Tag: New Video

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Virtual Nobodies Shares Brooding and Cinematic “Night of the Skinwalker”

Although they come from different backgrounds and styles, Newbury Park, CA-based post punk outfit Virtual Nobodies — longtime friends, co-vocalists, multi-instrumentals JAAG and Xavier Valdez — have developed a sound and genre that they’ve dubbed coastal desert alt rock, which incorporates bristling riffs, disco grooves and Beach Boys-like harmonies. As a Los Angeles– based journalist once wrote, “Virtual Nobodies are if Oasis, Kaleo, and U2 had a baby in LA, and their drummer locked them down.” 

The duo released their debut EP, Costal Desert Melancholy last October. The EP’s latest single “Night of the Skinwalker” is a brooding noir-ish bit of post-punk built around shimmering and reverb-soaked twang, bursts of soaring synths, fuzz pedaled power chords, yearning and plaintive vocals, and a propulsive rhythm section paired with rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses. While comparisons to U2 are well-founded to a degree, sonically “Night of the Skinwwalker” also reminds me a bit of JOVM mainstays Still Corners, VOWWS and others.

Virtual Nobodies’ Xavier Valdez explains “‘Skinwalker’ is about one’s temptation and at times feeding into that. Often times we carry a lot of shame for said situations. There’s a line in the song that’s my personal favorite. The other singer, Jaag, sings: “In my dreams I fly, higher than my shame,” which I think is such a powerful truth.

Directed by Jeremiah Gray and Ty Metcalfe, the Halloween-themed video for “Night of the Skinwalker” starts Dave Brown, Matthew Nordquist and Virtual Nobodies’ Xavier Vasquez. Set on a dark and fateful, moonlit night, the video tells an ancient tale of a man, who turns into a werewolf and because of primal urges does something horrible.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: ALYA Teams Up with Bhramabull on a Slick Banger

Bhramabull is an enigmatic, emerging hip-hop producer, who can trace the origins of his career back to being a fervent fan of hip-hop and hip-hop culture. Inspired by the genre’s beloved pioneers, the emerging underground producer developed and honed a gritty, hard-hitting boom bap-inspired sound with a fresh and edgy twist, fueled by an unyielding passion for crafting raw, authentic beats.

ALYA‘s latest single, the Bharamabull-produced “Crazy.Trap” feat. ALYA is a heady mix of meets-boom-bap-meets trap that’s a remarkably accessible and slickly produced bed for ALYA’s slightly processed and sultry, pop starlet delivery paired with some incredibly catchy hooks. The result is a headbanger that brings back memories of Timbaland — but with a subtly modern take.

Directed by Alya Michelson, Tim Carmon and Dilia Alshina, the recently released video for “Crazy.Trap” prominently features a rubber room: We see ALYA put her hands onto her desk top — and then suddenly her world becomes irrevocably changed. We then see her in a rubber room with a late 70s-early 80s computer, expressively dancing to the song. We also see a lone dancer in the room, dancing. Where do the worlds of tech and the human begin? Where do they end?

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Newmoon Shares Painterly “Crazing”

Antwerp-based shoegazer outfit Newmoon established a sound and approach that meshes elements of shoegaze, post-punk and alternative rock with dreamy melodies, atmospheric soundscapes and emotive lyrics with the release of 2014’s Invitation to Hold EP, 2016’s full-length debut, Space and 2019’s sophomore effort Nothing Hurts Forever.

The Belgian shoegazer outfit’s third album Temporary Light is slated for a March 22, 2024 release through PIAS Recordings across the European Union and Manifesto Entertainment, a new imprint of Quiet Panic, across the US. The album reportedly marks the next step in the band’s musical evolution, showcasing their growth as a band and musicians — and their dedication to creating transformative music.

Sonically speaking, the album sees the Belgian outfit returning to their roots to embrace an abrasive yet ethereal sound — but with a fresh approach. The band’s new drummer Conor Dawson enriches the band’s signature penchant for grand yet delicate melodies with rhythmic finesse, adding a layer of depth and musicality to the album’s material. “Thick layers of guitars always felt natural to us, and are kind of our main thing. We wanted to explore some ideas that have been in the back of our mind ever since we started this band,” Newmoon’s Bert Cannaerts explains. “As soon as we let go of trying to write a specific type of album, the songs grew organically and everything just clicked.”

