night and a ton of double exposure-based footage.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: The Afghan Whigs Return with Sultry “Jungle Roux”

JOVM mainstays The Afghan Whigs —  currently Greg Dulli (vocals, guitar), John Curley (bass), multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson and the band’s newest member, Blind Melon’s Christopher Thorn (guitar) — will be releasing their 10th album, Soft Control on August 21, 2026 through Royal Cream/BMG.

Soft Control is reportedly a testament to the old David Bowie quote, where he describes aging as “an extraordinary process, where you become the person you always should have been.” By now, the volatile years of frontman Greg Dulli’s youth have been substituted with a wry and self-aware, Zen Buddhist-like satori. The edge and sensitive temperament remain but the unchecked conflagration of ego and rage no longer threaten personal immolation.

“I’ve worked hard on my inner peace,” Dulli explains. ““I was an angry young man, and it fueled my art, ambition and my drive. I wouldn’t change anything because I can’t.  But as I got into photography and other art forms, I realized that I’m not in competition with anyone – including myself. Now, I know what I’m doing and there’s a quiet confidence that comes with being able to back it up.” 

The band recorded 22 songs for the album in session s at Joshua Tree, CA‘s Fireside Sound, New Orleans‘ Marginy Studios, East Hollywood’s Gold Diggers Sound and Cincinnati’s Sycamore Studios. Several favorites were cut because they didn’t seamlessly fit into the album’s taut 37-minute run time. The album features guest spots from former drummer Patrick Keeler, vocalist and violinist Petra Haden, My Morning Jacket‘s Bo Koster and a list of others.

Soft Control reportedly captures the JOVM outfit’s long-held ability to craft material that can effortlessly bounce between and mesh arena rock anthems with brooding, cubist refractions of soul and R&B. The album has its Afghan Whig-style bangers — because Afghan Whigs after all. But there’a reconciliation of ear drum shattering volume and somber reflections, living life with joy and purpose while keeping one eye on the clock, while remaining aware of life’s absurdities.

The album’s latest single “Jungle Roux” is a sultry bit of R&B and soul-tinged rock with phased out guitar twang that sounds a bit like a synthesis of “Gimme Shelter,” Dr. John, and Motown, and evokes a woozy, sweaty and desperate craving. It’s arguably the album’s sexiest, song to date.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Glimmer Shares Hazy, Summery “Someday Sunshine”

Last year, New York-based grungazers and JOVM mainstays Glimmer — Jeff Moore (vocals, guitar), Jaye Moore (drums), Johnny Nicholls (guitar) and Kevin Dobbins (bass) —released their Jeff Berner-produced full-length debut Get Weak. The album included The Colour and The Shape-era Foo Fighters-like “Dissolve” and the  Dinosaur Jr.-like “Been Down.”

The JOVM mainstay act’s latest single “Someday Sunshine” is the first bit of new material since Get Weak, and the single marks an shift in sonic direction for the band, showcasing a more melodic, dream pop-inspired sound while retaining their unerring knack for pairing catchy hooks with rousingly anthemic, power chord-driven choruses. But just underneath the mosh-pit friendly choruses, the song is underpinned by a bittersweet melancholy, seemingly fueled by the fact that summer will pass and leave you longing for those warm carefree days.

The accompanying video for “Someday Sunshine” was filmed by Digital Awareness and edited by JAM features the band performing the song and reddened in layers of psychedelic colored, VHS tape haze and hiss.

Following multiple tours across the US and Europe, the band will play a June 5, 2026 stop at TV Eye. They’ll head down to DC for Telepathic Windows Fest, before going across the pond for a July European Union and UK tour. Check out all tour dates below.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Video Interview: Hush’s Paige Barlow and Miles Dupire-Gagnon

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms chats with Hush’s Paige Barlow and Miles Dupire-Gangon about their recently released “For Dolly” and more.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Curtis Mayfield!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 84th anniversary of the birth of Curtis Mayfield.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: FIGHTMASTER Returns with Intimate and Introspective “Minotaur”

Non-binary actor, singer/songwriter and producer E.R. Fightmaster (they/them) first came into the public eye for their roles in Grey’s Anatomy and Shrill. They built a home studio that replicated a particularly fertile creative space from a previous apartment: a cozy closet. They also learned to use Logic and sharpened their engineering techniques. “It felt like leveling up in a creative way,” Fightmaster explains. “I never have wanted to do the technical part of things, but when you’re trying to be creative, you have to set up a space that does beyond what a loop station can do.” 

