Tag: Regal Degal

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Josh da Costa Shares Shimmering, Goth-like Dirge “96 Year Old Girl”

Los Angeles-based artist Josh da Costa was a fixture in the early 2010s Brooklyn scene. Covering music back then, it seemed as though anyone could start a band or a project — and just about everyone did. And they all played at hundreds of now, long-shuttered venues like Cameo Art Gallery, Glasslands, 285 Kent, The Palisades, The Grand Victory, Trash Bar and countless others. da Costa’s first band Regal Degal toured with Real Estate and DIIV and opened for The Pop Group.

When Regal Degal split up, da Costa relocated to Los Angeles. The old Craftsman house he shared with Geneva Jacuzzi, Shags Chamberlain, James Ferraro and Daryl Johns was a paradise for “freaks and friends,” as well as artists and musicians, who constantly wandered in for a jam session or for a hang. At the time, he played drums with Drugdealer and MGMT and he formed CMON, who released an album through Mexican Summer.

The party came to an abrupt end when the Craftsman burned down “in a blaze of glory,” set alight by a serial arsonist and the pandemic forced CMON, much like countless other acts, to cancel a big tour. da Costa’s serious relationship also ended. But for him, it wasn’t all disaster: his friends supported him after the fire, he met someone new and the pandemic meant that he finally had the time to revisit music from his adolescence and “get deep into some of the great I’d had lying around for years but overlooked.”

da Costa’s full-length debut, New Wave Graveyard is slated for a July 24, 2026 release through Stones Throw Records. He imagined the album as a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality.” “Instead of trying to hone in on one specific vibe or sound, I went through my own taste and record collection and tried out different approaches — as if I were more than just one artist,” he explains. While drawing from different styles and genres, the album’s material is anchored in how he crystallizes these very different approaches into something singular distinct, crafting a stylish record that defies easy categorization.

If you’ve been lucky to catch da Costa DJ around Los Angeles or have caught his Confusing Mix radio show on NTS, the album’s album overall aesthetic won’t come as a surprise. As a DJ and radio host, he has an uncanny knack for finding curious records from all over the place — music from Brussels-based micro-labels, Flying Nun Records favorites and left field post punk — and blending them in a way that somehow makes perfect sense.

Written over the course of several years, New Wave Graveyard was written during a transition period, a time when da Costa was “getting close to people and getting torn between the types of pleasure and discomfort all of that brings. Breaking people’s hearts, but mostly your own. And remaining excited about not just falling in love, but staying in love.”

Much like countless others, da Costa was drawn to LA’s “movie magic, bizarre music, sleazy sexy glammy druggy outsiders, and this blown-out bad vibe flipside to the California dream” – which interestingly enough, also describers New Wave Graveyard in a nutshell. The titular new wave graveyard is both a literal place (da Costa sometimes drives by his old burned-down house, which is still vacant) and a vibe, an elegy to forgotten fantasies and faded memories.

Nothing lasts forever: Bands start and break up. Friends flame out and lovers leave. Treasured spaces vanish. But the album reportedly bottles the sensation of being there, where the magic and cool shit happened — even if that place is completely imagined. It’s a celebration of strange people met once, but never forgotten, of shows and parties you attended and those you wished you had, of being young and earnest, and a little bit weird.

New Wave Graveyard’s latest single “96 Year Old Girl” is a dirgey yet shimmering electro pop ballad that to my ears is one-part brooding goth, one-part Tears for Fears, one-part Prefab Sprout and one-part Jorge Elbrecht. Thematically, the song reckons with not feeling seemed by a loved one and was written one night “after getting really high, ordering Dominos, and watching Terminator 2,” da Costa explains.

Directed by Skellyrot, the accompanying video for “96 Year Old Girl” fittingly employs 1980s VHS shot footage and resembles both public access TV shows and low budget music videos and horror movies.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Danish-born Los Angeles-Based Artist Dinner Releases Americana-Inspired Visuals for “Un-American Girl”

Anders Rhedin is a Danish-born, Los Angeles, CA-based producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who may be best known for a brief stint collaborating with Danish-born singer/songwriter and guitarist  Jannis Noya Makrigiannis in Copenhagen -based Choir of Young Believers, an act that had multiple chart topping hits in Denmark and was named “Best New Act” in 2009’s Danish Music Awards. Since relocating to Los Angeles several years ago, Rhedin started his own solo recording project Dinner, which received attention with the release of his debut EP collection and his full-length debut Psychic Lovers. 

With his sophomore effort New Work, which is slated for a September 8, 2017 release through renowned indie label Captured Tracks Records, Rhedin had a desire to do things differently.  “I just needed to get back to the approach I used when I was still self-release cassettes back in Copenhagen,” Rhedin explains in press notes. “I spent way too much time on the previous record. I was sitting in front of a computer screen alone for seven months working on it, obsessing over it. This time, I wanted to work very fast in order think less. I wanted to collaborate more. I hoped that other people’s presence would keep my perfectionism in check.” Rhedin enlisted Regal Degal’s and Ducktails’ Josh Da Costa to co-produce New Work, and the album features guest spots from Tonstartssbandht’s Andy White, and unlike the previous album, an array of American-born and-based musicians including Blouse’s Charlie Hilton, Infinite Bisous’ and Connan Mockasin’s Rori McCarthy, The Paranoyds’ Staz Lindes and Sean Nicholas Savage. The recording sessions found Rhedin, Da Costa and company working during the late night, off-hours at a  studio in an industrial section of downtown Los Angeles, with material being recorded on the spot — with little preparation time. “A lot of my favorite music is American. I thought it would be fun to go a little bit less Euro on this one,” Rhedin says in press notes. “I’m pretty Euro by myself, some might say. I wanted to add a different color.” 

In between sessions, Rhedin recoded and overdubbed material in his apartment with a 4 track recorder from the early 80s. We did very little editing, we just tried to record what was there. You’ll hear a lot of first-takes on the record,” Rhedin informs us in press notes. “The best part of the process was driving home early in the morning though the empty streets of LA, listening to the night’s recordings. Because it was such an immediate experience.”

Reportedly, New Work and its first single “Un-American Woman” was inspired a by William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” and Rhedin’s own personal experiences. “‘Un-American Woman’ is a song I wrote just before I stopped going out, just before I stopped sleeping around with woman,” the Danish-born, Los Angeles-based producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist says in press notes. “The song seems to be about disillusionment and a fear of being stuck in a certain lifestyle. But it also also touches upon the potential transformational aspects of ‘bad things.’ Nothing’s black or white, good or bad. There is just life-force moving. A constant movement. ‘The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom’ in the words of Blake.” 

Sonically speaking, New Work’s first single manages to be a mischievously anachronistic and effortless meshing of Joy Division and The Smiths-like post-punk, 60s guitar pop and psych pop with Around the World in a Day-era Prince, as the song manages to possesses a similar moody Romanticism paired with an ability to craft a slick and infectious hook. 

Interestingly, the recently released visuals for the song were shot in and around Las Vegas and manages to evoke the song’s haunting loneliness and swooning Romanticism; but interestingly enough the video features Mac DeMarco’s brother Hank dancing with his ballet troupe, and a sequence featuring a bunch of young people roughhousing in a seedy motel room. It’s decidedly American but from an outsider’s point of view. 

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

Regal Degal is a New York-based trio, by way of Los Angeles, CA of Josh da Costa (guitars and vocals), Josiah Wolfson (bass), and Jamen Whitelock (drums), with additional member Jimi Hey (Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, […]