Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: The Drums Teams Up with Mareux on Chilly and Brooding “It Didn’t Matter”

New York-based songwriter and producer Jonny Pierce is the creative mastermind of the acclaimed and beloved recording project The Drums. Since the project’s formation back in 2010, Pierce has released six albums, cultivating a fiercely loyal fanbase through sharp songwriting and a timeless blend of indie pop, surf rock and post-punk.

The Drums have consistently sold-out headlining tours across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia, while making multiple runs of the global festival circuit, playing sets at Coachella, Primavera Sound, Outside Lands, Corona Capital and Lollapalooza. Pierce’s work has appeared in film, television and global campaigns for brands, including Volkswagen. Their breakthrough single “Money” has taken on a remarkable second life, fueled by viral TikTok trends that have introduced the song to millions of new listeners. Recently certified platinum, “Money” has amassed hundreds of millions of streams while simultaneously resonating with fans both old and new.

Iranian American artist Aryan Ashtiani is the creative mastermind behind the goth-inspired project Marueax. His career has been a stratospheric rise: Ashtiani played his first sold-out Mareaux show in June, after his viral cover of The Cure’s ‘The Perfect Girl” lit up the internet, eventually being certified platinum in the States and gold in France. Less than a year later, Ashtiani played Coachella, embarked on two US tours and a European tour, while landing sets across the international festival circuit.

Having helped spark a resurgence of internet in post-punk and dark wave among a constantly online new generation, Maruex finds himself at the forefront of the latest innovative strain of goth. “I want to become a gateway to older subcultural genres for people who are just discovering alternative music today,” the rising Iranian American artist says.

Building upon a rapidly rising profile, he released his debut album 2023’s Lovers From The Past, and quickly establishing his brand through cult favorite videos for “Night Vision” and “Lovers From The Past.” Last year’s Nonstop Romance saw the rising Iranian American artist prioritizing feel and vibe over clarity rooted in his desire to “make every day about making someone happy and giving them the best life possible.”

Ashtiani will continue to support Nonstop Romance with a European tour and East Coast tour to close out 2026.

Last week, Pierce launched a new label, Abysmal Records. He founded the label as a home for collaboration experimentation and emerging artists he deeply believes in. The label’s first single “It Didn’t Matter” is a collaboration with Pierce’s The Drums and Ashtiani’s Maruex. “It Didn’t Matter” feat. Mareux not only kicks off Abysmal Records in grand style, it’s the first of a six-month series of collaborative singles originating from recording sessions with a handpicked group of artists over the past two years, artists whose work has inspired Pierce and whose work he wanted to amplify.

Built around a sleek and chilly, darkwave-inspired motorik paired with Ashtiani’s yearning, heartbroken delivery, “It Didn’t Matter” is a brooding tune featuring a narrator desperately seeking an explanation. Throughout the song’s runtime, Ashtiani’s narrator expresses feelings of confusion and foolishness over a heartbreak with difficult to ignore pleas. The result is a song grounded in a deep, psychological realism that gives the song a walloping emotional punch.

“Not since writing my earliest music has a song come together so effortlessly. Whenever that happens, it makes me feel certain the song was meant to exist—that it needed to be here, for all of us,” Jonny Pierce says of the collaboration. “Mareux’s synthesizer wizardry threw me back to my teenage years, when almost everything I listened to was synthesizer-based music, especially synth-pop. His sounds, textures, and perfect pop chord changes reminded me of the soundtrack to such a tender time in my life—when I was desperate for love but just couldn’t find it, and synthesizers became the soundtrack to my sadness. This one is for those of us who keep banging our heads against the wall of another heart, only to be given nothing in return.”

The Abysmal Records series will pave the way for The Drums’ 12th album, which is planned for a 2027 release.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 61st Birthday, MCA!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 61st anniversary of the birth of MCA.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Carolina Oliveros Shares Meditative “Oye Camina”

Colombina-born, New York-based singer/songwriter Carolina Oliveros is best known for being the frontperson of acclaimed act Combo Chimbita. Oliveros will be stepping out into the spotlight with her solo debut, Ya Rompimos el Silencio, which is slated for a November 6, 2026 release through Chulo Records.

Inspired by her journey of healing from childhood trauma, Ya Rompimos el Silencio is an act of reclaiming voice, body and memory. The album’s material follows the path forward towards truth, resilience, queer love, collective healing and liberation. Each song is both a personal testimony and an invitation for others to break their own silences.