Late last year, I wrote about Temporary Light‘s first single, the slow-burning and brooding “Fading Phase,” a track that channeled Souvlaki-era Slowdive and A Storm in Heaven-era The Verve that felt as comforting as pulling a warm blanket over you on a chilly night. 

“Crazing,” Temporary Light‘s third and latest single sees the band incorporating several different guitar textures — fuzzy and droning guitars, shimmering, reverb-drenched guitars — in swirling layers of enveloping sound paired with a propulsive rhythm section. An achingly plaintive vocal melody is buried within the lush and dreamy mix, seemingly yearning to burst free from their confines. For me, the result is a song that’s brooding yet yearning, noisy but painterly, heavy yet ethereal — and with a hint of bright optimism.

“‘Crazing’ is one of the noisier songs on this album”, Newmoon’s Bert Cannaerts explains. “We’re always looking for that one melody that hides within a song. With ‘Crazing’ we wanted to try our hand at a song that incorporates loads of guitar textures but still feels melodic and airy. On one hand it has these dark and droning fuzzed out guitars but on the other hand it sounds fresh and uplifting. The song exists on the edge of dark and gloomy with a hint of brightness and optimism. The exact spot where we like our music to sit”, he adds.

The accompanying video continues a run of trippy and decidedly 120 Minutes-era MTV alternative rock/shoegaze-like visuals that includes the band performing the song in a bare studio with loads of VHS fuzz and feedback seemingly mimicking the song’s guitar textures. There’s also a vase of flowers, which adds to the painterly feel of everything.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Psymon Spine Returns with Punchy and Groovy “Bored of Guitar”

Psymon Spine‘s third album Head Body Connector is slated for a February 23, 2024 release through Northern Spy Records. The album is reportedly a gritty, punchy, guitar-forward studio album from a band that’s long been obsessed with production. Perhaps more than their previous releases, Head Body Connector 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 the 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. 

So far I’ve written about two of Head Body Connector‘s singles:

“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. 

“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. 

Head Body Connector‘s third and latest single, the punchy and hook-driven “Bored of Guitar” is a mischievous tongue-in-cheek provocation built around guitar that sounds indebted to Gang of Four, Talking Heads, DEVO and others but full of scathing, self-deprecating, self-aware, self-criticism that’s seemingly informed by getting older, seeing your priorities shift and change — and perhaps hating it as much as you’re accepting it.

“‘Bored of Guitar’ was one of the earlier tracks we worked on for Head Body Connector. Like many of our songs, it started as two separate ideas that Peter, Michael, and I (Noah) smashed into one and then expanded upon,” the Brooklyn-based JOVM mainstays explain. “The lyrics came to me piecemeal inspired by conversations I had been having with Michael about the kind of guitar-centric dude rock bands we were getting tired of seeing. The underlying fear for me, of course, was that we were one of those bands. Nothing disgusts a person like seeing in others what bothers them about themselves. The song is an amped-up meditation on (amongst other things) self-criticism, priorities shifting around, and the hilarious, painful, beautiful, humiliating, exhilarating experience of being in a band. It’s also about me working on my relationship with my younger self, the one who set most of my current life experiences into motion long ago. I love him and we’ve both got notes for each other.”   

Directed by Max Mainwood, the accompanying video for “Bored of Guitar” is a surreal, seemingly horror movie-inspired visual that features an adult and their younger self interacting with other, while being chased and haunted by menacing presences dressed in black and more. “I wanted to represent this song with a visual narrative that came from the band’s storytelling, but also pull from my personal interpretation of the song,” Mainwood explains. “This video plays as an energetic backdrop to a groovy tune, as well as an underlying story left for the audience to discover.”   

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstay MAGON Shares Meditative and Introspective “Breakthrough Blitz”

I’ve managed to spill a copious amount of virtual ink covering the remarkably prolific, Israeli-born singer/songwriter, musician and JOVM mainstay MAGON. After the release of his fifth album, 2022’s A Night in Bethlehem, the Israeli-born artist, along with his partner relocated to Costa Rica, where he continued his ongoing prolific period with three more albums, 2022’s Enter By The Narrow Gate, last year’s Did You Hear the Kids? and Chasing Dreams.

Chasing Dreams saw the JOVM mainstay collaborating with local indie rock outfit Las Robertas, who acted as his backing band for the recording sessions. Sonically, the album continued a slow-burn expansion of his sound with the incorporation of string arrangements, which add a lush and dreamily cinematic quality to the material.

