JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tribute to Salt ‘N’ Pepa.
Tag: women who kick ass
New Audio: JOVM Mainstays Glixen Return with Woozy “unwind”
Phoenix-based shoegazers and JOVM mainstays Glixen — founder Aislinn Ritchie (vocals), along with Esteban Santana (guitar), Keire Johnson (drums) and Sonia Garcia (bass) — released their Sonny DiPerri-produced sophomore EP quiet pleasures last year.
quiet pleasures EP included the previously released “sick silent” and four singles I wrote about on this site, “foreversoon,” “lust” “lick the star,” and “all tied up.”
The JOVM mainstays supported their sophomore EP with stops across the global festival circuit, playing sets at Coachella, Reading and Leeds. They played a headlining Stateside tour with several sold-out shows. They hit the road with Turnover, Panchiko and Scowl — including their first UK and EU tour, supporting Turnover. They closed out 2025 with a co-headlining tour across the Southwest and West Coast with Glare.
2026 will see the band embarking on their first headlining tour in Japan and returning to the global festival circuit with a stop at Manchester, UK’s Outbreak. Throughout April and May, the JOVM mainstays will embark on a North American tour that includes an April 21, 2026 stop at Elsewhere Hall. As always, check out the tour dates below.
But in the meantime, the band remains busy. Earlier this year, they released “Medicine Bow.” The JOVM mainstays follow “Medicine Bow” with their latest single “unwind,” a hazy and woozy track that unfolds as a slow-burning churn, anchored around swelling textures that ebb, flow and dissolve. The result is a song that evokes a queasy push and pull somewhere between weightlessness and being yanked into an undercurrent. If you’ve ever had a complicated
“‘Unwind’ is about that feeling of relief when someone comes back to you after they’ve left,” Glixen’s Aislinn Ritchie explains. “It’s human nature to crave that push and pull—a drug weaned off. Blindingly hard to say no, we succumb to willful ignorance. We recorded this song in Los Angeles with Sonny Diperri producing, and it’s the first song we incorporated different instrumental elements, and it’s a glimpse into our evolution.”
Throwback: Happy Black History Month: Billie Holiday
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tribute to Billie Holiday.
New Video: Bella Litsa Shares Cinematic “Tied Together By a Silver Thread”
Isabella Komodromos is a classically trained pianist, who as a child split her time between Massachusetts and her father’s native Cyprus. Komodromos started piano lessons when she was six and quickly found herself gravitating towards minor keys and rewriting the lyrics in songbooks to be more macabre.
By the time she turned 13, she started vocal training, eventually attending Berklee College of Music, where she majored in songwriting and film scoring. Komodromos relocated to New York in 2020. Inspired by the city’s abrasiveness, she plunged into a musical and personal intensity to find her voice. The result is her solo art pop project Bella Litsa.
The bulk of her recently released full-length, studio album Drasticism was written between December of 2022 and February 2024 with much of her songwriting process occurring during periods of frenzied inspiration. “The choices I was making weren’t always good choices. I just was searching out all this extremity, like extreme love and extreme loss and to feel this crazy spectrum of things,” the Bella Litsa creative mastermind says. “The album is mostly asking: Why would I do that? But how could I not do that?”
Komodromos writes to cull her intense emotions and this personal excavation is part of her larger pursuit of the beautiful and divine. She cites her interests in astrophysics, synchronicities, Jungian psychoanalysis, the Book of Job, the Greek Orthodox church she attends, Andrei Tarkovsky and film scores for inspiration. Her work is rooted in a deeply-held belief that everything is beautiful and because every beautiful thing will end, everything is inherently sad. And in turn, songwriting is a relief, a way to preserve beauty. Similar to the drastic way she lives, she gravitates towards the extreme when it comes to her writing.
