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Laufey, the modest-yet-virtuosic Icelandic jazz singer who melds highbrow sonic forms with new-world palatability, was a kid when she fell in love for the first time — with education.
She navigated school in her homeland with a stringent inclination to not break any rules, the motivation for her goodie-two-shoes approach being split between untethered curiosity about what she was learning, and a high-priority desire to someday attend college in, and permanently move to, the United States. Half-Icelandic and half-Chinese, she was born to a family as musical as it was culturally diverse — her mother played classical violin with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra; her grandfather taught the instrument at China’s Central Conservatory of Music — which, with the added stimulant of rigorous schooling, translated into a restless devotion to grasping the jazz-rooted soundscapes that furnished her home, in hopes of eventually making them her own.
Boasting self-deprecating lyrics that would probably do numbers on the right corner of Twitter, a new-age story far removed from those told by dust-covered old white men rotting in record collections nationwide, and a debut album called Everything I Know About Love set to double down on both of these things later this month, Laufey, who goes mononymously, looks and sounds nothing like the olden jazz vanguard responsible for laying the foundation she expounds upon today. But as she peers contemplatively behind pitch-black oval sunglasses in a cozy Upper West Side community garden, the honking buzz of Manhattan’s ritzy bowels churning off in the near distance, she mulls over what she hasn’t heard from that era until now, and why.
“Oh– There’s this album I discovered recently — it’s Charlie Parker with Strings,” she says animatedly, capping off a list of things she’s been listening to lately. (A lot of Faye Webster.) Laufey shares a Spotify account with her father — he did get her a separate login of her own at one point, but by that time, all of her music was already saved on his — so, every now and then, whatever he may have in rotation will make a cameo appearance on her home page. “One day, he obviously liked the album, so it just showed up in my library,” she continues. “It’s so good. I can’t believe I didn’t know about that. I feel like, as a string player who loves jazz music, I’m very surprised that I hadn’t discovered that album. That’s been on repeat.”
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Laufey, 23, plays a similar role for the growing listener base she’s struck a chord with. The nearly half-million consumers that follow her page on TikTok — where she posts homely guitar clips, vocal duets, and intimate, generationally ambiguous performances for a markedly newer audience — often flock to her comment sections to describe her sound as “nostalgic,” or somewhat evocative of faint memories. Whether rooted in nostalgia or a longing for something they can’t put a finger on, the general consensus across the singer’s hefty social media following is a deja vu-inflected sense of shock, understandably wielded at the notion that it’s a shame we all hadn’t discovered this sooner.
This lateness may not necessarily be so much a fault of her generation, as it is the fault of an infrastructure long notorious for its exclusivity. “I still am [scared] to a certain extent,” she says of nose-in-the-air jazz attitudes, “and it’s funny, because even though I’ve had all of this formal music education both in classical and jazz music, sometimes it still feels — a little bit — not very accessible to me. So I’m like, How does this even feel to people who haven’t studied music?”
Laufey’s most recent performance came a few days ago at the Newport Jazz Festival, where, although it’s a stage she’s dreamed of playing since she was a kid, the prospect of bringing a new-world act into old-world territory still proved daunting. “I went back into my music college shell a little bit, where I was like Oh my God, I’m sure my professors are walking around here,” she laughs. “But then I was like Wait — this is exactly why I’m here. I need to push through these stigmas and these ideas that I’ve had. And once I got through that, I was very happy.”
For a while, rigid music-school shells contributed just as much to her sonic literacy as it did to an imaginative illiteracy. At the institutions she studied in growing up, it was a matter of course that she’d be given sheet music to read from, and judged based on accuracy. It was only when she got to Boston’s revered Berklee College of Music — yes, she did wind up making good on that goal to study in and move to the States — that she learned that breaking a rule or two wasn't punishable by death. Her earliest courses there banked as heavily on improvisation as her old schools did on precision, which, predictably for someone whose childhood was rife with classical strings and a trained ear, posed a new, existential kind of challenge. “I was a cello principal there, so I was put in a jazz band, and it was like [clap] Alright, improvise,” she recounts. “And I was like… What? I had no clue, and I felt like everything I was doing was wrong, and they’re all like Oh, there are no wrongs in improvisation, but I’m like How can that be? This doesn’t sound right.”
