more eaze – sentence structure in the country | Album Review

Thrill Jockey

On one of my family’s many trips to Southern California to visit my grandparents, we made our customary stop at Carpinteria Beach. Consumed with excitement, I burst out of the car the moment it stopped, scuttling towards the shore as fast as the uneven terrain would allow. The Pacific beckoned to me as a long-lost friend, pale green waves rushing to hug my short, sturdy legs. I smiled at the waving sea and noticed the way the sand felt between my toes. At my big age of six, I felt very important because I knew that the sand on these beaches was really just lots of tiny pebbles, so tiny that you couldn’t tell unless you looked really closely. Of course, looking really closely at things was my favorite pastime. I had recently received a child’s microscope for Christmas, complete with real slides and many delightful cross-sections to examine. The tide pools at this particular beach were another thing I liked looking closely at, each feeling like its own little microscope slide, a cross-section of the ocean that I loved so dearly. The textures, colors, and gentle motion within each pool enchanted me, and every visit provided some new fascination for my curious mind.

I have been drawn to texture and color in music for as long as I have loved the ocean. Every moment deserves precise decoration and shading, filled with a gentle motion that undulates without end as the tides do. I love music that swirls and crunches and buzzes and hums, any given moment displaying a vivid cross-section of its aural ecosystem. more eaze, the pen name of musician Mari Rubio, composes in this wonderful, variegated vein. Her most recent release, sentence structure in the country, is a beautiful and tapestried release that is yellow-warm with detail. Synthesizers, found sounds, string instruments, and vocals hang together like a dense kelp forest, every glitch and murmur precisely where it belongs. Rubio tapped musicians Alice Gerlach (cello), Jade Guterman (acoustic guitar), Ryan Sawyer (drums), Henry Earnest (electric guitar), and Wendy Eisenberg (piano, vocals, electric guitar) to realize the artistic vision alongside her.

Last year, I had the privilege of reviewing one of Mari’s previous albums, No Floor, a collaborative release with ambient artist claire rousay. The detailed, thoughtful placement of each sound throughout that album deeply impressed me. This type of composing is especially challenging, as it requires an innate understanding of the balance and relationship between each sound chosen for a song. You have to be able to achieve depth without busyness, clarity without sounding shallow, and intention without becoming predictable. The talent I observed from more eaze on No Floor is reflected and amplified on sentence structure in the country. 

The album opens with “leave (again),” a track lush with synth effects, pleasingly autotuned vocals, and emotive strings. It’s an incredibly impactful opener, immediately pulling the listener inside more eaze’s world, succinct and organized like the tide pools of my youth. “If you only knew why I lock the doors / You’d say it's illogical / and I’d say of course,” Mari hums as a melancholic synth organ repeats a rising melody line. “I’d say let’s go outside / but it’s far too warm.” Static crackles over these words, and I am reminded of one of my favorite perfumes, Warm Bulb by Clue. The perfume has a note called “burning dust” that fizzes in my nostrils and makes my nose wrinkle in the best way. It smells like a hot attic and old vanilla. This is exactly how “leave (again)” feels; the static hum is warm, dusty, and comforting, Mari’s vocals soothe, and the entire effect is incandescently cozy. 

This intimate mood shifts on the second track, “distance,” where the atmosphere is immediately cooler, sparser, and more reserved. Dense, blurred harmonies fill the piece's background like fog, inviting yet unimpenetrable. The lyrics of “distance” capture the unsettling feeling of growing apart from a friend or even completely losing a relationship. Life rushes on regardless, but there are subtle shifts in routine as certain things, once so significant, become mundane or disappear entirely. more eaze’s vocals create an otherworldly ambiance as they melt into the surrounding landscape of sound.

from the ground
to the stairs
one time
the last time

four o clock
for me
means something less to you

the scene changes
but mood
does not improve

“distance” is a track on this album that I have already found myself returning to regularly. I wish to fall into the song and let its velvety grey fog surround me, catching me mid-air as the alien atmosphere captivates every sense. This is what sets the work of more eaze apart — she creates landscapes, microcosms, dioramas. Each track is a glimpse of a world in miniature, a tide pool of sound and texture and emotion. 

more eaze continues her exploration of these worlds on “biters,” which stands in stark contrast to the atmosphere of “distance.” This particular microcosm is metallic, and as I listen with my eyes closed, I feel as if I am standing in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There is something large and ominous looming ahead, and there is something else much faster than I, roaring past. The wind whips my legs and pulls the jacket on my back taut against my skin. Electronic sounds glitch and garble through my ears. I wince as everything starts to sound closer and louder, but there is something familiar too. A smooth vocal line weaves its way through the chaos and razor edges of the noises crowding against my ears. Everything — the sounds, the voice, the volume — presses against my eardrums until it is almost too much, and then suddenly it is quiet. A breath, and a twangy guitar jangles in my ears. Where am I now? Drums skitter behind me like a tumbleweed and violins warm the air. There is singing again, raw and very close by. Everything crashes against my ears once more, but now I am floating, and I feel something like the sun against my eyelids. The whir of something fast intertwines with the guitar, acoustic against electronic. The air is very hot. I open my eyes as the dust settles and I am back on Earth.

“a chorale” is the world I love most on the journey this album takes. I have always been peculiarly drawn to works for strings, marveling at the depth of feeling that such simple instruments can create. Works like the evergreen “Adagio for Strings” by Barber, “Violin Concerto No. 1” by Philip Glass, and “Different Trains” by Steve Reich all hold a treasured place in my heart. They are moving to the point of being gut-wrenching, but I find myself returning to this sort of work again and again anyway. Because of this, I was delighted when the raw opening notes of “a chorale” met my ears for the first time. This piece is like coming upon a sunlit clearing in a dense forest, feeling the air suddenly warm around you and watching the light dance through it. This fleeting, gorgeous track ends with a poignant sustained note that feels like a heartbreak. As the echoes of that final note still resonate in my head, the next track, “healing attempt,” immediately shifts to a sunrise-warm synth. Little glitches scintillate through the beginning of the song as mari sings, “Princess of the texture / is looking quite vexed / at last year’s biography / It’s not a good mixture / when you win Best Picture for making a fool of me.” Suddenly, the song shifts stylistically, adding twangy acoustic guitar and background vocals that are charmingly reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens. “healing attempt” is a clever, tongue-in-cheek dissection of navigating growing fame and recognition, recognizing that it is just “the same hollow entry to something new.”

For the entire album so far, I have pondered the meaning of the title. What is sentence structure in the country? I like ambiguous, abstract concepts in art, so it appealed to me immediately; however, I also wanted to figure out the hidden meaning, so I was excited to finally listen to the title track. Though solely instrumental, this piece feels like bearing witness to a heated conversation. Strings slide and snap, skittering melodies are plucked on a guitar, electronic sounds murmur and scoff. A fiddle tune begins to worm its way into the piece, becoming more agitated, rushing through a fiery jig as the argument continues. It becomes obvious that, though the title seemed abstract to me at first, this song captures the precise feeling of sentence structure in the country. This is a brilliantly executed idea: the explanation of the title is saved until the penultimate track, and though “sentence structure” implies the use of language and grammar, more eaze achieves this reveal without using either. 

Tide pools fill at high tide and meet their mother ocean again. These tiny worlds become part of the vast Pacific, though but for a few hours. sentence structure in the country is filled with exquisitely crafted songs that each stand as their own tide pool, but together they swirl and froth into something bigger and even more beautiful. Mari Rubio has once again proven her mastery in creating immersive, thoughtful works of art with this release.

I sense that the tide is rolling in as the waves swirling around my sandy legs feel a little more eager than before, and I carefully wave goodbye before running up the sand.

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Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

An Interview… But it’s Midwest Emo: A Conversation with the Founders of Emocon

I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people I listen to emo music. Normally, I just prefer to say a few band names that I’ve been listening to lately and bury the lead until I know I can start saying things like “midwest emo revival,” “twinkledaddies,” or “Senff-Core.” Outside of college campuses, emo is often flattened into a 2000s genre primarily meant for tweens who wear black jeans, which seems pretty silly to obsess about.

Since its inception in the mid-80s, emo has had a bit of a credibility issue. As a relatively new genre with an ever-broadening sound, people seem to prefer to treat emo music and its surrounding culture as a flavor of punk or alternative. This fails to acknowledge unique aspects of the genre and prevents deeper cultural understanding and scholarship. 

This year, Varun Chandrasekhar (Washington University in St. Louis) and Patrick Mitchell (University of Cincinnati) are changing that. Together, they masterminded a first-of-its-kind conference at WashU in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 10th and 11th, dubbed “A Conference… but It’s Midwest(ern) Emo” or Emocon for short. With the help of nearly 40 researchers from across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic, they are changing the game for emo scholarship in academia. They’ve also secured two incredible keynote speakers for the conference: Dan Ozzi, author of  SELLOUT: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007), and Steve Lamos, the drummer and trumpet player for American Football, who is also an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado-Boulder. 

I was lucky enough to chat with Varun and Patrick to learn how they met, what they think emo is—beyond music—and how they put this conference together. We also touch on topics in academia, such as topical timeliness, overcoming credibility gaps, dealing with missing data, and removing barriers to access. 

The full interview is provided below, edited down for length and clarity. 

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SWIM: Thank you both so much for agreeing to sit down to talk about this upcoming conference. To get started, could you each say a little bit about yourselves and how the two of you met?

PATRICK:  I’ve been doing graduate work at the University of Cincinnati for five years. I did my master’s work here at UC, and I’m currently a PhD candidate at CCM [College-Conservatory of Music at UC].

VARUN:  I’m a fifth-year PhD candidate in music theory at Washington University in St. Louis, [Missouri], where the conference will be hosted.

PATRICK:  I knew Varun as like a micro-celebrity in the pop music scholarship world on Twitter before I knew him in person. Back when Twitter was still hanging on to any threads of relevance. But yeah, I met Varun at a Q&A for one of my papers at a conference in Minneapolis. We just hit it off, and it was at that conference that we jokingly pitched the idea of Emocon.

VARUN:  Yeah, we met each other at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference (IASPM).  What we were talking about then was this generation of people who grew up with bands like Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Paramore—or emo revival and fourth wave to some extent—now sort of being the age to have a PhD or be writing a dissertation.

This is something that really means a lot to me and I think is really important, so we had just been trying to plant a seed to get this conference to happen, and then a couple of grants came back favorably, and, uh, here we are. 

SWIM:  When was this conference that you’re talking about in Minneapolis? 

PATRICK: Summer of ’23, I believe. 

SWIM: Wow, okay. So this idea has been in the works. 

VARUN: We had been thinking about it for a while.  IASPM, the US chapter, had a couple of calls for funding ideas, and we had tried them, and we struck out twice. Then WashU had what they call a “Redefining Doctoral Education” grant that was provided on behalf of the Mellon Foundation,  and we were very fortunate to get that.