Sonically, the album reflects Oliveros lifelong dialogue between worlds. Anchored in the Afro-Indigenous musical traditions of Colombia and the Caribbean, vocal harmonies serve as connective tissue marrying bullerengue, cumbia, tambora, rumba, bolero, dembo, salve and other ancestral rhythms with adventurous contemporary production. The result if a sound that’s simultaneously intimate and expansive, ritualistic and contemporary — and honors tradition while boldly pushing it forward. Throughout the album’s runtime, its songs move effortlessly between ceremony and celebration, contemplation and the dance floor, revealing that healing can be a defiant, joyful act.

While showcasing another dimension of Oliveros’ artistry, Ya Rompimos el Silencio is rooted in the belief that music carries memory across generations, that telling the truth can be liberating and transformative, and breaking silence is not an ending, it’s a decision to choose a freer way of living.

Ya Rompimos el Silencio‘s latest single “Oye Camina” feels both timeless and remarkably modern. Oliveros’ powerhouse and expressive vocal asks the listener to slow down and savor the feeling moments that define a life, because nothing lasts forever. Anchored around the refrain “Que se va la vida” (life slips away). the song’s narrator reflects on the raw, fleeting beauty of those things that just can’t be held on to and really matter — love, friendships, and the moments that leave a mark and continue to shape us long after they have passed. “‘Oye Camina’ is a reminder that life is constantly in motion and that our challenge is to live with presence, gratitude, and courage before it slips away,” says Olivero.

The accompanying video is an intimate and deeply personal visual that showcases what may arguably be Oliveros’ most explicit artistic and authentic expression of Queer love and Queer joy rooted in the accumulation of the small, seemingly mundane moments that truly make life worthwhile.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: EYRE LLEW Shares a Meditative, Atmospheric Ode on Loss

Nottingham, UK-based trio EYRE LLEW — Sam Heaton (vocals, guitar), Jack Clark (drums, piano) and Jack Bennett (guitar, piano) — will be releasing their highly anticipated sophomore album Bloom on September 18, 2026 through Penance Music Group.

Bloom is deeply influenced and informed by pandemic-era quarantines and lockdowns. For the bulk of the band’s existence, they had defined themselves by seemingly constant motion: Cities blurred into one another. Border crossings were routine. Their lives revolved around airports, late night drives, ferry ports, backstage rooms, festival fields, hotel corridors and long-distance journeys. As a touring band, success, such as it exists, is often measured in miles traveled, crowd size, and momentum developed and sustained.

They kept moving at that frenetic pace, because that’s how it always was. As countless bands would view it, slowing down would mean — on some level, at least — that the momentum was slowing; that your career was stalling out. And stopping would mean accepting failure, when “making it” seemed to just within their grasp.

Much like all countless other acts across the globe, the pandemic dismantled their trajectory. That relentless forward motion that shaped their identity for the better part of a decade just suddenly stopped. Tours vanished. Plans dissolved. The result was an uneasy, unsettling silence. And understandably, for the trio, it was devastating.

However, in the stillness, something else emerged for the trio — space: For the first time in a decade, the space to rest, reflect, recover, and to make much different choices. The band made a quieter, more human recalibration, shifting away from survival towards sustainability. Rather than constantly feeling as though they had to prove something, they moved towards building something — and choosing meaning over the endless chase of momentum.

Written during lockdown and the subsequent years post-lockdown, Bloom is reportedly about several things simultaneously: presence, the love that feels like home, stillness as strength, devotion without spectacle, grief without melodrama, healing without performative optimism and growth that happens slowly, privately and honestly.

The shift in approach, fittingly led to a shift in their sound. Bloom continues to carry the vastness they’re known for, but it lives alongside a newfound sense of fragility and restraint. Instead of actively attempting to overwhelm the listener, the band is actively trying to meet the listener where they are right now.

The album will include the previously released “Miningsby,” the album title track “Bloom,” and its third and latest single “Rainbow Bridge.” “Rainbow Bridge” is a slow-burning and atmospheric tune rooted in a devastatingly confusing and heartbreaking sense of grief, nostalgia, and a life-affirming sense of gratitude that’s lived-in yet restrained. It’s your eyes tearing up over a loss with a wistful smile or a sad laugh over some idiosyncratic thing over your pet would do — or some small, mundane moment that you wish you could repeat just one more time. Sonically, the new single channels a blend of Sigur Rós and A Storm In Heaven-era The Verve.

