Do You Think About Me
LA-based music collective NVDES has made a few appearances here on TMN. Led by frontman Josh Ocean, this free-flowing art project is teeming with joyous energy and has gifted us with many feel-good jams, like this one. NVDES’ music is delightfully fun, meshing pop sensibilities with modern punk vibes.
NVDES received global acclaim for his last EP, Life with Lobsters in 2016, earning a feature on Zane Lowes’ Beats 1, and reaching the Spotify Global Viral Chart. So, naturally, we were excited to hear NVDES’ latest EP, La Nvdité Vol. 1, which is out now on Kobalt.
The opener of the 5 track EP, “May and June”, perfectly encapsulates the infectious energy that NVDES songs display so frequently. Dancy beats in combination with the electro-punk sound of that guitar will make you forget that summer’s coming to an end soon. In juxtaposition with this track, “Do You Think About Me” does an excellent job of showing the emotional range that NVDES possesses. This wistful track inspired by a long-distance romance maintains that summery feel while pondering over a melancholy topic like a strained love. Check out the music video for third track “Dancer From New York” below:
I was lucky enough to chat briefly with NVDES’ Josh Ocean about the collective, and this latest project. Read up below!
NVDES has such a distinctly fun and confident pop/punk sound that you really don’t find too often anymore. What’s the inspiration for your sound?
My inspiration is purely capturing the vibe i have while making the music…. Most of the time that vibe is high energy, joyful and exciting energy. Music is a drug to me….I make music to make myself feel good so ultimately I want to share that feeling.
As a group, your production style has been described as “lightning-in-a-bottle”– valuing “the thrill of uncertainty over perfection”. How do you know when you’ve got a keeper on your hands?
I’m constantly working on tracks and songs and sounds. For every NVDES track that I release there are probably 10 that I “shelve” on my hard drive. I like to see which songs finish themselves naturally as I’m working with them. I [don’t] try to force anything.
If NVDES could jam with any artist/group, contemporary or historical, who would it be and why?
Suicide.
How did you come up with NVDES as the name of your collective?
I was driving down La Brea ave one day and I passed a strip club with a “live nudes” sign and eureka!
La nvdité sounds like a really beautiful concept– the idea of being nude with yourself. Can you tell us more about it, and what it means to you as a person and a musician?
From the beginning I wanted NVDES to be a project that I could be totally “nude” with myself as a producer and make music with friends in totally new ways and create a feeling to express ourselves without any specific genre or box for the sound. I wanted the experience of jamming out a NVDES song to be whatever it came out as… to be nude…
I spent a lot of time in France last year and it is a place that has inspired me greatly. The expression to say La nudite really seemed to capture the ethos in which i started the project.
The cantaloupe seems to be a recurring motif in your artwork. What’s the story there? Do attendees of your shows still get cantaloupes?
For reasons I can’t explain, I have always been obsessed with the aesthetic of a cantaloupes. The colors, the texture, the taste…
On the deeper level I see the universe I have created around the music to all exist with the world of a Cantaloupe. Every cover artwork piece is me sharing a slice of the world that is NVDES.
And YES! Sometimes there are whole cantaloupes at the shows. We have also had slices at the merch table and cantaloupe cocktails at the bar…..
You can stream/buy La Nvdité Vol. 1 on Spotify and iTunes now!