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But by the time she graduated from Berklee in 2021, a fluid creative process worked its way into being a focal point of her approach — and at the very least, over the 40-plus minutes that comprise her forthcoming LP, either she isn’t doing anything wrong, or she’s having too much fun to care. Titled as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the fact that she’s never been in love (with another human), Everything I Know About Love sees Laufey masterfully find balance between a fundamental jazz skeleton, and the self-reflective, intrinsic, rom-com-ready flesh she stuffs within its bones. On single “Dear Soulmate,” released this past July, she asks a series of lovelorn questions to an unnamed interest eventually revealed to be hypothetical. “Do you live in New York City?,” she inquires softly in the song’s opening lines, “Or a couple towns away? Wherever you are, I’d jump in my car, just to see you today.” The tune ends with fitting words for an album dedicated to a fleeting concept: “I can’t wait to fall in love with you,” she sings, and with a wistful string of arpeggiations on both a piano and an acoustic guitar, the music fades out.
Sonically speaking, “Dear Soulmate” and Everything I Know About Love both bank on the same generational fusion that has made Laufey compelling to young audiences and old ones alike — at the same time that she’s curating soundscapes not too far removed from something you may hear on My Fair Lady, she’s also finding elusive nooks and crannies through which she can stick touchstones compatible for a generation less likely to be streaming Charlie Parker on Spotify. The dichotomy is one that makes her as appealing as she is perhaps polarizing. At this stage in the game, she doesn’t often get negative feedback online, but on the rare occasions that she does — and it isn’t something trivial about an outfit she’s wearing, “because for some reason that’s still a problem in our society” — it might come from members of an older musical lineage taking issue with what she’s doing to leave opportunistic cracks in historically-closed doors. “It’s rarely about the music, which is very encouraging, because I was scared that older people would come and be like, Why are you putting this drum beat into this jazz standard?,” she says. “Or vice versa, where young people would be like this is so old — I rarely get comments like that.”
But still, the potential is both present for the musician, and terrifying for the growing litany of aspiring ones that look to her for inspiration. Many of her messages across social media platforms come from young artists with varying versions of the same question — how do you overcome nervousness and start putting your work on the internet? — and, although she reports matter-of-factly that she’s learned to largely eliminate the fear factor for herself, it’s something she knows is increasingly challenging for children of an ever-evolving digital age. “I totally understand how extremely daunting it can be — especially if you’re in middle school or high school, those are brutal ages — if you want to post something of yourself singing, which you’ve never done before,” she says. “But I always told myself: let the trash take itself out. If they don’t want to stick around for my music and who I am, let them go.”
Laufey was largely introduced to American audiences when she performed her affecting single “Like The Movies” as a musical guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this year. It was far from her first time braving the public eye. When she was 15 years old in Iceland, she performed as a soloist in the same national Symphony Orchestra that housed her mother’s violin; she went on to become a finalist on Ísland Got Talent (the Icelandic installment of America’s Got Talent) while she was still a teenager, then, one year later, became the then-youngest competitor in The Voice Iceland’s history. A large factor in taking the pressure off was Iceland’s small-scale stakes — “I think I was aware that people knew who I was,” she says, “but at the end of the day, everyone in Iceland kind of knows each other” — though nonetheless, the gauntlet allowed her to gain considerable, now-tangible ground in making music as public-facing as it is introspective.
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Now, the personal-to-communal dynamic is one she both relishes in, and credits to the newly vulnerable tones social media has evolved to strike. “Half these songs I write, I’m just making fun of myself,” she admits. “That’s very modern humor. Everybody’s just making fun of themselves hoping that someone will relate.” A walls-down ethos like this one, tied together with a progressively elastic sense of structure, is part of why she says “there’s never been a better time to make music than now”: “My generation, this TikTok generation, Gen-Z, they don’t care so much about genre anymore. You’re not going into a record store and going straight to the section of the music that you love. You’re going on a streaming platform and turning on a mood playlist. It’s so much more about feeling, now— do I want to feel cozy? Do I want something more energetic? Everything is more about vibe, and I think that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to music.”
A good portion of Everything I Know About Love arose from lyrics written in dorm rooms at Berkley, when these future-friendly sonic liberationist ideas were first beginning to make sense for her. “When I moved to college alone,” she recounts with a sheepish grin, “I started breaking some rules for the first time. And it’s funny, because I was so focused on following rules — but somehow, the second I started breaking them, my life started getting so much better. Both breaking musical rules, and a couple of life rules.” She turns to her publicist, who is sitting on a nearby bench. “That’s really bad advice to give people, I’m so sorry — as my publicist, is that okay to say?”