The JOVM mainstay begins 2024 with the announcement of his eighth album The Writing’s On The Wall. The album’s first single “Breakthrough Blitz,” pairs MAGON’s laconic, easy-going delivery with a simple yet propulsive backbeat, glistening keys, and a bluesy, Keith Richards-like guitar riff with a big hook. Thematically, the song touches upon the freedom and connection found in simple, everyday moments with the sort of contented sigh that can only comes from someone, who has lived a full and messy-life — and understands that he is truly very lucky.

Shot in the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, the video stars MAGON and his family — and features the JOVM as a sort of magical taxi driver, who picks up a woman and her young kids (the JOVM mainstay’s partner and two kids) on a dreamy and slow-burning trip through the verdant green, golden yellows and mountainous Mexican countryside.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Ginger AF Share Furious Protest Anthem “Femininity”

Formed back in 2018, Florida-based duo Ginger AF — multi-instrumentalist Kristen Cannell and Jerry Black — specialize in guitar-driven indie rock paired with an undercurrent of dystopian and existential themes, seemingly inspired by the dystopian hellscape we’re currently living in.

Their latest single “Femininity” is a hook-driven, mosh pit friendly ripper that sonically — to my ears, at least — seems to be indebted to 90s grunge and the Riot Grrl movement and rooted in righteous, feminist protest against a shitty and exploitive system and society. With “Femininity,” Cannell and Black have written a protest anthem against the growing way of draconian reproductive bills and laws across the country that make it impossible for medical providers to provide the healthcare that woman need — and endanger women in critical need.

Across significant portions of the country, there have been at least 64,000 rape-related pregnancies with no legal access to healthcare. That number is outrageous and absurd. And as result, the Florida duo’s single has a palpable and forceful urgency. It’s also a reminder that as voters, we must not lose sight of the fact that the world is complicated, and we’re going to have to make difficult and unsettling compromises for our loved ones’ well-being and safety.

The accompanying video begins with a newspaper featuring a headlines that read “Roe v. Wade Is Overturned,” “Overturning Roe Is An Insult to Women” and “Abortion Bans Will Result in More Women Dying” with the duo performing where the photos would normally be. The newspapers fade to the background — but important headlines pop up right behind the duo as they perform the song in a varying settings.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Donna Blue Shares Swooning “Aphrodite”

With the release of 2017’s self-titled debut EP, which featured  “Sunset Blvd,” a track that received airplay on Elton John’s Apple Music radio show Rocket Hour, acclaimed indie duo Donna Blue — romantic couple and musical collaborators Danique van Kesteren and Bart van Dalen — quickly established a dreamy and cinematic sound that seemed influenced by Phil Spector Wall of Sound-like pop, Pasty Cline, yè yè and David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks.

2020’s self-produced and self-recorded, five-song EP Inbetween EP saw the duo continuing upon the sound that won them attention nationally and internationally — while also seemingly drawing from Roy Orbison, Julee Cruise, Nancy Sinatra, Patsy Cline and so on. For me, it’s an effort that evokes very specific memories: wandering Amsterdam in varying degrees of inebriation, passing fellow drunk revelers shouting and dancing; scantily Red Light District prostitutes dancing to American pop, summoning customers with a wry smiles and knowing winks; and walking through Frankfurt-am-Main’s Haupwatche and Romer Districts longing for a face like mine in the crowd.

The duo’s full-length debut, 2022’s Dark Roses featured 11 dreamy, film noir-like cinematic tracks that saw the acclaimed duo taking up a decidedly twangy, Western sound inspired by Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni and John Barry paired with dreamily sensual vocals. 

The duo’s sophomore full-length album, Into The Realm of Love is slated for a March 8, 2024 release through their longtime label home, Snowstar Records. The album’s latest single “Aphrodite” is a swooning and twangy, film-noir-like bit of pop that seemingly channels Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and more, full of sweet and charmingly old-timey declarations of love and devotion.

