Video by William Ruben Helms

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.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Total Fucking Darkness Shares Yearning, Pop Gem “This Is The Last Time”

Electronic music outfit and JOVM mainstays Total Fucking Darkness features: 

Over the past 18 months or so, the trio have released a handful of standalone singles, including “Desolation Boys,” “Take It Easy,” “Give Me Everything You Own” “Horizontal Rain” and “Beaten to Write.” Their latest single “This Is The Last Time” is glistening sophistipop-meets-80s New Wave-meets New Order-like tune anchored around what may arguably be the most melodic and the most earnest and achingly oversized yearning song of the trio’s growing catalog.

Sonically, “This Is The Last Time” sees the JOVM mainstays looking backward to move forward. Campbell, Ramsey and McFall have had a long-held obsession with late 1980s and early 1990s electronic music, and the new single pushes that fixation towards its biggest pop-leaning instincts. There aren’t software shortcuts hiding beneath the surface either. “No plug-ins, anywhere. This track is all analog, baby.”

When asked what inspired it, Total Fucking Darkness’ Stephen Ramsey offers a characteristically economic answer, “New Order.”

“This Is The Last Time” arrived with similarly little ceremony. Ramsay had barely made it through the instrumental once before Torquil Campbell had the lyrics ready. “It may as well be called ‘Real Time’ because Torq wrote this in real time,” Ramsay explains. “By the time I played him the instrumental once, he had written the lyrics.”

“‘This Is The Last Time” is about the point where letting go becomes forward motion, following whatever dream remains, committing to it completely, and accepting that the only sensible response to uncertainty is to set your heart on fire — and see what survives.

“Every band says their latest music is the best thing they’ve ever done,”the band’s Stephen Ramsay says. “It’s obviously cliché at this point and therefore categorically untrue in almost all cases, but I’m telling you, this is the best song we’ve written.”

The accompanying video features edited footage from some movie that follows two dogs, who are in love. It’s adorable.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Normal Bias Share Surreal Visual for Thumping, Club Banger “Soft Power”

Currently split between New York and Atlanta, electro pop duo Normal Bias — Matt W.(vocals) and Chris C. (synths) — are a self-described “pump and dump scheme, mining the most bloodthirsty parts of decades of electronic music and striping it for parts” while describing their sound and approach as “equal parts techno synth pop and ruthless venture capital.” The duo have supported their recorded output — 2022’s self-titled EP and 2024’s Kingdom Come — with shows and touring with Nitzer Ebb, Boy Harsher, Nuovo Testamento, High Functioning Flesh and Phase Fatale. Adding to a growing reputation in the electronic music scene, the band is currently on tour with Spike Hellis, who has performed and collaborated with Nitzer Ebb, Boy Harsher, Pixel Grip, Buzz Kull, Nuovo Testamento, and more.

The duo’s sophomore album Ways of Keeping Clean will be released next year through DKA Records. Ways of Keeping Clean‘s first single “Soft Power” is an EBM and goth-styled banger built with thumping, wall-rattling beats, walls of glistening synths, razor sharp hooks paired with Matt W’s sultry Dave Gahan/Michael Hutchence-like vocals. Sonically seeming to channel early Depechde Mode, the song as the do explains “confronts the numbing effects of propagandized multimedia addiction that looms over the modern world and enables the worst instincts of our leaders and institutions, and leads us further into nowhere and nothing.”

Directed by Logan Devlin, the accompanying video for “Soft Power” is a sleek blend of live performance, stop-motion amination and Dali-esque landscapes with bursts of VHS glitch. While watching it, I thought of So and Us-era Peter Gabriel and Pet Shop Boys — but with a mix of mischief and menace.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 88th Birthday, Fela Kuti!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 88th anniversary of the birth of Fela Kuti.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

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.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 117th Birthday, Art Tatum!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 117th anniversary of the birth of Art Tatum.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 68th Birthday, Thomas Dolby!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Thomas Dolby’s 68th birthday.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Los Angeles’ Charm School Shares A Thumping Club Banger for Our Dystopian Hellscape

Los Angeles-based electronic music act Charm School features Louisville, KY-born, Los Angeles-based multi-hyphenate artist and frontman Andrew Sellers and his longtime collaborators Matt Filip and Dave English. Sellers grew up immersed in Louisville’s underground scene, soaking up the work of local acts like Slint, Crain and Rodan, as well as the catalogs of beloved Chicago indie labels Touch & Go and Drag City. Later, Sellers got into PIL, Swell Maps, The Fall and Fugazi and The Nation of Ulysses. All of that informs Charm School’s sound and approach.

Their debut EP, 2023’s Finite Jest introduced listeners to a philosophically-minded, crushingly loud critique of modern life’s increasingly maddening realities. Last year’s full-length debut, Debt Forever introduced a broader range of influences and a much more acerbic viewpoint with lyrics drenched in salty, satirical humor.

Released earlier this year, Schadenfreude Ploy EP picks up where Debt Forever left off, musing on humanity’s tortured psyche and the confounding implications of living in a technocratic, dystopian hellscape in which tech billionaires, AI and modern life’s various manipulative traps are ubiquitous and seemingly inescapable.

