Tag: women who kick ass

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Rising Aussies Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers Share Raucous and Rowdy “BALCONY”

Currently split between Ngunnawal/Canberra and Naarm/Melbourne, the rising Aussie indie outfit Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers — Anna Ryan they/she, vocals, guitar), Scarlett McKahey (she/her, guitar, vocals), Jaida Stephenson (she/her, bass) and Neve van Boxsel (she/her, drums) — broke out into the national and international scene with 2022’s Pretty Good For A Girl Band EP, which received praise from The Guardian and Teen Vogue, as well as airplay from triple j.

Pretty Good For a Girl Band EP‘s lead single “Girl Sports” landed at #55 on the triple j Hottest 100 list. Their full-length debut, 2023’s I Love You debuted at #6 on the ARIA Albums Chart and included “I Used To Be Fun,” which landed at #52 on the Hottest 100. That same year they opened for Foo Fighters — and they were named one of Spotify’s New Noise Artists to Watch for 2024.

Adding to a growing list of accolades, the band received a J Award-nominations for Australian Album of the Year and Song of the Year for “I Used To Be Fun,” an APRA Award-nomination for Emerging Songwriter of the Year and Rolling Stone Australia Award-nominations for Best New Artist and Best New Single. They also won an AIR Award for Best Independent Rock Album or EP, a MusicACT Award for Artist of the Year and the Michael Gudinski Breakthrough Artist ARIA Award.

Last year’s deluxe album, I Love You Too featured standout collaborations with Softcult on “Dull” and the rapidly rising The Linda Lindas on “Please Me.”

While developing a reputation as one of the Australia’s most urgent and exciting contemporary acts, the band has also received attention for their political concerns, including advocating for Green Music’s No Music on a Dead Planet, contributing to an Aussie Parliamentary inquiry into live music and being outspoken supporters of AAM’s Michael’s Rule. The rising Aussie outfit has found ways to channel their passion for music and social change into everything that they do.

The Aussie quartet’s latest single, the raucous Catherine Marks-produced “Balcony,” finds the band channeling the likes of Wet Leg, Amyl and the Sniffers and Dream Wife with the band pairing rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses with a relentless motorik groove, angular and fuzzy power chords, McKahey’s punchily coquettish delivery and a glitchy trip hop-like bridge. At its core, the song describes a desire to get out there, drink, party, flirt with some pretty young thing and just cause some fucking chaos. It’s a Friday, and you just got out of work song y’all.

“BALCONY IS FOR WHEN YOU’RE FEELING CHEEKY AND WANT TO KISS SOMEONE ON THE FACE AND GET KICKED OUT OF A BAR!!! CHAOS!!!!!” The band says.

“Balcony” marks a bold new chapter for the band, with the band expanding their signature sound with a widescreen flair. It’s the first bit of new material that came out of a five-week recording session at New South Wales-based The Grove Studios with Catherine Marks, who the band calls “a frickin’ dream.” They add “We have learnt heaps from her and have been such huge fans for so long! She’s stupidly hardworking and makes us all feel very motivated and inspired, which is hard to do when you’re locked in an isolated studio for 5 straight weeks. Hallelujah and god bless Miss Marks.” 

Directed by Nick Sullivan, the accompanying video for “Balcony” features the members of the band at a rowdy house party, including the titular balcony. Of course, there’s booze, lines for the bathroom, folks making out and hooking up — and drunk POV shots. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing that — but you know, YOLO, right?

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 108th Birthday, Ella Fitzgerald!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 108th anniversary of the birth of Ella Fitzgerald.

singer/songwriters by William Ruben Helms
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Live Concert Photography: The New Colossus Festival 2023: Day 4: 3/11/23: Shoegaze Party at Arlene’s Grocery feat. Lauren Lakis, Astronomies and Gossamer Blue

Live concert photography of Lauren Lakis, Astronomies and Gossamer Blue playing 2023’s New Colossus Festival Shoegaze Party.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Milena Casado Shares Meditative “SELF LOVE”

Milena Casado is a rising Spanish-born composer, producer, trumpeter and flugelhorn player, who has generated incredible buzz over the past years through her work with Terri Lyne Carrington, Vijay Iyer, Aaron Parks, Kris Davis and others, which has led to performances at some of the world’s most renowned venues and festivals, including Carnegie Hall, Village Vanguard, The Kennedy Center, North Sea Jazz Festival, Montréal Jazz Festival and Monterrey Jazz Festival.

During that same period, Casado has also developed a reputation as a notable bandleader in her own right, leading a working quintet with sets at North Sea Jazz Festival, Montréal Jazz Festival, NYC Winter Jazzfest and a list of others. Adding to a breakthrough year, the rising Spanish artist will be releasing her full-length debut, Reflection of Another Self on May 16, 2025 through Candid Records.

Reflection of Another Self is reportedly a sonically adventurous and deeply personal exploration of her identity that tackles overcoming personal trauma, including experiencing racism in Spain, grappling with her dual heritage and more.

