Tag: indie rock

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: EYRE LLEW Shares Painterly “Miningsby”

Initially conceived as a studio project back in 2014, Nottingham, UK-based trio EYRE LLEW — Sam Heaton (vocals, guitar), Jack Clark (drums, piano) and Jack Bennett (guitar, piano) — have developed and honed a sound that meshes elements of shoegaze, post rock and dream pop and channels influences like Sigur Rós, Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver and The National into cinematic, emotionally overwhelming soundscapes.

2017’s debut album, Atelo was released to widespread critical acclaim with the album landing at #25 on Drowned in Sound‘s Top 100 Albums List of 2017.

And during that same period, the Nottingham-based trio have also established themselves as a compelling live act, playing over 300 independently booked shows across 23 countries, including sold-out shows across the UK, Europe, The Baltics (Latvia and Lithuania) and the Far East. The trio have also made the rounds of both the national and international festival circuit, playing sets at Glastonbury‘s John Peel Stage, The Great Escape, Dot to Dot, FOCUS Wales, Y Not Festival, Ritual Union, Rockaway Beach, Alternative Escape, Handmade, Glastonbury’s Shagrai La, Icebreaker, Perth Music Expo, 110 Above, Beat The Streets, Splendour, Riverside, On The Waterfront, Farm Fest, A Carefully Planned, Hockley Hustle, and others. Internationally, they’ve played sets at Singapore’s Music Matters, Taiwan’s Beastie Rock, South Korea’s Zandari Festa, Germany’s Umsonst Und Dresden, France’s FIMU, Belgium’s Fifty Lab, Sweden’s Future Echoes, Lithuania’s Zagare Fringe Festival and What’s Next In Music, Hungary’s HOTS Outbreakers Lab, Latvia’s Riga Music Week, Estonia’s POFF Shorts, Poland’s Seazone Music Festival and Conference and SpaceFest.

Building upon a growing profile, EYRE LLEW’s highly anticipated sophomore album Bloom is deeply informed and influenced by pandemic-enforced lockdowns. For the bulk of their history, the band defined themselves by seemingly constant motion: Cities blurred into one another. Border crossings were routine. Their lives revolved around airports, late night drives, ferry ports, backstage rooms, festival fields, hotel corridors and long-distance journeys.

As a touring band, success, such as it existed, was often measured in miles traveled, crowd size and momentum developed and sustained. The band kept moving because that’s just how it always was. Slowing down would mean — on some level, at least — slowed momentum. Stopping would mean accepting failure, when “making it” was just a little bit out of reach.

Like countless touring acts, the pandemic managed to dismantle their trajectory. That relentless forward motion that shaped their identity for the better part of a decade just suddenly stopped. Tours vanished. Plans dissolved. The result was an uneasy silence. Understandably, for the trio, it all felt devastating.

But in the stillness, something else emerged for the band — space: The space to rest, reflect, recover, feel and importantly, to make different choices. The band made a quieter, more human recalibration, shifting away from survival to towards sustainability. Rather than constantly feeling that they had to prove something, they moved towards building something — and choosing meaning over the endless chase of momentum.

The result was Bloom. Written during lockdown and the subsequent years, the album is about several things simultaneously: presence, the love that feels like home, stillness as strength, devotion without spectacle, grief without melodrama, healing without performative optimism, growth that happens slowly, privately and honestly.

Wher eas previously released material was frequently defined by scale and endurance, Bloom‘s material is defined by intimacy and grounding. Its songs are built from small moments rather than big, grand statements. It’s about choosing to stay. Not just in relationships but in places, in moments, in emotions and in identity.

The shift in the band’s approach, fittingly lead to a shift in their sound. While the album’s material continues to carry the vastness they’re known for, it lives alongside of a sense fragility and restraint. Instead of actively attempting to overwhelm the listener, the band is trying to meet the listener where they are right now.

The album’s first single “Miningsby” is a slow-burning and atmospheric tune that’s simultaneously cinematic and intimate, while evoking a loving, patient calmness. The track is about something that’s somehow both difficult and easy — being present when your loved one is struggling with anxiety, depression or something else.

“Rather than trying to dramatise that experience, ‘Miningsby’ is about something quieter and harder: staying, listening, and offering warmth,” the band explains. “It’s a love letter to emotional endurance, grounded in small moments and the hope of better days ahead.”

The song’s title came from a bit of serendipitous happenstance. When the original demo files were saved in an old, rural Lincolnshire studio, they were geolocated to Miningsby, a tiny nearby village. For the band, the title — and in turn, the town’s name — became an unintended marker for a place and time that no longer exists, but continues to resonate through the music, much like the fleeting yet beautiful moments the song memorializes.