Inspired by the much-loved poem depicting the place where departed animal companions wait to reunite with their owners in the afterlife, “Rainbow Bridge” is a personal mediation on love and loss. Written after the passing of family dogs, the song reflects on the quiet ways animals leave lasting marks on our lives, their fearless curiosity, unconditional affection, and the everyday moments that become treasured memories once they’ve gone.

“Rather than dwelling in grief, the song sits in gratitude.” the band says “It acknowledges loss, but frames it through warmth, memory, and the idea that love doesn’t disappear; it just changes shape. Rainbow Bridge is a soft tribute to the companionship.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Alex Amor Shares Heartbroken Yet Buoyant and Anthemic “Inside”

Rising Scottish singer/songwriter and musician Alex Amor has three EPs under her belt, 2021’s debut, Love Language, 2022’s The Art of Letting Go and 2023’s Super Sonic, all of which have received praise from The Line of Best Fit, DIY Magazine, Clash Magazine, Dork Magazine, Wonderland, Notion, 1883 Magazine, The Skinny, Ones to Watch, The Sunday Mail, and The Scotsman — and she has received airplay from BBC Radio 1‘s Jack Saunders and Sian Eleri. 

Building upon a growing profile across the region, Amor has made a run of the UK festival circuit, playing sets at TRNSMT, The Great Escape, Liverpool Sound City, Live at Leeds and Dot to Dot. She has also toured across the region, playing on bills with the likes of Good Neighbours, Liang Lawrence, Gretta Ray, Swim Deep, VLURE and a list of others. 

Amor’s highly anticipated full-length debut Heavenly Bodies is slated for an August 21, 2026 through New York-based label VERO Music. Written and recorded between London and Glasgow with Peter Brien, Baz Kaye and Karma Kid, the album’s material is heavily informed by meditation, rune reading and the work of Swedish mystic Hilma of Klint. Weaving together celestial imagery, spirituality and the vast emotional terrain of human connection, the album’s material reflects Amor’s fascination with cosmic symbolism and the belief that personal experiences mirror the rhythms of the universe. Sonically, the album is a decided evolution from the raw indie charge of the rising Scottish artist’s earlier work as the album features diaristic, intimate and confessional songwriting is paired with shimmering guitars, ethereal synths and slow-burning arrangements. 

The album will feature the previously released “Avalanche” and the album’s final pre-release single “Inside,” which comes on the heels of festival appearances at this year’s Liverpool Sound City, The Great Escape Festival, Footsteps Festival and opening slots with Liang Lawrence and Prima Queen. “Inside” is a twangy New Wave-tinged bop that showcases Amor’s unerring knack for pairing catchy hooks and shout-along worthy choruses with introspective, lived-in lyrics. While buoyant and rousingly anthemic, the song is anchored in a complicated mix of loss of innocence and faith, weary, heartbroken exhaustion and of devastating loss that lingers and reverberates throughout your life.

Originally written as a sprawling poem, “Inside” arrived in the studio with producer Baz Kaye determined to preserve every word Amor had written. With a run time of 5:30, the song features what may arguably be some of Amor’s most earnest and devastatingly honest writing with an defiantly upbeat arrangement, informed by the optimism Kaye and co-writer Peter Brien carried back from that summer’s Glastonbury Festival.

“It’s about coming to terms with compounded grief, generational trauma and taking a stark look at one of the coping mechanisms that defined much of my twenties: dissociation,” Amor explains. “Pulling away from connection altogether to avoid the pain of needing someone, missing someone, or losing someone. Part of love is accepting loss, making space for grief, and finding the courage to feel it all. It’s a song about connection, the choice to be vulnerable, and learning that the only way through grief is to let yourself feel it.”

The accompanying video follows a simple conceit: Amor and her band performing in the corner of a studio space — or an elevator. It nods at early MTV-era videos with a modern, frenetic sensibility.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: PUREST FORM Shares Bruising and Feral “ANIMAL”

Los Angeles-based dance punks PUREST FORM — Story Beeson (vocals), Madi Woodward (guitar, programming) and Riley Oikawa-Dahlson (bass) — draws on the individual members’ respective backgrounds in hardcore punk, and their shared love of industrial and techno, blending the intensely heavy with the playful and sensual.

Within two years, the Los Angeles-based trio have quickly developed a reputation for a must-see, chaotic live show while landing opening slots for Boy Harsher, Chat Pile, King Woman, Sextile and a growing list of others. 2024’s self-titled EP was released to praise from Stereogum, dublab, FLAUNT, Consequence, BrooklynVegan, Revolver, Treble, New Noise and more.

