Started in 2020, TV Head is the brainchild of Ottawa Valley musician/producer Samuel Agnew who plays every instrument in the studio. For the last 2 years. Samuel has been crafting TV Head’s debut album “The End At The Beginning” due for release on April 25th, 2025.
The album combines elements of Post-Hardcore, Progressive Rock, Midwest Emo, Shoegaze, and Electronica into one big mish-mash of songs, with features from artists like Levi Post (Pantomime, POST) and NKWM.
I sat down with Samuel to talk about his early musical memories, how he began playing music and writing songs and the making of the album which you can hear a small sample of here.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as a kid and what artist or band did you enjoy the most?
Samuel-If i’m being honest, the first band I ever remember getting really into was when I was 8 years old, I remember seeing the music video for Ride by Twenty One Pilots, as this was around when it came out, and it just blew my mind. I became a massive fan, and since this is around the time I started playing drums, Josh Dun was my biggest influence and who I got a lot of my early inspiration from. Later on, when I was around 12 years old, I got really into bands like Nirvana and Foo Fighters, and Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins became my biggest influences.
Then, around 2020, when the pandemic happened, I remember I got really into The White Stripes. The fact Jack White could make simple riffs sound so complex and cool blew my mind, and it inspired me to start trying to learn how to play guitar. Later on, I discovered bands like Radiohead and The Smashing Pumpkins. Those bands opened a whole new door of riff writing and songwriting to me, and still inspire a lot of the soundscapes I tend to make in the background of songs. Going back to guitar playing, by far one of my biggest influences is Tim McTauge from Underoath, specifically on They’re Only Chasing Safety. That album was such a big influence on me, both on guitar and drums, and was a very big inspiration on the new TV Head album. I think the biggest albums for my writing, especially in TV Head, have been OK Computer by Radiohead, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins, White Pony by Deftones, They’re Only Chasing Safety by Underoath, and LP1 by American Football. Even in other projects I am in, I find myself pulling things from each of these albums.
CMM-When did you first start playing instruments and writing your own songs?
Samuel-As I said in the last paragraph, I started playing the drums first, when I was around 8 years old. I had always been told I had had a natural sense of rhythm by a lot of people around me, and I have a lot of early memories of hitting pillows, pots, and my kitchen floor with spoons when my parents would play CD’s, so my parents decided to try to sign me up for drum lessons to see if I would enjoy it. I took lessons for around a year, and ended up hating it, so I stopped, and continued to learn myself. I had always wanted to be in a band, and even tried doing some stuff with some friends of mine around 2016-2019, but it didn’t really end up going anywhere. Around March 2020, when COVID happened, I was very bored, and as I said, was really into The White Stripes, so I picked up my brothers left-handed guitar, and started teaching myself guitar, albeit upside-down. Later on that year, I was given a white Fender Strat by my parents, which I still have to this day and used for this last album. I was able to learn guitar properly with this guitar.
I started attempting to write my own songs around 2017, when I would mess around on drums, making beats for that band with my friends, but then I got into writing lyrics, which weren’t the best, but it taught me what writing songs was. I didn’t start writing my own songs on guitar until around late 2021, when I started collecting ideas I had written for a project I hoped to record. The first TV Head songs were Sometimes Always and Dreamy Night, which were written and recorded back to back in a day in December 2021, then polished up for The World Online in 2023.
CMM-You have a new album coming out soon called “The End At The Beginning” What was the writing and recording process like? Any particular gear and instruments you used during the recording sessions that helped inspire you?
Samuel-I actually started writing this album even before Tales From The Static came out! The first song I wrote for this album was Sound On TV, and that song was recorded in March 2023. I remember I wanted it to be the sort of guinea pig song for what I wanted this album to sound like, as our previous 2 EPs don’t really have a whole lot of our emo influences on display. Usually what I would do when I sat down to try to write is I would get a guitar, and sit and mess around on it until I came up with a cool idea, then I would record the idea, and then build off of it to create a song. I remember doing that for our new song Forecast Of The Nation. I remember sitting with my guitar, which was tuned to FACGCE, because I was trying to learn an American Football song, and I started putting the capo on various frets to see if I got any inspiration, and I remember when I landed on the first guitar progression you hear in the song, I sat and played it for around 10 minutes before recording it, because it was my favourite thing I had ever come up with at that point.
Sometimes chord progressions were born out of other elements having a progression. In Never Be Alone, I remember that song started off because I used a sample of the intro of “Tile By Tile” by Alvvays, and chopped it up, and I didn’t know what the chords were, so I had to sit around for a while and figure out how I was going to play the riff to match with the keyboard. I actually almost scrapped that song about 5 times during the making of this album, just because it was a nightmare to put together, but I am very glad I didn’t, because it is one of my favourite songs on the new album.
A lot of the stuff that inspired me for writing this album gear wise was my white fender strat, tuned to FACGCE. That tuning opens a whole new world of possibilities for riff writing, and there are a few songs on this album in that tuning, those being Forecast Of The Nation and The Head Slips.
CMM-If you could do a score for any film director who would it be and what would the film be about?
Samuel-One of my favourite movies of all time is Lost In Translation by Sofia Coppola (in fact, if you listen very closely in Neon Moon Pt. 3, you can hear a sample from it being played), and Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine did the soundtrack for that movie, so I would love to do a soundtrack for either Sofia Coppola or even David Lynch, Rest In Peace. On the indie side, two of my favourite directors are Anthony Leroy, who has done a lot of Slasher/Found Footage movies, and they are all on Youtube on the Elytra Collective Youtube Channel (Brain Bucket, Bodybag), as well as Joseph Gagnon, who I have been friends with since I was 4 years old-ish, who I have been helping create short films with for around 8 years now. I would recommend going to watch his latest short “Bluewater” on the Kid Brothers Films Channel on Youtube.
On the side of what the film would be about, I really love found footage horror, as well as mystery movies, so I would love to somehow combine the two, and tie them into the TV Head concept, to create a short film of some kind.
CMM-What do you have coming up next? Any new recordings or shows?
Samuel-Our 2nd album is being written as we speak, though nothing is recorded yet. I am taking a break from writing for TV Head to start writing for my two other bands, Right and Pity Fountain. Right leans more into my metal influences, and that is a project I started in 2024 with a few high school friends, originally for fun, but it has turned into a full-blown project now, and we released our debut album last year. We are wrapping up recording for our 2nd album, which will hopefully be released in the next few months. Pity Fountain is a brand new project, started by me and Anthony Leroy (yes, the director!), who is also a pretty amazing metal vocalist, and we just released a small demo EP a few weeks ago.
As far as TV Head goes, after the album comes out, I hope to start playing more shows in cities we haven’t been to before around Ontario, and play with a bunch of bands I admire in the Ontario scene, and maybe even open for some bigger bands (Fleshwater, one can dream…)