SWIM:  That’s amazing. Thank you guys for continuing to try at it. Can you say the name of your conference? I’m going to ask you to elaborate on the title for those of us who might not be so online.

VARUN:  So the conference is called “A Conference… but It’s Midwest(ern) Emo.” If you’re not familiar—well, first off, in the Midwestern emo tradition especially, often what you will get is a band taking a clip from a show and then playing what people often refer to as a “twinkle riff” underneath it.  A really foundational one is the Mom Jeans one with Bob’s Burgers.  What people do on the internet then is, they’ll take these clips, often of very sad moments from TV shows or movies, and they’ll play a twinkly Midwest emo riff underneath it. It’s sort of this comedic mismatch and context collapse. They’re very funny, they’re on the internet, and there are a million of ’em you can find.

@benquadok Can u hear the second guitar I dubbed in? #midwestemo #emo #fifthwaveemo #diyemo #poppunk #mathrock #telecaster #guitar #riff ♬ original sound - benquadok

SWIM:  Nice. And you thought naming the conference in this format would be… good? [laughing] for its reach?

VARUN:  We thought it would get the people who we wanted to come, to come.

SWIM:  Oh, definitely, I think it hits the right audience. So, you’re both music researchers. Can I ask what your working dissertation titles are—if you have one—and how does emo specifically fit into them?

PATRICK: Sooo, working dissertation title… [laughs] My dissertation is on emo, and—this is not a unique stance at all but—I’m looking at third-wave emo in the context of post-9/11 US. But what I’m really interested in are the contradictions and displays of counterculture in a post-subcultural music industry.

SWIM: [confused eyebrows]

PATRICK:  So, you know, counterculture and mainstream culture are essentially the same after the ’90s. So, I am looking at how third-wave emo used its mainstream platform to speak back to the status quo, but also at how it used the status quo for its own corporate and commercial gains.

SWIM:  I gotcha. So this conference slots right in there. 

PATRICK: Oh yeah.  And we’re so lucky to have so many papers that talk about emo and 9/11. I think this is a great opportunity for music studies to get into post-9/11 studies, which is a really, really robust academic field that is now 25 years after the attacks. We can now really treat this time period with the academic vigor that it needs.

 I don’t necessarily remember 9/11, just my age, I thought it was a tornado drill. So I didn’t necessarily understand the cultural significance at the time, but I lived in that world afterwards, and I think emo is a great avenue to study this really consequential decade, which not only had a paradigm shift in the US, but a global paradigm shift that just completely rewrote the way we interact with the rest of the world.

SWIM:  Yeah, absolutely. And, Varun, what about you? What’s your thesis title?

VARUN:  My thesis title is Being in Jazz: An Existential Analysis of Charles Mingus. So, that reads the life and music of Charles Mingus through the lens of Sartre and existentialism to discuss the way that the often racialized, commercialized, and urbanized gaze of jazz bands on jazz musicians limited their freedoms, and how that speaks to discourses of freedom in a post-World-War-II America. So, very little to do with emo. [Laughter]

Although I do maintain Charles Mingus would like emo, and I’m happy to talk about why that is the case. But, yeah, I’d also been pursuing this idea of, what can I say about emo music in my other projects, class essays, and doing some conference presentations about it, so it’s sort of morphed into these two scholarly fields that I was pursuing. 

SWIM:  I gotcha. Really interesting. Since we’re talking about emo a lot and since a lot of people have different definitions, even for the same genre, can I ask each of you to just give a quick boilerplate definition of emo and any bands you might point to as an example?

VARUN: … you’re gonna get people mad at us.

PATRICK:  Well, what I think is fascinating about emo is that it’s difficult to define sonically because the waves are so disparate. You know… [exasperated sigh]

SWIM:  What I’m asking is really like a positionality statement. I think the issue with emo discourse is that a lot of people don’t say what they think emo is, and then they argue with other people, and they don’t even have a baseline that they agree on. So I’m asking, what is your baseline definition of emo? And you’re right, sonically, it’s really difficult to say anything, but I imagine there are some other interesting things.

VARUN: I would say Matthew Carillo-Vincent provides probably the best understanding of it in his article “Wallflower Masculinities and the Peripheral Politics of Emo” (2013) where he says emo is defined as a normative critique of normativity that uses performances of non-hegemonic masculinity to challenge hegemonic masculinity, but while still embracing hegemonic identities—you know, your sort of straight, upper-middle-class white man. It often reflects as a critique of sub-hegemonic cultures, such as hardcore cultures.

And so I think that is probably the social position of emo, and why a lot of people will say things like, “Everything is emo now; your grandmother’s emo.” That’s one category of it. I think there are some roots in the hardcore tradition that have to be present. I would say there is a certain vocal styling: the sort of whiny, nasally, upper register. And then a certain alt-rock, loud-soft dynamic. I think those are probably getting most everything there. I don’t know, Patrick, what would you say?

PATRICK:  Yeah, I think you’re spot on with the voice.  And—not that blink-182 is necessarily emo—but when people make a caricature of the emo voice, they often think of Tom DeLonge’s voice.  And I think especially of vocal drawls, like the over-pronunciation of certain words or the under-pronunciation of certain words, is really a clear indicator of the genre. If that vocal drawl isn’t necessarily present in a song that could go either way, you lean towards emo, so I think the voice is a huge, huge part of that.

VARUN:  And to that, Patrick—I’ve thought about this, and Braden, you might have an opinion too—what band do you think if you asked everyone who self-identified as an emo fan, “is this band emo?” would get the most votes, assuming that person knows the band. 

SWIM:  Yeah, this is a really tricky thing with selection bias because—I mean, MCR, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, the big three—obviously everyone knows those are “emo.” But part of the aesthetic and actual social impact of emo bands is that they’re countercultural. They’re undercurrents. They’re DIY. They’re not played on the radio. It’s not something your mom has ever heard. 

So, this metric of “what is emo? Oh, it’s the thing that everyone calls emo.” That’s not the most stable because emo is scene-specific. I think that’s also how you get waves and amazing things like Florida-specific emo bands. Like, Hot Water Music was doing its own little thing for years, and eventually it rose up into the rest of the United States.  I don’t know if I want to say that Hot Water Music is emo, but they’re influential within the emo scene. 

FROM TOM MULLEN’S WEBSITE “IS THIS BAND EMO?”

VARUN:  Well, that’s the interesting thing, ‘cause—speaking of Florida bands—Dashboard Confessional might be the most [emo]. If you liked that music in the early two thousands, you probably knew “Hands Down” or “Vindicated.”  If you’re really into the hardcore scene and like the emo outgrowth of it, you probably respect Chris Carrabba having at least some tie sonically to that scene. But also saying “Dashboard Confessional is the quintessential emo band,” I don’t know if that sits right with me—and I love Dashboard Confessional.

PATRICK:  Reading through early music critics, when it was really clear to them that emo was not just a flash in the pan but was going to be a lasting youth subcultural phenomena, the two quintessential emo bands they identified were Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids.

VARUN: Really? 

PATRICK: When we think of these “genre-defining” groups [like MCR, FOB, Paramore], they really hadn’t burst onto the scene yet. In the early 2000s, when you thought about emo, you thought about Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids.

The Get Up Kids were a band that I didn’t really know when I was an emo fan growing up. It was one of those that I feel was submerged underneath the mainstream craze of third-wave emo. That could also be a time period thing; at the turn of the century, you have the lingering effects of Midwest emo and the beginnings of third-wave as well.

VARUN:  It’s interesting ‘cause I thought you were going to say Jimmy Eat World, but that’s also somewhat of a reconstruction because, from what I understand of the late 90s/early-2000 scenes, people weren’t really considering Jimmy Eat World an emo band, and now I don’t know if anyone contests that.

SWIM:  Yeah, and Jimmy Eat World is also an interesting example because their two chart-toppers are hits that my mom does actually know. And that album is also a 9/11 thing—it was going to be titled Bleed American, but then it was titled Jimmy Eat World, and then they changed the title back several months later.

And a lot of emo people that I talk to are like “yeah, that album’s great, but you should really listen to Clarity,” which came out several years before. That album has a foot in the door of second wave, whereas their thing that brought them to the mainstream is actually closer to third wave.  Not necessarily vocally, but just its proximity. It’s more related to those bands that you hear playing in the mall or you would’ve heard in 2008. 

VARUN: The production is so crisp. The first time you listen to Clarity, you’re like, “Wow, this is just a little rough around the edges, but these are great songs.” Then Bleed American is peak loudness wars and has really pristine guitar production. Although the best Jimmy Eat World record, in my opinion, is Futures, and no one agrees with me on that, but it’s peak Jimmy Eat World for me. 

SWIM: Yeah, I’ve honestly never heard Futures, so I’ll have to look into it right after this. I’m so glad for all this discourse, which makes this next question a lot easier to answer. Why take the effort to organize a conference and engage more researchers on emo in particular?

PATRICK:  I can think of a few reasons, but one I really like and might punt to Varun. The papers about third-wave emo mostly wanted to talk about “emo,” the cultural phenomenon, but Varun brought something up when we were reviewing the abstracts, which is that emo is affect, with the second-wave emo bands. We weren’t expecting the intellectual diversity that we have [with Emocon], it’s not just, “Okay, well here are 40 papers on MCR, 9/11, and masculinity.” We certainly have some papers that touch on that, but the amount of creativity that some of our presenters have brought to the table has been astounding, and that was an unexpected result of hosting this conference.

VARUN: Yeah. And, to maybe go towards the cultural side, if Kurt Cobain is sort of the figurehead of Gen X—or at least like the underground of Gen X—I don’t think you can make any claim about that with Patrick Stump or someone similar. This idea that if you aren’t represented by Drake or Taylor Swift or Beyonce—and I don’t say that to demean those artists in any way—but like the countercultural identity of the millennial generation really did coalesce around this emo identity.

When we think about the people who are showing their young kids the music of their youth or the definition of what it meant to be against the grain in 2005 and 2008, it’s very much tied to pop-punk and emo. There were definitely people who are more about the DIY scene, or a little more hardcore or whatever, but I think the thing that most crystallized in the popular imagination really is emo, and that’s what comes through in the conference really clearly. 

We are talking about 9/11, and we’re talking about queerness and finding a queer identity. We’re talking about gender, affect, and all of these things that are so central to understanding this. The thing that we are really proud of is that, even if you aren’t really concerned about emo that much, you would still get a lot out of this conference just because it demonstrates a very vivid picture of what the cultural terrain was like in the mid- to late-2000s, and up to our current moment. 

PATRICK: Exactly. I hate to be hyperbolic—but again, going back to the old music criticism of the 2000’s—the amount of times I’ve read emo critics concede that although they criticized this genre initially for being a flash in the pan, that it had become the voice—I hate to say—the voice of a generation for a lot of suburban white kids and a lot of suburban kids in general.