Her publicist says yes (which is why you just read it), and for what it sounds like, it’s quite likely that every time she asked herself a variation of the same question — is that okay to say? — over the recording process of her new album, the same answer came back. On one track, she admits, with a motherly intonation strewn over acoustic guitar arpeggiations, a slew of not-so-impressive things: the first verse alone touches on directionlessness, absent-mindedness, and a tendency to talk to the walls of her room. By the end of the song, though — much like the rest of her music — embarrassing anecdotes aside, when she relays it all back to the album’s titular mystery and its strange doings, it’s difficult not to admit that we’ve all been there.
Part of what makes her honest stories so accessible is the package they’re delivered in. Most of the online commenters that call her music “nostalgic” credit the sense to her voice, which oscillates between the aged wisdom of an old soul, and the exploratory openness of a young one. The ethereal exploits of both her vocal register, and her artistry writ large, are a quality she absorbed from growing up in an equally ethereal place, locationally and mentally. She moved around more than the average young person, so in place of a concrete geographical sense of home, she instead found belonging in music and family. “I was really close with my family, because we moved around so much. My twin sister was, like, my best friend. I literally wrote a song about it,” she says. “But growing up was fun. When you grow up in Iceland, it’s so isolated, and you have this innate sense of… you become a dreamer. You get this sense of wanderlust that I think definitely shows through in my music.” Asked whether she still considers herself a dreamer: “I even used to be more of a realist, and now I’m absolutely delusional.”
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A long-standing dispute in improvisational sonic forms like jazz hinges on the hazy line between delusion and genius. For Laufey, delusion looks more like a dreamscape than it does a mental institution, and the threshold between that and “genius” — the “official” standing of an artist who has made it — is manifesting itself right now in where she chooses to lay her head. She’s in New York right now for a string of promo gigs, interviews and finishing touches to be made on the business side of releasing her new record. The busybody underbelly of the city is a polar opposite from the notably less-hectic Los Angeles she’s called home since graduating from Berklee. “I think it’s a young musician’s rite of passage to go live that movie life for a few years,” she says of LA’s appeal, as, ironically, loud construction vehicles give her voice stiff competition somewhere in the distance. “I was stepping out of my comfort zone when moving to L.A, and I definitely think it’s important to not get too comfortable.” That doesn’t mean it’s easy to not kick your feet up: “What I will say, is that there is no feeling like getting off of a sweaty tour bus and just laughing in the sun.”
She’ll have another shot at not getting too comfortable post-travel come this fall, when she’s slated to embark on her first ever headlining tour — a 32-date slew of international performances that, as of the writing of this piece, is completely sold out with the exception of four shows. Performances for Laufey aren’t as stringent and to-the-books as a tightly-wound touring schedule might suggest, and coming off of her set at Newport Jazz a few days ago, she speaks on them with the same carefree flair that populates the music when it’s on wax: “I love doing solo sets," she says, "because I can kind of change it up on the spot. The amount of times I’ve been in the middle of a performance, looked down at a setlist and been like, I really don’t want to do that right now, and just done some other song…”
As much as this may be a common facet to an inherently-improvisational medium, it’s also one of several glimpses into a producer-consumer barrier Laufey is intent on breaking down. “Laufey as an artist is exactly who Laufey is as a person,” she tells me at one point. “The Laufey you get to know on stage and on social media as the artist is just very much who I am. There really is no difference. The way that I present myself on social media hasn’t changed at all since I became an artist. The way I talk, or engage with my friends, hasn’t changed. I write about my own experiences, and I experience to write.”
The collective experience retold by Everything I Know About Love is one Laufey simply describes as that of “a young woman in this century.” The knowledge she’s accumulated on love thus far is as far-reaching as it is dense — from interests that didn’t feel the same way, to people she herself didn’t feel the same way about, to dates that stood her up, to afternoons spent talking to bedroom walls — and for the great lengths she goes to make fun of such experience for the sake of empowering listeners, she also goes great lengths in redirecting a jazz lineage long hinged on stories not nearly reflective of her own. Laufey’s agenda is a simple one — to translate old music for younger ears — and without groundwork being laid to build bridges between generational gaps, genres like the ones she specializes in may be headed for the graves they spent decades of exclusivity digging for themselves.
