At its core, TVAM’s third album Ruins is a raucous exploration of grief and loss through a range of aural palettes. Shoegaze, electronica, goth, synth pop, and indie jangle are all used on an album that feels nostalgic, yet also immediate. It wears its musical influences firmly on its sleeve, whilst never feeling imitative or reductive. In short, it’s bloody good.
Certain aspects of the world have become almost unrecognisable since Joseph Oxley, aka TVAM, released his debut albumin 2018. Psychic Data and its follow-up High Art Life, from 2022, share similar themes to Ruins. Yet, those first two records contained a sense of optimism at their centres, something almost entirely lacking in Ruins. And, frankly, it’s all the better for it as it matches the mood we’re all surely feeling as the first two months of 2026 fade. There are still danceable beats under the washes of synths and guitars, but they’re neither central to the song’s construction nor their enjoyment. Yet, the despair at the heart of the record is enlivening, enriching even.
Opener “Comfort Collar” is a mess of sprawling sounds; a collage that sets the downbeat aesthetic tone for the album as a whole. Swirling chords ebb and flow, sonic focal points shift in and out of range, while the chiming guitars offer a certain sense of minimal order within the textured chaos. The layers of sound blend beautifully, and the more you listen the more you pick out. The guitar line that opens “The Gloom” has a wow and flutter effect that’s also present on “Comfort Collar” but it’s much more obvious here. The effect gives a warped and aged feel to the backing, in a similar vein to how Boards of Canada’s reliance on old tapes gives a sense of temporal distance in the high-sheen modern world of digital. If we’re headed towards cultural collapse, then this is the sound of someone sifting through the wreckage to quantify what needs to be salvaged, and what can be upcycled into something new.
Obfuscated vocals are a key component of Ruins. The reverb-drenched, drawn out vocals are more often than not low in the audio mix, buried beneath a blanket of warm, distorted noise. It’s a clever approach: by refusing clarity, TVAM mirrors the very emotional confusion he’s highlighting and critiquing. The result is an album that feels less like social commentary and more like pure immersion. This is a lived, visceral experience – not the view of a cold distant observer.
That’s not to say that the album is entirely dour. “The Words” has a total earworm of a chorus, while both “Powder Blue” and “Love Like Glue” are heavy on the New Order-style synths and hooks. There’s a tightness to the songs, a sense that holding things together is crucial to getting through to the other side – a key element of grief for so many of us.
In the closing stretch, the album loosens its grip on structure. Tracks bleed into one another; rhythms fragment while melodies become suggestions rather than statements. It’s a risky move, but it pays off. “Sweetness & Light” is a languid dreamscape of ethereal vocals, with a disconcerting sense of the uncanny going on. There’s an eerie familiarity here, and this is one of TVAM’s strengths as a producer – when he leans on the past there’s never a genuine feeling of insincerity or of being derivative, and his songs may well have the echoes of other bands but only in the same way that no art can exist in a cultural vacuum.
Album closer “The Haunted” is a funereal-paced, glacial wonder with the album’s clearest vocals. “Wrap your arms around me / Hold me until I sleep” may not win an Ivor Novello Award for lyrical brilliance any time soon, but the plaintive delivery coupled with the simplicity of the words feels right.
Ruins doesn’t offer escape, but nor does it wallow in despair. Instead, it documents the act of continuing amid collapse, of making art from the rubble and it feels like a privilege to sit alongside someone as they process their sorrow in this way.