Varun hit the nail right on the head. We have enough historical distance from it now, where this is almost like the ideal time to be diving into this because it’s hardest to historicize the present. I think, especially with emo revival bands, we can see what it is about this subculture that has made it have such a lasting impact on adults and new fans, too.

A MAP SHOWING US CITIES SENDING A PRESENTER TO EMOCON

SWIM: So I’ve read quite a few of the abstracts that are already on the site. I’m trying to make it through all of them before the conference. You said you were surprised about some of the ones you received, so I have two questions. How many abstracts did you receive? And how did the paneling procedure go where you’re grouping these things together? Was that difficult, or were there a bunch of topics that neatly worked out? 

VARUN:  Yeah, I think we got 55 or 56 abstracts in total, somewhere a little under 60. The selection was just courtesy of me and Patrick, so if you want to send some hate mail, we are the two people to send it to. But we found it actually just fell into place pretty naturally. There are 12 total panels, and maybe 9 of them were pretty obvious. I don’t think we really even had to stretch that much to add more. I think that just speaks to the equally distributed care that people have for this genre. 

You know, one of the stereotypes of emo is that it is a place for a very specific type of white man to voice their complaints about women.  And these panels are something that really shows that’s not the case, man. One of the abstracts was about finding queer identity in Modern Baseball. And as someone who loves Modern Baseball, but who’s not queer, I was like, “Wow, you know, I’m kind of surprised about that.” Then I was talking to a queer friend of mine, and they said, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, and I think like actually a lot of MoBo fans would agree.” It’s exposing us to this diversity of thought about emo that exists even beyond the realms of someone who’s very immersed in these discourses.

PATRICK:  And Varun, to his credit, was a mastermind at looking at the large picture. It took a very short amount of time because I feel like he could zoom out and see the conference, and it was just a matter of putting all the abstracts together. It was really, really incredible. I think we had graded the abstracts and also put together the panels that evening.

So it was really like a matter of puzzle pieces, which is not always the case. As pop music scholars—unless it’s a pop music panel—you are oftentimes shoved into a session that has nothing to do with your topic. You’re trying to find some methodological correlations or some theoretical similarities there, and there’s nothing. But—not to toot our own horn—I think we did a great job with putting like-minded or similar-focused talks in the same sessions, but not necessarily much overlap on topic or content, if that makes sense.

I feel like there are focused sessions, but also a good amount of diversity within them. 

SWIM: Yeah, reading through them, I absolutely agree. And two things—the one thing that bums me out about the conference is I won’t be able to go to every single talk.  All of them seem so interesting to be at. The other thing is, you two are students. I am a student myself, and I would be terrified to organize a conference. So, it’s just that much more incredible that you’ve pulled this off and you have this thing that’s going ahead, and I think it’s going to be a real big hit for the genre, the audience attending, and probably all the scholarship after. 

There will be “before Emocon” and “after,” that’s what I think. And this gets into my next question. We’ve sort of talked before about emo having a credibility problem and there being a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with the research itself. People don’t do the research because it’s not taken seriously as a genre, and because of that, there’s very little scholarship to even pursue further research. Do you think that’s been a problem with other genres in the past? Is that unique to emo, and do you think a conference—just one—can change that?

PATRICK:  I have a very short answer. I think it’s unique to emo in the fact that it has a subcultural complexion to it. Most subcultures, especially musical subcultures, academics really love to get into it. Like, one of the most famous academic studies on punk, Dick Hebdige’s Subcultures, was published a few months after the Sex Pistols broke up in 1979.

So that just shows you that most subcultures get immediate academic attention and immediate robust academic attention. They still have their own fights for credibility, but even amongst scholars who study subcultural music, I got the sense that emo wasn’t necessarily taken seriously. 

I’m trying to think of other genres that have that difficulty; a few come to mind, but not necessarily genres. Taylor Swift studies are picking up quite a bit, and I have heard significant pushback, though I would say quietly, behind closed doors. I’ve not heard anyone go to Taylor Swift panels and talk about how “this is trashy music,” but I don’t know if they’re struggling for validity, because there are a number of books coming out–both monographs and edited collections. 

VARUN: Shouts out to Paula Harper and Kate Galloway.  I think what Patrick is touching on a bit is that this is a longstanding issue. To give a very quick gloss of it, mass culture became a thing around 1900, and by even the 1920s, 1930s, what you have is the Frankfurt School saying, “this is actually a sign of cultural decay. This is all bad. This is just reproducing capitalist hegemony. Yada, yada, yada.” But then what happened in England in the 50s and 60s—what’s termed the Birmingham School with people like Stuart Hall—are saying “Well, regardless of what you think about these sorts of youth cultures and subcultures, they do reflect important things about society.” 

 A lot of those authors were saying things like, “The Beatles do have to be taken seriously.” So these are calls going up in the 60s and 70s, and it’s this sort of constant terrain because you don’t want to be writing about the Harlem Shake two years after it happened, waiting another year for your article to get published, and everyone going, “what is that?” You don’t want to be saying something about the meaning of something that’s changed pretty significantly recently. 

I just taught Drake in a class, and I can imagine the way my students would’ve responded to Drake four years ago versus the way they responded to Drake post-Kendrick Lamar beef is very different. You want to have an accurate, full picture of it, and yet at the same time, there is no time like the present, you know? 

We have a couple of these panels about emo in the archive, and how do you preserve cultural memory, and how do you preserve things like zines and whatever. So you’re always fighting this tension. The people who do it really well are the people who can speak the language of an established scholarship, convincing them why these things are going to matter, both in the moment and in the long term, as a critical reflection. I think that’s an age-old problem that has existed as long as the modern view of academia has. 

PATRICK: You bring up emo in the archive—I wonder if digitization has anything to do with preservation as well. Low-hanging fruit—punk has historically received a lot of academic attention, and so these zines are almost seen as preservations of cultural artifacts. I’m thinking of the punk archive at UCLA. But with emo, were there necessarily people with hard drives full of show videos, or grassroots interviews with scene bands? I don’t think so. 

We’re seeing now that it’s incredibly difficult to navigate the popularity of the genre, but also the local significance of it, too. And the local significance: because of digitization, either there haven’t been effective modes of categorizing it, or a lot of these things just don’t exist, or it’s on someone’s camcorder in their mom’s basement, just waiting to be plugged in and downloaded. So I think there’s a little bit of dismissal of it, but also a lot of the artifacts themselves were not necessarily physical.

VARUN: And to that point, the digital side introduces this view of temporality that can really reconfigure things.  I think there’s a very real timeline where “Never Meant” doesn’t take off on the internet around 2015, and Steve Lamos then is a professor who tries to tell his kids, “No, trust me, we were this big deal,” versus the world now, where we are so honored to have this living legend.

Which is not to dismiss American Football, but I mean the internet really grabbed a hold of this thing that was so important as not just a touchstone of what was happening in Urbana-Champaign at the turn of the century, but as a thing that really spoke to people across areas and generations,  and a thing that the internet demonstrates its power and its ability to construct that.

SWIM:  Absolutely. These keynotes that you two got for this conference are both incredible, Steve Lamos and Dan Ozzi. How did you make that happen? Were you just cold emailing and crossing your fingers? What was it like getting them on board? 

PATRICK: Hail Mary.

VARUN: Hail Mary. Having a fair amount of funding doesn’t hurt either. We hope we’ve set them up at a nice hotel and they’re leaving with a bit of pocket cash. But, also, I think—I don’t want to speak for Steve—but I saw recently a clip of a guy saying, “I was just talking with Steve and he was talking about how they had made this thing that matters to so many people, and he felt like it was his duty to sort of preserve and care for that fact.” And I imagine Dan feels similarly. Again, this is all conjecture on my end, but I hope, to some extent, they feel that this conference is, in many ways, a high point in demonstrating what caring for the genre looks like.

PATRICK:  Yeah, and to their credit, it was such an honor to receive those responses. I think Varun texted me, and he was like, “Oh my God, did you see the Gmail?” Because both of them were so immediately down and so excited. I think Steve said, “This is a great idea. I can’t wait to do it. Let’s talk details immediately.” And likewise with Dan.

That was also validation on our part as well. Some of my colleagues were like, “You’re doing a conference on emo? That’s crazy. All right, man. Good luck.” Then, to get these keynotes was a validation of the conference, but also just an incredible, incredible honor. And yeah, we hope that they view it as an honor as well, because we’re so incredibly excited to have them both.

SWIM:  Yeah, I’m super excited to see the keynotes, and it’s a great example of how a good idea sometimes takes a couple of years. I’m glad you two persevered with this thing, got the funding, and you got these awesome keynotes. 

You mentioned earlier that emo doesn't necessarily have icons the same way other genres do. I think of the Kinsellas as second wave icons, but even then I would break it up by wave. I don’t know what the layperson thinks, if they have an idea of an icon in emo. But yeah, it’s incredible that these people are on board. 

PATRICK: Yeah, they’re the closest to icons, actually. Yeah, that’s a great point. 

VARUN: Maybe, Soupy [Dan Campbell] from the Wonder Years? I feel like he’s kind of got that aura. Gerard Way, maybe. [DEFINITELY]

SWIM: Yeah, emo has a huge multiplicity of people. Which is something that—I’m not so into other genres, this is kind of my life—but I don’t get the sense that it’s the same in other spaces. There’s just a ton of people you have to know in emo, and they all know each other, and they all are inspired by each other.

VARUN:  And that’s part of the DIY thing. Like, my favorite band recorded one and a half albums, and they came to my town four times and they hung out with me. That’s not happening with Mick Jagger. If you want to idolize Mick Jagger, you’ve got to know like 70 records, and if he sees you, he’d probably spit on you. [Laughter]

PATRICK: But I think that speaks to the scene origins of the genre, too. A lot of these guys are used to just shooting the shit, bumming cigs behind a venue, and just talking it out while sweating after a show at a shitty dive bar. I think that it speaks to the origins of the community that you feel in a local scene. And when those artists get bigger, some of them don’t maintain those same origins, but many do.

They’re just regular old people. I know Real Friends used to go to my friend’s Starbucks in Illinois, and they’re just guys. They’re really cool, and most people didn’t recognize ’em, so it was like doubly fun.

SWIM:  Yeah. So our conversations, like we’re having here, there are specific questions I’m asking, but also we’re going a little off script, and just talking because it’s so much fun to talk about emo. Are these the types of things you expect to be doing at the conference in between panels? Are there people you really want to meet with and ask specific questions about your research? What are you hoping to get out of the conference, if anything specific?

PATRICK:  I’m personally looking forward to a lot of the autoethnographic presentations. Like, a scholar’s experience, that’s their framing methodology. That’s what I’m most excited about, the post-paper chats. 