“Continuing along the classic storytelling lineage from the likes of well-known 1960’s duos Nancy & Lee, Serge & Jane, and Ramses & Liesbeth, our second single ‘Aphrodite’ is a duet written as a sort of myth,” the duo explain. “An upbeat and refreshing, yet nostalgic tale about a man trying to prove to a woman he is worthy of her love, while she is only interested in what he can do for her.“

Directed and edited by the duo, the accompanying video for “Aphrodite” is shot in a gorgeous black and white, and playfully draws from Greek myths, and films from the 20s-60s.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: San Diego’s Crystal Night Shares Swooning “Julia”

Crystal Nights is an emerging and mysterious San Diego-based indie electro pop project. The Southern California-based project’s debut single “Julia” is a lush and swooning bit of nostalgia-inducing, 80s inspired pop featuring glistening synths, wobbling bass synths paired with yearning and ethereal vocals and soaring hooks. “Julia” is the sort of tears falling while you’re on the dance floor song that will take a hold of your broken and bruised heart.

The accompanying visuals are taken from the night out in Tokyo scene from Lost in Translation.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Swirlpool Shares woozy “Evergreen”

Formed back in 2016, the German-based dream pop/shoegaze outfit Swirlpool — Thomas A. Fischer, Markus Kraus and Chris Atzinger — have remained loyal to the “sounds better with reverb and distortion” maxim, and as a result they’ve managed to win over a loyal fanbase within the global dream pop and shoegaze scenes. 

The German dream pop/shoegaze outfit’s highly anticipated full-length debut, Distant Echoes features material inspired by titans like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive while breathing fresh life into the genre’s beloved sound and approach.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Distant Echoes album single “Reimagine,” a classic era shoegaze-inspired track built around dense and towering layers of reverb and distortion-laden guitars, thunderous drumming and ethereal, yearning vocals paired with enormous hooks and choruses.  “The single was one of the first ideas Tom came up with on rhythm guitar,” the members of the German band explain. “The lyrics deal with our sometimes too perfectionistic songwriting process, where we would spend days writing new interesting parts and sometimes just get stuck in a loop. It is about the agony of slow change and the need for re-invention.”

Distant Echoes‘ second and latest single, the woozy “Evergreen” features ethereal vocals floating over strummed guitars, painterly swirls of howling feedback that ends with a gorgeous, acoustic guitar-driven coda. Much like its predecessor, “Evergreen” brings memories of Slowdive, RIDE, and My Bloody Valentine to mind, fueled with a bittersweet sense of nostalgia.

“‘Evergreen’ is all about the moment,” the German shoegazers explain. “Brief seconds that feel like an eternity. The beauty of a memory that stays with you forever. We personally like to listen to albums from start to finish. It captures a time in your life forever, with all its ups and downs. A world you can immerse yourself in.”

Directed by Daniel Dueckminor, the accompanying video continues a run of 120 Minutes-era MTV-like visuals shot on what appears to be Super 8: The video follows the band walking around the wintry German countryside, and playing their instruments in the forest with psychedelic scenes behind them.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: West Wickhams Share Brooding and Shimmering “The Conformist”

Originally formed in Tresco, the second biggest island of the Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, UK, an island famously known as “The Island of Lost Souls,” and now currently based in Richmond, UK, the self-described psychedelic, garage noir duo West Wickhams — Jon Othello and Elle Flores — named their project after an imagined rival gang to British punk style icons The Bromley Contingent, a group who followed Sex Pistols and whose style was largely influenced by David Bowie and Roxy Music. 

Their overall aesthetic is influenced by a wide range of goth and horror sources including the work of Mary Shelley, Whitby Abbey, Edgar Allan Poe, Andy Warhol, abstract painting, film noir and more. 

Back in 2022, the duo released two EPs, their debut EP Consider Her Way, which featured the brooding, The Cure-meets-Cocteau Twins-like “Consider Her Way.” They quickly followed up with their sophomore EP Magenta, which featured the slick The Cure-meets-New Order-like “This Is a Hang Up,” one of the more dance-floor friendly tracks of their growing catalog.

The British outfit start 2024 with the recently released effort, Vivre Sa Vie. The album’s latest single “The Conformist” continues a run of material clearly indebted to 80s goth and post-punk — but with chiming percussion, which adds a subtle bit of bright beauty to the generally dark, brooding air.

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity,” the duo say of their latest single.

