JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Cyndi Lauper’s 73rd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 55th Birthday, Pete Rock!
JOVM’s WIlliam Ruben Helms celebrates Pete Rock’s 55th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Brian Wilson!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 84th anniversary of the birth of Beach Boys founder and creative mastermind Brian Wilson.
Throwback: Happy 66th Birthday, John Taylor!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Duran Duran bassist John Taylor’s 66th birthday.
Throwback: Happy Juneteenth!/The Roots on “black-ish”
A Juneteenth history lesson from The Roots and ABC’s “black-ish.”
New Video: POND Returns with Bombastic, Anthemic “Skyworks”
Perth-based JOVM mainstays POND — currently, Nicholas Allbrook (lead vocals, guitar, keys, bass, flute, slide guitar and drums); singer/songwriter and producer Jay Watson (vocals, guitar, keys, drums, synths and bass), who’s also the creative mastermind of acclaimed JOVM mainstay outfit GUM and a touring member of acclaimed, Grammy Award-nominated JOVM mainstays Tame Impala; Joe Ryan (vocals, guitar, bass, 12 string guitar, slide guitar); Jamie Terry (keys, bass, synths, organs, guitar); and Jamie Ireland (drums, keys) — will be releasing their 11th album Terrestrials on Friday through their newly-minted Mangovision/Secretly Distribution.
The writing and recording process for Terrestrials was subject to a simple set of rules: No fuzz pedal. No ballads. No “Pink Floyd shit.” Conceived from a place of deep reverence for a particular potent era of Oz rock, the JOVM mainstays’ 11th album reportedly mines the sound of open sky melancholia, heat haze sizzling on the plains and jangly pub backrooms that will hit an eternally poignant nerve for those familiar with the sound, time and place. And from there, the album evolved with the idea of “Goths at the pub” becoming the record’s stylistic north star — with 80s Australiana being acid-washed with the post-punk of Sisters Of Mercy, Magazine and the like. Throughout the album’s creative and recording process, they’d ask themselves “Would Goths like it? Could you have a beer to this?” If the answers were yes, it was thrust into the mix.
Like much of their catalog, Terrestrials is a record of people and place, of exploring the identity of each, as well as where and how they intersect and interact. Thematically, the album touches upon extractive capitalism, power dynamics., inequality, Indigenous incarceration, eccentric outcasts, fire and water, diesel and dust, unity and division, blood and bauxite, unborn tomorrows and dead yesterdays. And as a result, the album’s material twitches with the desperation of people and their planet on the brink, but while betting on the beauty of both to prevail.
The album will feature the prevoouisly released, album title track “Terrestrials,” the Sisters of Mercy-meets-Diesel and Dust-era Midnight Oil-like “Two Hands,” the achingly yaerning “Through The Heather,” and the album’s latest single, album opener “Skyworks.” “Skyworks” feautres what may argaubly be Terrestrials‘ most rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses within a song that channels a syntheis of Diesel and Dust-era Midnight Oil, pub rock and post punk.
The song explores the complicated and uneasy history of Australia Day and the juxtaposition of public celebrations against the brural and painful history behind the day — and in turn, the country’s — origins. “The skyworks happen every year on the day Australia was invaded and claimed by the crown. They explode over the river in a gaudy display of drunkenness and patriotism, sponsored by the Lotto,” Nick Allbrook explains. “We love a flutter. The river is bejewelled with magical glittering lights, and loud bangs that remind some of canons and muskets. The river is ablaze, magic, filthy, like a Hieronymus Bosch picture, strewn with bottles and shit in the morning. It’s a confusing time for a confused people. Joe Ryan wrote the main chord progression for this one and then it grew in weird ways”
Directed by Stephanie Senior the accompanying video for “Skyworks” is a syltishly shot visual that employs the same colorful silhouettes reminiscent of the early iPod ad campaigns.
Live Footage: Kim Gordon Performs “PLAY ME” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”
The legendary Kim Gordon released her third solo album, the Justin Raisen-produced PLAY ME on earlier this year through Matador Records. PLAY ME is reportedly distilled and immediate, and sees Gordon expanding on her sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautock.
“We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says of her continued collaboration with acclaimed, Los Angeles-based producer Justin Raisen. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident. I always kind of work off of rhythms, and I knew I wanted it to be even more beat-oriented than the last one. Justin really gets my voice and my lyrics and he understands how I work—that came forth even more on this record.”
