JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 91st anniversary of the birth of Sam Moore.
Throwback: Happy 71st Birthday, Pat DiNizio!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 71st anniversary of The Smithereens’ frontman Pat DiNizio’s birth.
Throwback: Happy Belated 56th Birthday, MC Lyte!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates MC Lyte’s 56th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 107th Birthday, Art Blakey!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 107th anniversary of the birth of Art Blakey.
Throwback: Happy 80th Birthday, Daryl Hall!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Daryl Hall’s 80th birthday.
New Audio: Sunnan Shares Wistful and Cinematic “Echoes in Time”
Swedish outfit Sunnan can trace their origins through a series of unlikely encounters, including pandemic-era change, a barn with panoramic windows in Sunnanhed and a meeting with a Stockholm rave legend. In many ways the band embodies creative serendipity — and unsurprisingly, their origin story, which feels both inevitable and improbable, echoes through their work.
The band quickly built a reputation with the release of a series of standout singles including “My Love For You,” “Wild Horses,” and “The Sound (Make It Come Back),” their collaboration with Titiyo. 2024’s debut studio album Cinema was released to widespread praise across the Nordics and earned two Swedish Grammy nominations.
Last year’s Cinema Sound System helped propel the Swedish outfit onto the global stage with its three singles receiving heavy radio rotation on Nordic radio stations, received strong DSP support and organic crossover into North American and European markets. The band supported their debut and EP with 20 sold-out dates across the Nordics and the European Union.
Building upon a growing profile, the Swedish outfit released their highly anticipated sophomore album, Spaghetti Soul last week. The album sees the band further cementing their critically applauded cinematic sound but while blending Italian Spaghetti Western soundtrack-styled grandeur with classic soul –filtered through a decidedly modern lens.
The album includes the previously released “Sail (Lady In Waiting)” and the album’s latest single “Echoes in Time” a widescreen, twangy bit of Morricone soundtrack-tinged soul anchored in a wistful, nostalgic ache while nodding at old timey ballads and Bossa Nova. Much like their previously released material, “Echoes in Time” showcases deft, incredibly gorgeous musicianship and songwriting.
New Audio: Brooklyn’s Marigny Returns with Punchy, Goth-like “I Grieve”
Marigny is post-punk/heavy rock/goth project of a mysterious Brooklyn-based artist, who blends coldwave textures, heavy analog distortion and dark atmospheres to craft material that’s simultaneously intimate and volatile. Their sound is intentionally analog and physical — loud, low end, corroded textures, cassette tape-like saturation and tension that feels more like a live room recording than a clean, polished digital mix. Thematically, the band’s work explores grief, obsession, addiction, masculinity and spiritual decay through a modern Afro-gothic lens.
Earlier this year, I wrote about “The Still,” which served as a bold introduction to the project and its sound. The project’s latest single “I Grieve” is a bruising blend of post-punk, industrial, dark wave and goth — with the song arguably being the most decidedly goth-leaning song from the act to date. And while rooted in raw, soulful emotion, “I Grieve,” continues to showcase the artist’s ability to craft punchy, hook-driven material.
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.”
Throwback: Happy 109th Birthday, Thelonious Monk!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 109th anniversary of the birth of Thelonious Monk.
Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, David Lee Roth!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates David Lee Roth’s 72nd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 86th Birthday, John Lennon!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 86th anniversary of the birth of John Lennon.
Throwback: Happy 82nd Birthday, John Entwistle!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 82nd anniversary of the birth of The Who bassist John Entwistle.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, PJ Harvey!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates PJ Harvey’s 57th birthday.
New Audio: Rhythm Scholar Remixes Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood”
Over the course of this site’s 16+ year history, I’ve managed to spill a lot of virtual ink covering the ridiculously prolific New York-based producer, DJ, remixer and JOVM mainstay Rhythm Scholar. During that period, the long-time JOVM mainstay has carefully built a nationally and internationally recognized profile for slickly produced, crowd-pleasing mashups and remixes of some of the most beloved songs ever written and recorded.
So do y’all want to feel extremely old? Gorillaz’s landmark self-titled album was released 25 years ago. And to celebrate the occasion, the JOVM mainstay has given the Damon Albarn-led project’s breakthrough single “Clint Eastwood,” his unique remix treatment. The Rhythm Scholar Beatslinger remix places Albarn and Del The Funky Homosapien‘s vocals within a dizzying and mind-bending array of samples including Ice Cube and Da Lench Mob.
Visually, the accompanying video features footage from Clint Eastwood-era Spaghetti Westerns, Yo Gabba Gabba, The Kinks, footage of a young Jane Goodall in the field, Donkey Kong, the original video for “Clint Eastwood,” Dirty Harry, old-timey cartoons and a lot more.