JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates A Place to Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann’s 49th birthday.
Tag: experimental rock
Throwback: Happy 54th Birthday, Jonny Greenwood!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Radiohead’s and The Smile’s Jonny Greenwood’s 54th birthday.
New Audio: Denmark’s Catcase Shares Brooding “Technicolored Eyes”
Initially, founded by Danish singer/songwriter and guitarist Lasse B. Beck, who also split time in Syringe and The Love Coffin, as a bedroom project that’s the culmination of years of tormented sensitivity, frustration and self-reflection, Catcase expanded to a full band last year with the addition of Beck’s brother Niclas Berg Christiansen, a member of Shiver Less and The Road to Suicide; Deadpan‘s and Sanderson & the Charabancs‘ Max Cosiner; Chopper‘s Josephine Alicia; Jane’s and Chopper’s Jason Lee Cameron; and Leizure’s, Tugboat‘s and Sanderson & the Charabancs’ Mathias Gørtz, who were enlisted to flesh out Beck’s artistic vision.
Sonically, the band draws from an eclectic array of influences: Australasian post-punk, sophistipop, jangle pop and dream pop with nods to Spiritualized, The Go-Betweens, Rowland S. Howard, Xiu Xiu, Prefab Sprout and My Bloody Valentine. And yet, the Danish sextet claims kinship with contemporaries like Strange Ranger, Bleary Eyed and Nyxy Nyx among others.
Slated for a February 20, 2026 release through Pink Cotton Candy Records, the band’s Kristian Alexander-produced full-length debut, As It Reels was recorded earlier this year at Copenhagen‘s Royal Danish Academy of Music. As It Reels‘ first single “Technicolored Eyes” is an eerie and brooding bit of art rock that channels Priest = Aura-era The Church with subtle dream pop and grunge-inspired flourishes that showcases the band’s ability to craft a rousingly anthemic hook and chorus, while being anchored earnest, lived-in songwriting.
Lyrically, the song evokes a liminal state familiar to my fellow night owls out there: The often lonely trip home after a night out of hijinks and adventures as the sun rises. And if you’re as familiar with it as I am, that trip home is throbbing mass of impressions, informed by nostalgia, loneliness, drunkenness.
New Audio: The Orielles Share Expansive “Three Halves”
Acclaimed, Manchester, UK-based JOVM mainstays The Orielles — Esmé Dee Hand-Halford (bass, vocals), Sidonie Dee Hand-Halford (drums, vocals) and Henry Carlyle Wade (guitar, vocals) — will be releasing their fourth album, the Joel Anthony Patchett-produced Only You Left through Heavenly Recordings on March 13, 2026.
Recorded last summer in two locations — the Greek Island of Hydra and Hamburg — the forthcoming, 11-song Only You Left reportedly sees the band consolidating the bold experimentation of 2022’s Tableau with the more stripped-back, song-driven approach of their earlier releases, channeling a return to the familiar. “There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece,” quips Henry, in reference to the band’s decision to return to their roots as a trio.
Now, as you may remember, the JOVM mainstays, which originally started out in Halifax gained attention both nationally and internationally with the release of their full-length debut, 2018’s Silver Dollar Moment, which will celebrate its eighth birthday this upcoming February. “These things come in like seven year cycles. So we’ve come in like a full circle back to a familiar place, just as different people,” the band says.
As for the foundations of the forthcoming album, the band’s Henry Carlyle Wade says “You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums.” “It comes naturally, the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford adds, “it’s not something we consciously do.” Interestingly through this process of creative renewal, the JOVM mainstays have managed to weather a pandemic, the fickleness of a trend-driven music industry and somehow emerge with something that’s familiar yet completely different.
According to Wade, the first ideas for the new album can be traced back to May 2023: Esmé Hand-Halford had purchased a freeze pedal, which allowed her to play around with sustained notes on her guitar. These heavy drones would later form the background of album tracks “Wasp” and “Three Halves.”
In breaks between tours, the bands began to meet up and record their practice room sessions, later analyzing the voice notes with a granular attention to detail. “We recorded everything on our phones, every snippet,” explains Henry. “We went so deep into what each song needed or what we wanted to hear from it.”
While the Tableau sessions were semi-improvisational and partially written in the recording studio, Only You Left was fleshed out through a series of intense writing sessions between May 2023 and last summer. Each of the album’s 11 songs were meticulously refined and became its own distinctive work. “It almost felt really novel for us to be writing as a three-piece and really, really crafting these songs,” the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford recalls. “But Tableau gave us that confidence to know we could go into a studio and pull things together in that setting under the time pressure.”
