JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 115th anniversary of the birth of Mahalia Jackson.
Tag: women who kick ass
Throwback: Happy 89th Birthday, Yvonne Staples!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 89th anniversary of the birth of The Staple Singers’ Yvonne Staples.
New Audio: Tycho’s Punchy Remix of Elder Island’s “Pink Lemon”
Over the past decade, Elder Island — Katy Sargent (vocals, cello), Luke Thornton (bass, beats) and David Havard (guitar, synths, programming) — have built a dedicated fanbase while amassing 375 million streams globally with a sound that’s rooted in 90s club culture.
The trio’s latest album Hello Baby Okay was released earlier this year. The album sonically features lilting funk pop guitars, hypnotic synths, intricate rhythms and warm analog textures. Last month, the band released the Hello Baby Remixed, Pt. 1 EP, which features remixes from Tycho, Harvey Sutherland and Dam Swindle.
Album track “Pink Lemon” is a breezy, hook driven disco pop tune anchored around Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar, twinkling keys and a supple bass line beneath Sargent’s soulful delivery. Tycho’s adds a punchier, funkier bass line, and glistening synth arpeggios while retaining the original’s remarkably catchy hooks, giving the song his singular take.
New Video: Lisa LeBlanc Shares Strutting and Funky “Too Many Cooks”
Acclaimed Rosaireville, NB-born, Montréal-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and Acadian icon Lisa LeBlanc will be releasing her sixth album Patchwork on February 5, 2027 through Bonsound. The roots of the album stretch from Moncton, New Brunswick to Lafayette, LA, two cities separated by about 2,200 miles/3,5000 kilometers, a distance that LeBlanc traveled in her van during a two month road trip. In the years leading up to the recording of Patchwork, Leblanc also spent time in Corsica, where she was struck by the rugged landscapes and in Ireland, where the cliffs and traditional music festivals brought her a new creative spark.
While nature plays a significant role for the album, LeBlanc channels her long-held love for 60s and 70s folk and rock to create a lush and rich tapestry of melodies, harmonies and grooves. The album also sees her drawing inspiration from traditional Cajun and Acadian music. The result is a sound that’s original, timeless — and singular. The album’s title is a nod to her grandmother, who, for over 50 years, has been making quilts meticulously from fabric scapes that weren’t originally meant to be sewn together.
Thematically, much like a travel journal, the new album offers observations of everyday life set to music with both sensitivity and humor.
Patchwork will include the previously released, rollicking “Whole Lotta Talkin‘” and the album’s second and latest single, the LeBlanc, Benoit Morier and Eric Heigle co-produced “Too Many Cooks.” A strutting and seamless blend of disco country, folk and Muscle Shoals-era soul “Too Many Cooks” may arguably the most playful and funky song LeBlanc has released to date, featuring contributions from Alabama Shakes‘ Ben Tanner and Dr. John‘s and Social Distortion‘s Ben Alleman on keys and piano; Sébastian Michaud on brass; Les Hôtesses d’Hilaire‘s Mico Roy on guitar; and Maxime Gosselin on drums. Based on the idiomatic phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen . . .,” “Too Many Cooks” points out what would happen when you’d have too many cooks in the kitchen: indecision, confusion, arguments, some sabotage, a wildly disgusting, poorly cooked meal and pissed off dinner guests.
“The music video for ‘Too Many Cooks’ is inspired by a reality cooking show where contestants host the other participants in their homes,” explains LeBlanc. “I’m competing against little mischievous puppets who are trying to sabotage my chances to win. Based on the turn of phrase ‘Too many cooks in the kitchen,’ it’s a quirky, kinda funky, kinda country fun tune!”