SWIM: And is that something that you think will be relevant to your research and dissertation, or is it more just personally interesting?

PATRICK: I mean, no information’s bad information, but it’s a type of scholarship that I am always really taken by. I think that it takes a lot of courage to not only put yourself out there and give a conference presentation, but it’s also framed by your own experience. And a lot of these topics you have to have a great deal of sensitivity to deal with, too. So, it almost speaks to the emo-ness maybe of the methodology. It’s mostly just of interest, and shows what Varun was talking about, the diversity of impact, too.

VARUN: Yeah, and like for me personally, I think these hangs are so important. In the same way that in order to build a scene, you really do have to work, making community a thing is work. Academia can sometimes be a little hostile to community building. On one hand, because everyone’s fighting for a really small slice of a really small pie. On the other hand, it’s like, “I need to go up into my room, and I need to read 300 books, and I need to do that to write two sentences. Please don’t bother me.”

We all live across the country, and there are only so many people really committed to the academic life. To whatever degree being an emo scholar means doing justice to emo as a concept, that means taking those ethoses of DIY and community building and bringing them to the academy as much as we can. So much of this was about, like, who are the people who are actually writing and thinking about this? And what are the things that they care about? And how can we position them so we know each other’s work and support it?

So, Janessa Williams, Francesca Sobande, Isabel Felix Gonzales, Steve [Lamos] himself, and I have all published essays about emo or pop-punk. Patrick is writing a dissertation. Our friend Peter wrote a dissertation on emo, and at least three or four other people coming to the conference are currently writing dissertations about emo, and I didn’t know about these publications. I didn’t really know about these dissertations [before], and how am I supposed to show up for these people if I don’t even know that they exist? 

That’s really the thing that I want to come out of this, is that feeling like we’ve got each other’s backs and we can really support each other growing to make this a viable academic study.  So no one’s advisor says, “I don’t know. Should you write an emo dissertation? What’s that going to do for you?”

SWIM:  Yeah, building a network is 100% necessary to real scholarship. Maybe 200 years ago you could have been the first person to think about something and write it down, but nowadays, with how connected the entire world is, if you have an idea, someone else has already had it, and they might have even already written about it. You shouldn’t view that as meaning your idea and your thoughts about it aren’t worthwhile; you need to view that as a source that you can use to inform and interrogate whatever it is you’re trying to get out on paper.

And yeah, 100% agree: a huge thing that should happen at this conference is that people should all exchange information, try to support each other, and read each other’s stuff. Just since learning about this conference, I’ve been more engaged, trying to read rigorous research, buying books, and going through them with a more serious, formal approach to the genre. As opposed to just scrolling through Spotify playlists and thinking, “Oh, this person doesn’t actually know what Midwest emo is.” [Laughter]

That’s really informal. I think that’s still important, but it’s also really important to read entire books and cite them.

VARUN: Yeah. Shout out to Judith Fathallah, Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture… A subculture, or a genre? 

PATRICK: [pulls out a copy of the book and holds it up to the screen] “Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture.”

SWIM: To this point of community and accessibility, whose idea was the livestream? I’ve been to livestreamed conferences, but I thought that was kind of normal for really big international events. Is that the standard in music things? Was that something you guys wanted to do specifically for this?

PATRICK: Varun, I think that was your initial idea.

VARUN:  Yeah, part of it is, I think we’re only dipping our toes into the livestream water because Zoom introduces infinite complexities. But I’m pretty committed to being a public intellectual. I think scholarship should be available and open to as many people who want to engage with it as possible.

And at WashU, these rooms are already set up. Setting up the Zoom call requires clicking a couple of links, hitting a few buttons, and then giving people some mics. If that’s all it takes and someone wants to spend their Saturday afternoon watching these talks, I certainly don’t want to keep them from that. In fact, I want them to come here because I think the things we are saying about emo as a collective matter to people’s lives and help elucidate the individual’s relationship to society at large.

If we can make that happen with a little bit of work, I think that’s our responsibility to do it. 

PATRICK: Exactly. What Varun said—especially dealing with a genre that has such popular significance—it really is. And Varun’s position, I’m sure you know, Braden, is not a widely taken position in the academy. I still run into faculty who say, “Well, the whole point of scholarship is so it’s inaccessible.” And they love the idea of the—I don’t want to use the word echo chamber, but for lack of a better word—echo chamber. When Varun posted the conference to r/emo, that was like the epitome of reaching out to the broader fan base beyond scholarship. 

We hope to get some of those folks in the Zoom rooms. And also, it’s not that Dan Ozzi is just a really famous author; it’s also a public event, the final keynote. We should probably make a plug about that at some point.

VARUN:  Dan Ozzi will not be livestreamed, though, because that was one where it’s like at a venue, and so that just introduces other problems… But Steve [Lamos] is, you know, how many people love American Football? And we’re getting people in from the community. If you’re in the St. Louis metro area or like surrounding it, and you wanna come down, parking’s free on the weekend. 

SWIM:  I super appreciate that you two both feel so strongly about the responsibility to open these academic barriers. I come from a different side of this. On the science/STEM side of things, as soon as you submit to a journal—if you do an analysis, you make a new detector or whatever—and you submit that to a journal, what’s common in science is also to submit that to a site called arXiv. Where the pre-print you submitted to the journal, that exact same paper, is just completely free and accessible on the internet to the public, and literally anyone can go on arXiv and send you comments. 

Of course, people aren’t obligated to respond, but if it’s someone from a neighboring collaboration, it’s a great way to get additional feedback and to break down these echo chambers, and to really say in a public way, “We’re doing this scholarship openly. We invite everyone to take a look at this.” That way, there isn’t even the possible perception that it’s happening behind closed doors, because it’s not. It’s so public-facing, and that’s how it is in a lot of science, and I appreciate that you guys are doing the legwork to make it a similar thing in this realm of scholarship.

PATRICK:  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does that as well. They invite academics to speak at public talks. There are some folks that knock it out of the park and others that, you know, maybe get a little too nitty-gritty. But that’s something I’ve always been incredibly moved by, that public-facing work, especially with popular music.

VARUN: And part of that is humanities has a bit more of—you’ve got to have the secret code to get access to it. But, it’s a thing that we should [do], because when we speak in this time of a decaying trust in academia and science and medicine and things that I personally don’t think are good for society, even if some of those critiques may have a certain kernel of truth to them. I think the solution is really just to say, “Wait, we’re a bunch of academic nerds. Trust me, we don’t have anything up our sleeves. I would kind of just like a publication, please.”

PATRICK: Exactly. Exactly. And especially when the academy has just come under incredible scrutiny from both the public and from elected officials. And that’s like what Varun said. Although there might be a kernel of truth to it, what we shouldn’t do is retreat back into the ivory tower. You know what I’m saying? To show a sense of earnestness with our work.  Not that I think that inspired the livestream, but it speaks to a broader conversation. 

SWIM:  Yeah, no, any way to make scholarship publicly available, and maybe an emphasis on communication as well. Because sometimes people use words that are jargon for whatever topic, but a really good educator and a really good communicator takes the time to say, “This is jargon. This is something I’m going to be using a lot, so I’m going to explain it this way.” And that doesn’t just make the scholarship better, it makes people better. It makes conversations better, it makes it more fun to be friends with these people. And it helps you go further, not just in the field but honestly in life, just to be a better communicator. So, yeah, I’m really glad the livestream is happening. 

We kind of mentioned it, but at the end of the conference, there’s actually  a post-conference show, which is amazing. It’s great for an emo conference to have some emo bands playing at the end. Would either of you be able to talk about the set list? Is that something you’d want to reveal at this time? And, if it’s possible, how do I get “Catalina Fight Song” added to the set list? 

VARUN: Well, we do “Catalina,” and then we go straight into “Constant Headache.”

SWIM: That’s beautiful.

VARUN: For those who don’t know, Patrick’s group, Girl Gordon, will be playing; they’ll be doing about 40 minutes of originals. Then my group, the “Silly Little Emo Band,” which does emo and pop-punk covers, will close out the night, and we will be sucking titty by the ocean. 

Girl Gordon

At MOTR Cincinnati.

Silly Little Emo Band

(AKA SLEB)

SWIM: Nice. Did you two have any closing thoughts you wanted on the record before we conclude? We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve been talking for about an hour, so no worries if not.

PATRICK: I’m trying to think. We did cover a lot of ground.  I’m not coming up with anything. Varun?

VARUN: Reiterating, go to www.emocon2026.com if you would like to sign up to attend either virtually or in person. If you follow us @emocon2026 on Instagram, we’re there. And we’re really thankful for this opportunity from Swim to come here and talk about it. We’re really grateful that this conference is happening. There’s just been overwhelming support from the emo community, to whatever extent we are known in the emo community, and that’s something that we really appreciate and honor, and we don’t take lightly. 

PATRICK: Exactly. Yeah. 

SWIM: Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you both so much for this opportunity to talk and put some things down on the record. And also for putting this whole thing together. I think it’s gonna be a smash hit, and I’m really looking forward to the impending explosion of emo scholarship. 

VARUN: Trust me, those damn walls are breaking soon.

~

For more information about Emocon, you can look up abstracts and panel times at the official site. If you liked that, you should also check out this previous interview Varun did on Dan Dipiero’s podcast Cry Baby, where he talks about his forthcoming article dissecting Hot Mulligan’s “BKYRD” through the lens of neoliberal politics.

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Braden Allmond is a particle physicist and emo music enthusiast. He anticipates graduating from KSU in August with his PhD in experimental high energy physics. When he isn’t writing his thesis, he’s data-scraping articles and books about emo music, making tables and graphs to interrogate and understand the genre.

Sella – Well I Mean | Album Review

Bar/None Records

“Biggest rule of two-song Tuesday—where’s Brian? … Brian?”
“Everyone say ‘Brian’ really loud. One, two, three…”
“BRIAN!!!”

These are the opening seconds of Well I Mean, the first album of Brian Sella’s mononymous new solo project, Sella. You might recognize that name as the singing and guitar-playing half of The Front Bottoms, and while he’s still unmistakably himself throughout this new venture, we find him in a completely new soundscape. According to Bar/None Records, this album was recorded “to amuse the muse, to re-find the fun and deliver something personal to the listener.” This music is pretty in a way that TFB has never ever been; it’s wholly its own, and completely sheds any baggage it might have had coming from a frontman of an established act, though it might take the listener a few passes to come to terms with that.

As someone who’s read, sung, hummed, cried, and shouted every TFB lyric, I feel pretty confident saying that Brian’s characters are always asking themselves questions: where they are, where they want to be, how they’re going to get there. This album is a fresh start, and it knows it, reflecting on lessons learned the hard way, advice accumulated over the years, and overflowing with gratitude for the people who stuck through it all. 