With a debut LP coming out soon, a headlining tour slated to follow it, and more vulnerable work on the horizon, though, jazz isn’t going anywhere if Laufey has anything to say about it. She hasn’t been in love before, but if there’s anything she is in love with, it’s her music — enough, at least, to lug it up from an old-world past, and revitalize it for new audiences who never knew it was what they needed. “It’s not only love towards some sort of significant other,” she says of love, at one point. “I think it can also just be love for movies.”
Love for movies hinges on a love for stories, and when she leaves the community garden with a slightly high-stakes live-stream gig on her schedule for later today, very few signs point to her being done telling them. The ears — whether from an old vanguard shaking its fists at her revolution, or a new one falling in love with it — are perked. As for her own ears, they're likely busy with whatever her dad has been listening to on Spotify.
Mixing sonic and subcultural elements of hardcore and metal with electronic music, the group is proving to be a force we're all reckoning with — whether we're fans of the heavier stuff or not — breaking the boundaries of stereotypical guitar or rock music in a unique and avant-garde way. And this summer, they continued to impress us with their debut with Relapse Records, releasing their latest album Heaven is Here.
From the name of the band itself to their new album, Candy has as much in common with millenial pink skies and sugary pop sounds as Taylor Swift has with heavy metal: nothing. What's more, the topics touched on lyrically are anything but light, ranging from environmental destruction and collapsing societies to corrupt governments.
The group, consisting on Zak Quiram on vocals, Michael Quick and Andrew Stark on guitars, Kaleb Perdue on bass and Steve Digenio on drums, has created an almost uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing and cutting-edge record, and we'd argue their best yet. Michael Quick, guitarist and mainly responsible for the electronic production, sits down with us to chat about how Candy is in the business of crossing over: merging the electronic with the punk crowds. Their project pushes the overlapping of principles and values from DIY and its anti-establishment attitude with electronica's technical fixation, bringing both audiences closer together than anticipated, and turning their concerts into the best of both worlds picture a rave with a wild mosh pit.
Continue reading below to learn more about the band that we've become addicted to, even if they may not be so sweet.
When I was looking at your album for the first time, it really reminded me of Dante's Inferno. Does heaven actually mean hell in that case then?
I think it's sort of playing with the same theme as the band being named Candy, but the music being really intense or unpleasant, I guess. It's kind of the thought that there are a lot of leaders in our society who are trying to argue that they're selling us this version of utopia - some big tech and specific political messages and stuff like that. They have their own brand of utopia and heaven. All these people cycle through control of the society we live in. If you look at the ground level of how most people in modern society are living, it doesn't look much better than something like our artwork.
The last song on the album, Perverse, is 10 minutes long, but the other songs on the album are not longer than two minutes ish. What was your reason behind that?
Some bands that we liked in the past in hardcore and punk music have done similar things. We just wanted to bring in all these electronic and noise elements and all these things to kind of increase to sort of knock people off their balance whenever we could. So, if we had a straightforward punk song, like in the sequencing of the album, at the end of that song, there might be some crazy noise interlude that goes on for 15 seconds or something like that. The goal there was just to knock people off their balance and never get a sense of comfort within the album. I think that song was kind of a longer version within the whole album - a way to do the same thing. You think you got to song ten, and it's going to be a two-minute fast punk song, but you're just stuck there for ten minutes listening to chaotic noise. We were just playing with the structure of the album.
Why did you choose to include electronic elements in your album in the first place? I mean punk is not really known for having any electronic bits at all.
Yeah, it's not. I grew up kind of in hardcore punk culture, but I like a lot of other music besides just guitar music and punk, specifically DIY culture. The main type of shows I went to growing up and still do was going to shows at warehouses and under bridges and stuff like that. I've always been interested in electronic music, and the more I read into it and dug into it was essentially the start how rave culture started. They also had DIY spaces and they also were anti-authority and anti-police. When you compare them, you can see that they have a lot of the same cultural ethics and values.
Punk and electronic music maybe don't necessarily go hand in hand in regard to history, but there is a lot in common. That's what sparked the initial idea. Then going deeper into it, if you look at a crazy rave, or look at a crazy hardcore show, people are putting out a high level of physical energy at both.
I wanted to see if we can make punk songs with electronic instrumentation that maybe could scratch the itch of wanting to dance for people that are used to going into more electronic-based raves. Or maybe if you want to mosh in a mosh pit or stage dive. I just tried to bring those things together because I do think there are similarities despite it not being seen as going hand in hand.
Do you think the techno audience is very different to the punk audience? How do you bring them together?
