Tag: Love Injection

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: JOVM Mainstays Psymon Spine Share Two Slick Remixes from “Heady Remix Collector”

Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays Psymon Spine released their third album, Head Body Connector last year. The album is a gritty, punchy, guitar-forward studio album from a band that’s long been obsessed with production. And perhaps more than its predecessors, their third album is explicitly informed and inspired by the band’s cathartic live show. “It’s more unhinged than anything we’ve made before,” Psymon Spine’s Noah Prebish says. “Throughout the writing process, we were always asking ourselves how we could make it really fun to play live.”  

Ironically, the album, though ready-made to be performed, was mostly written in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The band split their time between various home studios and friends’ back porches in Montauk, The Catskills, Boston and Brooklyn. It was fall and the crisp autumn air, and political uncertainty and disquietude looming in the background lended itself to an undeniable longing for companionship. “It felt like we had collectively jumped from one timeline to another, more bizarre one,” Prebish says. 

The central theme of time being fractured, chopped and screwed is integral to the album’s material and its album art, which was designed by New York-based artist Bucky Boudreau and appears in the form of alternative measurements of passing seconds, minutes, days, lifetimes, tally marks on a chalkboard and infinity signs made of camp bracelets on a cracked egg.“Head Body Connector is our response to a world even more chaotic than usual,” says Peter Spears, “and an exploration of the little joys, anxieties, and absurdities that world has to offer.” While being an ode to the dissonance of temporality in our current moment, it’s also an elastic tribute to friendship and harmony in the face of that dissonance. 

In the lead up to the album’s release, I wrote about:

“Boys,” a track that begins with a glistening New Wave-meets-post punk introduction before quickly morphing into a funky, synth-driven both with slashing guitars. The two seemingly disparate sections are held together with Sabine Holler’s dreamy delivery. But just under the infectious, danceable surface, is an introspective song that reveals a subtle sense of unease. 

The track was written after the band’s Sabine Holler relocated to Berlin, but she still lends her voice to the song. “By nature every Psymon Spine song must be a little cheeky to bypass our own self-criticism, but in reality ‘Boys’ is just a very earnest song about friendship,” the band notes. “Early on in the pandemic Sabine moved back to Germany and we weren’t sure what was going to happen, either to us as a unit or to the entire world. We went to Peter’s childhood home in Boston for a few days and fleshed out a demo that Michael had started a couple weeks earlier. We sent it to Sabine who almost immediately replied with the same vocal take you hear on the song today.” 

“Wizard Acid,” a woozy bit of disco funk built around a punchy bass line, glistening synth arpeggios and thumping beats paired with lyrics about coming apart at the seams — both literally and metaphorically. Consumed with cabin fever, the song’s narrator is slowly losing their mind. 

The band told the folks at Flood Magazine that the song is “part allegory, part nonsense, encapsulating elements of cabin fever, dread and humor. We melded one of Michael’s early demos with one of Peter’s, creating one unholy coupling which eventually took the form of a shapeshifting disco jam. It sat instrumental for a couple months until Peter sent over some lyrics detailing a narrator slowly consumed by their sentient house, or perhaps losing their mind (maybe both?).” 

The JOVM mainstays will be releasing Heady Remix Collector, a bold reimagining of the material off last year’s Head Body Connector. Slated for an April 4, 2025 release through their longtime label home Northern Spy, the album features remixes by some of their favorite artists and collaborators with the album’s tracks transformed into fresh, electrifying soundscapes that are perfect for both the dance floor and deep listening.

“We’re thrilled to share our most eclectic remix album yet: Heady Remix Collector. The name says it all,” the JOVM mainstays say. We asked 8 of our favorite artists to reinterpret songs on Head Body Connector and what we got back was a glimpse into how truly weird and brilliant our friends are.

We generally take a very hands-off approach to the remixes that we commission (the exception being “Love Injection’s Antimatter Kid Remix”, which Noah played guitar on); anytime we ask someone to remix something it’s because we love their work and want them to do their thing. We send out the stems, tell them to freak it, and in a couple months we find a bunch of alien babies on our doorstep.

“For the DJs, we’ve got club bangers from Sam O.B. and GIFT, as well as balearic slow burners from Love Injection and lovetempo. MGMT and Matt FX’s mixes are psychedelic, joyous, delirious. And both This is Lorelei and Disq’s remixes are a stroll through a funhouse, complete with trick mirrors and trap doors at every turn.”

The band shared the first peak of Heady Remix Collector, a double A-side single featuring MGMT’s remix of “Boys” and GIFT’s remix of “Wizard Acid.”