The accompanying video is based among edited stock footage of two dangers — rendered in stark and trippy negative, as though they’re dancing amongst the cosmos.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays The KVB Share Brooding Yet Club Friendly “Labyrinths”

Formed back in 2010, the acclaimed Manchester, UK-based JOVM mainstays The KVB initially started as the solo recording project of its founder, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Wood. And as a solo project, Wood released a series of limited cassette and vinyl releases. But my 2011, vocalist, keyboardist and visual artist Kat Day joined on, finalizing the project’s lineup.

Since Day joined on, the JOVM mainstays have released several critically applauded albums and EPs through a series of different labels that saw them crafting a sound simultaneously inspired by The Jesus and Mary Chain and Cabaret Voltaire that became increasingly streamlined. The duo signed to Geoff Barrow‘s Invada Records, who have released 2018’s Only Now Forever, 2019’s Submersion EP and 2021’s Unity.

The duo’s seventh album, the James Trevascus-produced Tremors is slated for an April 5, 2024 release through Invada Records. Tremors sees the band returning to the darker, coldwave sound of their earliest releases and some of their early influences, while retaining the infectious hook driven pop of 2021’s critically applauded Unity. The band have dubbed the new album’s material “dystopian pop” and specifically wrote it with the live show in mind — energetic and full of hooks and dynamic moments.

Thematically, the album’s material, as the band explains expands “on previous album themes of dystopia, apocalypse and the human condition, but with a more pessimistic outlook and deeper distrust than before. It also touches on themes of loss, and the resistance, lament and acceptance of inevitable change.”

Tremors latest single, “Labyrinths” is a shadowy and brooding yet club friendly bit of coldwave/New Wave built around skittering, tweeter and roofer rattling beats, glistening synths, scorching guitars and a motorik groove paired with Wood’s seemingly detached delivery. “Labyrinths” sonically nods at Suicide, New Order, JOVM mainstays The Vacant Lots, A Place To Bury Strangers and others — but a bit sleeker, which gives the song’s underlying menace and unease a cinematic quality.

With “Labyrinths,” the band explains that “it’s the most aggressive track on the album and a nod to some of our early releases. Lyrically, it was inspired by the collection of short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and its references to historical subjectivity, the flexibility of truth and construction of narratives.”

The accompanying video is a highly digitalized realm of screens within screens with computerized effects in the background, with the duo signing and playing the song with layers of analog glitch. The duo describe the video as “a visceral assault of digitalised nature, CRT screens and analogue glitch textures. We wanted the first video single to reflect the album artwork and the energy of the edit to mirror the aggression of the song.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Smile Perform Brooding and Cinematic “Friend Of A Friend” for School Kids in New Visual

Last year, The Smile — Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet‘s Tom Skinner — released their critically applauded Nigel Godrich-produced full-length debut A Light For Attracting Attention. The album saw the acclaimed outfit collaborating with London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contemporary British jazz musicians that include Bryon Wallen, Theon Cross and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman, and Jason Yarde. 

The Smile’s sophomore album, the Sam Petts-Davies Wall of Eyes officially drops today through XL Recordings. The album, which was recorded in Oxford and legendary Abbey Road Studios features string arrangements from London Contemporary Orchestra. 

Late last year, I wrote about Wall of Eyes‘ first single, album title track, “Wall of Eyes,” an eerily haunting and meditative song that sees the trio pair Yorke’s imitably yearning delivery with a glitchy arrangement featuring strummed guitar melody, glittering strings and gently padded drums. The song evokes — at least to me — a slow-burning sense of dread and unease. 

Wall of Eyes‘ latest single “Friend Of A Friend” continues a remarkable run of broodingly cinematic and meditative material that sees the trio pairing twinkling keys, gently swinging jazz-inflected percussion, mournful saxophone from Robert Stillman and soaring strings with Yorke’s achingly yearning delivery. “Friend of a Friend” manages to be a subtle synthesis of Amnesiac-era Radiohead, 70s AM rock and art film scores. 

Directed by acclaimed motion picture director Paul Thomas Anderson, the accompanying video for “Friend Of A Friend” features the trio performing the song at a school assembly for a collection of first and second graders. Some of the little learners are mesmerized by what they’re seeing and listening to, others become bored and listless, others start shifting about uncomfortably, another group are roughhousing and barely paying attention. Most are kind of confused and don’t know what to make of what’s going on. The kids are adorable — and the video manages to capture childhood and the kids in their natural element with a guileless sweetness.

