I love tmbg, I enjoy drawing science Johns! I also draw album covers, I love old music, and I take requests! both for album covers to draw, and for stupid science John shenanigans!
- I am an artist. I post mostly only Tmbg stuff here. I go by securejet. And that's pretty much it. I will post semi daily (not always on Tumblr, I'm mainly only focusing on my other socials: see below).
My timezone is AEST, so don't mind if my posts are at odd times!
Basic stuff
- You can send me asks anytime! including requests for stuff for me to draw, preferably Tmbg related (I draw hcs, puppet johns, and real johns) but I also draw album covers, and occasionally album cover parodies. I love drawing stupid stuff for people, and will get around to all of them. (Whilst my main focus is not Tumblr, I will still respond to any ask, and I still encourage sending them!)
DNI: If you ship the johns together. Light joking is fine, but genuine shippers are creeps and should buzz off preferably. I know I can't fully enforce this, but if I find this content expect to be quietly blocked.
Other socials
- I'm on tiktok and instagram under the same name. I post mainly the same stuff but may have bonus content plus will post more regularly there (less hassle), My original plan was to have this be a tmbg blog :) though expect to see a few odd other drawings here. (Insta is my MAIN MAIN)
- with all this, i will also say: Tumblr does not let me post on my phone most of the time, so I need to bring out my laptop every time I want to post here... So sometimes I may take awhile to post stuff on here
link to archived article here or read the text below.
They Might Be Giants Drop New LP
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS The World Is to Dig LP Out Today, Share Focus Track + Visualizer ‘Get Down’
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THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS The World Is to Dig LP Out Today, Share Focus Track + Visualizer ‘Get Down’
“[They Might Be Giants] are practitioners of the ancient art form of popcraft, constructing tight, clever confections to ensure the hooks are delivered cleanly and efficiently.” ★★★★ – MOJO
“Perfect pop music can come from anywhere and can go anywhere. They Might Be Giants have demonstrated this for a quarter century…” – The New Yorker
“From their earliest days as a two-man operation built on drum machines, accordion, and a kind of conceptual mischief, John Flansburgh and John Linnell treated pop music less like a tradition to honor than a system to test. Genres weren’t lanes; they were materials.” – Chronogram
“One of rock’s longest and most prodigious partnerships” – Consequence
Brooklyn legends They Might Be Giants have released their highly anticipated new album, The World Is to Dig, available in all formats at TMBGshop.com and on streaming services. An exclusive 180-gram vinyl colour variant will be available at indie retail shops this Friday, April 17. The band’s first full-length since 2021’s Grammy-nominated BOOK, the album stands as a testament to the duo’s undying creative momentum, blending sharp songwriting and real experimentation into a refreshingly original, 18-song collection that showcases the duo’s timeless originality.
Alongside the release, They Might Be Giants have shared the album’s focus track, “Get Down.” The unstoppable dancefloor-filler finds the band pounding out huge musical hooks to a cautionary lyrical mantra: some uninvited guests have an urgent two-word message: Get down. The accompanying video is directed by graphic design superstar Paul Sahre.
They Might Be Giants treat the entire history of popular music as a trampoline rather than a rulebook. Like two pinballs pinging off of each other through musical murals stretching into a giddy ether, They Might Be Giants move by ricochet. On The World Is to Dig, the multi-
Grammy-winning duo continues bouncing through the pop multiverse, digging into whatever they find with playful zeal. John Linnell and John Flansburgh continue to fire ideas off one another like particles in a perpetual motion experiment, each collision producing a new angle, a new joke, a new melodic left turn, resulting in tracks packed with esoteric references, mischievous details, and left-field detours. Untethered from trends, immune to nostalgia, and equally ready to draw from Tin Pan Alley theatrics and contemporary pop culture references, The World Is to Dig is the sound of a band very much in motion; not chasing relevance but generating it on their own terms.