Bella Litsa writes to cull her intense emotions, and this personal excavation is part of her larger pursuit of the beautiful and divine. She taps her interest in astrophysics, synchronicities, Jungian psychoanalysis, the Book of Job, the Greek Orthodox church she attends, Andrei Tarkovsky, and film scores for inspiration. Because for Bella Litsa, everything is beautiful, and because every beautiful thing will end, everything is sad. Songwriting is a relief, a way to preserve beauty. And similar to her drastic way of living, she gravitates towards the extremes in her writing practice.
One spring day back in 2023, Komodromos came home in a strange, emotional state. She dat down at her desk, and eight hours later, she created the demo for “My Blue Eyes.” The next day she tried it again. After 12 hours, she had written “Tied Together by a Silver Thread,: a tragic epic inspired by the movements of classical music with three distinct sections. “It was probably the most inspired I was ever in my life,” she says. “I listen to it now and it just feels like my heart’s about to explode.”
That all-consuming feeling is what it feels like for the rising artist to dig deep into the core of her humanity. “I tell my psychoanalyst when we talk about songwriting: It’s like there’s a rope and I’m pulling on this rope, and the more I pull, the more the song is coming to me. But the song already existed. I’m slowly uncovering what was always there.”
For Komodromos, her propensity towards the extremes is ultimately about a desire to connect, not only with herself but with others. “I get to say all these things that I keep in and then all of a sudden people are listening to you, and they’re witnessing the breaking down,” she says. “I feel like I get so tortured, especially singing live. I think being witnessed is the most powerful feeling you can have.”
Her work is intimate and emotionally potent material that echo with a dreamlike intensity. Her sound sees her blending vintage romance with experimental textures, a sort of haunted Americana-meeting-minimalist futurism, has helped her draw comparisons to Lana Del Rey, Fiona Apple and Weyes Blood — while being a vessel for connection and cantharis. “Bella Litsa is my sadness personified. It feels like the closest I can get to my shadow, consciously,” Komodromos says.
Drasticism includes the previously released, “Angelica,” “Passion Plug,” “Never Ending Movie,” the Tori Amos and Lonny-like “1117” and the album’s latest “Tied Together By a Silver Thread.” Continuing a run of dramatic, remarkably cinematic yet deeply intimate material, “Tied Together By a Silver Thread” is a hauntingly gorgeous, lushly arranged song that features a mesh of elements of old-school balladry, rock, film scores and classical music. The rising artist’s equally gorgeous and expressive vocal dances and floats over the song’s arrangement. And much like its predecessor, the song evokes a sense of almost unreconcilable inner conflict.
Directed by Dylan Gee whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The FADER, Stereogum, NYLON and more, was shot entirely on form and thermal camera in Southern California’s Frazier Park. Fittingly, the cinematic visual evokes the swooning heart at the core of the song.
The rising artist will be playing a record release show at Night Club 101 on February 27.
Throwback: Happy Black History Month: Whitney Houston
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and honors Whitney Houston.
New Audio: Pom Femme Shares Breezy and Effortlessly Cool “Sunny SIde Up”
Swedish duo Pom Femme is a collaborative project featuring two highly accomplished musicians and producers:
- As a producer, Michelle Amkoff has worked with a lengthy list of Swedish artists. She also spent several years as a studio engineer for producer Patrik Berger.
- Phillipa Magnusson is a singer/songwriter and creative mastermind behind the solo recording project Bluephox.
The origins of the duo’s newest project can be traced to their meeting through Magnusson’s work with Bluephox. This quickly developed into Pom Femme, which is rooted in their commonly shared musical influences and interests.
According to the duo, as being a bit of “vintage pop with a French touch.” They add, “It was as if together, we wanted to make music Levi’s 501s — the core that has held genres together for decades and can be styled with everything.”
The Swedish duo released their debut EP Telenovela last year. Building upon growing momentum surrounding the pair, the follow up to their debut EP “Sunny Side Up” is a self assured and breezy tune that seemingly draws from yé-yé, 60s British Invasion rock and late 1960s psychedelia while showcasing some remarkably effortless and catchy hooks. The result is a song that’s insouciantly decadent and timelessly cool.