Continuing a remarkably prolific period, the Los Angeles trio’s latest single, the Matia Simovich-produced “Desolation” is a hook-driven, EBM/darkwave/goth banger featuring 80s synthclavier stabs, thumping 808s paired with Sellers dryly sardonic yet simultaneously sincere delivery. Sonically bringing the likes of early Ministry, Depeche Mode, as well as contemporaries like Public Circuit to mind, the song is a club anthem for our dystopian hellscape. The world’s on fire and everything seems hopelessly fucked, so have a little fun, dance and sweat it out with some other humans.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Sam Zalta Shares Shimmering “I Might Die Tonight”

Over the past decade, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sam Zalta is best known as a touring member of JOVM mainstays Bambara, an act that has toured alongside the likes of Foo Fighters, IDLES, Gilla Band, fellow JOVM mainstays METZ and Algiers.

As a solo artist, Zalta’s work occupies a world entirely his own, one increasingly shaped by elaborate storytelling, recurring characters, dreams, devotion and the uneasy space where beauty and pain meet over the course of four albums, 2015’s Paraiso Terminal, 2017’s o, 2019’s It All Ends The Same and 2023’s Memento Mori. The Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist crafts songs that feel superficially soothing but underneath is something more unsettled and stranger that sonically draws from dream pop, shoegaze, indie pop and the likes of The Beach Boys, Spiritualized, Big Star and Swans.

Zalta’s latest releases finds him pushing further into orchestration, narrative and world-building while still being anchored around his penchant for melodicism.

His latest single “I Might Die Tonight” is a shimmering tune that sonically brings Caveman, Tunnel of Love-era Bruce Springsteen and Cocteau Twins to mind and while expressing an aching yearning, there’s a churning unease just under the surface.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

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.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 79th Birthday, Sammy Hagar!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Sammy Hagar’s 79th birthday.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Tony Moreno Pays Tribute to Mentor and Friend Elvin Jones on “EJ’s Blues”

Elvin Jones (1927-2004) was known for redefining jazz drumming as we know it, liberating the instrument from simple timekeeping and instead treating it as a fluid, multi-layered voice. He was also famously known for being the polyrhythmic backbone of John Coltrane’s legendary quartet, contributing to some of the most beloved and influential recordings ever made.

Back in 1967, an 11-year old Tony Moreno was determined to see the legendary drummer Elvin Jones perform live for the first time, and soon realizing he was out well past his bedtime fell asleep on the table of the jazz club he was at. He was awakened by Jones, who sat down at the table, and upon leaning that the young Moreno hadn’t owned a drum set yet, invited him up to his apartment. Jones quickly assembled and gifted Moreno, a drum set, which he played on as a member of the Coltrane Quartet. The exchange kicked off decades of mentorship and friendship. (And in case you were wondering, Moreno still owns that drum set.)

For Moreno, who has worked with Dave Liebman, Barry Harris, Mal Waldron, Frank Kimbroough, and a lengthy list of others across the globe, that day in Jones’ home marked the beginning of a career that has now spanned more than 50 years. In 2024. the 20th anniversary of Jones’ death, Moreno felt that the time was right to assemble a project to pay tribute to his most formative mento and dear friend.

Intent on celebrating the titan from his own lens, he collaborated with arranger Rich Shemaria to present the music orchestrally, providing an interpretation that combines the ferocity the drummer is widely known for with the sensitivity and attention to detail that isn’t brought into the spotlight often. He eventually assembled an all-star ensemble featuring there-time Grammy Award-nominated tenor saxophonist Troy Roberts, Grammy Award-nominated pianist Manuel Valera, Grammy Award-winning percussionist Mauricio Herrera, alto saxophonist Patrick Cornelius, and bassist Gene Perla, who spent the first half of the 1970s in Elvin Jones’ band.

Moreno’s newest effort, A Celebration of Elvin Jones is slated for a November 6, 2026 release through Mayimba Music. Playing tribute to his mento and friend, who gave him his first drum set, the album features ten tracks associated with Jones’ work as a bandleader with spirited new renditions that pain a portrait of the legendary drummer’s dynamism and humanity. A widely acclaimed, singular drummer, who came up in the famed Jazz Composer Orchestra Association (JCOA) loft scene, A Celebration of Elvin Jones served as a portal that transported Moreno back to the moments that sparked his profound love of the music. “Playing Elvin’s music is like going home,” he explains. “My formative years were based on the things that I learned from him, but every musician gets to a point where they realize that your own identity is paramount. It may be difficult to shed some of the history that you’ve lived in your music, but you realize at a certain point that you have to make personal statements, which took me in different directions. So this feels like returning home, and it’s been an emotional journey.”

The Jones tribute album’s first single “E.J.’s Blues” is a strutting, swinging blues that simultaneously marks Moreno’s return to his musical roots and showcases the adept, soulful musicianship of Moreno and his cast of collaborators.

Reflecting on the profound impact Elvin Jones had on him, Moreno said, “This album is a tribute to a man I consider to be my father figure. Elvin gave me a purpose, to live and grow and to be a musician, so this is my way of giving thanks.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 91st Birthday, Sam Moore!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 91st anniversary of the birth of Sam Moore.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 71st Birthday, Pat DiNizio!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 71st anniversary of The Smithereens’ frontman Pat DiNizio’s birth.