That sense of motion is no accident. For Flansburgh, the freedom of They Might Be Giants has always come from refusing to plant a flag in any single approach. “There’s a tremendous advantage to being in a project that is open-ended,” he says. “We can do something that’s straight-ahead punk or dig into Count Basie, and that keeps things zesty. The people with their arms folded in the back row might wonder, ‘Do these guys still have it?’ To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we ever ‘had it’ but the truth is, right now, we’ve got something new.”
“I think both John and I are kind of professionally dysmorphic,” Flansburgh continues. “When I think of rock culture, I don’t think of our band as having any place in it. I never think about where we land in the world.” The album’s gestation followed a similar creative pattern: each John would workshop ideas in their home studio only to bring the best ones into a fluid musical conversation, at which point they became inextricably They Might Be Giants-ified. At that point in the process, Flansburgh adds, The World Is To Dig gained some added fluidity. “This album, like our first album, was all made by the same people at the same time in the same place. It has its own musical universe,” he says. “Even as songs pull apart and get further afield, it became naturally cohesive. Our most successful records hang together in very natural ways, and this album has that continuity.” Linnell agrees, noting that the duo’s penchant for brevity aids in that strength: “Very early on, we admired bands that had short songs that said what they had to say and finished. There was this movement in the mid-20th century to write confessional poems full of very specific personal emotion, but I want to write about geostationary orbits. That would be an interesting poem for me. And speaking for Flansburgh, there’s something beautifully opaque and elliptical about his recent lyrical ideas.”
“We do this for ourselves. We’re trying to make the kind of album that we would be interested in,” Linnell says. In the end, the project acts as a thesis: a duo of funny, intelligent, creative musicians still primarily guided by genuine affection for songs, ideas, and moments that move them. On The World Is to Dig, that instinct remains They Might Be Giants’ greatest constant: proof that curiosity, love, and joy are more sustaining than any trend, and that chasing those emotions naturally will always result in new discoveries.
Our new LP The World Is to Dig is everywhere 4/14, but grab your headphones and tuck in for the weekend because you can download it NOW. It’s a fundraiser for our studio work! Help sustain our project and hear all 18 new song before the rest of the world does! Exclusively at TMBGshop.com.
My alt design for mermaid Linnell... This one is early 2000's era Linnell.
I attempted to post this a few days ago, but my awful awful tumblr hates letting me post when I am on my phone.... It went good for a while, but not anymore.
Tiny apple john... Request from @jukeboxwhimzur !
Apologies Flans is a bit bigger than the apples...
I was looking at pictures of tiny apples for this, and I saw a picture of a heap of them in a circle, so this is where my mind led me...
i love yer johns mermaids.. can you draw the science johns as tiny one apple tall guys
yer so cool twin ty
Aww Yesss! That would be so cute 😌
Thank you! Will get to work....
Plus, I will say - tomorrow sometime, Ill be posting an alt design of mermaid linnell, plus some other stuff. I tried posting it a few days ago, but Tumblr hates me 😭
Sorry Tumblr is not my priority, I will start posting some non tmbg art possibly, just to switch things up, and I am going to return to my regular daily posting again soon. I'm kind of hopeless, be patient....
The cracks on the front cover are sadly from shipping. A copy of the sticker resides on my laptop, next to my mousepad. - A copy, for the sake of preservation of the original. I just scanned the sticker and printed it onto sticker paper I had lying about. Oddball and tryotophane are brilliant tracks, I like Flansy's version more than Frank Black's! I will be attempting to find a replacement case on thrift cds, but it may be a little difficult thanks to the damn patented green case...
I'm still posting daily, or at least I will— haven't posted because I've been painting something to post, and damn paint drying times... It will be posted later, when it's not late at night for me. Then next time I work on a project that will take a little while, I'll pre make some art, or make some art while taking breaks from the larger project to post. I feel that may be a better way to work.
I made this edit a while back to have a a computer wallpaper, changing all my app icons to evil varieties of Waw. I tried submitting this to tmbgaresuck, I don't think they posted it though sadly. Look at these evil, horrible people.