The duo explain that the song is about choosing simplicity over complication, something they can believe can be extremely difficult in the never-ending stream of choices we’re presented with every day. “Would you like milk, A2 milk, hemp milk or half-and-half in your coffee,” the duo say. “A short-haired economist or a long-haired culture worker in the dating app? ‘Sunny Side Up’ is a tribute to the opposite: can’t we just have a bit of fun without unnecessary hassle and live life in its simplest, most banal form?”
The duo’s full-length debut is slated for a September 2026 release.
New Video: Lucid Express Shares Dreamy and Yearning “Promise Me”
Hong Kong-based shoegazers and JOVM mainstays Lucid Express just released their long-awaited and highly anticipated sophomore album Instant Comfort today through Kanine Records.
Mixed by Kurt Feldman during marathon overnight, transpacific sessions on Discord, Instant Comfort reportedly captures the unsettling stillness of the nighttime hours. The album’s material sonically sees the Hong Kong-based JOVM mainstays pairing ethereal melodies with towering walls of jangling guitars and hazy, swirling feedback while being more clear-eyed, complex and layered than anything they’ve released to date.
The album includes the previously released “Something Blue,” and “Faux Sweetness,“as well as the album’s latest single “Promise Me.” Featuring towering layers of shimmering and churning guitars, thundering hi-hat driven drumming serving as a lush and eerily uneasy bed for Kim Ho’s ethereal and yearning vocal.
Directed and filmed by fellow Hong Kong native Neo Yeung, the accompanying video is a mix of live performance-styled footage and candid footage shot over the course of a day-long shoot.
New Video: Chicago’s Snowcuffs Shares Hazy and Anthemic “Burst”
Formed back in 2022, Chicago-based dream pop outfit Snowcuffs features members of Lightfoils and Astrobrite, Their debut EP, last year’s Sink Down saw the band quickly establishing a sound that balanced shimmering textures and memorable hooks. Inspired by Alvvays, Beach House and Mazzy Star, their work frequently drifts between nostalgic haze and fuzz-driven intensity while thematically touching upon longing, reflection and fleeting beauty.
The band has shared stages with Cold Gawd, Seashine and Cigarettes for Breakfast, and played a standout set at Kalamashoegazer, the country’s longest-running shoegaze festival.
Building upon a growing profile in the national shoegaze and dream pop scenes, the Chicago-based outfit’s sophomore EP Sweet Gravity is slated for a March 5, 2026 release. Engineered by Sanford Parker at Hypercube Studios, mixed by Robert Cheek and mastered by Baseline Audio Labs’ Chris Goosman, Sweet Gravity EP reportedly sees the band showcasing refined songwriting and a much more expansive sound that pushes the boundaries of dream pop without losing its heart and soul.
Sweet Gravity EP‘s latest single “Burst” sees the band pairing shimmering and swirling guitar textures, a forcefully driving rhythm section and remarkably catchy, rousingly anthemic hooks with ethereal vocals. Sonically, “Burst” seemingly nods at 120 Minutes-era MTV shoegaze and alternative rock — but with a decidedly modern sensibility. And at its core is a song and a narrator struggling with crippling ambivalence and self-doubt.
The band explains that “‘Burst’ is about the struggle of trying to be everything at once, and what happens when inaction, ambivalence, and self-doubt slowly erode your options in life.
I wait and see
Stare at the tree
Will it die of thirst
And fall down on me?
Ambivalence isn’t neutral, it’s destructive.”
Directed by Dave Rentaukas, the accompanying video for “Burst” is split between footage of the band’s lead singer in a Chicago area park as the sun begins to set and the rest of the band performing in a studio in front brooding yet trippy projections.