The album’s latest single, “SELF LOVE” is a meditative neo-soul/smooth jazz-like number that features Casado’s ethereal cooing, floating over glistening synths played by Casado and Morgan Guerin, Casado’s soulful and punchily swaggering trumpet lines, a supple and soulful bass line from the legendary Meshell Ndegeocello, shimmering keys, synths and Rhodes from Mike King and expressive yet minimalist drumming from Jongkuk Kim. While subtly recalling Dave Guy‘s long-awaited full-length debut, last year’s Ruby and Robert Glasper, “SELF LOVE” expresses a contented sigh of hard-earned yet empowering self-acceptance.

“Loving yourself is one of the hardest things to do,” Casado explains. “With ‘SELF LOVE,’ I wanted to capture that journey, what it feels like to reach a place of acceptance and understanding. For me, self-love is still a work in progress, but maybe . . . this is how it sounds.”

Along with the new single, Casado announced an album release show on May 10, 2025 at Public Records. The show will feature guest spots from Morgan Guerin, David Virelles, Maasai, Zacchae’us Paul and more.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunflower Bean Shares Shimmering “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back”

Formed back in 2013, while they were still teenagers, New York-based trio Sunflower Bean — Julia Cumming (vocals, bass) Nick Kivlen (guitar, vocals) and Olive Faber (drums) — are arguably one of the New York metropolitan area’s most acclaimed and commercially successful, contemporary indie bands. Since their formation, the New York-based trio have released three critically acclaimed albums, 2016’s Human Ceremony, 2018’s Twentytwo in Blue and 2022’s Headful of Sugar, which featured several chart-topping singles. 

The band has supported those albums with sold-out tour dates as headliners and as openers for the Beck, The Strokes, Cage the Elephant, Interpol, Courtney Barnett, The Pixies, The Kills, DIIV, Wolf Alice and more. They’ve also made the rounds of the international festival circuit with stops at Glastonbury, Governor’s Ball, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Reading Festival, Leeds Festival and others. And famously, they opened for Bernie Sanders during primary campaign rallies. 

Late last year, the band returned with the Shake EP. The self-produced and self-recorded effort featured some of the band’s heaviest, most immediate and loudest material they’ve written and recorded to date. Influenced by the doom-laden, riff-driven sound of Black Sabbath and others, the EP is an embrace of rock tropes and excess, while nodding to the band’s first two albums. 

“SHAKE was inspired by our first years as a DIY band, the spirit that birthed us and gave us the chance to have this enduring journey together,” the band says of the EP. “We wrote, recorded, engineered, and produced these songs so nothing was filtered through anyone else’s idea of us. We always felt like rock and roll was a feeling, not a sound. But sometimes there is no subverting it or explaining it. We’re now offering it exactly as it occurred to us.” 

The JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated fourth album Mortal Primetime is slated for a Friday release through Lucky Number. Three years have passed since the release of Headful of Sugar and in that time, the members of the band drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. The album reportedly finds the band with a deeply renewed sense of purpose after nearly losing everything they’ve built together. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” the band’s Julia Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.”

Mortal Primetime‘s material was inspired by alternative rock and psychedelia and rooted in arena-sized ambition, which results in a sound that’s not just undeniably theirs, but also sees the band celebrating their history while boldly pushing into the future. 

Earlier this year, I wrote about “Champagne Taste” a song title that’s a nod to the band’s long-time alias when performing secret shows to test out new material. Anchored around scuzzy riffs, arena rock friendly, power chord-driven hooks and choruses paired with Cumming’s sultry, The Idiot-era Iggy Pop-styled croon, “Champagne Taste” sees the band simultaneously channeling a synthesis of 80s glam rock and 90s riot grrl alt rock and punk. But at its core, is a fierce, almost feral determination.

“This song came after a period that felt like rock bottom for the band. It is about feeling beaten down but still driving forward, to keep faith, to grow and to continue to create on our own terms, our Mortal Primetime,” the band explains.

Mortal Primetime‘s latest single “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back” is a Laurel Canyon-like tune that nods a bit at Twentytwo in Blue while featuring chiming guitars and one of Cumming’s most beautiful and earnest vocal turns in some time. But at its core is the simmering anger of being mistreated and denied innocence; of having an inability to trust; of knowing that you’ll live with the impacts of that treatment for the rest of your days.

The song, which is about personal experiences with being groomed finds Cumming being “as intentional and direct as possible,” as she grapples with what she’s experienced — and how it has shaped her and her life.

“This song is about the lasting scars of grooming—the parts of yourself that are stolen and the anger you carry because of it,” Cumming explains. “It came to me in such a raw and direct way, there was no second-guessing or wondering how I felt. I didn’t want to write a song about being healed, I wanted to be angry about needing to heal at all. The line, ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord lets me get even first,’ is important because it captures the intensity of these feelings and how they go beyond logic. I am confronting the pain and the questions that will never be answered.”