PLAY ME is the follow-up to 2024’s critically applauded sophomore album The Collective, which featured the two-time Grammy-nominated single “BYE BYE.” PLAY ME sees Gordon processing in her imitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times-like fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill vibes flattering of culture — where dark humor voices the absurdity of our moment. But despite its frequent outward gave, the album is essentially an interior effort, one in which heightened emotionality pulses through physical jams, while rejecting definitive statements in favor of an inquisitiveness and curiosity that keeps Gordon searching — and ever in process.
Amid PLAY ME’s rabbit-hole reality bricolage, pitch-shifted vocals and shadowy layers of dissonance, the album’s material are clear-eyed about the attention they pay to a world that would rather you be distracted and rage-baited into oblivion. “I have to say, the thing that influenced me most was the news. We are in some kind of ‘post empire’ now, where people just disappear,” Gordon says, echoing the title of one of PLAY ME’s tracks.
PLAY ME will feature the previously released “NOT TODAY,” and “DIRTY TECH,” as well as the album’s third single, album title track “PLAY ME.” “PLAY ME” may arguably be the most hip-hop influenced track of the entire album with the song anchored around a swaggering DJ Premier-like production tweeter and woofer rattling beats paired with a meditative, modal jazz trumpet line. Gordon’s imitable croon takes on a subtle staccato, hip-hop like flow to match.
Yesterday, Gordon and her backing band performed “PLAY ME” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She finhishes her NYC vist with a surprise, sold-out show tonight at Night Club 101. And because of overwhelming demand, she added a second show at Warsaw on September 16, 2026. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.
Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Paul McCartney!
JOVM’s William Ruben helms celebrates Paul McCartney’s 84th birthday.
New Audio: DONALADA Returns with Euphoric “C BEN D’VALEUR”
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.
The duo recently signed to Bonsound, who released their debut single “C FOU” last month. The French Canadian duo’s latest signle “C BEN D’VALEUR” derives its title from a common Québécois idiom that’s used to exress the sensation — or the feeling — of lost oppotunity, but it’s a wooozily euphoric bit of house music built around Larry Levan-like, arpeggiated and twinkling keys, skittering beats paried with the duo’s soulful harmonies. Theamtically, the song explores the concept of value (valeur in French) and the balance between significance and rarity.
New Video: Elephant Stone Share Bruising “Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘N’ Roll”
Brossard, QC-born, Montréal-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rishi Dihr has spent the past two decades blurring the lines between Western pysch pop and Indian classical tradition. What began back in 2006 as a quest for trasncendental sound has evolved into a singlar, self-contained vision. Operating out of his Montréal home studio, Sacred Sounds Dihr has estalbihed himself as studio autuer, producing, engineering and mixing his band Elephant Stone‘s increasingly complex and cineamtic output.
The JOVM mainstays — Dihr (vocals, bass and sitar), along with longtime members Miles Dupire (drums), Robbie MacArthur (guitar) and Jason Kent (keys, guitar) – will be releasing their 10th albun, ASHA on August 28, 2026 through Elephants On Parade. Limited edition signed and hand-numbered vinyl is avaialble for pre-order through Little Cloud Records. Named after the Elphant Stone frontman’s late mother, Asha translates to “hope” in Sanskirt — and is meditation on grief, hope, and the friction between sorrow and the darkness of our time.
While the band’s reputation has long-been built on airtight pop craftsmanship and spiritual exploration, their most recent work psoesses a new, raw intensity forged through Dihr’s lengthy history collaborating with The Black Angels, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Beck and hte psych rock supergroup MIEN.
lephant Stone remains at the forefront of the modern movement, constantly deconstructing the paevst to find something visceral, haunting, and undeniably human in the present.
ASHA includes the previously released “Everything Evil,” and its second and latest single “Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘N’ Roll.” Arguably, one of the crunchier, heavy metal-like songs of the Canadian JOVM mainstays lengthy catalog with the song anchored around Black Sabbath-like fuzz, motorik groove and bursts of wah wah pedalled guitar and shimmering sitar woven through sseveral tempo shifts.
Lyrically, the song is written in a protest-song-ike rage and addresses the global rise of fascism with both the unflinching authority of history and a cold, clear-eyed reckoning with our tempestous moment that seems to say to lisener “Let’s not beat around the bushes and bullshit ourselves. This moment is desperately urgent.”