Sonically, Well I Mean is a brass-dominant 25-minute jaunt that dispenses with the usual guitar-forward sound of TFB, opting instead for a softer style with plucky strings, shiny horns, and upright piano. Lyrically, there’s still a spool of matter-of-fact wisdom, picked up in remote places and doled out in an introspective, storytelling style. At times abstract, and at others more concrete than an ocean, Well I Mean could take a few listens to pick apart, but don’t worry, self-help has never sounded catchier.

After the opening shout, we get into the music with the faraway and somewhat regretful “American Shark.” We’re brought in with a shimmering set of strings, accompanied by a simple finger-picked melody, setting the tone as pensive and self-assuredly unworthy. Brian then immediately upends this table-setting with “Skipping Out,” which is ridiculously bright, youthful, and full of color. This is primarily thanks to the cornet, which you first hear in the call-and-response with the lyrics, “Falling into a nice routine / I’m drunk every time you see me.” The cornet lingers and builds in the verse, then lithely breaks away to support the piano in the chorus, “It seems / I’ve been lookin’ at things reversed / this whole time / So much so that at this point / the right way just don’t feel right.” It evokes the feeling of dancing at a celebration of life, summoning joy on a day meant for mourning. Positive tunes to losing-it-a-little lyrics is a classic juxtaposition very much in the TFB wheelhouse, now masterfully rendered in a new domain, setting the album on a firm foundation of its own. 

A little later on, we hear the similarly light and jubilant “South Dakota.” If you’re from a rural part of a landlocked state like me, you should understand immediately that roads, highways, and interstates are our lifelines to other people, hence the metaphor “The ocean is the highway.” Even in 2026, there are miles and miles of dead zones where you’re left to contemplate why you’re on that road in the first place. In the bridge, the narrator shares a revelation he had out there: “You finally realize / life’s but a dream / But exactly how you’re feeling / ain’t exactly how it seems.” Notably, “All that we see or seem / is but a dream within a dream” comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream. I think the narrator of “South Dakota” is assuring themself that emotions are not our reality; with time and experience, the difficult ones will pass.

Obviously a huge part of Well I Mean are the trumpets (or cornets, or flugelhorns). They have a literally instrumental role in a third of the songs on the album, most notably on “Perfect Worth It,” at first in support of the narrator, then fully taking over and playing out into a silvery conclusion. In researching for this review, I actually couldn’t believe that the last three TFB albums don’t have brass at all. The most recent song in their discography with a trumpet is “Don’t Fill Up On Chips” from Going Grey, then “The Plan (Fuck Jobs)” and “2YL,” both from Back on Top, around 10 years ago. It’s poetic for the brass on Well I Mean to be so good, because it was inspired directly by the intentionally amateurish brass sounds in TFB’s early catalog, namely “Flashlight,” “12 Feet Deep,” and “Swear to God the Devil Made Me Do It.” This album is orchestral in a way that we only saw glimpses of in early TFB. The best example is “Maps” from their self-titled album, which uses strings and simple piano to get about halfway to the style of Well I Mean. Now, Brian has made it out of his room, onto his big, big plans.

Well I Mean was produced by the prolific and incredibly cool Chad Matheny, of the DIY folk-punk band Emperor X. Actually, the music video for “Perfect Worth It” was a part of a joint release, with Emperor X publishing “Pissing With the Flashlight On” on Bar/None Records the same day, which details the darkly humorous realities of the all-too-real evil in our world. Emperor X and Sella have a short tour together this spring, and, in one final piece of kismet, it’s not the first time they’ve been on the road together. About 15 years ago, Emperor X and The Front Bottoms went on a DIY tour, which you can read a bit about in this interview from The Aquarian. This long friendship bearing fruit couldn’t summarize the album any better; dipping into the past for inspiration, finding new ways to be yourself, and creating something at once bathed in history and completely unique. 

At the beginning of this review, I mentioned Brian’s intent with this solo excursion was to “refind the fun.” In that same Bar/None Records page, they open by talking about the distance between the stage and the bedroom. Throughout, I’ve referred to Brian as, well, Brian. It felt so odd to call him Sella, even though that would be the correct “journalistic practice.” To me, he’s an everyman; he could be my eccentric neighbor, my favorite buddy’s favorite buddy, or the mailman. His songs have always seemed like something a friend of a friend could have made and played in a garage or backyard. Those qualities are most obvious to me in TFB’s earliest on-label works, The Front Bottoms and Talon of the Hawk, which Brian magically channeled into Well I Mean. 

For example, on their self-titled album from 15 years ago, The Front Bottoms built their album closer, “Hooped Earrings,” around voicemails. They’ve had voice samples here and there throughout their discography since, and now Sella uses this trick again, building a full song around a voicemail in “Stocking Up.” Actually, what we’re privy to sounds more like a deposition, which, oddly enough, also sounds like directions for a DIY music video. In it, we hear the lines, “You got a gun in your hands / but it should be a guitar” and “At this point giving up the gun / should be easy to do / Don’t worry, just know / I’ve got another you could use.” At first, I thought this meant another gun, but I think the narrator is saying he wants to help his friend change, letting them know that if they want to change, he’ll support them. It might seem like a reach, but I think it actually falls nicely into place if you consider the line, “I’m sure that we could find something for you to do on stage / Maybe shake a tambourine or when I sing, you sing harmonies” from TFB’s most famous song, “Twin Size Mattress.” These are the same sentiments: making space in your life to help someone, even going so far as to let them join your band if it means they can get better.

While we’re on the abstract stuff, two quick notes about the stream-of-consciousness track “Wichita.” First, the line “If you were brave enough / to drink the Arkansas / you cast a shadow / on the river like an art piece” refers to the Keeper of the Plains on the Arkansas River in downtown Wichita, Kansas, about 30 miles from my hometown. Second, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the Yogi Berra quote “You can observe a lot by just watching,” and the line “Walk around from light to dark / you see a lot.” Neither of these guys are trying to be profound; they are kindred spirits articulating how they see the world, and through their matter-of-fact descriptions, they arrive at somewhat profound (if at times cockeyed) conclusions.

THE KEEPER OF THE PLAINS ON THE ARKANSAS RIVER IN WICHITA, KANSAS. PHOTO BY ANNA WATSON.

One track before the end of the album is “Daredevil.” This is the second time the narrator directly refers to himself as the devil, saying, “I was the same old snake / We made a cute couple / and a couple mistakes.” The first instance can be found in the opener “American Shark” where Brian says, “I feel like I am the devil / and I’ve got an angel / lying next to me.” Also, Captain Obvious has indicated to me that there is a devil even on the album cover, how subtle. Where other tracks used rhythm guitar or Latin percussion to keep time, “Daredevil” uses a drum machine, breaking sharply with the rest of the album. 

While I really do think it stands on its own, making space for a new sound with a matured voice and musical style, there is a rich web of connections to older TFB songs. In some ways, Brian’s always talking about the same ideas, but—miraculously—he keeps it fresh. After all, he told us a long time ago, “Freshness is expected from any hip-hop artist.” Brian is always saying something new, even when it’s the same, or as he puts it on “Daredevil”: “But this new normal / is under heavy disguise.”

Earlier, we got the line “Walk around in circles / like I’m trying to walk my manic out / Talk to all my problems / but I’m only talking to myself” from “Skipping Out,” which now pairs nicely with “In my life and in my mind / endless running around / chasing highs.” The majority of the narrator’s perspective in this album can be explained by just these two songs. It seems that they suffer from bipolar depression, experiencing mania, chasing highs, fucking up, blaming themselves, getting depressed, and repeating the cycle. These two songs alone tell us the album is about recognizing wrongs and trying to be better, and just about every other lyric on the album supports that conclusion. 

In all, Well I Mean is a shining example of what 15 years of growth looks like, both personally and musically—waking up, approaching healing as a process, and making a choice every single day to get better and to be better. The album doesn’t sugarcoat the slip-ups, but the narrator’s best days are not begrudged to them. It ends with a winding ambient track helpfully called “Untitled,” which I believe contains audio from a eulogy. In it, the priest says, “It was one of the saints that said, ‘Music is the only art of heaven we can experience on Earth, and the only art of Earth that we will take with us to heaven.’” But I think this is a paraphrase of something normally attributed to the 18/19th century English poet Walter Savage Landor, who once wrote, “Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to Earth, the only art of Earth we take to Heaven.” I make the point of crediting the poet because Brooklyn Vegan quoted Brian recently as saying, “I’m a poet first and foremost, so my focus is always on communicating something emotionally and artistically.” I’ve always thought that about him, but I’m glad to know he thinks it about himself, too.

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Braden Allmond is a particle physicist and emo music enthusiast. He anticipates graduating from KSU in August with a PhD in experimental high energy physics. When he isn’t writing his thesis, he’s data-scraping articles and books about emo music, making tables and graphs to interrogate and understand the genre.

Harry Styles – Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. | Album Review

Erskine Records Limited

i like harry’s music for the most part. sometimes after a long day at work i want to listen to the audio equivalent of a diet coke.

Radicalizing Self-Love: An Interview with JER

Bad Time Records

Over the last several years, Jeremy “Jer” Hunter has become a prolific fixture in the New Tone ska movement. They have been a viral sensation countless times, racking up nearly 40 million views across YouTube and TikTok for crafting ska covers of popular songs under the moniker Skatune Network. A true multi-hyphenate and one-person band, in the average Skatune video, you can see Jer playing trombone, trumpet, guitar, bass, sax, and singing – to list a handful of their proficiencies. 

Jer has wielded these talents on numerous records and on stage for acts such as Jeff Rosenstock, Fishbone, We Are The Union, The Bruce Lee Band, and many other notable names in the ska and punk scenes. In recent years, Jer has begun putting out their own original music as JER – releasing their first LP, BOTHERED/UNBOTHERED, in May of 2022 and their sophomore album, Death of the Heart, in August of 2025. 

Jer capped off the end of last year not only with the release of their new album, but with plenty of touring to keep their hands full. This recent bout of time on the road included a jaunt to Japan, as well as stops at FEST in Jer’s home state of Florida, No Earbuds Fest in Southern California, and MAGfest up in Maryland earlier this year. Now that they’re back from trotting the globe, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jer to chat about these enthralling live shows before thoroughly delving into the creation, inspirations, and broader meaning behind their thought-provoking and politically-charged new album, Death of the Heart.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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SWIM: How has touring, MAGFest, FEST, and coming back from all that been?

JER: It's been really good, the back half of 2025 was very eventful. We went to Japan again, and this was the first time for the JER band. Those shows gave me a new reason to play music live. The love and the energy was so revitalizing. Then FEST had the same energy. So many people that I love from across the music industry, the music world, all the music scenes, typically they're at FEST.

So, to feel that love again, it fueled me. We ended our year in SoCal at No Earbuds Fest, and SoCal showed up. It was just banger, after banger, after banger. All the touring has been great, but that last run of shows in particular, the energy was through the roof.