New Video Helena Deland Shares Shimmering “Tip of My Tongue”
2020’s debut studio album, Someone New, which was released by Luminelle Recordings introduced Montréal-based singer/songwriter and musician Helana Deland as a new and resonant voice to both the local and national indie scenes. She explored new soundscapes by teaming up with fellow Montréaler Ouri in the collaborative project Hildegard, which released two albums, 2021’s self-titled debut and 2024’s Jour 1596. And adding to a growing profile, Deland has collaborated with Men I Trust, JPEGMAFIA, Jonah Yano, Sam Evian, claire rousay and a lengthy list of others. During a remarkably busy period, Deland released her acclaimed sophomore solo album, 2024’s Goodnight Summerland through Chivi Chivi.
After opening for Weyes Blood, Andy Shauf, Connan Mockasin, Soccer Mommy and Iggy Pop, Deland supported her sophomore album with touring across North America and Europe.
Her highly anticipated third album, Eternity Shrugs is slated for a January 22, 2027 release through Chivi Chivi. Produced by Deland with longtime bandmates Francis Ledoux and Alexandre Larin, as well frequent collaborators Lysandre Ménard and Cedric Martel, Eternity Shrugs was recorded in rural Québec in bursts over four seasons. Piano, bass, organ, viola and woodwinds gather around her vocal and guitar in patient arrangements anchored by finely textured percussion. The result are songs that feel sparse one moment and subtly ornate the next. Deland imagines the album’s palette in browns — wood, leather, smoke. Warm and inhabited, the music never entirely settles.
Eternity Shrugs will include the previously released “How Do You Like Me Now,” and the album’s latest single “Tip of My Tongue.” “Tip of My Tongue” is a shimmering, dream pop-like tune featuring Deland’s breathy and expressive delivery floating over an vibey, autumnal arrangement of jangling acoustic guitar, bursts of shimmering synths, a gently chugging rhythm section driven by a simple yet propulsive drum pattern. But at its core is something left unsaid, an inner conversation between people with an intimate connection that has become a bit awkward yet still deeply familiar.
“I’m thinking of a long-awaited, momentous run-in, the kind that has kept a part of the mind alert,” Deland says. “Maybe you need to privately navigate how up-to-date on the other person’s life you’ve remained since the last time you spoke, or maybe you know a former version of them so well that the present-day one feels entirely, surprisingly familiar. The song was arranged with that feeling of familiarity in mind, like something that has been on the tip of my tongue for a long time.”
Directed by Jodi Heartz and Alex Blouin, the accompanying video for “Tip of My Tongue” is a dreamily surreal scenario that features Deland and her bandmates playing cards on a Montréal rooftop at a table set for 5. We see Deland as she delicately slides between both sides of the table, glancing at her hand of cards.
Throwback: Happy 102nd Birthday, Celia Cruz!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Celia Cruz.
New Video: AN_NA Shares Glitchy Visual for Seething “Too Much”
French-born, Montréal-based married couple and electronic music duo AN_NA formed over three decades ago. And over the course of their lengthy careers, they’ve used their experiences within electronic music, industrial and experimental music scenes to create a unique sound that sees them frequently experimenting with different styles and genres. Their long-held penchant for experimentation has given them the space to evolve as artists, while keeping them open to new ideas and influences that they readily incorporate into their own songwriting approach.
If you’ve worked in the music industry long enough, you’ll recognize that surveying longer than a few seconds in a hyper-competitive and often cutthroat industry is extremely difficult. But for the Montréal-based duo, they’ve credited their longevity to being true to their art — and to making music that they’re passionate about.
“Too Much,” is the French-born, Canadian-based duo’s latest single — and the first since the release of 2024’s sophomore album More Pills. Arguably one of the more confrontational songs of the duo’s catalog to date, “Too Much” is a seething song, featuring propulsive, tweeter and woofer rattling, industrial thump and scorching synth oscillations beneath an unhinged Nicola Kuperus-like vocal performance that’s defiant, furious and paranoid within a turn of a phrase.
While being a club banger for a dystopian age that’s inching ever so much closer to the apocalypse, “Too Much” as the duo explains finds them moving a bit closer to their punk roots. “Having lost none of our rage, ‘Too Much’ explores, without embellishment, the questions surrounding violence.”
The accompanying video for “Too Much” features the duo performing the song in a darkened club with hot, analog/VHS fuzz and glitch that undulates with the song’s propulsive thump.
