TVAM will release his new studio album Ruins on 27 February via Invada Records. Like its predecessors, Ruins was written, produced and recorded by Joe Oxley himself in his small bedroom studio in Wigan, just outside of Manchester. James Trevascus (Nick Cave, The KVB) mixed and mastered the album. The new single Powder Blue is out now.
The follow-up to High Art Lite (2022), Ruins is an album shaped by grief, reflection, and transformation; a record that captures both the weight of loss and the strange beauty that comes with it. At its core, Ruins explores loss not as emptiness but as presence, something that reshapes the world around you. The album finds Oxley wrestling with the dualities of human experience: the tension between what’s said and unsaid, between humanism and nihilism, public and private, despair and acceptance. “Hope and despair don’t cancel each other out,” he says. “They can co-exist — that’s what makes it feel real.” Musically, Ruins is expansive and immersive. The result is a record that finds beauty in dissonance and light in the wreckage.
Somewhere within a lifetime of repeats, reruns, and reboots, TVAM lives, crafting work that touches on our memories while toying with our fears, creating a world in which broadcast becomes performance. Hypnotic tracks draw from a wide spectrum of influences Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia, Suicide’s deconstructed rock’n’roll, and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise all converging in Oxley’s singular sound. TVAM released his debut album Psychic Data in 2018, featuring the track Porsche Majeur, which was used in several commercials and also in the HBO hit series Succession.
Powder Blue sees the brooding, mechanical textures that have become a signature of Joe Oxley’s sound collide with bold, emotionally charged hooks, pushing his industrial-leaning aesthetic into more theatrical, melodic territory. Lyrically, Powder Blue explores obsession and attraction, fast-forwarding through the emotional fallout before it even arrives. “The song is all about obsession and attraction - seeing how the act of that obsession would play out before it actually happens,” he says. “It jumps ahead to feelings of being trapped in a relationship, then the fear of not being trapped… It accepts that sometimes things are inevitable.” Watch de video below.