The Brian Jonestown Massacre was formed in San Francisco in 1990. The band has had over 40 members since then, but its driving force and main songwriter is Anton Newcombe. Other prominent members have included Matt Hollywood, Dean Taylor, Jeff Davies, Brian Glaze, and Joel Gion. Their sound is heavily influenced by the psychedelic sounds of the 1960s, but also carries influences from shoegaze, jangle pop, garage rock, and lo-fi genres.

Much has been made of the fact that Newcombe is head strong and has just one vision in mind: his own. However, many of the musicians who quit his band have stayed in his orbit and continue working with him in some capacity. Newcombe was, at one point, a drummer in Hecksher’s Warlocks. Campanella produces or engineers many of the records on Newcombe’s record label, the Committee to Keep Music Evil and has also been on the last 2 highly successful European tours, playing keyboards and on occasion, guitar. Gion is forever showing back up shaking the tambourine at BJM shows. Even the Dandy Warhols appear to have buried the hatchet with Newcombe, as he joined them onstage at Lollapalooza in July of 2005.

In 2015, Newcombe returned to the themes of Aufheben with Musique de film imaginé, a collection of soundtrack cues for a nonexistent movie, inspired by his love of classic French cinema. A seven-song collection of new, more rock-based material arrived later that year under the amusing title of Mini Album Thingy Wingy.

It’s now been ten years since Melody Prochet burst into our consciousness with her enchanting, psychedelic pop, and much has happened since. Her third studio album, Emotional Eternal, is a glorious consolidation of the lessons learned along the way, seen through the eyes of someone who has taken a step back, and who can see clearly as a result. The fact it is with us at all is a minor miracle. It was no coincidence that the last album was called Bon Voyage, as Prochet had had every intention of saying au revoir and not just à bientôt.

Since Bon Voyage came out in 2018, Melody has swapped Paris for the clean air of the French Alps. That sense of equilibrium is detectable in the new record. If Bon Voyage was anarchic in its unruliness, then Emotional Eternal is the more cohesive and orderly of these siblings, though it too is full of sonic surprises.

Melody’s Swedish accomplices, who she met by chance at The Levitation Festival in Angers in 2015, Reine Fiske of Dungen and Fredrik Swahn of The Amazing reuniting the ‘Bermuda Triangle’—the nickname they gave themselves due to their ability to get lost in music together. That trio have grown into a production powerhouse, working closely together and refining what was already sublime.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Melody’s Echo Chamber’s debut album Domino and Fat Possum have reissued the record alongside ‘Unfold’, a collection of long lost and previously unreleased songs from 2013.

In March 2023 Melody has returned with a handful of intimate shows in London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York. The live band consists of her accomplices on the two last albums: Reine Fiske from Dungen and Fredrik Swahn from The Amazing. Johan Holmegard, also from Dungen, will play the drums and Jérôme Pichon will play guitar.