“You’d have to be living under a rock to ignore what’s happening,” Elephant Stone’s Rishi Dihr says. “I don’t claim to have the answers; this song is about giving the threat a name. It’s a reminder that we’ve seen this script before… and we’ve overcome it before.” That defiance is embedded in tthe song’s bridge: “All you fascists, you’ve all come and gone / We know yer game, we’ve all heard that song.”
The accompanying vidoe feautres repurposed and edited footage from One Got Fatm a 1863 public domain bicycle safety film, with deeply unsettling imagery of masked children being a disturbing and fitting backdrop for the song’s tehmes of conformity, power, control and historical repetition.
New Video: Sweeping Promises Share Forcefully Urgent “Cocoon”
Lawrence, KS-based duo Sweeping Promises — Lira Mondal (vocals, bass, production) and Caufield Schnug (guitar, drums, production) — can trace their origins to a chance meeting in Arkansas, which led to a decade of playing together in an eclectic assortment of projects. Meticiuluosly controlling every aspect of their craft, from the frist note they write together, through production and engineering, using space as a key element of their sound, to mastering, each song is a testament to their long-held dynamic chemistry as musicians and artists.
Their full-length debut, 2020’s Hunger for a Way Out was released through Feel It Records. Written before the pandemic, the album’s material managed to pair the anxious urgency of a commanding live performance with a gauzy production, creating a distorted sense of time. That resonated with tons of folks during quarantine, who turned the album into a life-saving flotation device — and fittingly the album received rapturous praise from Stereogum, Pitchfork, and NPR. Around then, Feel It Records and Sub Pop agreed to join forces to distribute the duo’s work across North America and globally, starting with 2021’s “Pain Without a Touch.”
2023’s sophmore self-produced album Good Living Is Coming For You was released across North America through Feel It Records and globally through Sub Pop. Produced and recorded in the duo’s Lawrence-based home studio, Good Livng Is Coming For You was a decided cahnge in direction and appraoch: They eschewed the brutalist ambienace of their former Boston subterranean, concrete laboratory and the single mic recording technique of its immediate predecessor. Recorded in a nude painting studio bathed in light with high-ceilings, their Kansas studio is a reverb-rich space, that helps influence the album’s overall sound. Thematically, the album’s material touched upon power struggles, accepting aging, breaking restraints and more, delivered with a fervent urgency.
The band’s third album, You Say I Romanticize is slated for an August 14, 2026 release globally through Sub Pop. Recorded over an 18-month period, You Say I Romanticize is a tribute to the chaos of creation and collaboration under shifting circmstances. Mondal and Schung found and tested themselves in their combination tour house and recording studio annually working on dozens of albums by other bands, hosting tour stops, planning shows and the like. After an immerseive process of traking adn whittling down YSIR demos and carving out an idiosyncratic chamber recording member for the album’s deliberate and international wall-of-sound appraoch, the duo brought in touring drummer Spenser Gralla to play the album’s matreial as the band would on stage.
The album’s frenzied and passionate sound shines most in Modal’s vocal perforamnce. Where you might have heard a growl here and there on certain previously releserd Sweeping Promises trcks, the band’s frontwoman shouts, roars, hits tricky notes all over teh place and shreds her thraot throhgout the album’s run time.
You Say I Romanticize takes the art-by-any-means-necessary ethos that Mondal and Schung have firmly established throhgout their careers and turns the prompt upside down, landing on a perosnality epidemic that manifests across the album’s ten songs.
The album’s second single “Coccon” is a forcefully urgent and angular post-punk ripper, anchored around some of the most impassioned and musuclar recorded performances I’ve yet to personally heard from the band — especially from Mondal, who showcases a punchy attack for the song’s verses and a forceful growl for the song’s choruses and hooks.
“We wrote ‘Cocoon’ years ago to extend our live set back when we only knew the ten songs from our first album,” the band says. “
It has become a staple of our live set over the years and has undergone several metamorphoses in our home studio, as we wanted to develop this track in a disarming and dead-simple way for the ‘live sound’ mentality of YSIR. The music video intercuts homegrown live footage of the band playing shows in the Kansas community with the sculptural and psychogeographic idea of the cocoon, which entices and finally envelops our singer, Lira Mondal.”