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.”
Throwback: Happy 39th Birthday, Kendrick Lamar!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Kendrick Lamar’s 39th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 68th Birthday, Jello Biafra!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Dead Kennedy’s co-founder Jello Biafra’s 68th birthday.
New Video: Body Type Returns with Vulnerable and Introspective “Sick Bag”
Over the course of their decade long history together, Aussie punk outfit Body Type — Sophie McComish (vocals, guitar), Annabel Blackman (vocals, guitar), Cecil Coleman (drums) and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums (vocals, bass) have received coverage from internationally recognized media outlets like Billboard, Rolling Stone, NME, The FADER, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and more, as well as airplay from Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson and BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders, and a list of others. Adding to a growing profile, the Aussie quartet have extensively toured across the globe, sharing stages with Foo Fighters, Sleater-Kinney, Warpaint, Pixies, Fontaines D.C., Big Thief, Cate Le Bon, POND, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Frankie Cosmos, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Wolf Alice, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, DZ Deathrays, and many moire.
Body Type’s highly-anticipated third album, Tally is slated for a July 24, 2026 release through King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s p(doom) records. Recorded at Los Angeles-based Velveteen Laboratory Studios with producer Stella Mozgawa, Tally reportedly marks a deliberate evolution for the quartet. While 2023’s Expired Candy arrived on a wave of post-pandemic momentum, their third album takes long to breathe — the material’s ambitions are quieter, its craft more considered. ‘
The album cones as the band celebrates their tenth anniversary together. Featuring a blend of big, jagged riffs, moody post-punk and 60s pop, Tally may arguably be their most self-assured and expansive batch of material to date, capturing band maturing and taking stock but while wit and playfulness still are supreme. Thematically, the album chronicles mundanity’s mystical implications, the deformations of romance and love’s confounding elasticity and more.
The album will include the previously released “Mulberry,“ and the album’s latest single “Sick Bag.” Continuing a run of material that seemingly channels a mix of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era PJ Harvey, The Breeders and a bit of Marquee Moon-era Television,”‘Sick Bag” may arguably be the most vulnerable, broken heart worn on sleeve song on the album. Thematically, the song examines the very fine line between generosity and self-erasure.
“Our first ever song to feature a mellotron — a true Stella moment,” the band’s Sophie McComish says, “”This one just poured out of me like ink in a broken biro.” Written during a relationship that felt increasingly one-sided, “Sick Bang” emerged after a conversation McComish had with bandmate Annabel Blackman, who pointed out the unusual patience McComish was showing someone, who just couldn’t meet her halfway.
Directed by Madeline Purdy, the accompanying video for “Sick Bag” is a surreal, fantastical and darkly comedic visual that seems inspired by Igmar Berman while pointing out the mundanity, boredom and exhaustion of being a worker bee.
New Video: Cowards Share Bruising “Fear of Fear”
Italian noise rock/shoegaze/post-punk trio Cowards — currently founding members Luca Piccinni (vocals, guitar) and Guilia Tanoni (vocals, bass) and the band’s newest member Michele Prosperi (drums) — formed back in 2019 and quickly established a sound deeply rooted in 1990s aesthetics featuring a blend of abrasive, feedback and noise-driven guitar textures and elements of dream pop and grunge.
Following the tragic and untimely death of their previous drummer Pepe Carella in 2021, the band found renewed momentum with the addition of Michele Prosperi. The band released their full-length debut, last year’s God Hates Cowards through Bloody Sound. They supposed the album with extensive touring of the Italian club scene, as well as a run of the Italian festival circuit.
Building upon a steadily growing profile, the Italian trio will be releasing their sophomore album Can You Hear Me through Bloody Sound on Friday, June, 19, 2026. Can You Hear Me? reportedly sees the Italian trio further cementing a sound rooted in noise, post-punk and shoegaze while being more nuanced and texturally layered. While still featuring the abrasive guitars they’re known for, there are more atmospheric passages, a more forceful and driving rhythm section and it’s all underpinned by urgent, unflinching vocals.
Whereas God Hates Cowards thematically was intensely introspective, Can You Hear Me? sees the band turning their gaze outward. Personal unrest and unease is merged with a much wider narrative, in which individual emotional collapse reflects a broader systemic breakdown.
Can You Hear Me?‘s first single “Fear of Fear” is a bruising and bombastic, 90s alt rock-meets-METZ mosh pit friendly ripper that thematically channels John Cale’s “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend.” “Fear feeds on itself, limiting and controlling us — yet it can be faced and dismantled,” the band explains.
The animated video for “Fear of Fear” channels Edvard Munch’s The Scream while capturing paralyzing fear — of the thing just around the corner; that will relentlessly chase you down and so on.
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Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Lamont Dozier!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 84th anniversary of the birth of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Lamont Dozier.
