JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 53rd anniversary of The Notorious B.I.G.’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 51st Birthday, Havoc!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Havoc’s 52nd birthday.
New Video: The Wants Shares Brooding and Anthemic “Data Tumor”
Formed back in 2017, New York-based trio The Wants — currently, founding membes Madison Velding-VanDam and Jason Gates along with the band’s newest member NightNight‘s Yasmeen Night — quickly carved out their own niche in experimental music’s outer reaches with their full-length debut, 2020’s Container, which was released to critical applause while quickly establishing a sound that draws from an eclectic array of influences across decades and genres, including Alan Vega, Korn, Hildur Guǒnadóttir, Bauhaus, Throbbing Gristle, and experimentation techno among others.
Container‘s success led to the then-duo’s successful tour of the UK and Europe, which was cut short as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But after returning back to the States, the band enlisted NightNight’s Yasmeen Night whose deft synth work has helped add an additional electronic sensibility to their post-punk aesthetic.
The trio’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Bastard is slated for a June 13, 2025 release through STTT. The album thematically explore disconnection in an age of endless and unceasing connection, pulsing with the tension between Velding-VanDam’s Midwestern roots and his present in NYC. That duality is manifest through the album’s material — organic instrumentation wrestle with electronic ghosts, while traditional song structures are dismantled and reassembled.
The album is also deeply influenced by personal tragedy: Velding-VanDam began writing the album’s material after learning that his father had died in his Michigan trailer, eight days before he was found. The aftermath of this discovery — hoarded belongings, towers of empty liquor bottles and oxycodone containers, grime-covered childhood photos — became the emotional backdrop for the album’s creation.” Bastard, both as an album and an experience, is an emotional purge—a meditation on isolation and loss,” The Wants’ Velding-VanDam explains. “The story of my father’s life and death loomed large as a backdrop of the writing process. I explored the darkest periods of my life, and the reality that we can all spiral into our own personal voids.”
Bastard‘s second and latest single “Data Tumor” serves as a bridge between their debut and the forthcoming sophomore album. Sonically recalling a synthesis of She Wants Revenge, Interpol and Suicide, “Data Tumor” is a brooding and uneasy song, delivered with a Kasabian-like swaggering bombast while showcasing the band’s unerring knack for arena rock friendly hooks paired with forcefully, propulsive rhythms and Velding-VanDam’s eerie delivery.
“‘Data Tumor’ inhabits the psychological push and pull of trying to assert individuality in a world intent on commodifying and distorting it,” explains Velding-VanDam. “The faceless collective of information and stimuli incentivizes the surrender of personal agency. Choices have to be made or they are made for you.”
“Many songs on Bastard embody a character or voice that is meant to observe and reflect an experience, but not necessarily make a judgement about it,” the band adds. “The resulting tone oscillates between earnest and acerbic, not quite serious but not joking, either.”
The accompanying video, which employs flashing strobe light, touches upon horror movie and true crime themes while turning them on its head. Who is being chased? Who is the victim?
Throwback: Happy 53rd Birthday, Busta Rhymes!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Busta Rhymes’ 53rd birthday.
New Video: Smut Shares a “120 Minutes”-era MTV-like Power Ballad
After spending years in the Cincinnati DIY scene, Smut — currently Tay Roebuck (vocals), Andie Min (guitar), John Steiner (bass), Sam Ruschman (guitar) and Aidan O’Connor (drums) — caught the attention of Bayonet Records, who signed the band and released their sophomore album, 2022’s critically applauded How the Light Felt. The album brought the band to Chicago, a city with more room for their growing sound.
But despite their early successes, they still faced the struggles of the modern working musician: instability, financial precarity, objectification and more. The band channeled a period of touring, personnel changes and personal upheavals into their third album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing.
Slated for a June 27, 2025 release through Bayonet Records, Tomorrow Comes Crashing marks the band’s first album with O’Connor and Steiner and reportedly sees the band re-energized and trained on the limitless potential that comes with making music with people you love.
The members of the band focused on capturing the big emotions that come with falling in love with music for the first time. The result is ten of arguably their most intense, bombastic and focused songs to date.
The Chicago-based band recorded the album’s material “as live as they could,” alongside Momma‘s Aron Kobayashi Ritch in a Red Hook, Brooklyn-based studio over a breakneck 10-day session. Roebuck. Right before they went off to New York, Roebuck and Min got married, with the rest of the band by their side.
“We have so much energy right now,” Smut’s Roebuck says. The recording sessions were a true labor of love — driving from Chicago with all their equipment, returning from 12 hour studio days to sleep on friends’ couches and floors, Roebuck completely blowing her voice by the end. Fittingly, the album is culmination of the band’s long-held DIY spirit — with the band creating a record that encompasses the intensity, moodiness and emotions of their journey so far.
