JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 73rd anniversary of the birth of The Clash frontman Joe Strummer.
Tag: punk rock
Throwback: Happy 27th Birthday, Genesis Owusu!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates JOVM mainstay Genesis Owusu’s 27th birthday.
New Video: Street Eaters Return with Doom-Tinged and Witchy “Spectres”
Oakland-based post punk outfit Street Eaters — co-founders Megan March (vocals, drums) and John No (bass, vocals), along with Joan Toledo (guitar) — will be releasing their long-awaited and highly-anticipated fifth album, Opaque on September 5, 2025 through Dirt Cult Records. The seven-song album reportedly sees the trio attempting to stitch up the bloody wounds of their past while being a meditation on birth, death, excavated trauma, and trying to find steadfast kinfolk in a world that’s increasingly splintered, fucked up and cruel.
Much like all of us, Street Eaters have been through the wringer a bit since 2017’s The Envoy.
The band’s guitarist Joan Toledo, left a transphobic family and government in her native Florida, eventually relocating to San Francisco, where they became an editor at Maximum Rocknroll Magazine and a radical union organizer at the world famous City Lights Books.
The band’s front woman Megan March had a child. And while becoming a mother was, as she puts it, “an incredible joy and opportunity to rewire emotional pathways and deep wounds,” it was also a reminder of her own childhood: March’s mother was violently homophobic and eventually threw Megan and her teenage sister — both queer — from their childhood home.
For March, childbirth was both a traumatizing and transformational experience. Ironically born on July 4, her baby immediately entered a world steeped in bureaucracy: The hospital was so understaffed that March was neglected until the last moment and was forced to endure an emerging C-section. “I was borderline dehumanized by the toxic, misogynistic nature of the American medical system and its focus on efficiency and profit before care,” she says.
“Opaque is a record that gets deep into the stark and beautiful reality of growth and transition from trauma and loss,” Street Eaters’ March explains. “What does it mean to wake up one day and realize you are living the way you have always demanded to live — yet with all those jagged piles of emotional, physical, and social/political baggage still slicing through the veil?” The album isn’t just confrontational; it’s complicated. It sees the band, much like the rest of us, groping towards identity, understanding, and a place in the world in the process of being curated. “It’s a transition into finding peace with the world — a resonant connection with community and chosen family, getting beyond a lot of the pain and hurt,” the band’s John No says. “We’re trying to suture up wounds at this point and create something that’s healthy.”
Last month, I wrote about Opaque‘s first single “Tempers,” a furious, adrenaline pumping ripper that as March explains is about “being in isolation and not being sure what the future is going to be like and how things will be when the storm is over.” The album’s second and latest single “Spectres” is a doom-tinged, witchy incantation that’s deceptively belies its sweet and deeply loving core. The song’s narrator processes their complicated past while reflecting on healthy parenthood, striving to imbue love, caring and positive direction for their child — with the understanding that she also has to empower the child to be their own person. “I’m working to create a much better emotional landscape for my son o grow in — to find both understanding and healing from the breakage of cycles of abuse and isolation,” the band’s Megan March says.
Filmed by Joey Lusteman and John No, the accompanying video for “Spectres” is split between footage of the band performing in a small club and of March locking herself out in an industrial wasteland, trying to figure her way out.
Throwback: Happy 61st Birthday, Adam Yauch!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 61st anniversary of the birth of Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch.
Throwback: Happy 73rd Birthday, Stewart Copeland!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Stewart Copeland’s 73rd birthday.
New Video: Austin’s Die Spitz Shares a Bruising, Mosh Pit Friendly Ripper
Rising Austin-based outfit Die Spitz — Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Ellie Livingston and Kate Halter — can trace some of their origins back to when Schrobilgen and Livingston met in preschool. They befriended Halter in middle school. And they brought De St. Aubin into their friend group when they started the band back in 2022.
Initially, the quartet was looking to find reasons to hang out more often, and decided they should start a band after a late-night viewing of the Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt. They settled on the name Die Spitz over a “brown bag of Fireball,” opting for the feminine German definite article in place of the English. “It reminds me of the Grim Reaper spitting,” Livingstone jokes.
