JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Living Colour frontman Corey Glover’s 62nd birthday.
Tag: music
Throwback: Happy 62nd Birthday, Greg Graffin!
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Throwback: Happy 78th Birthday, Charles Bradley!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 78th anniversary of the birth of Charles Bradley.
Throwback: Happy 55th Birthday, Jonny Greenwood!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Radiohead and The Smile guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s 55th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 67th Birthday, Bryan Adams!
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New Video: JOVM Mainstays GIFT Returns with Introspective and Woozy “Every Step”
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.
Throwback: Happy 60th Birthday, Kool Rock-Ski!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates The Fat Boys’ Kool Rock-Ski’s 60th birthday.
New Video: Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul Share a Funky, Club Friendly Critique of Wellness Culture
Acclaimed Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul‘s sophomore album, the Stephen and David Dawæle co-produced Mainland Madinina is slated for a February 5, 2027 release through DEEWEE/Because Music. The highly-anticipated follow-up to their globally praised 2022 debut, Topical Dancer marks the duo’s first collaborative album in almost five years. More personal in its focus but no less ambition, the duo’s forthcoming sophomore album explores grief, parenthood, lineage and colonial history through their distinct blend of electro pop and dance punk, delivered with their signature sharp, irreverent humor.
The album reflects on family, belonging and the histories we carry, and is named for their respective places of origins — for Pupul, mainland China where his grandparents are from and Hong Kong where his mother is from; and Madinina, the Indigenous name for the Caribbean island of Martinique, where Adigéry’s mother is from. The album’s tile imagines a meeting point between two seemingly distant places, questioning the boundaries between mainland and island, while creating a shared space in which their stories can sit alongside one another.
Much like its predecessor, Mainland Madinina‘s material grew out of conversations between the two friends and collaborators as their lives changed. In the years since Topical Dancer was recorded, both have become parents, while Adigéry has also experienced the loss of her father to Alzheimer’ disease. Pupul’s solo album, 2024’s Letter to Yu, which was inspired by his journeys to his late mother’s homeland of Hong Kong, brought his own family history into focus. Together, these experiences led the duo to explore the parallels between their backgrounds coming together in Belgium — from Pupul’s grandparents’ Chinese restaurant in Aalst to Adigéry’s mother’s cocktail bar, Madinina, in Ghent.
Written in Ghent and Martinique, Mainland Madinina moves between deeply intimate songwriting and the duo’s long-held and familiar electronic intensity. The pair returned to songwriting fundamentals, working with little more than a guitar to creat songs that couldn’t hide between sleek production. The result is an album that makes space for vulnerability, while retaining the energy, wit and unpredictability that has defined their collaboration.
At its core, the acclaimed duo’s sophomore album is about what we inherit, what we choose to carry and how we find a sense of belonging. While Topical Dancer confronted the absurdities of contemporary life through privation and humor, the sophomore album turns inward, towards the duo’s own histories, finding connections between personal experience and wide questions of identity, memory and community. Yes, it’s an album shaped by life’s changes and by loss, but also the sustaining power of a deep and abiding friendship, and the possibility of making something new from the past.
Soulwax once again assisted as mentors/co-producers on the album, with Adigéry describing the duo’s contribution to Mainland Madinina as invaluable. “They’re people who can really inspire us when we get stuck – they invite us to go deeper, to really grasp the intention behind the song,” she says. Pupul adds, “They’re still the musical chiropractors – they really know where to push when stuck.”
Mainland Madinina will feature the previously released “GOOGOO GAGA” and the album’s latest single “From Healer to Dealer.” Built around a strutting bass line, skittering, tweeter and woofer thumping beats and shimmering synths, “From Healer to Dealer” is a hilarious and incisive critique of spiritual materialism and heath culture that features a ridiculous phone conversation between “Grace” and “Ruben,” two wellness-obsessed manics that Adigéry and Puul use to explore the complex, often confused vernacular of health culture — while also pointing out its vapidity and self-absorption.
Directed by Lennert Madou, the accompanying video feature the duo doing a mix of pilates and yoga and in front of a wind machine — while seemingly reaching a higher plane of consciousness. But they look ridiculous while doing so.
