Tag: Grind Select

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: GUMDROP Shares Sugary and Hook Driven “EYE CANDY”

Los Angeles-based GUMDROP is a collaborative project featuring acclaimed producer Shmu, who has worked with Zorch, Botany and Vinyl Williams and singer/songwriter Buttons. The project sees Buttons, whose vocals oscillate between rage-driven screaming and distorted bubblegum pop paired with Shmu’s R&B-inspired vocal stylings and kaleidoscopic production.

The duo’s self-titled full-length debut is slated for a December 25, 2025 release through Grind Select. The album sees the pair swimming between the shallow and the deep with the material thematically touching upon heartache and entanglement, social unrest and the effects of late-stage capitalism warping our sense of self identity and more. Sonically, the pair intentionally confound and subvert musical norms with verve, aggression and saccharine-fueled wonder.

The soon-to-be released album’s latest single “EYE CANDY” is a woozy, hook-driven blend of 80s R&B bass synths, shimmering and angular New Wave-like guitars and bubblegum pop that’s anchored around a pointed commentary on beauty standards in our late-stage capitalist hellscape. The song captures a narrator, whose sense of self is a bit warped — by social media influencers, memes and pop culture.

Fittingly, the video is an all pink, fever-dream that emphasizes the song’s unique mix of cute, sultriness and menace.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: S.C.A.B. Shares Yearning and Nostalgic “LOVE”

Ridgewood, Queens-based indie band and JOVM mainstays S.C.A.B — currently Sean Carmago (vocals, guitar), Cory Best (guitar, backing vocals), Alec Alabado (bass, backing vocals), Evan Eubanks (drums, percussion), Jordan Rich (synth, piano, production) and Sean Brennan (cello) — will be releasing their third album, Somebody In New York Loves You! through Grind Select on November 21, 2025.

The soon-to-be released third album reportedly sees the Ridgewood-based band simultaneously turning inward and stretching wide with the album’s material leaning into vulnerability without retreating into abstraction, drawing from Carmago’s psychedelic-fueled realizations, intimate journal entries and moments of raw emotional rupture.

Much of the album’s material was written in a creative sure following a psychic reading that left Carmago feeling oddly affirmed and fantastical. And as a result, a sense of magical realism and sepia-tinged nostalgia is at the core of the album. At times, the band sounds like huge, like an arena rock band and others, eerily close, like a voice memo you weren’t meant to hear.

With Somebody In New York Loves You!, the Ridgewood-based outfit makes space for contradictions: songs that are personal but big, naive but knowing, imaginative but grounded. After a stretch of false starts, rain-soaked gigs and artistic doubt, the band emerges sounding both clear-headed and ready — while reminding the listener that yes, somebody here in this town does love you.

“LOVE,” Somebody In New York Loves You!‘s third and latest single is a mid-tempo 120 Minutes-era MTV-like sigh of gratitude anchored around shimmering guitars, Carmago’s expressive delivery and the band’s unerring knack for big, shout along worthy hooks and choruses. It’s arguably one of the more direct songs of the soon-to-be released album and of the band’s growing catalog, expressing gratitude for the complicated and odd place New York is, to family — whether biological or chosen, to being unafraid of finding a way to pick yourself up and start over.

“This song is a reminder to myself to get clearer on what I would like to see,” S.C.A.B.’s Sean Carmago says. “The roles we play. The illusion of truth. I had a tiny blue bird when I was young. You had a love, it hurt, now it’s done. Blood is your teacher now. Let go of duality.”

Directed by Sampson Dahl, the accompanying video was shot in his laundromat space on beta film and evokes a warm, nostalgia for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Gumby with the video being fantastical yet grounded in mundanity and handmade in a way in which you can see the stitching, seams and glue, but done so with a playful, knowing charm.

The Ridgewood-based band will be playing a record release show at 94 Bogart next week.