Building upon a growing profile, the trio signed to Dais Records, who will be releasing their highly-anticipated third EP, the six-song RESISTANCE. The EP is reportedly an anarchist assault on the system, fueled by their collective anger amidst our late-stage capitalist dystopia and a year of bitter, nonstop trauma over the past year in Los Angeles, including the wildfires and ICE raids. “Resistance, less of an idea, more of an absolute action that has to be taken,” Story Beeson asserts.

RESISTANCE EP reportedly builds upon their self-titled EP with the forthcoming EP’s material reportedly being more agile and charged up with structural jumps and hard left turns, confronting sonic and societal constructs. Nodding at death metal and acid house, the material is built with serrated guitar riffs, fractured breakbeats, forceful bass lines and body-quaking feedback beneath Beeson’s urgent, feral howls. “We decided to just take it to the next level with this one,” PUREST FORM’s Madi Woodward says. “It’s like a unification of all the music that we love and feel. And it makes sense to us. If it sounds good, we don’t care where it comes from.” 

Woodward continues,  “We set out to do something and say something. It did feel cathartic.”Beeson adds, “The nature and actions of our country are overwhelming, I can’t get away from the feeling of ‘what can we do to resist this at all costs?’ We have very radical fantasies across the board, making music that isn’t talking about what’s happening right now just feels unimportant to us. We are willing to sacrifice whatever to make music that is honest. It’s both important and fun to have a project where it’s just like a complete fuck you. And also a complete desire to unify.”

The EP was recorded sporadically throughout the course of last year, beginning while Beeson had been evacuated from her home. Sketches started on the computer, before open-ended sessions with their longtime collaborator and producer, Andrew Oswald. “A helpful and needed distraction during a pretty bleak year for the world. It became the one thing that felt good to us,” says Riley Oikawa-Dahlson. “We explore some dark headspaces, but it’s also dance music.”

The EP’s latest single, live show staple and EP opening track “ANIMAL” is a bruising and primal, mosh pit friendly ripper anchored around serrated guitars, relentless thump beneath Story Beeson’s feral howls. The song simultaneously evokes the unending horror, despair and rage of our moment while seemingly channeling Ministry and Astro Creep-era White Zombie.

Directed by the band’s Story Beeson, the accompanying video is a righteous condemnation of constant surveillance world while capturing the band’s furious performance. “The video takes on the horror of surveillance. While using a lot of throwback technology, mostly to pay homage to its influence – Peter Christopherson’s video for Ministry’s ‘Over The Shoulder’, it very much intends to communicate how more modern technology is being used for violence against our communities and humanity as a whole,” Beeson explains. “It fits with the concept of ‘ANIMAL’: whether the nature is sexual or simply a desire to exist, we deserve to have freedom and we must take that freedom back.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy Belated 65th Birthday, Pete de Freitas!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates the 65th anniversary of the birth of Echo and the Bunnymen drummer Pete de Freitas.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 125th Birthday, Louis Armstrong!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 125th anniversary of the birth of Louis Armstrong.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 63rd Birthday, James Hetfield!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Metallica frontman James Hetfield’s 63rd birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 63rd Birthday, Ed Roland!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Collective Soul frontman Ed Roland’s 63rd birthday.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Skinshape Shares Shimmering and Introspective “The Blade of a Knife”

Will Dorey is a London-based producer, singer/songwriter, producer and creative mastermind behind the solo recording project, Skinshape. And with Skinshape, the London-based artist has established himself as a master of understated soundscapes, blending rich textures with an array of eclectic influences from around the world. Dorey’s work is known for being imbued with warmth, depth and a timeless character.

Every Skinshape effort reflects the London-based artist’s meticulous approach to composition and production, rooted in the distinct sonic identity made possible by the vintage analog recording equipment he uses.

The London-based artist’s 11th Skinshape album, Chapman’s Pool derives its name from a a secluded bay on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, near Dorey’s childhood home. The album draws inspiration from the landscapes that have remained a constant source of influence throughout his career.

Chapman’s Pool’s first single “The Blade of a Knife” is a shimmering tune that sounds as though it draws from psych soul, Northern soul and troubadour pop — and in a way that reminds me a bit of The Beach Boys, Bobby Oroza, Common Saints, and others. Rooted in an deeply introspective lyricism, the song is poignant, seemingly lived-in ode to the vicious cycles and loops that can wrap us up in down times, but while keeping a sliver of light — just in view. “This song was written about the mental struggles one faces in life. How we are a slave to our mind and the habits we form go round and round day after day. We wish to be free of our confusion as it stabs us like the ‘Blade of a Knife.'”