The MGMT remix of “Boys” pairs a chugging motorik-like groove, buzzing and crunchy guitars and twinkling synth oscillations with Holler’s dreamy delivery to create a dreamy and euphoric house music-meets-New Wave take on the original.

The GIFT remix of “Wizard Acid” turns the song into slick and glistening Echoes-era The Rapture/DFA Records dance punk-meets-house music banger with euphoric hooks.

If I were doing a DJ set, I’d play these bangers to get people moving — and if these tracks don’t get you moving, there’s something wrong with you.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Last year, the rising Brooklyn-based psych pop/dance pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Psymon Spine — Noah Prebish, Sabine Holler, Brother Michael Rudinski, and Peter Spears — released their sophomore album Charismatic Megafauna. Thematically, the album explored the complicated feelings and catharsis involved in the dissolution of human relationships — through hook-driven, left-of-center electronic dance music meets psych pop. The album received critical praise from  the likes of Paste Magazine, FLOOD, Brooklyn Vegan, Under the Radar and NME. The album and its material was added to number of playlists including NPR Music, Spotify‘s New Music Friday, All New Indie, Undercurrents and Fresh Finds, Apple Music‘s Midnight City and Today’s Indie Rock and TIDAL‘s Rising. And the album received airplay internationally from BBC, KEXP and KCRW among others. 

The Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays capped off a big 2021 with the the digital 7 inch release “Mr. Metronome”/”Drums Valentino.” 

  • “Mr. Metronome” may arguably be the most straightforward, club friendly track of the band’s growing catalog. Featuring a German vocal hook sung by Sabine Holler, which translates to “I saw your message, I have to go work,” followed by a repeated refrain of “my schedule, my schedule,” “Mr. Metronome” is centered around tweeter and woofer rocking beats, glistening synth arpeggios and a relentless, motorik groove. Inspired by Kraftwerk, Soulwax and others, the song’s lyrics features musings on dating and social dynamics while reflecting the band’s restlessness and desire to quit all unfulfilling obligations to focus on what really matters to them — music. 
  • “Drums Valentino” is a New Wave-like single featuring industrial clang and clatter, shimmering guitars, glistening synths and an off-kilter yet dance floor-friendly groove. Sonically, the song helps to emphasize the song’s lyrics, which talk about feeling uneasy and uncertain with a psychological precision.

The members of Psymon Spine grew up in the ’00s and ’10s with a deep appreciation and love for the art of the remix. And after the release of their sophomore album, the band found themselves craving longer, even more dance-floor friendly versions of the album’s material. The band recruited a handful of producers and electronic music acts including Love Injection, Dar Disku, Each Other, Safer, Bucky Boudreau and Psymon Spine’s Brother Michael to remix material from the album. 

Charismatic Mutations, the remix album of last year’s Charismatic Megafauna, is slated for an April 1, 2022 release through the band’s label home Northern Spy Records.

Last month, Hot Chip‘s Joe Goddard tackled “Milk” feat. Barrie. Goddard’s remix retained Barrie’s coquettish and ethereally cooed vocals but placed them within a euphoric Balearic house-like production centered around skittering beats, glistening synth arpeggios and cosmic space effects. “This remix was very natural and very joyful for me,” Goddard explained. ” I did it in lockdown so I felt a sense of freedom and playfulness that was really nice and actually, in retrospect, very unique.  I love the vocals on this song, so I placed them at the forefront, and I tried to sonically make the mix one that was balearic and satisfying.  Macrodosing.”

Charismatic Mutations second and latest single sees Love Injection tackling the funky, dance punk bop “Jumprope.” Clocking in at an expansive seven-and-a-half minutes, the Love Injection remix is a seemingly LCD Soundsystem-like instrumental take that retains the propulsive bass line of the original and pairs it with skittering beats, glistening synth arpeggios, congo-led percussion, a relentless motorik groove and chopped up vocal samples.

“‘Jumprope’ immediately takes us back to the early 2000s and the sound that would be synonymous with the kids in Downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Love Injection explains. “It was the reintroduction of dance music to punk, pioneered by the likes of Suicide and Was (Not Was), but was immortalized in a new way by DFA (both the production duo and the label) in some of their earliest releases.” 

“There was one particular remix that we know, love, and have had special moments with on the dancefloor at the late David Mancuso’s Loft parties that became the guiding light for our reinterpretation. We very intentionally set out to reimagine ‘Jumprope’ in the spirit of that moment, rewriting the bassline and bringing in new synth elements. The Loft memory greatly influenced the remix’s arrangement and gave it its name.”