Producer and engineer Joel Anthony Patchett, whom Esmé Hand-Halford dubs the honorary fourth member of the band, has had a massive influence on the album’s sound and approach. “Joel brings an extra level of interpretation and deep listening,” Henry Carlyle Wade says, “and it’s always exciting to explore that.” Sidonie Hand-Halford adds, “He’s constantly talking us through every step of what he’s doing and getting really, really involved with that process as well. And we’re just kind of learning together and making these mistakes and discovering things together.”
Only You Left‘s first single “Three Halves” derives its title when Wade stitched together three recordings on Ableton and needed a working title. What began as a temporary placeholder soon became a theme for Esmé Hand-Halford to riff on, a metaphor for the trio and their deeply shared connection.
At points noisy and driving and dreamlike and mediative in others, “Three Halves” is an expansive study in contrasts that’s experimental yet accessible while anchored by the razor sharp hooks that the Manchester-based outfit had been known for.
“Citing ideas that we took interest in during the early stages of writing the new record, ‘Three Halves’ flips between its absurd contrasts as the name suggests,” the band says. “Built upon a soundscape of droning organs, guitar, and cello it floats between noise and emptiness, precision, and catharsis, welcoming each half leads into the next.”
New Video: Ulrika Spacek Shares Eerily Atmospheric “Build a box Then Break It”
Formed back in 2014, London-based art rock outfit Ulrika Spacek — founding members Rhys Edwards (vocals, guitar) and Rhys Williams (guitar) , alongside Joseph Stone (guitar, keys), Callum Brown (drums), Syd Kemp (bass) — can trace their origins back to a night the band’s founding duo spent in Berlin, where the pair conceptualized the project around their mutually held passions and influences — in particular, Television, Pavement, Sonic Youth and krautrock.
Upon the duo’s return to the UK, they began working on the material that would eventually comprise their full-length debut, 2016’s The Album Paranoia, which featured album tracks “She’s A Cult,” and “Strawberry Glue.”
Since then, the project which started out as a duo, expanded to quintet with the addition of Stone, Callum, Brown and Kemp – and then released 2017’s critically applauded sophomore album, Modern English Decoration, an album that saw the band pushing their sound into a more textured territory. Their third and latest album, last year’s Compact Trauma channeled the anxiety and dislocation of the modernize age through a prismatic haze of guitars, loops and elliptical lyrics.
The British art rock outfit’s highly-anticipated fourth album EXPO is slated for a February 6, 2026 release through Full Time Hobby. Unlike its predecessors, which looked within EXPO reportedly holds a mirror up to the world and captures a warped reflection. The material was deeply informed by the band’s most recent American tour and was written while the band’s Rhys Edwards was awaiting the birth of his daughter, and started to wonder what kind of future world she’d inherit.
Although their foundations have long been in art rock, they’ve been increasingly drawing from electronic elements. But as a band, they’re interested in the glitchy space that exists between the two. And as a result, their most recent work reckons with human warmth and digital isolation, while being welcoming and alienating, exploring the uneasy tension of modern life as we know it. “Our music has always been a collage – a bit patchwork, sonically – but what makes this album a landmark for us is that we went one step further and made our own sound bank and essentially sampled ourselves,” the band says.
The band creates their own doppelgängers in a world of almost-real, where the band appears as if they’re in a funhouse hall of mirrors. Digital drums are sampled and layered over real drums and the like, creating an eerie, spectral vibe. Sonically, album’s material grapples with the organic and the digital while dancing across musical languages.
EXPO‘s first single “Build a Box Then Break It” serves a de-facto album mission statement that sees the band actively pushing their sound into a new, liminal space. Seemingly channeling Geoff Barrow‘s work with Portishead and Beak>, Radiohead‘s Amnesiac and The Orielles‘ The Goyt Method EP, “Build a Box Then Break It,” features sampled upon sampled breakbeats, eerily atmospheric synths and squiggling guitars serving as a broodingly uneasy bed for Rhys Edwards’ plaintive and uncannily Thom Yorke-like delivery. The new single evokes our fractured experience of reality, reflected not through our eyes but through various screens.
The accompanying video was edited by Low Limit Vision and features live footage shot by Pedro Soler interspersed with title cards, math equations and other ephemeral imagery.