Yes, and no. I think for the punk audience, the downside is that it's very homogenous. It can be just straight white males. That's historically how people see hardcore, punk, and metal, and that's not wrong. Over the years, even since I got into hardcore when I was 14, or 15, it's becoming more and more welcoming. It just looks different than when I got into it, which I think is a good thing. Trying to bring in some of that electronic stuff, hopefully, that welcomes more people. I think punk should stay anti-authority and DIY, but I don't think it should be a thing that anyone feels excluded from because of how the crowds look. Maybe if you bring in elements of other kinds of music that can hopefully bring up the comfort level of other people so that there's just something for more for people to understand, more for people to grasp onto.
And because of that, do you think the genre of hardcore and punk needs to be redefined?
I think about the genre definition so much, especially hardcore. I think that the boundaries of the genre of hardcore need to be looked at differently. A lot of hardcore traditionalists and purists would say that what we're doing with electronic music makes us not a hardcore band - I get that, but I disagree with them. If you look back to the people who started hardcore and punk music, they were not trying to uphold any genre standards. So, people that were starting hardcore and punk, weren't trying to uphold any strict genre definitions. I think that's what I value about hardcore. At this point, people are making music that is as aggressive as metal and punk without guitars only with synths, drum machines, and samples. It would just be crazy for the genre not to grow with it.
Your lyrics cover quite heavy topics such as environmental destruction, the collapse of society, or corrupt governments. How does your music relate to politics and social issues?
Just on a personal level, we care about that stuff and try to stay engaged with it. That's really where we start with all of the music we make - it's just personal expression. Then we try to add things on top of it. I think in the bigger picture, it's a small platform, but we do have a platform where people are paying attention. It would just feel wrong, not to be addressing that stuff. If you're listening to our music, maybe we can lead you to think about some things, and eventually that could lead to helping some of these issues hopefully. I think it would just feel wrong not to use the small platform.
Not every artist gets the chance to hear legendary producer Shlomo claimed their demos, off the bat, as "captivating and directive". But the "massive vision" he heard in rising artist LST's rough cuts got such treatment.
And it's well deserved, we now know, after hearing the debut EP by the Woodstock, New York-born artist — otherwise known as Lauren Tischler — titled Closer, which was released last week on WEDIDIT Records.
Though perhaps Tischler's work falls under the category of "bedroom pop", to place it under any umbrella would be a disservice.
There's a Joni Mitchell singer-songwriter quality to her heavy, lyrical ballads of heartbreak, though the folkiness gets flipped on its head with the use of auto-tune and eerie, minimalist guitar. Sticky pop hooks and digitized vocals crooning psychoanalytical lyrics is a surprising and powerful paradox, standing up to any cliche about pop music being trite or firmly formulaic. Having listened to the ethereal and unexpected EP on a loop since it's release, I was grateful for the chance to dig deeper with the artist herself, and uncover what I could about Closer, as much as where, and who, it came from.
Is being a musical artist something you always saw for yourself?
I think that I have always wanted to pursue music but I was too scared to admit that to myself because I didn’t believe that it was an option for me or something that I could be good at. I’m a perfectionist and I didn’t allow myself to even attempt to write music for a very long time because I was so scared of writing something bad. I had to get over that ego part of it, and I wrote a lot of bad songs before I started to feel like I was getting to some that I liked, but I’m so happy I pushed through.
What are your inspirations and reference points? The aesthetics and sound itself seem dichotomous almost, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s a compliment.
I'm happy you say that because I also feel like there is a feeling of dichotomy and opposition in the music. Like the use of autotune and some of the hyper pop elements in the production feel in contrast to what I hope is a feeling of authenticity in the songwriting. I reached out to Charles of Planet 1999 about working together because I love PC Music and I loved their album Devotion. I sent him over the stems for the first version of the song, which was a really stripped down demo, and he sent me back the version that’s on the EP now. It was the first time I had ever heard my voice with auto-tune on it and I was pretty adverse to it at first, mostly because most of my favorite musicians and influences — like Mazzy Star, Fiona Apple, Cat Power — all have this really strong feeling of honesty and vulnerability in their work that I admire and hoped to emulate, and I was afraid that by using something so ultramodern I would be taking away from the deeper emotional content of the songs. But I sat with it for a while and ended up really falling in love how the two elements, this synthetic feeling and a sense of genuineness, worked together.
What was the hardest or most fear inducing aspect of this process?