Directed by Harv Frost, the accompanying video for “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back” visually exploring Mortal Primetime‘s central themes while seeing the trio supporting one another as they fight to regain their footing in gorgeous, almost painterly settings.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Dominque and the Diamonds Share a Patsy Cline-Styled Ballad

Led by Colombian-American frontwoman Dominque Gomez, Los Angeles-based country band Dominique and the Diamonds can trace their origins to back to last year, when the band came together on a whim after Gomez was asked to perform a country set local summertime series, The Grand Ole Echo.

Friends from cosmic country outfit Caravan 222 and rock band Triptides were asked to perform as a backing band for Gomez and over the course of the year gained buzz locally for a sound that channels Linda Ronstadt, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Townes Van Zandt and the Laurel Canyon sound — but with a contemporary feel.

The Los Angeles-based country outfit’s Glenn Brigman-produced debut EP, For a Fool is slated for a June 13, 2025 release. Recorded using a mix of analog and digital equipment in Brigman’s Crestline, CA-based studio, For a Fool EP channels the golden age of classic country with the material touching upon tried-and-true themes of romance, lonesomeness, revenge, drunken playfulness while anchored around the old school song-as-story. And the material sees the band weaving the experiences of the contemporary world, too.

“I write country music and love to sing country songs, but I’ve always associated myself with the Colombian half of my identity more than the white side. My Dad and his immediate family immigrated to the US from Colombia in 1966 and they’d endured so much struggle in the process,” Dominique and the Diamonds’ Dominque Gomez says. “Then, you have my Mom’s side who were small town farmers in Minnesota and Southern trailer park girls. When you look at me, you see a brown girl, and I fucking love that. And when I was younger, I felt like I was forced to fit into a category, but I was too white to be Latina and too Latina to be white. It’s a beautiful thing to have the wisdom now to embrace both and just be me.”

The EP’s first single, EP title track “For a Fool,” is a Patsy Cline-styled ballad of heartbreak, despair and uneasy acceptance anchored around some gorgeous pedal steel and Gomez’s Linda Ronstadt-like vocal. Inspired by the modern “situationship” phenomenon and Gomez’s experiences dating in Los Angeles, the song describes a bitterly common scenario: dealing with a love interest you really dig, who’s an unserious time waster that’s playing with your heart and emotions. And while the song’s narrator is heartbroken, she clearly recognizes her time and her worth, offering a bit of wisdom for anyone who encounters this sort of lover — leave that fool alone before you get played for a fool.

“I was 28, single, and could finally see through these types of guys so clearly,” Gomez says. “I actually started to feel bad for them at a certain point. You’ve got to be real sad deep down to just use a person to satisfy your own loneliness and boredom.”

Directed by the band’s Hamilton Boyce (bass), the accompanying video for “For a Fool” was shot at Bar Flores, a Latina-owned tequila/mezcal bar in Los Angeles’ Echo Park section, known for having predominantly female bartenders of color behind the bar, including them and’s Gomez. And throughout we see Gomez in a series of flashbacks, presumably falling in love — and then in the present, proudly telling off an off-screen love interest.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Doechii Shares Surreal and Anxious Visual for “Anxiety”

Last year was a breakthrough year for Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal was released to critical praise from NPR, Paste, Consequence, Stereogum and UPROXX while coming in at #1 on Rolling Stone‘s “The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2024” and in the top 10 of their overall “Best Albums of 2024” list. And unless you were living in a cave or just awoken from a coma, you’d recall that earlier this year, the acclaimed artist won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.

Adding other a boatload of accolades, Doechii was recently named Woman of the Year at the Billboard Women in Music event and Outstanding Music Artist at the GLAAD Media Awards.

Her latest single “Anxiety,” follows “DENIAL IS A RIVER,” which debuted at # 1 on both the Official Physical Singles and Official Vinyl Singles charts, and was released last month through Top Dawg Entertainment/Capitol Records, and has already amassed over 272 million combined global streams, include 85 million domestic streams and more than 23 billion views across her social media. And if you somehow hadn’t heard the song on the radio or on your DSP of choice, you’d be familiar with the song because it’s gone viral and has become a firmly buried earworm. The song is remarkably catchy but it also continues to showcase one of our moment’s most unique and wildly talented artists — and some of the most inventive production you’ll hear in pop and hip-hop.

Directed by James Mackel, the accompanying video follows the acclaimed artist as she makes her way through an elegant mansion with an overly attentive staff. However, the luxurious setting is fraught with disturbing, deeply surreal, anxiety-inducing and/or terrifying situations, including a raging kitchen fire, an enormous and menacing Doberman, a falling chandelier, a team of black-clad, ninja-like intruders, who break through the windows, two creepy twins, before ending with a collection of “Thriller”-like dancers that turns into a Broadway-styled dance scene. It’s playful yet deeply unsettling.

“Anxiety” is Doechii’s first single to enter Billboard‘s Hot 100’s Top 10. Currently, the track is in the Top 20 of the Top 40 and Urban Radio Charts. And it currently ranks in on the To 10 on the Rhythm radio charts. The track is currently #12 on the Spotify Global Charts and Top 5 on the UK’s Official Singles Charts.