New Audio: GOODTWIN Shares Breezy and Sultry “Roadside”
Led by Augusta “Gus” Alexander, indie pop project GOODTWIN derives its name as an ode to Alexander’s very good twin sister. And with the release of handful of singles over the past two years, the […]
Live Footage: JOVM Mainstays Gotts Street Park and Olive Jones Perform “Wake Me Up” at ATA Studios
Leeds-based trio and JOVM mainstays Gotts Street Park— Josh Crocker (bass, production), Tom Henry (keys) and Joe Harris (guitar) —released their full-length debut 2023’s On The Inside, which included “Got To Be Good” feat. Pip Millettt, “Fuego,” “Mountains” feat. ENNY and “Tell Me Why” feat. Olive Jones to international acclaim. And in the subsequent years since its release, the album has amassed over 300 million streams across all DPS with “Got To Be Good” landing in Season Three of BBC’s hit series Boarders and this year’s Finding Emily starring Spike Fearn and Minnie Driver.
The acclaimed British trio’s recently released sophomore album Somewhere Between is a natural progression from the soulful-groove led sound that has defined their previously with the material drawing from Bill Orcutt, Dylan Day, Dick Gaughan, Jessica Pratt, Big Thief and Blaze Foley, as well as the working methods of the house bands at Stax Records and Sun Records. The result is an album that combines the collective’s signature production prowess with an even greater warmth than before, as they also draw on the spirit of the 1970s troubadour singer/songwriter movement with a cast of long-time collaborators that include Celeste, Olive Jones, Pip Millett, Matt Maltese, Sofia and The Antoinettes, anaiis and Rosie Lowe. While the album finds the band exploring new textures, arrangements and approaches to songwriting that helps to create space for a wider cast of collaborators, the material stays rooted to the understand, live-take-in-the-studio feel that has become synonymous with the band.
Speaking on the evolution of their sound, the band said: “New influences have definitely found their way into this record, but it’s still grounded in our love of soul and jazz. The sounds originally introduced to us through all of us growing up on hip-hop. It’s about new strands weaving through what we already do”.
“The title only arrived once the album was finished, and it means something slightly different to each of us,” the band continues. ““For me, it reflects the space that collaboration creates, a place where our individual lives, moods and experiences overlap for a while to make something together. We’re all arriving from different places, but in the studio those separate worlds meet. There’s something about making music that feels like stepping into a space between the tangible and the intangible, where ideas seem to come from somewhere beyond ourselves. In many ways, that’s what this album represents: meeting somewhere between who we are individually and what we can create together.”
The album includes the previously released “Some Birds Don’t Fly” feat Matt Maltese, “Easy” feat. Celeste, and the album’s latest single “Wake Me Up” feat. Olive Jones. Featuring a sultry, old-school soul-meets-Soulquarians-like groove with dusty breakbeats, a strutting guitar lick and bursts of bubbling synths beneath Olive Jones‘ breezily soulful yet yearning delivery, “Wake Up” explores the blurred lines between true love and infatuation, capturing the messy uncertainty of someone trying to decipher whether the rush — and hope — of a new romance can develop into something deeper.
“It’s about coming out of the whirlwind stage of early romance and trying to find a steadier, more enduring form of love,” Olive Jones explains. “It’s a phase of confusion and questioning: ‘Am I making the right decision? Is this the right person for me?’ It’s about not wanting to let the fun of the whirlwind go but knowing it can’t last forever.”
The live footage of Jones and the band was shot by Andy Berriman in Leeds-based ATA Studios.
New Video: Montréal’s DONALDA Share a Glitchy, Politically-Charged Banger
Montréal-based electronic dance music duo DONALDA — Florence Lafontaine and Olivier Martin-Fréchette — derive their project’s name from the name given to the first women admitted to college in Québec in the late 19th century, and is a nod to the fictional character introduced in Claude-Henri Grignon’s 1933 novel Un homme et son péché, who, for several generations, embodied the consequences of patriarchy.