Throwback: Happy 85th Birthday, John Lennon!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 85th anniversary of John Lennon’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Thom Yorke!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Thom Yorke’s 57th birthday.
New Video: Copenhagen’s Young Couple Shares Brooding “As the Leaves Unfold”
Copenhagen-based art rock/experimental art rock outfit Young Couple — Jonas Tøibner (vocals, guitar), Mikkel Kruse (bass), Eigil Fauerskov (guitar), Jens Brøndum (saxophone), and Christian Hafdrup (drums) — have crafted a intimate and unpredictable sound that sits within the intersection of post-rock, dream pop and neo-psychedelia featuring complex rhythmic structures, glitchy electronics, shoegazer like guitar textures and brooding sax lines paired with yearning vocals singing abstract lyrics full of fleeting, evasive images, describing an emotional landscape where love, dreams and friendships often intertwine.
The quintet have made a name for themselves in the Danish underground scene, playing shows with Jenny, Himmelrum and Bishbusch while members of the band have also played with Martha Elisabeth, Niko Corlin and Vakt. Building upon a growing profile in the Danish scene, Young Couple’s highly-anticipated full-length debut, yc is slated for a November 7, 2025 release through Pink Cotton Candy Records.
yc is the culmination of years of close friendship, extermination and musical exploration that reportedly sees the band pairing warm, organic instrumentation with layers of processing and effects. While drawing from shoegaze, post-rock and experimental pop, yc‘s material pushes the boundaries of those genres into something simultaneously familiar yet new. Thriving on contrast, texture and space, the Danish outfit’s full-length debut evokes a nocturnal, urban atmosphere perfect for listening on headphones late night.
yc’s first single “As the Leaves Unfold,” is a slow-burning and brooding tune that draws from and meshes elements of post rock, art rock, post punk, indie rock and shoegaze that captures an uneasy tension between the inner and outer worlds of its narrator with a precise attention to psychological realism. According to the band, “As the Leaves Unfold” is an exploration of “the small mysteries of everyday life,” and an optimism rooted in the belief that the most profound discovers of our lives can hide under the smallest of stones.
Adhering to long-held DIY ethos, the band accompany the new single with a completely self-made video, that features snippets of every day life full of symbolism — sunset at the beach, a major bicycle race, a boat ride in Arctic-like waters and more.
New Audio: Total Wife Shares Woozy “second spring”
Over the past decade, the experimental Nashville-based duo Total Wife — Luna Kupper and Ash Richter — have firmly cemented as fixtures of both the Nashville and East Coast DIY scenes.
The duo’s fifth album, Come Back Down is slated for a September 25, 2025 release through Julia’s War Recordings. Come Back Down is the follow-up to 2023’s in/out and builds upon their varied and rich catalog, while featuring the previously released 0 EP tracks “naoisa,” and “(dead b).”
The album’s latest single “second spring” is a woozy track that features fuzzy and churning guitars paired with syrupy sweet, ethereal melodies. At its core, the song evokes both the hope of new beginnings and the unease and anxiousness of what those new beginnings will actually mean for you and your life.
“Ash started the lyrics for this song in early spring of 2020, and worked them out over the next few years before Luna wrote this song, which helped her finish them,” the Nashville-based duo explain. “Hard to remember, but flowers will bloom with or without you,” is from the same poem that “Reveal Sky,” was written from (total wife Self-Titled LP, “It’s easy to forget that it’s spring, staring through grey-blue drywall”).“
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Ed O’Brien!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Ed O’Brien’s 57th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Mike Patton!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Mike Patton’s 57th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Frank Zappa!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 84th anniversary of Frank Zappa’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, John Lennon!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 84th anniversary of the birth of John Lennon.
New Video: Montréal’s Yoo Doo Right Shares Stormy “Eager Glacier”
Deriving their name from one of Can‘s best known — and perhaps most covered — songs, Montréal-based experimentalists Yoo Doo Right — Justin Cober (guitar, synths, vocals), Charles Masson (bass) and John Talbot (drums, percussion) — pair noisy and melodic guitar lines, effects-laden synthesizer soundscapes, deep bass grooves and furious and driving percussion into sprawling, cathartic musical pieces that draw inspiration from post-rock, krautrock, shoegaze, classical music, electroacoustics and musique concrète.