New Video: I WANT POETRY Shares Flirty “No Is A Full Sentence”
German indie electro pop duo I WANT POETRY — Tine von Bergen (vocals) and Till Moritz Moll (keys) — have received attention for crafting music that simultaneously feels cinematic and deeply human, blending emotional depth with luminous pop soundscapes.
While developing a reputation for an immersive live show and striking visuals, the German duo have earned critical acclaim and a nomination at the European Songwriting Awards. The duo have played over 100 shows across their native Germany, Poland, Sweden and elsewhere, while making the run of the European showcase festival circuit. And adding to a growing national and international profile, the duo’s single “Light” landed on iTunes charts in several countries, amassing over 500,000 streams globally — and was selected for the soundtrack for the Canadian film, La mécanique des frontières.
2026 looks to be a breakthrough year for the German indie electro pop duo: Their highly anticipated third album, Future Selves is slated for a May 29, 2026 release. The album is reportedly hopeful and transformative, inspired by a brief moment in time when the future still felt like a promise, channeling the spirit of past dreams of utopia and progress. And as a result, the new album offers a forward-thinking vision shaped by memory, imagination and the will to create what comes next.
Sonically, the album’s material marks an evolution from the reflective tones of Solace + Light, featuring layers of shimming synths and soaring melodies.
Future Selves will include the previously released “Mirrors Of The Sky,” and the album’s latest single the Micheal Vanja, Ghian Wright and The EmU-co-produced “No Is a Full Sentence.” “No Is A Full Sentence” is self-assured, flirty and defiant pop tune, anchored around glistening synth stabs and the duo’s unerring and effortless knack for catchy hooks and sleek, dance floor friendly grooves.
But under the flirty, dance floor friendly vibes is a song that’s a one-part bold feminist anthem, one-part confidence booster for those who’ve had enough. The song says that it’s perfectly normal to stand up for yourself, to go out there and get what you want, no matter what anyone else.
The accompanying video features the duo, strutting and vamping it up in a modern metropolis — mostly at night. But it emphasizes the playful, confidence boosting nature of the song.
New Video: La Sécurité Share Punchy “Bingo!”
Acclaimed Montréal-based JOVM mainstay collective La Sécurité — Éliane Viens (vocals, synths, percussion and drums), Félix Bélisle (bass, synths, percussion, piano and production), Kenny Smith (drum, guitar), Laurence Anne Charest-Gagné (guitar, percussion, vocals) and Melissa Di Menna (guitar, synths, vocals, percussion and artwork) — specialize in a brand of art punk that’s equal parts jumpy beats, off-kilter arrangements and minimalistic melodic hooks run through an insomniac filter that’s the result of excessive exposure to the city’s neon-lit late night scene.
The Canadian art punk collective’s music is about living dangerously and is prefect for being blasted at deafening levels on dance floors. But lyrically, the material is deeply inspired by and shares the ethos of the Riot Grrl movement, celebrating and defiantly advocating for the autonomization of women, friendship and benevolence.
Since the release of 2023’s full-length debut, Stay Safe!, which landed on the Polaris Music Prize long-list, the Montréal-based art punks have released 2024’s Stay Safe! REMIXED and last year’s “Detour” and “Ketchup.” Along with receiving critical praise both nationally and internationally, the outfit has made the run of the intentional festival circuit, playing sets at M for Montréal, New Colossus Festival, SXSW, End of the Road, The Great Escape, Reeperbahn and Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. They’ve toured as an opener for The Go! Team and The Rapture. And they’ve shared stages with Mauskovic Dance Band and JOVM mainstays Automatic and Death Valley Girls. During that whirlwind period, they also signed with Simon Raymonde‘s label Bella Union.
The JOVM mainstay act’s highly-anticipated, Emmanuel Éthier and Félix Bélisle co-produced sophomore album Bingo! is slated for a June 12, 2026 release through Mothland in Canada and the States, and Bella Union for the rest of the world. The new album reportedly sees the band continuing to meander in and around the fringes of punk, new wave krautrock and dance punk, while mischievously flouting stylistic form every change they get. While continuing to implement polyrhythm, counterintuitive chord changes and subtle melodic and harmonic dissonance, the album reportedly sees them introducing more no wave, no wave, noise rock and shoegaze elements to the sound that has won them intentional acclaim.