Lafontaine and Martin-Fréchette both have an academic background in digital, contemporary mixed-media and instrumental composition, as well as in jazz interpretation. Inspired by UK garage, dubstep, left field bass and other British electronic music sub-genres as well as the queer nightlife scene, the duo take a pedagogical approach to music in order to deconstruct the boundaries of musical genres. While getting people onto the dance floor is their ultimate goal, they also seek to spark musical curiosity among their audience, something that is at the core of their inclusive, unifying philosophy.
Through composition, sound design and creative coding, the Montréal-based duo tap into their wide-ranging experiences to bring every stage of DONALDA’s creative process to life. And fittingly, their versatility imbued their sound with a coherent and deeply personal artistic identity rooted in a celebration of diversity and inclusion, freedom and the French language.
Earlier this year, the duo signed to Bonsound. And since then, French Canadian outfit have released “C FOU,” “C BEN D’VALEUR” and their latest single “C CHER.” Translated into English as “It’s expensive,” “C CHER” is one-part footwork, one-part Larry Levan/Chicago-styled house and one-part glitchcore with wobbling bass that references Daniel Lanois’ 1989 song “O Marie,” which focused on the grueling, back-breaking labor of French Canadians who used to work in Ontario’s tobacco fields while also being a critique of the frantic pace of capitalism and its physical and psychological effects. The result is a song that turns collective physical and mental exhaustion into a visceral, deeply universal anthem — and is both a cry of frustration and a call to question a broken system that hinders individual and collective fulfillment.
Directed by Cori & Zacksta, the accompanying visualizer features the French Canadian duo making beats, brushing their teeth, stopping a bloody nose, making beats and hanging out with VHS video glitch and in heat mapped-style footage. It’s as trippy and high energy as the song it accompanies.
New Audio: Mynolia Shares Dream-like “Take the Mountain by Surprise”
After years of constant motion and relocation, singer/songwriter and musician Mynolia decided to embark on on a new beginning, landing in the remote wilderness of the American South, where in new isolation, she began writing the songs that would eventually comprise her forthcoming, new album Salt Around My Bed. And while in the South, she found herself turning into the mundane magic unfurling all around her, making friends with her superstitions and recognizing the holiness in the most humblest of tasks — including the burning of pictures, the scattering of salt, the crushing of eggshells for the garden. Minolta conducts each ritual with equal care throughout the album, small acts of protection that hold real power.
She then brought the album to celebrated jazz musician and co-producer Rich Ruth and with the help of a talented cast of musicians and friends around the world fleshed out the material including Pete Pételle and Florian Holoubek on drums and percussion, labelmate Spencer Cullum on pedal steel, Corin Droullard on horns, Patrick McGonigle on violin and mandolin, Sam Que on bass, All Them Witches‘ Charles Michael Parks. Jr. on bass, Blood Root’s Taylor Waffford contributed backing vocals, and co-producer Rich Ruth also contributed synths, guitar and bass.
The Rich Ruth co-produced Still Around My Bed is slated for a January 15, 2027 release through Full Time Hobby and will feature the previously released singles “Needle,” “Run Like Hell” and Holy Line,” as well as the album’s latest single “Take the Mountain by Surprise.” “Take the Mountain by Surprise” is a gorgeous folksy ballad featuring strummed acoustic guitar, gently bubbling synths and bursts of distorted guitar beneath Mynolia’s earthy delivery. Sonically seeming like a blend of old-timey mountain folk, indie rock and shoegaze, “Take the Mountain by Surprise” is both remarkably contemporary and timeless.
“This song had an unconventional birth, inspired by a weird guitar tuning with which I wrote a for-fun song called ‘Sweatpants and Straitjackets’ some years ago. That B part became the guitar foundation for this track, which then came out, lyrics, parts and instrumentation all at once,” Mynolia explains. ” I remember writing and then recording this song in one sitting after a severe rainstorm had washed out part of the mountain road to my house. An act-of-God natural boundary formed between my home and the outside world and it was exactly what I needed. I took it to Florian Holoubek for drums and then to Rich Ruth for final production, mix, and synth flourishes. ‘I wish the creek would rise, take the mountain by surprise / As the landslide pulls away there’s space for me too, today.’ Making yourself small for others to find you more digestible usually has an expiration date. Better to confess in song and set that boundary, as a mudslide won’t always do it for you.”