Their first live shows saw them pairing originals with covers from some of their early inspirations including Black Sabbath, Pixies, Mudhoney, PJ Harvey and Nirvana. Unsurprisingly, they express their ideas and themselves through a shameless blend of classic punk, hardcore metal, alt rock and more. They’ve also become known for riotous live show, where dueling cartwheels, members climbing rafters and solos while crowdsurfing could happen at just about any moment.
The Texan quartet’s highly-anticipated full-length debut, the Will Yip-produced Something to Consume is slated for a September 12, 2025 release through Third Man Records. The album reportedly sees the members of Die Spitz combining their passion, friendship, identity and artistry to fight against the seemingly inescapable decay and chaos that surrounds modern life. “There’s a political side to it, but addiction and love can also be all-consuming,” the band’s Ellie Livingston says.
As the band trades off instruments, swapping songwriting and vocal duties, and generating powerful songwriting on concussive bursts, they have managed to create their own little pocket of the world, where we can all stand on the edge together.
Something to Consume‘s 11 tracks reportedly contains multitudes and yet feels like a singular epicene, an expansive and expressive collection, unified in its camaraderie and freedom. “We depend on our freedom — freedom to do what we want, present the ideas we want, make the music we want,” Livingston says. “Whether it’s based in metal or something soft, no matter which of us wrote the song, we all contribute and work together. As a person, I don’t have a strong ego or voice, but within this band each one of us is capable of so much more.”
“Something to Consume is an album experience for everyone. Whether you’re craving a smack of lively metal or a melancholy wave of grungey violin, there’s a piece of all of us injected. Something to Consume is a call to the multitudes of ways we as humans allow consumption to enrapture our culture as well as ourselves.”
Though they’ve only been playing together for a few years, the album also shows a maturity and technical prowess wielded and wed to the service of their deep and abiding friendship — and a hope to inspire change. “Some people aren’t interested in being political activists via music, but it weighs on me heavily and I feel misaligned with my calling if I don’t,” Chloe De St. Aubin says. “The four of us are free spirits with multiple interests, and there’s no limit or power dynamic that can derail us.”
Something to Consume‘s first single, “Throw Yourself to the Sword” is a bruising, most pit friendly synthesis of Slayer and long-haired Metallica era thrash metal, The Sword-like stoner rock and punk anchored around some of the hardest and grimiest riffs I’ve heard in some time paired with punchily delivered verses and feral howls for the song’s hooks and choruses. Play loud and open up that fucking pit — right now!
“‘Throw Yourself to the Sword’ is a high-energy ode to what we want young people to feel. There’s a lot of existentialism and despair in other songs on the album that still sheath the same theme, but ‘Throw Yourself to the Sword’ is the raise of optimism. Despite living in a state of mundanity or hopelessness, you can still rise up and fight the unknown, as long as you’re willing to throw yourself to it,” Ellie Livingston explains.
Fittingly, the accompanying video directed by Emily Sanchez is set in and around a local laundromat, supermarket and farm with young women playing “Throw Yourself to the Sword,” as the band’s frontperson appears and inspires them to be mischievous and joyful as a form of resistance and when necessary to pick up the sword and fight.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Debbie Harry!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the iconic Debbie Harry’s 80th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 70th Birthday, Mick Jones!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates The Clash’s and Big Audio Dynamite’s Mick Jones’ 70th birthday.
New Audio: Detroit Punks The Lowcocks Share a Cheeky Cover of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”
Founded back in 2017, the Detroit-based punk outfit The Lowcocks have established their own sound while sharing stages with several national touring acts, including The Casualties, Total Chaos, Nekromantix, The Koffin Kats, Menstrual Tramps, GBH, The Suicide Machines and The Exploited.
The Detroit-based punks latest single is a deliriously fun and cheeky, straightforward bruising cover of Dolly Parton‘s beloved 1980 smash-hit “9 to 5.” If you somehow didn’t know, “9 to 5” is a defiant feminist anthem, capturing the ambition, chutzpah and the bitter frustrations of its narrator/songwriter. But what makes it truly great is that what the song expresses and evokes is something that generations of working women know exactly what Dolly is talking about in the song. And in some small way, The Lowcocks cover feels like a passing of the torch for a younger generation, who will have to maneuver and fight an altogether different yet similar fight.
New Audio: Detroit’s The Lowcocks Shares a Blistering, Politically Charged Ripper
Founded back in 2017, the Detroit-based punk outfit The Lowcocks have established their own sound while sharing stages with several national touring acts, including The Casualties, Total Chaos, Nekromantix, The Koffin Kats, Menstrual Tramps, GBH, The Suicide Machines and The Exploited.
