Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays GIFT — TJ Freda (vocals, guitar, production), Jessica Gurewitz (synths, vocals, guitar), Kallan Campbell (bass), Justin Hrabovsky (synths, guitar) and Gabe Camarano (drums) — will be releasing their third album, the TJ Freda and Teddy Mars co-produced Frenzy For The Thill on January 15, 2027 through Captured Tracks.
The JOVM mainstays began in earnest during the pandemic with the band’s Freda holed up in Brooklyn building the lush layers of what would become the band’s 2022 full-length debut, Momentary Presence. Both Momentary Presence and it’s follow-up, 2024’s Illuminator saw the band blending various strains of psychedelic music — krautrock, New Wave, electronic music and shoegaze — while cataloging Freda’s ongoing battles with panic attacks, frequently seeking to counter anxiety with transcendence. However, before the creation of GIFT’s third album, TJ Freda found that particular metaphorical drug wasn’t working.
The tours to support Illuminator had left Freda ragged and burned out. When a friend offered to let him stay at their Los Angeles home for two months, it seemed — at the time — to be a perfect way to decompress, to take time and write songs for other artists, and to put GIFT to the side for a bit. However, Freda arrived in Los Angeles as firefighters put out the final fires of early last year, to a house full of ash and not much else than the instruments he brought him. Moved by the renewal and resilience he saw in Angelenos coming together in the wake of the wildfires, the GIFT frontman suddenly felt a creative outpouring.
New GIFT songs arrived much more angst-ridden than in the past, yet not within their own sense of release. For the GIFT frontman, the songs were vehicles to ask the big, existential questions: Now, in his 30s, had watched friends settle down, but he found he was not doing searching. “Making Frenzy For The Thrill was partially about exploring the balance of living as an artist without disappearing into it,” Freda explains. From despondence, Freda emerged with a revitalized sense of creative purpose and direction.
Freda found himself gravitation towards grittier, angstier inspirations including 90s alt-rock, grunge and brasher iterations of electronic music. Combined with the band having become a tight, deeply connected unit honed by rigorous touring. Freda wanted to create something more visceral and collaborative. And as a result, Frenzy For The Thrill may arguably be the most-band orientated album of their catalog to date, anchored around the sound of five musicians diving into the madness together with an “one-for-all, all-for-one” sort of approach.
While adopting much of the ethos and structure of dance music, the album reportedly harnesses the energy the immediate energy the band cultivated onstage, while also incorporating more of their individual personalities and instincts in the overall arrangements and songwriting, Frenzy For The Thrill is anchored in far-seeing melodies and synth textures the band has become known for, while paired with what may be the most muscular performances to date.
Lessons are learned by the end of the album, including a soft of hard-won self-acceptance on the other side of the album’s violence, a healthier, more balanced life after staring into the void. “We’re always looking for resolutions, but life isn’t like that,” Freda concludes. “Frenzy For The Thrill is about still being in love with the chase knowing we might not find answers on the other side. This is the sound of us crashing headlong into the unknown.”
Frenzy For The Thrill will include the previously released “Hand To The Flame” and the album’s second and latest single, “Every Step.” Arguably one of the most meditative and introspective songs the JOVM mainstays have released to date, “Every Step” is anchored around a grunge song structure featuring quiet, acoustic guitar-driven verses, woozy feedback and power chord-driven choruses and hooks beneath TJ Freda’s breathy crooning. Evening out the album’s feverish state, the song sonically — and thematically — offers flickers of clarity and perspective poking out of the haze of a scattered, frazzled mind.
“Everything comes down to perspective. There’s so much happening in the world that matters more than the small things we let upset us,” Freda says. “But when those small things feel just as big, guilt comes along with them, and it’s easy to feel disillusioned with yourself for not feeling the way you think you should. Perspective follows every step, whether you lean toward hope or toward heaviness. Beauty lives in the broken places, and something broken lives in every beautiful thing.”
Directed by TJ Freda and Crista Simiriglia, the accompanying video for “Every Step” brings Memento and Groundhog’s Day to mind as it follows Freda with an impressive shiner as he wanders around Chinatown, the West Village and Brooklyn with his actions and that of the world surrounding him going forward and backward — seemingly at will.