Last month, I wrote about album single “Syd Sweeney,” a track named for an inspired by the actor, that’s anchored around Siamese Dream-like power chords, rolling and propulsive drumming and enormous, beer-raised-high-in-the-air, shout-along worthy hooks and choruses paired with Roebuck’s rock goddess-like delivery before ending with a thrash metal-like coda that would make Billy Corgan smile.
The song is about how profoundly strange it can be to be a woman, to be misunderstood by people, who don’t even know you — and probably will never know you. Roebuck says: “Women in entertainment are exceptionally talented, smart and beautiful, because they have to be. Sometimes they want to explore sexuality and vulnerability in their work. Then the pitchforks come out, how dare they be amazing AND sexual? You can only be one or the other! Why is talent and hard work seemingly erased once you’ve seen a woman naked?”
“It makes sense then to interpret it as a horror film, where we have the dividing tropes of final girls and sexy bimbos who die first for being too damn sexy,” Roebuck continues. “We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it. It’s a lose-lose. Being a woman in art is to be objectified one way or the other. Success is the monster chasing you, waiting for you to be a little too sexy, knife ready.”
Tomorrow Comes Crashing‘s latest single “Touch & Go” is a full-throated, 120 Minutes MTV-era power ballad that showcases the band’s knack for pairing rousingly anthemic hooks with, big riffs and earnest, lived-in lyricism and songwriting.
“‘Touch & Go’ is a broken fantasy that was pretty directly inspired by ‘Time to Pretend’ by MGMT,” Smut’s Tay Roebuck explains. “The pursuit of success and the daydreams we have of ‘making it’ are pretty easily shattered once you put that fantasy in the modern world. The song ends with the realization that the best part of music will always be the community you build with it.” In the song’s last moments she sings, “The basement flooded / The coffee burned / The van is broken down / We all take turns / Touch and go.”
Fittingly, the accompanying video looks and feels as though it could have aired during 120 Minutes.
New Video: bat zoo Shares Shimmering “Diamond Lane”
bat zoo is a rising American-born, Berlin-based singer/songwriter and producer, who has developed a reputation for boundless creativity — and for genre-agnostic work.
As a child, the rising artist and producer was immersed in a melting pot of musical influences, as a result of his father’s eclectic record collection. He grew up listening to soul, R&B, hip-hop and much more — and it opened his young years to kaleidoscope of sounds and styles, which helped informed his genre-blurring sound and approach.
He also brings his artistic vision to life by seamlessly blending his work with dynamic visuals. Embracing authentic and innovation, the American-born, Berlin-based artist continues to push boundaries as a jack-of-all-trades creative director of his solo recording project, a culmination of many years of trial and error. He’s extremely busy: while developing his own sound as a solo artist, he’s also a part of the acclaimed Berlin-based vocal ensemble A Song For You and one-half of R&B duo GOLDA.
bat zoo’s forthcoming EP, The Upward Bird is slated for a July 22, 2025 release through Lekker Collective. Last month, I wrote about the hauntingly minimalist, Nick Hakim-like “Frozen Milk,” which featured the rising Berlin-based accompanying himself on strummed acoustic guitar paired with swirling electronics and his achingly tender falsetto sining lyrics that thematically touched upon chaos and the brief and desperate search for balance amidst moments of self-destruction and connection.
bat zoo’s latest single, the sleek and slickly produced, The Weeknd-like “Diamond Lane” is anchored around swirling and glistening synths, skittering beats serving as a lush and dreamy soundscape for his yearning and heartbroken vocal turn. But just under the slick, dance floor friendly surface, the song is a bittersweet and melancholic reflection on a love affair that has slowly unraveled, fueled with the recognition that the narrator may be powerless to do anything to slow it down — or to stop it.
Lyrically abstract yet deeply intimate, the song simultaneously feels like a stream of consciousness pulled from the depths of the narrator’s memory and a conversation — or more likely a monologue — bitterly directed toward that someone, who once meant everything and now is leaving.
The accompanying video is a hazy, dream-like visual that feels like a regret-tinged tinged fever dream.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Pete Townshend!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Pete Townshend’s 80th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 77th Birthday, Grace Jones!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Grace Jones’ 77th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 74th Birthday, Joey Ramone!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 74th anniversary of the birth of Ramones frontman Joey Ramone’s birth.
New Audio: Music 4 Diana Shares Heartfelt Ballad “Mil Años”
Diana Jiminez is a Colombian-American, New Jersey-based singer/songwriter and creative mastermind behind the emerging recording project Music 4 Diana. Jiminez’s latest Music4Diana single “Mil Años” is a slow-burning ballad that showcases Jiminez’s gorgeous vocal and deeply heartfelt lyrics.
The emerging New Jersey-based artist explains that the song was written to pay tribute to her father. And as a result, it captures a sense of gratitude while being anchored around a message about love, legacy and the eternal bond between a daughter and her father.