The song’s origins manage to mirror its themes. The song was recorded on a baby grand piano that the band no longer owns, in a studio they’ve since left behind. The song captures something gone yet the feeling of being held through it all.

The song sees the band framing love through tangible, physical moments and sensations — breath, warm, light. But along with that, there’s a sense of calm, loving patience and the belief that things can get better with love and through time.

The accompanying video, shot in black and white features the band performing the song in studio.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: The Orielles Share Angular “Wasp”

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 highly anticipated fourth album, the Joel Anthony Patchett-produced Only You Left through Heavenly Recordings on Friday.

Recorded last summer in two locations — the Greek Island of Hydra and Hamburg — the 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. 

The JOVM mainstays, who originally started out in Halifax first gained attention both nationally and internationally with the release of their full-length debut, 2018’s Silver Dollar Moment, which recently celebrated its eighth birthday. “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 band 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 Carlyle Wade. “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 will include the previously released “Three Halves,” the double single “You Are Eating Part of Yourself”/”To Undo the World Itself,”Tears Are,” and the album’s latest single “Wasp.”

Anchored around a looping, buzzing and droning guitar line, an angular and propulsive bass line and skittering, off-kilter drumming and percussion, “Wasp” subtly channels In Rainbows while simultaneously evoking a wasp flying in figure 8s and circles higher and higher.

“Taking on another shift in perspective, the lyrics follow a [sic] miniscule wasp as it reaches the height of a mountain, one of nature’s grandest settings,” the band explains. “Inspired by the film Black Narcissus I wanted to capture this feeling of questioning faith, purpose and the self when confronted by such vastness, using a wasp to exaggerate this magnitude even further. In seeing through its perspective maybe we can relate to the plight of the wasp, but the real sting in the tale (hah!) is that ultimately it is nature itself that conditions the wasp to hurt us.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Sun Spots Shares Anthemic “Rocket”

Pacific Northwest-based indie rock outfit Sun Spots features members of essential regional punk and hardcore acts, including Criminal Code, Nudes and Bricklayer. With the release of their debut EP, 2022’s Loosey, Sun Spots quickly established a songwriting process that they’ve jokingly dubbed pop songs for hardcore fans — or hardcore songs for pop fans, depending on your perspective.

The Pacific Northwest-based outfit’s sophomore EP, Dog Is Calling is slated for a Friday release through Seattle-based indie label Den Tapes. Engineered and mixed in Seattle by Cameron Heck and mastered by Greg Obis, the EP features four upbeat and driving songs that sees the band pairing thick, crunchy guitar riffs with buoyant melodies, showcasing their love of the Big Muff pedal and big, catchy hooks.

Dog Is Calling‘s lead single “Rocket” will bring back warm and hazily nostalgic memories of 120 Minutes MTV-era grunge for all of you fellow olds as the song showcases the band’s penchant for pairing big, crunchy riffs with even bigger hooks with saccharine sweet, pop melodies. And of course, this is placed with a classic grunge song structure — alternating quiet verses and loud choruses. Play loud.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Weird Nightmare Shares Punchy “Pay No Mind”

Almost every band that’s worth a damn has had a member, who at some point worked in a record store. With JOVM mainstay acts METZ and Weird Nightmare, it was frontman and creative mastermind Alex Edkins. Slinging indie rock and hardcore records at his hometown record store while attending university, Edkins became an ardent student of rock ‘n’ roll from the psychedelic 1960s to the DIY 1990s and beyond. 

Hoopla, Edkins’ sophomore Weird Nightmare album, which is slated for a May 1, 2026 release through Sub Pop globally and Dine Alone Records in Canada, reportedly sees the JOVM mainstay mixing and matching these wide-ranging influences in fun, exhilarating combinations, showcasing his sophisticated musical mind, while continuing to showcase his unerring knack for ridiculously catchy and rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses.

Co-produced by Edkins and Spoon‘s Jim Eno at Providence‘s world famous Machines With Magnets, Hoopla also sees the acclaimed Canadian artist expanding upon Weird Nightmare’s musical palette with the addition of piano, bells and castanets, which give his long-held straightforward songwriting a shiny luster. 

The album will feature the previously released “Forever Elsewhere,” and the Cheap Trick-like “Might See You There.”

Hoopla‘s third and latest single “Pay No Mind” is a punchy, downright punk rock-like take on power pop, anchored around Edkins’ unerring knack for ridiculously catchy hooks and big riffs paired with what may arguably be his most socially aware, thoughtful lyrics of his growing catalog.

“We had a blast making this video with director Ryan Faist,” the Weird Nightmare creative mastermind says,. “It was a nod to the Elvis Costello and the Attractions ‘Pump it Up‘ video and some early footage of the Buzzcocks on cable access TV. 
 