Their latest single “The Forgotten” is a blistering, politically charged, mosh pit friendly ripper, anchored around scorching, power chord-driven riffage, propulsive drumming and a snarled vocal. While “The Forgotten” channels old-school hardcore punk, the song focuses on contemporary concerns with a laser-like, incisive precision: The band explains that the song is centered around immigration detention center at this country’s southern border — and the experience of children who arrive without the safety and protection of relatives.
“The next time you see a four or five year old kid, imagine them running alone, in the dark, scared – and then being put in a cage,” the band’s Annie Oakley says. “Our news cycle moves fast and it’s easy to get burned out, or feel overwhelmed by the world, but these cages are still full of people and these kids are being forgotten, which is where the name of our song came from – it’s a reminder and a promise that we won’t let them be forgotten.”
New Audio: Essex, UK’s Nukie Shares Swaggering “Face like -_-“
Essex, UK-based artist Nukie is an emerging artist, who is gaining momentum within East London‘s underground music scene. And within a short period of time, he has quickly established a sound that’s a bold collision of punk and British electronic subcultures, blending garage, indie rock, drum ‘n’ bass and grunge. Routinely driven by distorted guitars, punchy rhythms and gritty vocal-led hooks, the rising British artist attempts to channel the tension and urgency of his environment while channeling the disillusionment and intensity of modern life.
Operating with a DIY ethos, the rising British artist oversees every aspects of his creative output from production and recording to visual design, bringing a cohesive and authentic quality to his work.
Nukie’s latest single “Face like -_-” is a bold, swaggering anthem anchored around dusty and glitchy breakbeats, distorted and woozy guitars, enormous hooks and choruses paired with an insouciant, extremely British delivery. The result seemingly channels a synthesis of The Streets, Odelay-era Beck and garage while showcasing at an artist with an uncanny knack for catchy and rousing hooks and choruses.
Throwback: Happy Belated 70th Birthday, Topper Headon!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates Topper Headon’s 70th birthday.
New Video: DVTR Returns with an Incisive Ripper Tackling Colorism and Racism
French Canadian JOVM mainstays DVTR — Le Couleur‘s Laurence G-Do a.k.a. Demi Lune and Gazoline‘s, Kandle‘s Xavier Caféine‘s and Gab Bouchard‘s JC Tellier, a.k.a. Jean Divorce — burnt up the Canadian indie scene with the release of their debut EP, 2023’s BONJOUR. The EP amassed a plethora of rapturous reviews, landed on a number of Best of 2023 lists and earned the duo the first batch of a growing number of awards in Québec.
Building upon that momentum of the previous year, the duo released an expanded edition of their debut EP BONJOUR (BIS), which featured a couple of bonus tracks.
The Montrealers supported the original and expanded editions of BONJOUR EP with a frenetic and whirlwind world tour over the past couple of years, which has featured sets across the club and festival circuit in Asia, Mexico, Germany and Québec. They’re currently in the middle of an extensive bit of touring across France.
During this remarkably busy period, the duo released a live album on VHS (!) and added more awards to their already crowded mantle — the 2025 Breakout Artist of the Year at the GAMIQ Gala earlier this year.
And they’ve still managed to release new material. They began this year with “Né pour flâner (Born to loiter),” a song that further cements the duo’s uncanny knack for mosh pit friendly, catchy hooks, punchily delivered vocals and furious synth and guitar riffage.
Cementing their reputation for restless and frenetic creativity, the duo return with “Couleur peau (Your Next Token Asian Friend),” arguably one of the more defiant, feisty and perhaps somewhat straightforward punk songs of a growing catalog of breakneck rippers. The song sees the duo happily spitting on and trampling the outdated, ridiculous French concept of couleur peau (“skin color”), a term that according to the band only ever refers to white or beige skin. While calling out colorism, the song is also an incisive criticism of performative and wishy washy White liberals that sees the song’s narrator ready to cash in on White guilt. I’ll be your token Asian pal– if you ante up, the song says. But she’ll also call you out for it, as she’s cashing that check.
The accompanying video by Cedric Demers and Alexandre Normand feature DVTR’s frontperson insouciantly eating a buffet-style table of Chinese food while the song plays — with chopsticks and then a fork.