The album’s material features songs that tackles knotty themes like mental health, the autonomization of women, dysfunctional relationships with their custom moxie. Other songs playfully muse about food or address everyday mundanity with sarcasm and irony. There’s a song that celebrates unsung heroes, like the elderly. Much like its predecessor, many of the album’s tracks saw the group improvising lyrics in the studio, effectively catching lightning in a bottle.
The album was recorded with the band playing life off-the-floor, using rare ribbon microphones and vintage compressors. Adding to the overall free-flowing feel and vibe to the album’s material, many of the song’s hooks were improvised through jazz-tinged musical flights during recording sessions. The album was mixed by Bélisle and Étheir before being mastered by Robin Schmidt.
The result is an album that harnesses the Montréal-based art punks’ natural sound, a sound that fuses calculated musical chaos and musicality with high decibels.
Bingo! will feature the previously released “Detour” and “Ketchup,” and the album’s title track “Bingo.” “Bingo” is a sleek blend of DFA Records dance punk, Devo-inspired New Wave-like synths, fuzzy and angular guitar attack and a muscular, Gang of Four-like bass line paired with Viens’ mischievously punchy delivery.
The song is about embracing inspiration as it comes with lyrics informed by a filename of an early voice-demoed version of the song. “‘Bingo’ was a working title Melissa used to save the demo when we were working on the song,” the band explains. “The lyrics came later following a suggestion from Félix to describe a game of Bingo, to put into words the social life from an old folks home—elderly people that are young at heart, hence the references to Orange Crush, little hats, etcetera. The bass line and its tone are a tribute to Death From Above 1979.”
Directed by Philip Beauséjour, the accompanying video is a high-energy collage full of explosive, bright colors that accurately captures the song’s propulsive energy. Beauséjour says the the track’s energy “inspired in me the anxiety of the players leaving the hall with a big sum. It’s like a light social activity evening that can turn into a frenetic obsession with combinations of letters and numbers, stimulated by repetitive movements, sugary drinks, and cigarettes. The numbered cards become calculated abstractions, and every word from the hosts, a prayer.”
Throwback: Black History Month: Sister Rosetta Tharpe
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and pays tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Throwback: Happy Black History Month!/Happy 85th Birthday, Brian Holland!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and the legendary Brian Holland’s 85th birthday.
New Audio: Paris’ OOMA Shares Mesmerizing and Meditative “A Timeless Echo”
Paris-based outfit OOMA — Irish-born singer/songwriter Tansy Greenlee (vocals), Nicolas Bauer (bass), Hélios Mikhaïl (drums), and Florian Berret (piano, synths) — have developed a sound that meshes elements of soul, jazz and trip-hop, featuring ethereal synth laters and intricate grooves paired with mesmerizing moments of improvisation.
Each member of the band leaves their own imprint on the project’s constantly evolving sound, while blurring the lines between structured composition and songwriting and open-ended exploration and improvisation. At the core of their creative process, is the Parisian quartet’s fluid and ever-shifting chemistry, which helps their work be collaborative — and seemingly in perpetual motion.
Lyrically, the band’s material is informed by Greenlee’s existential crises with the music as a refuge, and as an intimate space where she could try to make sense of a world that’s crumbling apart. And in that refuge, raw emotion outweighs certainty.
OOMA’s latest single “A Timeless Echo” is a gorgeous yet meditative track that features Greenlee’s expressive, jazz-like vocal effortlessly dance over a mesmerizing arrangement that blends elements of jazz, trip-hop and pop.
