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 comes with it. Written after a self-imposed break from songwriting, it represents a shift in focus and perspective for Joseph 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. 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.”

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. Since his debut album 'Psychic Data' burst from a small bedroom studio in Wigan, TVAM has defined the sound and spectacle of nostalgia’s grip on modern life, from the sloganeering of 'Porsche Majeure' to the electioneering of 'Semantics', his music has gained daytime playlisting on BBC 6 Music and has been featured on TV including groundbreaking series Succession.

Musically, 'Ruins' is expansive and immersive. Dark but magical, it is filled with reverb-drenched synths, fractured textures and hammer-blow snares. Guitars weave through the mix with a newfound restraint, creating space for atmosphere and emotion to take centre stage. "Broken reality” textures collide with driving rhythms, recalling the cinematic pulse of Floodland-era The Sisters of Mercy, and the melodic melancholy of Disintegration-era The Cure. The result is a record that finds beauty in dissonance and light in the wreckage.

TRACK LISTING

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

TVAM returns to the sun lounger to deliver a horizontal view from the pool of self-reflection. Joe Oxley, a.k.a. TVAM, offers “Costasol began life as two atmospheric interludes that I wrote for my last album, High Art Lite. Over time these ideas took on a life of their own and demanded that I take another look at them. I slowly began putting the pieces together and ended up with a track which became much more than the sum of its parts”. The resultant Costasol is a song about longing, loss and regret wrapped-up in heatwave bass and shimmering guitars, all perfectly enhanced by Mona’s dreamlike vocal.

TVAM self-released his much-acclaimed debut Psychic Data in the autumn of 2018, something of a cult-classic, the album joined the dots between Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll, Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise. High Art Lite, released in October 2022 took a different tilt to its predecessor by emphasising the immediate and the personal. The colours were blown-out and the brightness was cranked up.

It’s in this world where TVAM’s new Costasol EP exists. Full of colour and noise, with a vibrant, distorted palette. Though the title track may find a home at some pool-side retreat, the subsequent tracks return to TVAM’s claustrophobic realm. Ephemerol evokes its own mutant groove, part ‘Midnite Vultures’ Beck, part ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ Nine Inch Nails, with Heart Attack and VHF rounding off this bold, bright, brief encounter.

TRACK LISTING

Costasol (feat. Mona)
Ephemerol
Heart Attack
VHF

TVAM self-released his much-acclaimed debut Psychic Data in the autumn of 2018, something of a cult-classic, the album joined the dots between Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll, Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise. Psychic Data spawned an ‘Album Of The Day’ at BBC 6Music whilst signature tune ‘Porsche Majeure’ featured in HBO’s smash-hit ‘Succession’.

Fast forward the VCR to 2022, High Art Lite takes a different tilt to its predecessor by emphasising the immediate and the personal.The colours are blown-out and the brightness is cranked up.TVAM’s take on role models, fictional movie character tropes, and fables of good and evil, are all tackled with the same suspicious cynicism but this time with an urgent belief in the human condition.

A heady mix of Black Mirror’s modern fables, JG Ballard’s gated communities of sun-drenched wealth, and Mulholland Drive’s boulevard of broken daydreams, High Art Lite offers an all-inclusive package of redemption.

High Art Lite is the first-ever Dinked Edition collaboration with Invada Records.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Future Flesh
Every Day In Every Way
Club Nautico (Part 1)
Piz Buin
Double Lucifer
Shallow Ends
Side B
Semantics
Say Anything
Host
Club Nautico (Part 2)
High Art Lite

Joe Oxley is the self-styled one-man electro / psych machine behind TVAM - arguably producing the biggest dancefloor action Wigan has seen since the legendary Casino closed its doors in the 1970’s . As 6Music’s Lauren Laverne observed “It’s like someone took Spiritualized to the club!!”

Hypnotic tracks which straddle an impressive spectrum of influence; with Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia, Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll and My Bloody Valentine's infinite noise all becoming touching points in Oxley’s musical output.

TVAM gigs blur the boundary between art and performance; via a large television sat on an 80’s secondary school-style podium, a VHS video recorder projects long-forgotten Mondo movies alongside vintage footage often sourced from hours spent poring through charity shop shelves – “What started as a passing interest became an obsession. I found so many seemingly random videos, each with its own individual meaning, now estranged from their owners. Did these people ever take up calisthenics? Did they install a model railway in their spare bedroom? Did they learn to communicate more effectively with their teenage children? Did they find something in those high-speed rally crash videos unseen by us today..?

I love the process of chopping things up and splicing back together; creating new meaning out of thin air. Combining this with the music I was making, I knew the performance had to fit. Somewhere between Adam Curtis and BBC Schools… somewhere between ‘Threads' and ‘Words & Pictures’.”

Self-produced and home-recorded, the album was mixed by the steady hands of Dean Honer (Moonlandingz, I Monster, Add (N) To X) - “It was great working with Dean. I’m a massive Add N To (X) fan and, after hearing what he was doing with Moonlandingz, I knew he’d get where I was coming from. Though having seen his collection of synths I now need to up my game.”

TVAM has remixed Amber Arcades, The KVB, TOY, FEWS and is currently putting fin-ishing touches to a remix for Tunng (who are returning the favour, watch this space…)

Crafting a world which touches on our memories but toys with our fears, a world in which information seeps under your door and pools by your feet, a world in which he seeks to define everything from abandoned meanings to subconscious desires, Psychic Data invites us to experience the psychodrama first hand.

TRACK LISTING

1. Psychic Data
2. Narcissus
3. Ident 7
4. Porsche Majeure
5. CRC
6. Bitplain
7. These Are Not Your Memories
8. Ident 9
9. Gas & Air
10. Total Immersion