We also know that some of those kids will remember being at that video shoot for the rest of their lives.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Rat Mass Teams Up with Sami Michelsen on Feral “Holding Me Down”

Rat Mass — Ryan Taylor and Mitchell Sosebee — is a fairly mysterious, and emerging American metal duo, who frequently improvise to create heavy music with elements of ambient music and noise. The duo released their latest album Time Pulls The Trigger earlier this month, and the album’s first single, the PJ Harvey-meets-Chelsea Wolfe-meets Soundgarden-like “Holding Me Down” which features Sami Michelsen’s bluesy crooning and wailing over a menacing and scorching riffs, thunderous drumming within an arrangement that rapidly shifts time signatures and tempos.

The result is a song that feels and sounds feral, unpredictable, difficult to pigeonhole and wildly adventurous.

The accompanying video evokes — and seems inspired by our contemporary and seemingly unending hellscape of despair, protest, inequity, bloodshed and fire.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Corridor Shares a Shimmering Rumination on Mortality

Mimi, Corridor‘s long-awaited and highly-anticipated fourth album is slated for an April 26, 2024 release on CD, LP and DSP globally through Sub Pop and across Canada through Bonsound.

The 8-song album, which was co-produced by the band and Joojoo Ashworth and recorded at Montréal-based Studio Gamma and mastered by Brooklyn’s Heba Kadry Mastering, derives its name from Jonathan Robert’s cat and features — presumably — Mimi’s face on the album artwork. Thematically, the album as the band explains is about “getting older” and “figuring out new parts of life,” inspired and informed by the type of personal changes that accompany the passage of time. And while the album’s material reflects a newfound and perhaps hard-won contemplative maturity, sonically, Mimi is reportedly a huge step forward with the band expanding on the sound of 2019’s critically applauded Junior with ever more richly detailed music rooted in a distinct rhythm pulse that recalls post-punk’s own classic era of meshing dance and rock textures.

For the acclaimed Montréalers and their fans, Mimi will feel like a fresh break — even for a band that has established themselves as being forward-thinking. Much like its predecessor, Mimi sees Corridor being impossible to pin down from song to song; however, whereas the elastic guitar rock of Junior came together quickly — or as the band’s Jonathan Robert describes the process ” in a rush” — then the steady-as-they-go creative pace of Mimi marked a desire to break from the “exhausting” work ethic that birthed Junior.

“The goal was to work differently, which is the goal we have every time we work on a new album—to build something in a new way,” Robert explains. “This time, we took our time.” During the summer of 2020, the members of the band — Jonathan Robert (vocals, guitar), Dominic Berthiaume (vocals, bass), Julien Bakvis (drums) and multi-instrumentalist Samuel Gougoux — holed away in a cottage to engage in the sort of creative experimentation that would lead to Mimi‘s material. “We went there to write, and a lot of ideas came from that retreat,” Berthiaume explains. “We didn’t end up with songs as much as we did ideas, so the result is a collage of the ideas.”

After that productive writing retreat, the band continued to tinker with the songs’ raw parts digitally and remotely over the next few years with co-producer Joojoo Ashworth leading their own specific talents in the theoretical booth. This process was naturally a byproduct of not having access to their rehearsal space as the COVID-19 pandemic faded into public view, but it was also a result of the band leaning header into incorporating electronic textures than previously.

 “For a long time, we identified as a guitar-oriented band, and the goal of making this whole record was trying to get away from that,” Berthiaume says, but while admitting that the band encountered their own challenges as a result: “We had to figure out how to make new songs without having the chance to play together. It was complicated sometimes.”

Some of the album’s new energy and life may be owed to Samuel Gougoux joining the band full-time, after pitching in on live performances in the past. “I come more from a background of electronic music, so it was nice to involve that with the band more,” he explains.

Mimi‘s first single “Mourir Demain” is built around brightly shimming and chiming guitars and soaring synths and post-punk like angular rhythms serving as lush, velvety and somewhat uneasy bed for Robert’s plaintive delivery ruminating on his looming mortality with a brutally, unvarnished yet very fearful realism. “I wrote it when my girlfriend and I were shopping for life insurance,” Corridor’s Robert says with a laugh. “With our little daughter growing up, we also considered making our will. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, from now on I’m slowly starting to plan my death.”
 

Directed by Paul Jacobs, the accompanying video for “Mourir Demain,” features hand-drawn and animated images of death and despair that’s simultaneously beautiful and unsettling.