TVAM releases new album ‘Ruins’ via Invada Records

Photo credit: Debbie Ellis. Hi-res

Praise for Ruins so far

“A singular, understated musical talent capable of playing utter havoc with your emotions” Electronic Sound

“Allowing the harsh tones and shimmery melodies to wash over you is a glorious experience” Clash

“Easily his best album yet” Louder Than War

“‘Powder Blue’ folds alt-rock, coldwave, and post-punk into cathedral-scale sighs and Jesus and Mary Chain-esque swagger” Post-Punk

“Ruins is a whirlwind of synth layers, urban imagery, shoegaze cries and psychedelic shivers that combine into something unique and special” Rockerilla

TVAM is back with his new album Ruins, out now on Invada Records. The follow-up to High Art Lite, Ruins is an album shaped by grief, reflection and transformation; a record that captures both the weight of loss and the strange beauty that can emerge from it. Written after a self-imposed break from songwriting, it marks a deliberate shift in focus and perspective for Joe Oxley. “I wanted to step away from what I thought I was supposed to make,” he explains.“The worst advice anyone can give you is, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ It’s always broken. It always needs fixing.”

At its core, Ruins explores loss not as emptiness but as presence – something that reshapes the world around you and lingers in the room long after the moment has passed. Across the album, grief is personified: a shadow, a companion, a second voice in the relationship. Songs such as “Love Like Glue” and “The Haunted” blur the lines between attachment and absence, while “The Words” and “Sweetness & Light” wrestle with the impossible task of articulating final sentiments and the bleak responsibility of finding something to say when there are no right words. Rather than settling into a single emotional register, the record moves between extremes, capturing the unstable terrain of lived experience. “Hope and despair don’t cancel each other out,” Oxley says, “they can co-exist together.”

Somewhere within a lifetime of repeats, reruns and reboots, TVAM continues to craft work that touches on memory while toying with fear, creating a world in which broadcast becomes performance. Hypnotic and immersive, his music draws from a wide spectrum of influences, embodying the nostalgic pull of Boards of Canada, Suicide’s deconstructed rock’n’roll minimalism and My Bloody Valentine’s engulfing noise, yet always resolving into something singular. Since his debut album Psychic Data emerged from a bedroom studio in Wigan, TVAM has defined a sound and aesthetic rooted in nostalgia’s grip on modern life, from the sloganeering pulse of “Porsche Majeure” to the electioneering bite of “Semantics.” Along the way, he has received daytime playlisting on BBC 6 Music and placements in television including the groundbreaking series Succession.

Musically, Ruins is expansive and immersive, dark but magical. Reverb-drenched synths bloom into vast interior spaces; fractured, “broken reality” textures flicker at the edges of otherwise driving, disciplined rhythms. Hammer-blow snares anchor the songs with physical force, while guitars weave through the mix with a newfound restraint, allowing atmosphere and emotion to take centre stage. There are flashes of Floodland-era The Sisters of Mercy in the cavernous percussion, and echoes of Disintegration-era The Cure in the melodic melancholy, yet the album never leans into pastiche. Instead, it finds beauty in dissonance and light in the wreckage as a body of work that feels at once intimate and widescreen, vulnerable and propulsive.

With Ruins, TVAM delivers his most emotionally direct record to date. An album that doesn’t attempt to resolve grief, but instead inhabits it fully, allowing darkness and tenderness to move side by side. It is alive to contradiction, alive to feeling, and unafraid to let both speak at once.

TVAM – Ruins tracklisting

1. Comfort Collar

2. The Gloom

3. The Words

4. Real Life

5. Powder Blue

6. Follow Me Home

7. Winter Rose

8. In Memory

9. Love Like Glue

10. Sweetness & Light

11. The Haunted