Since their formation back in 2016, the Montréal-based trio have been prolific: Their first two EPs 2016’s Nobody Panicked and Everybody Got On and 2017’s EP2 served to introduced the band’s signature bombastic approach to psychedelia. Their 7″ split with Japanese experimentalists Acid Mothers Temple saw the trio adopting a decidedly motorik feel. The Canadian trio’s full-length debut, 2021’s Don’t Think You Can Escape Your Purpose saw the band further establishing an undeniable sound while receiving praise from the likes of Paste Magazine, who wrote “sometimes vigorous and verging on total collapse and sometimes delicate and measured [ . . .] a gift that never stops giving.”
Their Polaris Prize long-listed sophomore album, 2022’s A Murmur, Boundless to the East received praise from AllMusic, who wrote “Yoo Doo Right are skilled at employing restraint, but when they let themselves go, it feels truly earth-shaking” and Flood Magazine‘s Stephan Boissonneault writing “The post-everything krautrockers’ sophomore album is a towering release fit for nebulous contemplation and feelings of foreboding astral projection.”
Released earlier this year, The Sacred Fuck EP was a sonic departure that saw the acclaimed tiro experimenting with found sound, field recordings and sonic collage, momentarily straying away from the high-decibel eardrum shattering sound they’re best known for.
During that same period, they’ve become a highly in-demand live act that has toured across North America, including a making the rounds of the festival circuit with sets at Levitation, M for Montréal, Sled Island, Pop Montreal and New Colossus Festival. The Canadian experimentalists have opened for Acid Mothers Temple, DIIV, A Place to Bury Strangers, Wooden Shjips, Kikagkiu Moyo, FACS, Frigs, and Jessica Moss and a growing list of others.
The Montréal-based outfit’s third album, the Seth Manchester-produced From The Heights of Our Pastureland is slated for a November 8, 2024 release through Mothland. Recorded at Pawtucket-based Machines with Magnets, From The Heights or Our Pastureland is reportedly an honest and patient sonic poem about the destructive process of unbridled expansion in the name of “progress,” that expansion’s inevitable collapse and what it means to rebuild. The album sees the trio further developing ideas they previously started exploring, while creating what’s arguably one of their darkest, heaviest and ominous batch of material to date.
The trio wrote the material in a remote cabin near Saguenay, QC last winter. Snowed in, Cober, Masson and Talbot played for three days straight, archiving anything and everything, musing about “the storm of colonialism, the collapse of capitalism and the massive undertaking it is to rebuild with past mistakes taken into deep consideration.” Fittingly, the album draws major inspiration from parallels drawn between natural phenomena ranging from climate change-related bad weather to environmental disasters and the overwhelming force of our sociopolitical frameworks. Also informed by the commodification of art, AI and algorithmic art, the trio later revisited the album’s material, altering their initial compositions by way of element juxtaposition and extensive sound design. The album sees the band embracing their penchant for sonic manipulation in all of its forms while achieving an uncanny equilibrium between unresolved tensions and soothing resolutions throughout.
“We aimed for something cinematic, but not in the way of a score, rather something more experiential. We wanted to create music that could ignite drive in oneself, hopefully something of significance in and of itself,” the band says. “While we’re really not here to force understanding on people, for us the predominant themes are anxiety and patience, the storm of colonialism, the collapse of capitalism and the massive undertaking it is to rebuild with past mistakes taken into deep consideration. It draws a parallel between natural disaster and social disaster, the experience of watching an impending destructive storm roll in and watching an impending societal disaster unfold under our current colonial, capitalistic frameworks. Hopefully, folks can give themselves time to make some sensible thoughts of the album on their own.”
The album’s second and latest single, the sprawling “Eager Glacier” is anchored around a propulsive and thunderous drum beat, whirring synths, layers of swirling shoegazer-like guitar textures that build up to a brewing and malevolent storm. Featuring elements of post rock, drone, metal and shoegaze, “Eager Glacier” manages to feel like a natural phenomenon, much like a glacier breaking apart at the seams, while possessing a cinematic quality.
“I’ve recently embraced the surrealist and absurdist in me, and this project reflects my desire to blur the lines between reality and the subconscious,” the video’s director Stacy Lee explains. ” Inspired by my recent deep dive into experimental cinema, I’ve come to see genres as fluid—cinema, like music, exists on a continuum, and my work is an ongoing exploration of that entire range. This video doesn’t follow a traditional narrative but instead invites viewers into a space where they can create their own meaning. Through visual experimentation, I wanted to transport us into another dimension, where magic literally unfolds on screen.”
Throwback: Happy 56th Birthday, Thom Yorke!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Thom Yorke’s 56th birthday.