Throwback: Happy 84th Birthday, Eddie Levert!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helm celebrates The O’Jays; lead singer Eddie Levert’s 84th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 55th Birthday, Tupac Shakur!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 55th anniversary of the birth of Tupac Shakur.
New Video: Julia Jacklin Shares Jangling “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You)”
Acclaimed Melbourne-based singer/songwriter and musician Julia Jacklin will be releasing her highly-anticipated fourth album, the Robert Muiños and Jacklin co-produced, 10-song album The Gem through 4AD Records digitally and on CD, cassette and vinyl on September 25, 2026. Exclusive color vinyl editions with retailers will include turquoise, green opal, ruby and rose quartz. Pre-order information can be found here.
When Jacklin first moved to Melbourne from Sydney back in 2017, she discovered a little bar on a back street in Collingwood, a suburb just outside of downtown, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor. She didn’t know anyone in town, but knew she wanted to make the city home, so she started hanging out there, facing herself out of her comfort zone. That pub was named The Gem.
Eight years later, Jacklin had released three acclaimed albums, 2016’s Don’t Let The Kids Win, 2019’s Crushing and 2022’s PRE PLEASURE — and was looking to write and record her fourth. Her contract with her previous label had ended. She was searching for a manager. And with time on her hands, she decided that she would make her fourth album in Melbourne, something she’d never done before.
She called up an old drinking buddy Robert Muiños, owner of Rat Shack Studios, which is just above The Gem and brought in her friends Jacob Diamond (guitar), Mimi Gilbert (bass) and Jess Elwood (drums). Recording happened in close quarter, in converted hotel room accommodation upstairs at the pub. Because The Gem was in a residential neighborhood, they couldn’t record late into the night for fear of bothering neighbors and sound bleed for a glorious constant: foot traffic to the hairdressers and lotto parlor next door and loud music from the bands and the kitchen staff downstairs. But if anyone needed a break during the sessions, they would head downstairs and watch a local band play. Jacklin and her friends even played two unannounced shows there to try out the album’s material before recording them.
They thought they’d be able to finish the album in two weeks, like she’d always done previously, but this time that wasn’t the case. In fact, it took nearly a year of tinkering to arrive at something Jacklin could get behind, “The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was doing it almost in the dark, just trusting I was going to find something,” Jacklin says. While conjuring images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile, the album documents the songwriter’s journey back to herself.
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” says Jacklin. That theme underpins the album’s material.
The Gem‘s first single, “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You)” is mischievously charming and hooky bit of 80s inspired jangle pop that captures the neurotic yet yearning push and pull of a narrator, who can’t quite figure out yet how to be free and be loved simultaneously. And while informed by the songwriter’s own-lived in experience, the song is rooted in something that’s both universal and youthful.
The video created by Jacklin reimagines the album’s cover art with images of Jacklin singing and strumming her guitar, and gems on other instruments.
New Audio: Yeisy Rojas Teams Up with Manolito Simonet and Ricardo Amaray on Defiantly Celebratory “LATINO”
Yeisy Rojas is a Cuban-born, Oslo-based, classically trained, jazz violinist, singer/songwriter and composer. In her native Cuba, Rojas received a classical education and performed as a violinist with the National Opera Orchestra in Havana. Her passion for jazz led her to relocate to Norway, where she pursued her Masters studies in jazz violin at Kristiansand-based University of Agder‘s Conservatory. The cross-cultural experience allowed Rojas to deepen her understanding of the African influences in Cuban music.
‘Rojas’ latest single “LATINO,” feat. Manolito Simonet and Ricardo Amaray is an upbeat tune built around twinkling keys, big brassy horns and driving, Afro-Latino polyrhythm inspired by 1990’s Cuban timba energy that manages to be simultaneously thoughtful and dance floor friendly. As a native New Yorker, “LATINO” reminds me of listening to Mega 97.9 in the 90s and teenaged house parties in and around Corona — but at its core, is a defiantly upbeat message of unity and belonging.
“LATINO” was written as a response to the increasingly divisive rhetoric that has dehumanized and villainized migrants and Latino communities across the US and elsewhere. Informed by her own experience, the song reminds listeners of a profound yet simple truth: every person on Earth deserves respect, dignity and respect while being an anthem for Antone who has felt judged because of their origins, their heritage, their accent, their food or anything else. And in turn, the song serves as a celebration of the things that are both universal and unique about all of us. In our incredibly divisive times, it’s a deeply humanistic reminder of all the things we should be celebrating and cherishing.
Throwback: Happy 89th Birthday, Waylon Jennings!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 89th anniversary of the birth of Waylon Jennings.
Throwback: Happy 57th Birthday, Ice Cube!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Ice Cube’s 57th birthday,