“The lyric was lifted from an Atlantic City tourism t-shirt. ‘I’m so broke, I can’t even pay attention‘ struck me as a particularly accurate comment on modern life. Obviously, the shirt is meant to be funny, but it felt quite dark to me. Due to the overwhelming onslaught of information and emotional baggage that comes with it, I think there is a tendency for people’s lives to become quite myopic. As a coping mechanism, we become more and more insular, ignoring the world around us.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 66th Birthday, Steve Wynn!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Steve Wynn’s 66th birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Endearments Return with Shimmering and Anthemic “Marianne”

Brooklyn-based indie outfit Endearments — Kevin Marksson (vocals, bass), Anjali Nair (guitar) and Will Haywood Smith (drums) — closed out last year by signing with Trash Casual, who will be releasing their Abe Seiferth–produced, full-length debut An Always Open Door. 

Slated for a March 6, 2026 release, the nine-song An Always Open Door will include “Real Deal,” “Summersun” and “Marianne,” the album’s third and final pre-release single. “Marianne” is a rousingly anthemic ballad that sees the band balancing introspective, heart worn on sleeve-driven lyrics and a cinematic sound. Seemingly nodding at some of the great 80s movie soundtrack tunes, like Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Think About Me” and Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty In Pink,” An Always Open Door‘s latest single contends with long-distance longing, mixed messages and the possibility that your feelings and investment may be unfulfilled — or worse, unrequited.

“‘Marianne’ is about the uncertain and vulnerable moments at the beginning of a new relationship,” the band’s Marksson explains. “It’s a song about longing for someone who is far away, physically and emotionally, and what it takes to break down those barriers. We wanted the music video to emphasize that metaphor, with the band playing in a liminal place, bright and surreal, before the mirrors that are reflecting us literally shatter.”

The accompanying video continues their ongoing collaboration with director Paul Desilva.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: JOVM Mainstays The Orielles Return with Hook-Driven “Tears Are”

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 highly anticipated 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 celebrates its eighth birthday this months. “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 band 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 will include the previously released “Three Halves,” the double single “You Are Eating Part of Yourself”/”To Undo the World Itself,” and the album’s latest single “Tears Are.” Arguably the track that directly channels elements of their earlier sound, “Tears Are” is anchored around the JOVM mainstays long-held penchant for post punk-like hookiness paired with dreamy vocals. But the track ultimately fades out in a brooding, minor take on the song’s motif. The song evokes an unfinished thought or something left hanging without a sense of closure. The lyrics explore paradoxes with inversions and wordplay — and are intentionally ambiguous for the listener to make their own interpretations.

“ We had this vague imagery of wood versus metal,” the band’s Esmé Dee Hand-Halford says. “Hamburg was metal and Hydra was wood. Everything fell naturally into either category.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Québec City’s worry Shares Anthemic “Regret”

Through the release of their five-song debut EP, 2020’s after something and a handful of standalone singles, Québec City-based indie outfit worry — creative mastermind and frontman Kerry Samuels, backed by Gaspard Eden‘s Joey Proteau, Valence‘s Aubert Gendron Marsolais, Mid Divers‘ Xavier Beaulieu and l i l a‘s Marianne Porter — quickly developed a reputation for pairing lyrics inspired by Samuels’ experience and emotions with a hook-driven sound that’s heavy yet dreamy. The band describes their sound as “a noisy and emotional wave of sound capturing a warm feeling of nostalgia, like watching childhood home movies on a broken TV.”

The Québec City-based band has begun to build a profile locally and across the province, with the band making runs of the provincial club and festival circuit, including sold-out shows at L’Imperial Bell with July Talk and SOLIDS.

Building upon that growing profile, worry will be releasing their debut album, Positive Memory in the spring. The album’s second and latest single “Regret,” is one-part 90s grunge, one-part Brit-pop, one-part 2000s emo that showcases that band’s knack for pairing vulnerable, lived-in lyrics with rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. The band explains that “the song reflects on memory, death and the moment that linger long after they’re gone.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Filth Is Eternal Returns with Grungy “Long Way”

Formed back in 2020, Seattle-based quartet Filth Is Eternal — Lis DiAngelo (vocals), Brian McClelland (guitar), Logan Miller (bass) and Josh Pehrson (drums) — was initially inspired by the raw, impulsive ethos of punk. The Seattle-based quartet quickly developed a reputation for a frenetic live set, which they brought to DIY venues across the country. “Filth has always been about energy at the heart of things since the earliest recordings,” the band’s Lis DiAngelo says. “We wanted to leave our blood and guts out on the floor,” Brian McClelland adds. 