Earlier this year, there was MAGFest with Rebecca Sugar. Steven Universe is such an important show to me – especially the music. I probably wouldn't be doing Skatune Network if it weren't for Steven Universe. What Aivi and Surasshu were doing on that show inspired me to open Logic and start making music, so that full-circle moment was very cathartic.

SWIM: Crazy full circle. My friends Sierra and Carina went to MAGFest too, and they were sending me videos of the Rebecca Sugar show, and I was like, “Oh, there's Jer in the back on the Trombone!”

JER: I didn't really talk about it a lot, because I got doxxed around the same week that they announced that. Far-right Twitter was having a field day. I think if I announced that I'm performing with the creator of the Gay Space Rocks show as far-right Twitter was dogpiling on me, that might just add fuel to their fire. I kind of just didn't post about it, and then I went on tour and realized I'd never posted about it, so that was a surprise to a lot of people. 

SWIM: ‘Joke’s on you. I'm literally never home!’ [Laughs]

JER: Yeah, right. Good luck showing up at my door, no one’s here!

SWIM: My friend Avery was in a couple bands that were at No Earbuds Fest, and that seemed really cool. 

Something I also never thought about until the last several years was how big ska is in Japan and how many ska bands there are, like ORESKABAND. It's so cool that it's such a big pocket in Japanese music culture. 

JER: Yeah. I've gone twice now: once in October 2024 with the Bruce Lee Band, and then this past October again with the JER band. Japan feels like it is almost 20 years behind when it comes to pop culture. The best way I can describe it is how there's a bunch of people who are nostalgic for the 80s, but they were literally born in the 90s, so they have this nostalgia for the 80s through seeing 80s media. I feel like Japan's the same way: they're seeing ska, punk, and alternative through the media's gaze, and now they're recreating it years later. 

They consume so much American culture, and they might not understand all of the reasons why that American culture happened, but they're still recreating it in their own way. On top of that, their culture just values music and art way more; it's more accessible there. It's the perfect combination of those factors that have allowed Japanese ska to be so big, but also alternative music in general.

SWIM: Absolutely. That's how I've always felt about K-pop, too, where it's a mirror reflection that keeps going back and forth between Korea and America. If you look at J-pop, Hikaru Utada’s career, their 2000s stuff sounds like the 90s. It's just a cool pattern.

Something I’ve always admired about you is how prolific you are and how much stamina you have to put out content, be in so many different bands, and do the marching band. Where do you feel that initiative to do all of those things comes from?

JER: Part of it is a love for the craft. It's that mantra that's capitalist propaganda of "Find a job you love, and you'll never work another day in your life,” when the reality is, it is work. I love music, and I'm more inspired to create a ska cover, play music, or teach marching band than I ever was to flip bacon at Waffle House. It's easier for me to get out of bed knowing I can make music than it is to make meat as someone who's vegan. [Laughs]

Photo by Rae Mystic

It's a very volatile and uncertain profession. I'm grateful people back me up and support me with Patreon and buying my music and merch. That is the only reason I'm able to do this. Even if I'm not feeling motivated, it helps knowing that people love it when I share a cover, or seeing the comments from people really hyped on it. Whether it's people telling me at shows or people showing up to concerts, anything like that, those are the things that make me want to keep creating. 

Sometimes there are days when I'm not really feeling it. It might take me a little longer to get it done, but there's also the time constraint: I have a month before I go on tour, and I need to get X, Y, and Z done. Sometimes the pressure of that just forces me to get things done. There always comes a point in every cover, even if it feels like I’m dragging my feet, where I have to get this done. By the time I'm halfway through the process, I start getting hyped on it. ‘Oh, this sounds really cool, and I know people are going to really dig this!’

The other work that I do are kind of my anchors. Every summer I'm doing band camp, every fall I'm doing marching band competitions, and every October is FEST. Those things ground my life into some sort of reality where, during all the time in between, I could probably make three months’ worth of covers, and then I'm not making covers when I'm on the road. It’s a lifestyle where you have to be adaptable. I once saw someone say that they gave up their 9-to-5 to work 24/7, and damn, that's so true. 

The Undertale cover record I did was purely out of passion, but then [Toby Fox] used it for a stream. I did not make money on that at all. Even after selling records, I only broke even because I paid the artists to record on it and the people who made the art. I wasn't expecting them to compensate me for making that cover record. I really didn't make money off of it, and then two years later, that money came back.

There are some months where I worked all day, every day, for months at a time, and I made very little money. Then there are other months where I can go on tour, and that work I put in is still sustained. If I'm not posting, the Patreon does go down gradually. If I'm posting, it goes up gradually. So, there still is a consistency that needs to be there. There's a give-and-take with it. 

SWIM: Exactly. One of the things I think that you’re known for in the music industry and in general is how outspoken you are about social media and the algorithm. Being a content creator and a musician while under the constantly changing social media culture we're in right now, what is your general approach to tackling that uncertainty?

JER: My whole philosophy lately for myself and what I try to internalize is moving back to logging off, unplugging, the same way that there are people who are ditching Spotify and streaming altogether. People are starting to buy CD players again and build up their physical collection. I just bought a DVD player, because I went to watch Steven Universe, only to find out it's not on HBO Max, it's on Disney+, which is ridiculous. I just want to watch my show and don't want to give Disney any money. I just bought the DVD boxset, and now this can never be taken away from me, unless I lose it or something. It's something I've been meaning to do, but how do I translate that to music?

I've been building an email list since last year, basically harassing anyone who joins my TikTok live streams to sign up. We announced this tour, and ticket sales have been better than any tour we've done so far. Some people say they don't want to join the email list because they get so many emails. I have multiple email accounts, so when I'm looking for this information, I'm not digging through spam. I'm encouraging people to really lean into that; being intentional about the content that they're taking in, especially in an era of AI slop on the rise.

Social media feeds are so overwhelming, and I don't blame people who might see me, but then see like 500 more posts that day. I can't even remember the last three posts I saw on social media. I have to treat everyone like that. Someone might've seen my tour announcement, someone might've seen my new record, someone might've seen my last cover, but they probably saw a million posts after that and forgot about it. You don't forget going out to a show, unless you're blackout drunk, then you forget. [Laughs]

If you're going out to a show and you're actively engaging, you're not going to forget that. If you go up to the merch table and meet the artist, you're not going to forget that. An email with very specific information that you'll only see on that email list. So for me, it’s finding the quality people within the quantity; find the people who want to be there and reach out to them. The people who see all my posts, who constantly see me repeating the same things – for every one person like that, there's a thousand people who may have followed me for years, and they've never heard that I make my own music, or that I'm on tour, or that I have a new cover. I've been touring, and it's not even your fault; you just haven't seen it because I've been pushed out of the algorithm, not because the algorithm is evil, but because there's an oversaturation of content. On top of the algorithm being evil. [Laughs]

SWIM: Absolutely. I'm stoked to hear that you're getting so much love for the Seattle date of the Bad Time tour. I'm glad people are seeing that and buying tickets because, like you've said in your videos, we are the farthest away from you right now. So that means people are talking about it, sharing it, and actually seeing that information.

JER: No, Seattle's been great. Honestly, most of the more remote places, like Denver, have been great. The Northwest is not used to bands making it through as much as Chicago, New York, or Philly. Those cities are also doing great, but Seattle, by far, is the best one. Also, a lot of my videos do well there. When I checked the top cities, Seattle has always been one of those. We played Seattle on the Fishbone tour, and that was by far the best show of the tour for us. I'm really thankful for that.

SWIM: You mentioned AI when you were talking about the algorithm, and I was curious, as an artist who is so vocally anti-AI, what's getting you through this AI slop era we’re in? 

JER: Yeah, the whole AI thing is really annoying in general. Even most of the time, it's just slop in every sense of the word. It looks bad, it sounds bad, but it's gotten to the point where it's indistinguishable. It's still slop, it's just slop that looks better. The point of it being slop isn't that it looks bad; it’s that no effort went into creating it. What makes art cool is that somebody couldn't express something that they were feeling, so they developed the skill to express that thing. With AI, somebody felt something, but instead of developing any sort of skill, they just made a computer do it.

It's getting to the point where more people reject AI than not, but these algorithms are just shoving it down our throats whether we want it or not. Bandcamp announced that they're banning AI, and I haven't seen a single person say that's a bad thing. Moves like that are starting to show that there is a market for it. I see a future where you might start seeing indie artists selling DVDs. I've seen some Kickstarters where they offer that as a perk, but you might see more of a push. I already see it on TikTok, where artists are really pushing CDs and CD players. Vinyl is coming back for all the people who didn't know that it never went away. Bands have been selling records forever, but CDs are also getting a huge push right now. I think people will move more towards physical media and become more intentional about what they consume. 

If every TikTok or Instagram Reel or YouTube short is a minute, you can at most watch 60 of them an hour, and that's assuming you dedicate a full hour to doing that. So, how much content is going to get on there to the point where you can't even watch stuff? You can just get offline and go directly towards who you follow to find out about stuff. I think that's where the future is moving. I can already see that happening with people deleting or getting off of Instagram and signing up for email lists.

SWIM: When I deactivated Twitter, I had that nostalgia of “This is where I met so many of my music friends and this has offered me so many opportunities,” but now it's this soulless reflection of something I used to like, and it's not even serving me anymore. So that made it easier for me to push it away. The same thing is happening on Instagram right now. The same thing's happening on TikTok. 

pulses. is a band I always bring up, but they just released a dual-CD/DVD for their 10th-anniversary show from last year. When I was talking to Kevin about that last year, he said, “You know, I don't know if we're going to be able to do it. It's hard, and I'm figuring it out all by myself, and I don't know if we're going to make money off of it, but we're going to put it out there for people.” People need to be taking that risk and offering that, so people have shit to put on their shelves and in their collections. 

JER: I agree, 100%.

SWIM: Death of the Heart has been out for months now. How's the reception been?

JER: It's been great! Death of the Heart came out in August of 2025, and especially in the back half of the year, I feel like every week there were banger records coming out. Pool Kids dropped their record the same day as Death of the Heart. Kerosene Heights dropped their record that day as well. We went on tour with The Bouncing Souls over to Japan and back to FEST. By the time we got back to FEST, people were singing the new songs more. Even going to California in December, people knew the new songs more than the older ones. The general consensus is that people have really latched onto Death of the Heart a lot quicker, which is really cool. 

It wasn't a record that took over the world, but I think it's really dope that, within the following, people are really loving it. Bands often put out a second record and people say they like the first one better, but I'm finding a lot of fans saying it's been a step up. People who are finding me through Death of the Heart are now finding BOTHERED / UNBOTHERED retroactively. Death of the Heart has been, without a doubt, more successful on social media. Every time I post a video that does well on Instagram or TikTok, I gain a lot of followers, but I also attract a lot of other cool people. Topaz Jones is a rapper I found a couple years ago, and he followed my page, which is cool. I'm noticing a lot of rappers, hip-hop artists, R&B singers, and jazz artists are finding it. I think it's a testament to how good music is good music. People are really resonating with that.

