STOLEN NOVA: CHASING CONTRAST OF ART AND LIFE IN ISSUE 19 FEATURE
From sleepless Paris
parties to skating empty pools in
Venice Beach, the glam rock mu-
sician channels a lifetime of risk,
heartbreak, and rebellion into his
debut album.
Words by Alyssa Goldberg
Photos: Dean Bradshaw
Stolen Nova joins the video call with his camera off, his voice rough and worn from a sleepless week spent performing at parties across Paris. A few minutes in, he appears on-screen shirtless, tangled in slept-in white sheets, a gold eye mask still in place, silver chains catching the morning light. It’s chaotic glamour, but on brand for the nomadic, Venice Beach native who grew up skating in empty swimming pools and chasing the L.A. punk scene.
“Stolen Nova” is the stage name for Josh Landau, lifted from a Slick Rick lyric: “He dipped into a car, a stolen Nova.” Landau kept it in his back pocket for years, but after seeing the legendary rapper live in 2025, he decided to pull the trigger. He’s described Slick Rick as an “incredibly stylish, ridiculous character” and “the nucleus of hip hop.” That, combined with the double entendre of “nova” as an exploding star, it felt like the perfect fit for his moniker.
2026 marks a big year for Landau as his debut LP as Stolen Nova is set for release on Sep-
tember 4. It’s a project he’s been working on his whole life and is “the culmination of every mistake I’ve ever made.”
Speaking about some of the tracks from the album, the musician shares that ‘Shame’, a funky
single with an “Andre 3000-inspired flow,” was “written in the throes of a breakup.” The song is centered around “disconnecting with somebody you were in love with and so close to,” a loss so
devastating it forces you to move cities.
“Even when the buildings get torn down or the apartments change, you pass by those streets, and you still think about those things for years,” he explains, recalling how he told his ex, “You can have L.A., I’ll just go to London.”
“It can be so strange how it can feel like a dream after at some point,” he says.
After spending the better half of the past two years abroad, music pulled him back home. Still, he rarely spends more than two weeks at a time in the same place; he’s constantly bouncing
between Paris, London and L.A. As for what he needs on the road? Just a “good pair of boots” and a well-fitting outfit. But working on the upcoming record, he’s had to tap back into the memories he’d stored away.
Landau sets introspective lyrics against bright, elastic basslines. “It’s not sad boy emo,” he clarifies. His last single, ‘Dancing With A Ghost’, moves like a party track, but at its core, it’s
about loss. “There’s an insanely deep lineage of art and music that has that juxtaposition of happy and sad things, dark and light things,” he explains. “I don’t think there’s too much fantasy in my writing. Even if it’s dressed up, it’s very literal.”
He’s also not afraid to take risks, a mentality he says comes from his skateboarding
background. “It’s such an outcast and insane activity that will make you fall in the street, in the fucking sewer, in the filth, in the dirt, and get up smiling, or clean toxic waste out of the bottom of an empty swimming pool,” he says. It’s impacted every way in which he projects himself to the world as a musician, such as booking a billboard on Sunset Boulevard and climbing onto the roof of a two-story building to promote his project.
“You’re kind of risking your life for your art to create something,” he explains. “To create a moment that’s full of excitement that inspires you and hopefully inspires other people to live their life however they want, and ignore whatever rules may be in their way.”