Filth Is Eternal’s third album, Impossible World is slated for a March 17, 2026 release through MNRK Heavy. The highly-anticipated follow up to the band’s acclaimed 2023 sophomore effort Find Out was written against a backdrop of accelerating gentrification, unchecked technology and the slow — but quickening — creep of authoritarianism and fascism. So the album thematically confronts life in our present dystopian hellscape. And yet, rather than surrendering to despair and hopelessness, the band push forward with a defiant clarity, while asking difficult questions about survival, humanity and resistance in a world increasingly shaped without anyone’s consent. 

Despite the album’s overall heavy subject matter, Impossible World has many soaring moments throughout — flashes of light that give fans a sense of possibility midst the brutal toils of contemporary life. The album is a salve in hard times, reminding the listener that art has the radical potential to enliven us, to connect us with others and to keep us holding on, as we wait out and plan through the darkest hours. 

Sonically, the album reportedly sees the band balancing hardcore urgency with a sharpened melodic sensibility. The result is an effort that draws from punk’s immediacy while seeing the band push their sound towards something much more deliberate and expansive. “I think the biggest changes from LP1 to now is that we’ve upped the intention by using more melody, harmony, and singing in general. We’re working with aggression, but moving toward something beautiful and true,” DiAngelo says. 

The album also features collaborations with The Blood Brothers‘ Johnny Whitney, Fall Out Boy‘s Joe Trohman, Gina Gleason and Lauren Lavin, alongside their use of the FILTH EQ+, a pedal they crafted that helped shaped the album’s overall sound. 

.The album will feature “Stay Melted,” which I wrote about last month, and the album’s second and latest single “Long Way.” Featuring d a bruising and driving riff and backing harmonies from Lauren Lavin, “Long Way” sees the band pushing their sound into a grungier, subtly pop leaning direction while still being urgent. The song is also the first track that they recorded with the FILTH EQ+ pedal.

The band’s Lis DiAngelo says of the new single, “We live in a time saturated by consumer culture; we are hyper-focused on acquisition and consumption as means to happiness. ‘Long Way’ is about finding ourselves at the center of that, then finding our way OUT.” 

Directed by Che Hise-Gattone, the accompanying video for “Long Way” employs a mix of public access TV and 120 Minutes-era MTV aesthetics.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Weird Nightmare Shares Sweetly Nostalgic and Anthemic “Might See You There”

Almost every band that’s worth a damn has had a member, who at some point worked in a record store. With JOVM mainstay acts METZ and Weird Nightmare, it was frontman and creative mastermind Alex Edkins. Slinging indie rock and hardcore records at his hometown record store while attending university, Edkins became an ardent student of rock ‘n’ roll from the psychedelic 1960s to the DIY 1990s and beyond.

Hoopla, Edkins’ sophomore Weird Nightmare album, which is slated for a May 1, 2026 release through Sub Pop globally and Dine Alone Records in Canada, reportedly sees the JOVM mainstay mixing and matching these wide-ranging influences in fun, exhilarating combinations, showcasing his sophisticated musical mind, while continuing to showcase his unerring knack for ridiculously catchy and rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses.

Co-produced by Edkins and Spoon‘s Jim Eno at Providence‘s world famous Machines With Magnets, Hoopla also sees the acclaimed Canadian artist expanding upon Weird Nightmare’s musical palette with the addition piano, bells and castanets, which give his long-held straightforward songwriting a shiny luster.

The album will feature the previously released “Forever Elsewhere,” and the album’s latest single “Might See You There.” Seemingly channeling Cheap Trick and Weezer, “Might See You There” is a raise-your-beer in air and shout along with your best pals power pop anthem that continues to showcase Edkins’ remarkable craftsmanship. But the song is anchored in sweet, perhaps rose-colored glasses of nostalgia for one’s youth. In the case of “Might See You There,” the boredom, isolation and small joys of the narrator’s teenaged years, living in a small town — before the days of social media and constant screen time.

“‘Might See You There’ is about going back to visit my hometown and being flooded with teenage nostalgia,” Edkins explains. “Small-town boredom and isolation almost feel like a gift in today’s highly connected world. I feel fortunate for that time spent idly, down in the basement, learning the entire Rancid Let’s Go album on guitar with my friends. I find it easy to romanticise that time in my life, even though I was, without question, a disgruntled kid who badly wanted to escape my surroundings and see the world.
 
“I was listening to a lot of the Irish bands The Undertones and Protex while writing this one, and I think there is a fair bit of their influence,” the JOVM mainstay adds. “Just the simplicity and big bar chords mostly. Seth Manchester and I were very into the idea of adding piano and bells to the outro, akin to the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century album by The Ramones. The great Julianna Riolino sings with me on the choruses, too!”

The mind-bending, animated accompanying video was directed and edited by CC Mulligan.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 56th Birthday, James Murphy!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates LCD Soundsystem frontman and DFA Records founder James Murphy’s 56th birthday.