It's also been 100% DIY; I'm not really getting a publication push from the music industry. I'm not getting features on huge podcasts or reviews. It's literally word of mouth. The fact that the social media push and the word of mouth have gone this far has been really cool. There's so much room to grow with the record. People might come out to the Bad Time tour, and they might not have listened to the record yet, but then they're going to see the band absolutely tear it up, because the JER band rips. I'm excited for people to hear these new songs and see the band’s energy.

SWIM: That's awesome. I think all DIY and smaller artists are feeling that inundation of music. If you're someone who tries to follow music as much as possible, the weekly deluge of new albums, EPs, and singles can be disheartening if your mindset is to be on top of everything as it's released. Something I try to tell artists when they're feeling discouraged is that their music isn't going anywhere. Just because a week has passed since it was released, people go back and find records literally all the time. Don’t be so focused on, “I have this finite amount of time to release my music and talk about it. Otherwise, it'll never be heard.”

JER: Yeah, the music industry is just like that. “You need a new record in two years.” I put out the record six months ago. I'm supposed to be 25% through this whole era before I put out the next record. I don't think a record's coming in the next year and a half, but there's nothing wrong with that. 

There's this one bit from Family Guy: it's some dude in jail watching TV, and he’s like, “If I haven't seen it, it's new to me.” I'm pretty sure you know exactly what scene I'm talking about. [Laughs]

SWIM: Yeah. That's so funny, I have that Family Guy vocal stim, I could recite the inflection verbatim. [Laughs]

JER: But it’s so true! I see videos that went viral on Tumblr and Facebook 15 years ago going viral on Instagram now. That song “Chinese New Year” is another great example. That band, SALES, put out a five-song EP, they toured a little bit, they weren't going anywhere, they broke up. Five years later, Chinese New Year went viral on TikTok, they went up to 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and then that band literally came back. They weren't on TikTok posting, that was just organic.

Someone with 10 million subscribers on YouTube could find and talk about Death of the Heart, and then as a creator and as an artist, it's my job to always be ready. That's what I've learned after 10 years of doing Skatune Network. I could wake up tomorrow with an influx of followers, but are they seeing what I want them to see? Are they seeing my tour dates? My new music? Is it easy for them to find? You never know what the future's going to be. 

SWIM: What are some of the musical or non-musical media influences that went into Death of the Heart? 

JER: Normally, I always have these references sitting around, but Death of the Heart ended up not having any. That's just naturally what happened. When I first started doing JER, “R/Edgelord” uses a sample from Arthur with Buster being like, “You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?" If you didn't grow up on Arthur, that's something that wouldn't necessarily be on your zeitgeist. “Say Gay or Say Goodnight” sampled the series finale of The Owl House. Most people my age weren't watching that show unless you were really into animation. Going into Death of the Heart, that record was formed at a time when I was finding a lot more real-life influences. At the end of “What Will You Do?” there is a sample from a two-hour news report about the MOVE bombing, with the citizens of that neighborhood airing their grievances about how the police handled that whole situation.

While writing this record, I was doing a lot of reading, learning, growing, and expanding. There’s that Jamie Baldwin quote where the record's name comes from. There are more nuanced, subtle influences. I believe it’s “Cult of the Lonely” talking about love being a contraband. That's an Assata Shakur quote. “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child” is actually a paraphrased Bell Hooks quote, talking about love and the action of love being a verb and not a noun. There are six pillars that she talks about, like respect, communication, care, and nurture. “The death of the heart” is the absence of love, and with things like racism and sexism, bigotry, and transphobia, you cannot be a loving person and hold those in your heart, because you're doing the active opposite of love. The action of love, of caring and respecting and communicating with people.

The flip side of “the death of the heart” is not allowing yourself to grow. That's where the record ends. You can't say you're about growth and care if you're not allowing yourself or others around you the space to learn, grow, and care. That's what revolution is. That's what being radical is. It's recognizing that we have been raised by a system of harm and doing the work to unlearn that harm and repair it with love, care, accountability, and healing. If you're not willing to allow that to happen, then that is “the death of the heart.” 

I took a sample from The Truman Show, which I think is the only actual media reference. The whole movie is about how Truman is in a TV show, and everyone knows about it except him. He's having a nervous breakdown, because he's been made into a product against his consent. He's trying to figure out what's going on, and people know, but they don't care because they just want to be famous and want money. His wife in the show is like, ‘You seem stressed! Product placement!’

SWIM: That was one of my favorite memes for a while. The world is burning around you, but all of these content creators are putting up the Mococoa drink, and he’s like, “What are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”

JER: I thought it'd be cool to splice that up over a beat, because the whole front half of the record is, “The world is burning and this person is just promoting a product and acting like nothing's wrong and there very clearly is something wrong.” I first got the idea when I was watching that movie again, I heard the “Do something!” and I needed that to be how that sample ends. In the movie, she's calling out for the film crew to do something to save her. In reality, we collectively need to do something. 

SWIM: BOTHERED / UNBOTHERED came out square in the middle of the Biden presidency. We shift into this complacency mode when there's a liberal president, but when we have a sitting dictator president, people are angrier. Do you feel like Death of the Heart is a heavier record, especially with the Omnigone feature and the themes? Where is that coming from?

JER: It definitely is a much heavier record, both in its tone and the actual music itself. Hardcore and heavy music has always been an influence of mine; I just wasn't really writing in that style quite yet with BOTHERED / UNBOTHERED. That record was also me figuring out my own sound. One of the first tracks I demoed on Death of the Heart was “What Will You Do?” and I was like, “There's no way this could be a JER song, it's way too heavy.” I was listening to a bunch of Gouge Away, Turnstile, and Soul Glo. As the record started coming together, it felt almost like a disservice to leave it out. At a certain point, I was like, “I'm Jer, so if I write it, it's the JER sound.” It's my music.

I remember when Biden won, I made a post saying, “If we treat this like a victory and celebrate, we're going to be saying good morning to President Trump or President DeSantis in 2025.” Especially being a Floridian, watching Florida go through what we've gone through, everything that's happening everywhere has been happening to Black America for so long.

People are already making the parallels now. The ICE raids, they're slave patrols. They're doing what slave catchers were doing. Black people have been saying this. That's where “What Will You Do?" came from, speaking of that song and where the record starts getting heavier. That song was inspired in October of 2023, when I was posting a lot about Palestine, and somebody was like, “You know, you're really worried about the Palestinian struggle, but why aren't you posting like this about the Black struggle? Shouldn't you be focusing on the people in your own backyard who are your people instead of this other entity?” My response is: that is the Black struggle. That person asked me, “What are you going to do when they do what they're doing to Palestine in America? You're so focused on Palestine, but you're not worrying about America.” I said, “Dude, do you not realize when I see Palestine being bombed, I see the MOVE bombing. When I see ICE detaining people and throwing them in prisons and tearing families apart, I see the slave patrols who tore families apart and auctioned children off to be sold into slavery. When you see the prison industrial complex, you see chattel slavery. Anything that is happening to any marginalized group of people, it happened to Black people first. That's something that became a core tenet of Death of the Heart.

Even amongst progressive people, if it happened to a marginalized non-Black person, it's being spun as if it's never happened to Black people. When Black people have talked about this, they're reprimanded for their anger. People who are supposed to be in our scene and on our side, progressives, will say that I'm aggressive for being angry at systemic injustices, but then, when those same systemic injustices happen to other groups of people, they speak out with that same anger. The non-Black people who do that are suddenly rewarded for their bravery and their courage. This is why I wanted to write a record that represents not only my queer and Black identity, but also the queer and Black plight. They have to be interconnected, and anti-Blackness is the root of it all. That's where the theme of the record started shifting towards how we can't have an honest conversation about the injustices and pain and the suffering and everything about the system that we're in if we're not going to talk about the fact that it is rooted in anti-Blackness. 

The first couple of songs on the record talk about the problem being there, but not being able to identify it. The assumption of “Couldn't Be Me,” where that song quite literally was written about these things. There are people who are asking, “How is ICE doing this now?” What do you mean now? It's always been fuck ICE, it's just that it’s only affecting you now. These things have always affected Black people. The whole chorus, “Did you lose your safety?” Black people never had safety in this country. “Guaranteed by the roots of the family tree.” Your family tree, being a white person, allowed you to feel safe up until the point where fascism got too far. “Based on the fruits of the labor of Ebony bodies.” Black people built this country. The decaying fruits of our labor are what created the fertile soil for those white family trees to grow to the point where they are. Now fascism has risen to the point where it's affecting everybody. Now you have white people getting shot by officers. Now you have a bunch of white people who are scared. We've been trying to tell y'all this entire time. The writing's been on the wall. That's the angle that I chose with this record. I think for a lot of people it resonates, because it gets to the root of it.

Lyric art for “couldn’t be me” By JER

I'm not impressed when a band says, “Capitalism is bad.” Tell me why it's bad. There are bands who will say, “Fuck ICE” on stage, but then that's where it ends. You're not giving a solution; you're just saying a thing that's already stating the obvious. I knew with this record, I didn't just want to say “Conservatives are bad,” I wanted to explain why it's part of upholding a system that is racist and transphobic and how that harms people.

Then there's the back half of the record, the part about restorative justice and accountability. Understanding that we're all victims of this system that we live in. “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child" is a great example. I often get misgendered a lot and don't get included when talking about queer people in ska, because people have a very specific idea of what it means to be queer and non-binary. That song in particular is about reckoning with the fact that I identify as non-binary and I'm a queer person, but that doesn't change the fact that I was raised in this society as a man, through toxic masculinity. That whole song is about how men are taught not to feel their feelings. This heavily affects Black men. This is a very Black song, and it's also a very queer song. The intersection of those things is so important, and that song is not seen as either of those things for the same reasons. Men are taught to shove their feelings down, and that is what causes a lot of harm to be perpetuated. You are taught not to process your feelings. You are reprimanded for processing your feelings, and then you repeat the system of harm. Recognizing that and learning to feel again and knowing it's important to feel, but also to recognize that I could identify as non-binary or queer, but that doesn't mean that the masculinity that has been instilled in me is gone.

In the same way, if somebody is raised in a conservative household, they're probably going to have some racist microaggressions, whether they realize it or not. It's not bad that you do it; it's that you recognize it so you can learn not to do it. That goes for everything. That song, again, was inspired by Bell Hooks, somebody who truly believes in the abolition of prisons. She said, “You can't abolish prisons if you're going to treat everybody like cops and punish people for making mistakes and never giving them that room to grow. Assuming that everyone always has malicious intentions and assuming that people can't make mistakes.” That's the whole point of that song and Death of the Heart in general. 