Inspired by a striking image of a bird’s song echoed by others until it outlives the bird that originated it, “A Timeless Echo” thematically explores the passage of time, our own impermanence and mortality. The new single reflects Greenlee’s deep-seated belief in music as a way to leave a trace of one’s existence.
New Audio: JOVM Mainstays The Orielles Return with Hook-Driven “Tears Are”
Acclaimed, Manchester, UK-based JOVM mainstays The Orielles — Esmé Dee Hand-Halford (bass, vocals), Sidonie Dee Hand-Halford (drums, vocals) and Henry Carlyle Wade (guitar, vocals) — will be releasing their highly anticipated fourth album, the Joel Anthony Patchett-produced Only You Left through Heavenly Recordings on March 13, 2026.
Recorded last summer in two locations — the Greek Island of Hydra and Hamburg — the forthcoming, 11-song Only You Left reportedly sees the band consolidating the bold experimentation of 2022’s Tableau with the more stripped-back, song-driven approach of their earlier releases, channeling a return to the familiar. “There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece,” quips Henry, in reference to the band’s decision to return to their roots as a trio.
Now, as you may remember, the JOVM mainstays, which originally started out in Halifax gained attention both nationally and internationally with the release of their full-length debut, 2018’s Silver Dollar Moment, which will celebrates its eighth birthday this months. “These things come in like seven year cycles. So we’ve come in like a full circle back to a familiar place, just as different people,” the band says.
As for the foundations of the forthcoming album, the band’s Henry Carlyle Wade says “You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums.” “It comes naturally, the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford adds, “it’s not something we consciously do.” Interestingly through this process of creative renewal, the JOVM mainstays have managed to weather a pandemic, the fickleness of a trend-driven music industry and somehow emerge with something that’s familiar yet completely different.
According to Wade, the first ideas for the new album can be traced back to May 2023: Esmé Hand-Halford had purchased a freeze pedal, which allowed her to play around with sustained notes on her guitar. These heavy drones would later form the background of album tracks “Wasp” and “Three Halves.”
In breaks between tours, the band began to meet up and record their practice room sessions, later analyzing the voice notes with a granular attention to detail. “We recorded everything on our phones, every snippet,” explains Henry. “We went so deep into what each song needed or what we wanted to hear from it.”
While the Tableau sessions were semi-improvisational and partially written in the recording studio, Only You Left was fleshed out through a series of intense writing sessions between May 2023 and last summer. Each of the album’s 11 songs were meticulously refined and became its own distinctive work. “It almost felt really novel for us to be writing as a three-piece and really, really crafting these songs,” the band’s Esmé Hand-Halford recalls. “But Tableau gave us that confidence to know we could go into a studio and pull things together in that setting under the time pressure.”
Producer and engineer Joel Anthony Patchett, whom Esmé Hand-Halford dubs the honorary fourth member of the band, has had a massive influence on the album’s sound and approach. “Joel brings an extra level of interpretation and deep listening,” Henry Carlyle Wade says, “and it’s always exciting to explore that.” Sidonie Hand-Halford adds, “He’s constantly talking us through every step of what he’s doing and getting really, really involved with that process as well. And we’re just kind of learning together and making these mistakes and discovering things together.”
Only You Left will include the previously released “Three Halves,” the double single “You Are Eating Part of Yourself”/”To Undo the World Itself,” and the album’s latest single “Tears Are.” Arguably the track that directly channels elements of their earlier sound, “Tears Are” is anchored around the JOVM mainstays long-held penchant for post punk-like hookiness paired with dreamy vocals. But the track ultimately fades out in a brooding, minor take on the song’s motif. The song evokes an unfinished thought or something left hanging without a sense of closure. The lyrics explore paradoxes with inversions and wordplay — and are intentionally ambiguous for the listener to make their own interpretations.
“ We had this vague imagery of wood versus metal,” the band’s Esmé Dee Hand-Halford says. “Hamburg was metal and Hydra was wood. Everything fell naturally into either category.”