They emerged as a solo artist with their recording project, the aptly named FIGHTMASTER with their debut EP, 2023’s Violence and 2024’s sophomore EP Bloodshed Baby. Building upon a growing profile, Fightmaster will be releasing their full-length debut, Tolerance on Friday, June 5, 2026. 

Tolerance is dominated by raw, unvarnished lyrics that reflect the complexities and messiness of emotional growth, and attempts to find equilibrium. When Fightmaster started writing the album’s material, they drew from their own life experience, analyzing them through the lens of hindsight and perspective. “Every song that I write is in some way a personal experience, but here I was mining a broader understanding of patterns throughout a lifetime: patterns of loving different people, patterns of watching my friends love each other,” they explain. “All of us do a relatively graceless job, but all the patterns are the same, which is endearing to me.”

“Tolerance is the most deliberate thing I’ve ever done,” they add. “I wanted to break through more personally on this album. I really waned to give people a part of myself . . . I would decided that a song felt good if it hurt a little bit. There had to be this real truth to it. And that requires a lack of wall between self and the audience.”

Fightmaster also wanted to work with more producers than they did in the past. On the album, they worked with Riley Geare, who produced both the Violence and Bloodshed Baby EP‘s; Casey Kalmensen, the creative mastermind of Little Monarch, who also plays keys for Gracie Abrams; and Gabe Goodman, who produced Del Water Gap‘s “Ode to A Conversation Stuck In Your Throat.“

The result is an album that exhibits artistic clarity and is a reflection of Fightmaster’s own self-awareness about their place in the world, musical and otherwise. “I have to have such a clear understanding of self all the time because I’m a public figure in a very queer way, and I’ve always taken that responsibility seriously,” Fightmaster says. “I don’t feel comfortable being reckless anymore . . . Nonbinary people and trans people have so few elders — I’m not an elder yet; I haven’t earned it — but I have taken on an understanding that’s the path that I’m on.”

Of course, none of this means that Fightmaster has completely figured it all out. No one really has it figured out. But in fact, Tolerance‘s songs brim with empathy — both for the narrators and others. “I want people to know that there’s still cracks in the pavement; I want them to feel safe with me,” they say. “I’ve always thought of myself as so tough, but in the last couple of years I had to realize that I get my feelings hurt every day… When I realized how much kid-heartbreak is still in there, even though I’ve been to all the therapy and I’m on the perfect amount of medication, I was able to write these songs with more kindness for myself than I ever had.”

The album will include the previously released “All Or Nothing” and the album’s third and latest single, “Minotaur.” “Minotaur” is a gorgeous, intimate and crafted waltz of a song inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the labyrinth. Much like the source material, “Minotaur” is a story about love, devotion and heartbreak written in a way to allow the audience to perpetually shift sympathies. “The longer I sat with this myth, the more my heartache shifted from Theseus and his father to the Minotaur himself,” Fightmaster says.

The accompanying video follows Fightmaster on some intimately shot behind the scenes tour footage that emphasizes the introspective nature of the song.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Black Marble Shares 80s New Wave-Inspired “Jim Carol New Year”

Singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and Black Marble creative mastermind Chris Stewart will be releasing his fifth Black Marble album, Life in Small Spaces through Sacred Bones Records on August 21, 2026. The album, which is Stewart’s first full-length album since 2021’s Fast Idol, is an album of clear-eyed commentary and analysis of the music industry as a whole, a discussion of authenticity and a heartfelt letter to all the independent creatives out in the world.

“I always knew a lot of people in music struggled to make ends meet, but it surprised me to learn that the people you thought would be doing well often weren’t. For me, seeing the business from the inside like that changed how I looked at things,” Stewart says. “When I looked up to see a new artist on a billboard, I started to wonder, ‘will I one day have to pretend to be something I’m not, in order to succeed?’ The life of an artist goes on after your moment ends, you know? So who do you want to be in the end and how do you want to be seen by the people that know you? I made Life In Small Spaces while thinking about that, and for me, it serves as my own ideal for living an artistic life. I’m doing it as a vocation, not some last-ditch effort to escape to some other world. I made this record not only as a way of saying that, but as a way of saying it’s ok to feel that way. It’s ok for people to sacrifice some degree of creature comfort in order to live a life you believe in. And it doesn’t have to be an endless search for something just out of reach, it can be a permanent way of being and something that sustains you.”

Drawing from early American left-of-the-dial “college radio” staccato guitar lines and live drum samples, the album’s material sees Stewart eschewing his usual wall of synths-driven sound for a more live sound.