I wanted “Death of the Heart” and “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child” to be the songs next to each other. “Death of the Heart” being the title track where I'm screaming, the time signature is asymmetrical, getting really heavy in the record. It ends with this big moment, and then it goes into the lightest and purest and most vulnerable moment of the record, musically speaking. Thematically, that's the moment of the record where there's recognition of the pain and, instead of ignoring that pain, you're embracing it. You're learning to feel those feelings and how to move forward with that.

The record getting heavier with each song was very intentional. Starting in the typical JER sound of ska punk, but then growing into “Capitalism Breeds Devastation,” which gets darker. Then “What Will You Do?” gets heavier, and then “Cult of the Lonely” gets heavier, then “Death of the Heart.” Then you get to this moment of “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child,” which is the first moment of relief, musically. That lack of tension leads through the rest of the record, which has a much more hopeful sound. The music, to me as a composer, is so important too. Where you start getting a lot more of those denser chords, like seven chords, nine chords, with the song “Grow Through What We Go Through.”

To me, life isn't black and white. It's not major – happy, minor – sad. You could have a major seven chord, which has the qualities of minor and major, because life and everything that we go through is a lot denser than just happy or sad, good or bad. Whether it is the Republican next door who might be flying a Trump flag or the other queer person in your scene.

I have found, especially in the last couple of years, that I have an easier time conversing with middle-of-the-road conservatives and talking to them as people and we can find some middle ground. I realized if you don't use the scary buzzwords like “communism” and “socialism,” you can meet in the middle better than some progressive people. “The death of the heart” is demonizing these people for the way they think, but you're not learning about why they think that way. That was the entire arc of the record. 

SWIM: Absolutely. That is what’s so lasting and refreshing about your music, and especially Death of the Heart. Not only are people under the impression that ska went somewhere, but that the last place it was was third-wave ska with the mozzarella stick memes and ska punk and Bosstones and Less Than Jake. Both thematically and musically, that version of ska didn't have those heavier roots, wasn't talking about workers' rights and race relations, or any of those core elements of ska, and the music got diluted and pigeonholed. 

Even right now, there are a lot of ska bands in the scene that just want to sound like Less Than Jake, and that's the biggest impression they want to leave. Something so great about Death of the Heart is how it starts somewhere familiar, and people can latch onto that – “This is JER” – and then as they're listening to it, you're pulling apart the layers thematically. Getting people into different genres and exploring new types of music and ska can feel different and look different and sound different and still be ska.

JER: Yeah, there was a period on the record where I was trying to hone it in and have a consistent sound. I wrote “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child” in the American Football tuning, like Midwest emo. I wrote “What Will You Do?” like a heavy-ass song and these songs that just kept not fitting. “Log Off” is like an R&B track. At a certain point, it's a disservice to me as an artist to try to limit my sound. In a sense, one of the most punk rock things that you can do is stand on your shit, regardless of whether people are expecting you to sound or look a certain way.

Photo by Rae Mystic

One of the most fun things we've been doing at our shows is we get four or five songs into the setlist, hit them with “What Will You Do?”, and watching the whiplash in the audience. Especially people at No Earbuds Fest, where many of them have not seen a ska band before, and they have this preconceived idea of what a ska band is going to be. Then I start screaming and there's breakdowns and shit. All of the bartenders just stopped and put their stuff down and looked up at once. Then I see them engaged through the rest of the set. A genre of music that you didn't think you were going to like, by the end of the set, they're so stoked on it. That's been the theme of the JER band. We finished these sets, and the workers at the venues are always so hyped on it. The security guy is running over, trying to buy some merch real quick. I don't know if other bands experience this, but at every show we play, there are four or five people on staff at the venue who buy merch from us. People who work at venues probably buy merch all the time, but they're really invested, and I think that's the power of good music.

There wasn't a Less Than Jake before Less Than Jake. They heard Operation Ivy, and they heard a ska punk band that might've been active before that, but they also heard The Descendants and those types of bands, and they just started playing the music they liked together, and that's why it was so special. There was no Op Ivy before Op Ivy. Tim Armstrong saw Dance Craze and was like, “I want to do that, but I also play hardcore punk,” and that's how Op Ivy was formed. There was no Two-tone ska before The Specials. They saw what their peers were listening to, like Studio One Jamaican ska, and they wanted to do that. Then they mixed that with their influences. That's how great music has always happened. They weren't focused on creating the new sound. That's less of a ska problem, even though it is a big problem in modern ska. It’s more that capitalism has made genres into identities.

In the 90s, 80s, 70s, and 60s, they were just playing music that they loved, and that's what created something special. Then, in the 2000s, you have these industries that are selling emo as an aesthetic. If you can hone in on an aesthetic, you can go to Hot Topic and get all your emo shit, you can go to Warped Tour, you can get your band tees, and you just created an archetype of person that is profitable. Whereas ska never was particularly profitable, which is why it fell off in the industry. Now people have to be this archetype and wear the fedora and the checkerboard everything, but I'm dressing like I'm in a '90s hip-hop music video, and I love to pull influences from Gouge Away, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Specials all in one song, because that's who I am. That's exactly what all the great, legendary bands have done, and it's what has created success. They focused on writing a good song. They didn't focus on, “How can I sound like a ska band, a punk band, a metal band?” I think focusing on just being good at your instrument and writing a good song is all you need to do and the rest will flow.

Photo by Rae Mystic

SWIM: Super well put. That's always how I feel about Blink. There was no Blink sound before them. Current, contemporary pop-punk is so fucking boring because all they're trying to do is sound like Blink. Blink’s biggest influence was the fucking Cure. They created their own thing that was then copied and done to death.

Earlier, you mentioned having less time for Skatune Network and that JER is your main focus now. How has it been for you, shifting gears like that? 

JER: It's been all over the place, honestly. It depends on who you're asking. It's really funny that my biggest focus for Death of the Heart was to create branding and an identifiable look for the record. I created a whole aesthetic chart, because Skatune Network is always going to be there. That's what I make most of my money through; it's my stability, so it's not necessarily going to go away, and it's not necessarily a bad thing either. There are things I love about Skatune Network, but I don't want to just be recognized as the person who has the ska covers; my artistry goes so much further than that.

I get some sort of validation whenever I make a post on my friends-only TikTok, and I'll get a response from one of my mutuals who just talks about pre-historic dinosaur facts. They’re a very special interest autistic person who has no business about music, but they liked one of my covers, and they'll always respond, “Why are people confused? Isn't JER your original music and Skatune Network is your covers?” Thank you, random TikTok person who's not in the music scene, because some people make it sound like building the two brands is the most confusing thing in the world. This rollout with Death of the Heart and the JER band has been very strong, and people are starting to really latch on. People from other music scenes are finding me through JER. Skatune Network reaches people who have nostalgia for whatever I'm covering, but it doesn't go much further than that. JER music is reaching people where the message resonates with them.

I found a new creator who talks a lot about communist stuff, and they're following the band page, not Skatune Network. The first 40,000 or so followers didn't follow Skatune Network. People don't believe me when I say that, but they are two very different followings. Sometimes they'll be following some Bad Time Records bands, but most likely it's bands like Scowl, Turnstile, or Pinkshift. They'll maybe follow Doechii and Kendrick Lamar, then a bunch of leftist creators. My music is reaching this audience of people who may not normally go to shows and may not be into the music scene we're into, but that's been the core JER following for a little while.

Photo by Rae Mystic

When we played Minneapolis with the JER band, I asked the audience who was at the Bad Time Records show not even a year ago, and maybe 15 people raised their hands. That's crazy, because the Bad Time show also sold 500 tickets in Minneapolis. It was mostly people who are into ska and punk. Definitely a different audience, but I expected more than 15 people to raise their hands. From the outset, the JER audience has been very different from the Bad Time shows. Part of that is probably because I tour with bands both in and out of the ska scene, so I'm bringing in different groups. People find me through TikTok, and that's how they show up. I'm at the merch table, and a lot of my TikTok mutuals who make content not geared toward music are the ones coming out to shows, and they are still the ones who come out to shows multiple times. I'm finding people who don’t have a regular show-goer background, but they're getting into shows and live music because of that. 

In the last year, especially with Death of the Heart, a lot of people in ska are starting to get hip. There was also a moment I noticed that happened a lot, where I'd be at a show, and people are like, “Oh, you're coming through New York?” I would say, “Yeah, I'm playing with We Are The Union, but also I have my own project, and I'm coming through here,” and people would straight up say, “I'd rather just see We Are The Union.” That was part of why I stepped away from playing with other bands, because it wasn't just We Are The Union; people were saying things like, “I saw you when you were playing on tour with Catbite!” I hopped up for a song or two, but I wasn’t a member of Catbite. I didn't even announce I was going on stage; you just went to the show and you saw me on stage.

It got to the point where, until people understand, I need to make it clear online and through social media that the JER band is the thing. I also do covers, but Skatune Networks is not a band. If you want to see me live, go see the JER band. That's my main focus. Over the last year, especially with the new record, I think that has been achieved.

SWIM: Hell yeah. What's up next for the JER band? Anything that you want people to know?

JER: The Bad Time tour, round two. 2026. We're doing the full U.S. West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest. Sorry, Texas, we're going to get back there as soon as we can. We were supposed to play Texas last year, but I was in a bad financial spot and had to drop off those shows. If I forced those shows to happen, it probably would've left me in a worse financial spot, which would've made it where I had to drop off the Bad Time tour. I'd rather save energy, recover more, and be able to do the Bad Time tour in a much healthier spot. Especially with the way shows are selling now, if those shows do well, my goal is to play some more in the back half of the year. 

I've been demoing and writing lyrics. I know I said earlier that I probably won't put out a record in the next year and a half, but anything could happen. My main focus is the Bad Time tour. It might just be a little touring hiatus after that.

SWIM: Well, I'm excited to see you in Seattle. That'll be a lot of fun. 

JER: Yeah, I'm so excited for that show in particular. 

SWIM: Any lasting thoughts or impressions about the album? 

JER: Thanks for having me. This record wasn't getting any sort of press push, so whenever people like you want to talk about this record or show up to shows, any sort of love or support is so appreciated from the bottom of my heart. Shouts out to y'all as well as the people who make the band possible. The JER band, in particular, the musicians who have dedicated so much to this band. Mike, for putting the record out. It takes a village. If it were just me, I'd be in my room playing songs to nobody. What makes it special is the people who listen, the people who connect, the people who care to be there. That's what makes this shit dope. So thank y'all. 

SWIM: Absolutely. Thanks so much.

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Ciara Rhiannon (she/her) is a pathological music lover writing out of a nebulous location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest within close proximity of her two cats. She consistently appears on most socials as @rhiannon_comma, and you can read more of her musical musings over at rhiannoncomma.substack.com.