Monograms is a Brooklyn-bred experiment that insists on fusing disparate histories of post-punk, new wave, and industrial pop into one combustible entity. Ian Jacobs, the architect of this “Nuke-Wave” sound, returns from a period of relative quiet with TONS, a single that announces itself like an alarm, brash yet deliberate, laying the foundation for his forthcoming SHAPES EP (out October 17, 2025). Released through PaperCup Music, the track already feels at home in the clubs it was designed to infiltrate.
Jacobs calls the song autobiographical, its origins locked in the memory of a near-death experience: “TONS a time at the beach where I quite literally almost drowned. It was a real ‘life flashing before your eyes’ kinda moment that I had, and it really stuck with me and put a lot of things in perspective. Mortality is a funny thing.” That candor forms the marrow of Monograms, where the personal collides with the mechanical, and the human voice is swallowed, reshaped, and amplified by the circuitry it courts.
With TONS, Jacobs has staged another episode in his ongoing chronicle of sound, one where mortality, memory, and machinery intersect. The EP looms, promising to further unravel the paradox he has cultivated: music that is both immediate and distant, visceral yet mediated, driven by the strange electricity of survival.
Monograms’ new EP promises a different vantage point. “The new Monograms SHAPES EP is an amalgamation of songs I put together over the last few years, as I stretched my life into a place that felt more comfortable and less angsty,” Jacobs says. “From my vantage point, this collection of songs just exists as what it is. I played every instrument and word on the EP so even though a lot of the songs came from slightly different timelines… I was able to create a singular voice and structure to things. The songs sonically lean into earlier iterations of the band, playing more real drum kits and a bit less drum machines, but still aiming to retain some of that ‘Nuke-Wave’ sound that I’ve built Monograms around over the years.”
Jacobs is not stepping into new territory, so much as mapping the strange cartography of his own aesthetic. Brooklyn remains the crucible: its DIY stages and warehouse echoes shaping the frequencies. His history is extensive, having supported names like Cloud Nothings, Sunflower Bean, A Place To Bury Strangers, and Girl Band, while licensing tracks to television and film (Shameless, SXSW Film Festival). This is not the résumé of an outsider but of an artist embedded in the bloodstream of independent culture.
Photo credit: Gannon Padgett
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