New Video: Leon Bridges Shares Ebullient Video for “Watch You Dance”
Acclaimed Atlanta-born, Fort Worth, TX-raised singer/songwriter and musician Leon Bridges released his latest album, the J Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto-produced, Happiness Anytime earlier this year Columbia Records. Happiness Anytime sees the acclaimed singer/songwriter and musician returning to the warmth of his 2015 debut but while seeing the members of Jungle and Bridges’ signature sensibilities blending to create something entirely new — an expansive, borderless sound and approach that pushes the Grammy Award-winning artist into a brand new territory. The album’s material echoes Fela Kuti, Paul Simon’s 1990 acclaimed effort The Rhythm of The Saints and Jorge Ben without feeling overly referential. At its core, the album is reportedly boundary pushing while remaining unmistakably Leon Bridges, rooted in his imitable vocal, effortless charisma and melodic sensibilities.
The album was written and recorded across three fast and furious sessions with Lloyd-Watson and Kitto, a collaboration that can trace its origins to the trio repeatedly crossing paths across the global festival circuit. The trio decided to attempt a low-pressure writing session at Los Angeles-based Chaplin Recording Studios. Four days later, they had come up with six songs — half of the completed album. Pino Palladino contributed bass during the sessions. The overall end result is a timeless body of work that feels unfussy and breezy — that they all hope will make the listener feel happiness anytime they play it.
“For me, happiness is not a feeling that you chase,” Bridges says,“I want this album to be something that lingers with people and lingers in people’s bones. There’s this feeling that we have to fix the problems of the world; you feel inadequate or it can be debilitating. My role is to be light. I hope that comes across with this album.” With Happiness Anytime, Bridges actively sets out with a desire to not only find joy but to find movement again.
Early in his career, Bridges was out in front dancing — and that was something that had begun to greatly miss. He wanted to get back to making music to dance to, music to excise the stresses and frustrations of modern life, and to feel grounded in the rhythms of the present. Over the summer, he had started introducing audiences to the new album with sets in Paris, Cannes, Los Angeles, Montreux Jazz Festival, London, Chicago and Outside Lands. And as he has being playing the new material live, he has unveiled “Leon Bridges Presents Happiness Anytime,” a reimagined stage production featuring a vinyl DJ, a horn section, three backing vocalists and Bridges out in front dancing and singing. Partly inspired by the communal spirt of Jamaican dancehall culture, the live set mirrors the album’s emphasis on movement — and on dancing your stresses and frustrations away for a bit. You can see what the live show will look like during his most recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he performed medley of tunes from the soon-to-be-released album — the strutting Afrobeat-meets-1970s Motown soul-like “Light The Way” and “Illusion” and jubilant, joyous ode to working things out “Talk It Over.”
“Watch You Dance,” Happiness Anytime‘s latest single is a strutting and sultry bit of neo-soul meets classic soul that feels like a funky, dance floor friendly synthesis of Black Pumas, Cody Chesnutt, Daptone Records and Marvin Gaye‘s “Got To Give It Up” but anchored in old-school craft, earnest, seemingly lived-in lyricism and a grown ass folks sensuality. The song’s narrator knows that seduction is a game that you have to play — and he knows how to play it well.
Directed by Rippy Austin, the accompanying video for “Watch You Dance” was shot on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in New Orleans and features Bridges and a collection of beautiful — and infectiously ebullient– Black dancers moving and grooving to the song. The video and the song are a much needed joy bomb for a desperate, uneasy time. And I’ll add this because it’s necessary: Black is beautiful y’all.
Essay: Midterm Elections 2026/Stakes Is High . . .
An Election Day reminder to vote — if you haven’t already.
Throwback: Happy 63rd Birthday, Rick Allen!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s 63rd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 75th Birthday, Robert Bell!
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Throwback: Happy 74th Birthday, Bernard Edwards!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 74th anniversary of the birth of Chic co-founder Bernard Edwards’ birth.
Throwback: Happy 65th Birthday, Larry Mullen, Jr.!
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Throwback: Happy 60th Birthday, Ad Rock!
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