Life in Small Spaces‘ first single “Jim Carol New Year” is a hooky, decidedly upbeat, 1980’s New Wave-inspired track featuring layers of glistening and shimmering synths and gated reverb-soaked, angular drum machine beats. Seemingly channeling Security and Peter Gabriel 3-era Peter Gabriel and New Order, the song’s title nods to the late New York-born and-based author, poet and musician Jim Carroll and holiday season carols, while casting a critical eye on modern life. Throughout, the song sees is narrator and protagonist rejecting false promises of religion, advice from so-called experts or easy answers in favor of self-validation and independent thinking. The song’s refrain of “I forgot my money” is meant to convey all the things the song’s protagonist isn’t buying. “If you want to be free,” Stewart says, “you have to watch out for some of life’s classic pitfalls.”

Directed by Clayton Hunt, the accompanying video for “Jim Carol New Year” follows two travelers — one of them is in a hazmat suit — being inexplicably drawn to a house in the distance. The two travelers wind up meeting each other and discovering they’re doppelgängers for each other.

“Chris had an idea of a house in the distance with two travelers being drawn toward it. We wanted each traveler to represent a different version of the journey,” Clayton Hunt explains. “One traveler struggled unprotected against the landscape, the other was cautious, outfitted in an orange hazmat – type suit. I decided to shoot 16mm and capture everything against the green landscape, creating a vibrant contrast. That imagery helped guide the production and inform the story.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Three from Vince Staples’ Soon-to-be Released “Cry Baby”

Acclaimed Long Beach, CA-based emcee Vince Staples will be releasing his highly anticipated sixth album Cry Baby on Friday, June 5, 2026. The album is a bold musical and sonic shift for the acclaimed Long Beach-based artist, who built each track around live instrumentation, which gives the album’s material a visceral sense of immediacy and urgency.

The result is dynamic, confrontational effort that reportedly captures the tension, absurdity and emotional weight of America. The album doesn’t just document our weird, mad, urgent and brutal moment and its precedents, but actively wrestles with them. With the album dropping in a few days, I’m going to do a rare, unprecedented thing here — cover the album’s three released singles in a single post.

“Blackberry Marmalade,” Cry Baby‘s first single is built around a breakneck and angular Gorillaz-meets-punk rock inspired arrangement. Arguably one of the more bounce around and mosh friendly songs of the Long Beach-based artist’s growing catalog, the song sees Staples taking aim at America’s hyper-violent past and present, the hypocrisy, stupidity and insulting nature of racism and racial stereotypes, the deep sense of fury and insult Black Americans feel every single moment of their lives with a cool, defiant swagger and profound clarity.

Directed by Vince Staples and Bradley J. Calder, the accompanying video for “Blackberry Marmalade” is disturbing, uncomfortable, fucked up, strangely funny fever dream of gratuitous violence that’s also all too American. America is Jim Crow racism, apple pie, baseball and mass shootings — and deep down we all know this.

“White Flag,” Cry Baby’s second single features a broodingly atmospheric soul-meets-trip ho arrangement. Staples expresses a mix of world weary exhaustion, defeat, despair and stubborn pride. Listening to “White Flag” reminded me of a line in Yasiin Bey‘s “Umi Says:” “Sometimes, I don’t wanna be a solider/Sometimes, I just wanna be a man . . .

Directed by Vince Staples and Bradley J. Calder, the accompanying video for “White Flag,” follows Staples as he grabs an American flag, paints it entirely white, hangs it up again — and then proceeds to shoot at it with an assault riffle. It’s a gorgeously shot visual that’s anchored in a cool, methodical calculation.

“Cotton,” the album’s third and final pre-release single is a strutting soul pop, funk, classic rock and gospel-inspired tune that much like its immediate predecessors is urgent and irresistible hooky and anchored around astute sociopolitical observation and introspection. Throughout the song Staples openly speaks of the brutality, anger, and desperation of the folks in his hometown, and of the power and necessity of music and community. The sort of community that will “pick you up when you feel like falling” as Staples says in the song. It serves as a reminder that the only way through this is community.

Directed yet again by Staples and Calder, the accompanying video features the white painted American flag with bullet holes being used as a projection screen that features imagery of the titular cotton in the Deep South, moments of pure Black joy, scenes of America’s violence, the Civil Rights era and more.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 85th Birthday, Charlie Watts!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 85th anniversary of Charlie Watts’ birth.