New Audio: SAOL Shares Earnest and Rousingly Anthemic “Lines”
Irish singer/songwriter and musician Zoë Gough is the creative mastermind of the recording project SAOL, a project that showcases a genre-bending sound that weaves elements of shoegaze, indie rock and grunge paired with vivid lyricism, catchy hooks and an uncanny knack for melodicism. The project is rooted in Gough’s dedication to engaging with music as a social platform while documenting her journey to situating herself within an Ireland that has undergone rapid change while holding onto the strands of the past that tie together the future and finding a way forward.
Gough’s work with SAOL has been played on RTE, RTE 2xm, Galway City Flirt FM and has received national radio play on Ireland’s Radio Nova while drawing comparisons to Hole, The Cranberries, My Bloody Valentine, Sinead O’Connor, and Garbage.
The Irish artist’s latest single “Lines”is a hook-driven tune anchored around earnest songwriting and performances, rousingly anthemic sing along worthy hooks and choruses, fuzzy power chords paired with her powerhouse delivery. While drawing comparisons to Hole, The Cranberries, Smashing Pumpkins and contemporaries like Soccer Mommy and Snail Mail, “Lines” draws out the prolonged process of loss and reckons with being the one left alone.
Throwback: Happy Belated 56th Birthday, MC Lyte!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates MC Lyte’s 56th birthday.
New Audio: Umeå’s Mi Von Ahn Shares Atmospheric “Yet All Drifts”
Over the course of two albums and four EPs, Umeå, Sweden-based singer/songwriter, musician and self-described sound artist Mi von Ahn creates evocative, dreamlike indie rock with intensity and presence that carries a introspective melancholy and a bit of northern Swedish wistful within a lush, dynamic soundscape in which stark open spaces meet inland forests. Her debut album, 2018’s Signals earned a Swedish GAFFA Award nomination for Best Newcomer. And adding to a now-established national profile, she has toured as an opener for The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Ane Brun, Loney Dear, and Christian Kjelvander.
The Umeå-based artist’s third album Delta Veins is slated for a November 6, 2026 release. Co-written and produced alongside Martin Hederos and Anton Sundell, the album sees Von Ahn pushing her sound into a new territory — widescreen and sweeping indie rock with trip-hop and shoegaze-inspired textures. The album’s material moves constantly between the personal and the collective, often without drawing a clear line between them. A song about holding onto an unsustainable relationship is, at the same time, a song about standing beside a burning climate crisis without acting, even while knowing better. Whether a song is about a relationship, identity, or the climate crisis, there’s an undercurrent of searching beneath it.
Delta Veins also marks the first time in the Swedish artist’s career that she has written and sung lyrics in multiple languages with passages in English, Swedish and Sámi woven together throughout the album.
Album single “Yet All Drifts” is a slow-burning tune that eschews conventional verse-chorus-verse song structures in order to let the song’s atmospheric and painterly, shoegazer-inspired textures settle into its own shape, paired with trip-hop-like breakbeats and the Swedish artist’s sultry delivery. Sonically, the result is a song that to my ears seems like a blend of 90s singer/songwriter pop rock like Joan Osbourne‘s “What If God Is One of Us?,” Portishead, Radiohaed and a bit of a A Storm in Heaven-era The Verve to create a song that’s intimate yet expansive, peaceful yet deeply restless, evoking a change that’s felt before they’re seen.
“The song is written from a dreamlike state that can arise when, instead of fighting it, you manage to accept the inevitable change and let yourself drift with it,” says Von Ahn. “On the surface everything is still, but underneath a slow, almost invisible shift is taking place. A sense that we are not victims of the change, we are the change.”