I think the hardest part has actually been releasing the songs after keeping this part of my life private for so long, I think I had forgotten that releasing was actually a part of the process. It feels really scary to have them out into the world, but really rewarding, and exciting to think that people might be able to connect and relate to the songs.
Are there specific people, places and things that have grounded you?
Where I grew up in Upstate NY, Woodstock, has always been really grounding for me. I wrote most of the EP while living with my parents at my childhood home during the pandemic, and I shot the cover art there with Eric Chakeen which felt really right and like a true representation of the project. I feel best and most creative when I am surrounded by nature and have space to think. And I do a lot of prayer and meditation to feel sane.
What’s it been like working with WEDIDIT and Shlohmo on your first EP?
Working with them has been the best experience, they’ve been so supportive since the beginning. I’m definitely a control freak and have a hard time trusting anyone else with something I’ve written. The first time I met Henry (Shlohmo) I played him all of the demos I had, which had been sitting in a dropbox folder for years because I couldn’t figure out where to go with them, and he knew right away how to finish them. When a producer understands what you are trying to do and is able to add to your vision without compromising it it feels like a really special thing. I feel very lucky to have worked with Henry on all of the music I’m putting out, as well as Ben Morsberger (Juice Jackal) and Jasper Patterson (Groundislava) who both contributed to the EP and my upcoming album and are so talented.
How do you think you have changed in the time since starting this album? How do you hope to going forward?
A handful of the first songs I ever wrote are on my forthcoming album. When I started writing music I felt really lost and had a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms. I didn’t know who I was at all then and I feel like I am able to listen back to those songs now as a sort of a diary of the last almost decade of my life and that can feel both painful and therapeutic. Including a lot of my early songs on the album feels scary but also like I am giving that part of my life a sense of closure. It’s been really nice to finish these songs and to be able to write from the place I am at now and see how different I am as an artist and how I have changed as a person. I feel like I’m always changing and growing so I’m excited to see how my music continues to evolve along with me.
Which song do you feel most personally attached to?
I think I’m most personally attached to "Not Enough", which is funny because it’s the only song I’ve ever written from start to finish with another person. I usually write alone, but I wrote this one with my friend Jeremy McLennan the first time we met. I usually tend to write about myself or my feelings or experiences in relationship to others, but this one feels really solitary and vulnerable.
But my favorite track on the EP is "Running". It’s my favorite sonically, and I like that it sounds like a love song but it’s really a break up song about wanting to run away from someone who you used to want to be close to.
If you had to pick a "rose and a thorn" of your experience making the EP what would they be?
The rose would definitely be meeting and working with amazing collaborators. I feel really lucky to be surrounded by so many talented and creative people. The artist Sara Dibiza made such a beautiful and ethereal lyric video for the first single, "Walking Away", I am a huge fan of her work. I don’t have any thorns. Even though these songs and the ones on the way have taken years to finish, I really think everything has happened when it was supposed to There were definitely painful periods over where I felt lost and discouraged, but I am so happy I waited until I found the right people to take on this project and to help me to finish it, instead of giving up on it or settling on my vision. I don’t have any regrets or things I would change about the process.
Many artists have an alter ego when they perform, do you feel like you truly are LST or is LST a creative persona?
Hmm. I feel like it’s me! I am pretty shy though so I feel like when I start performing I will have to adopt some sort of a persona to get me through that, but the music aspect feels like it comes from a very personal place.
What’s next for LST?
Live shows and touring! My first full-length album will be released before the end of the year on WEDIDIT!
LISTEN IF YOU LIKE: DRUM & BASS, DANCEHALL, AND NICKI MINAJ. The sonic equivalent of a bold red lip, a Jessicunt set makes its mark smudged across sweaty necks, salted rims, and the soggy end of a blunt passed from hand-to-lips-to-hand. Jessica Udeh, a music-obsessed first-generation Nigerian in Maryland, became Jessicunt by “acting cunty in a group chat.”
A proud barb, semi-music snob, and world traveler, Jessicunt is assertive, but not confrontational, confident, but not cocky, and forward without coming on too strong. Operating in the in-between, Jessicunt converges culture through her exploration of diasporic dance music. Jessicunt’s early years were populated with Afrobeats, Highlife, and Dancehall. As her musical sensibilities ventured outside her home, she dove into Rap and Hip-Hop history, filling the gaps between her Nigerian and American identity.
Driven by percussive rhythms and powerful vocals, Jessicunt’s sound is strong and heady, becoming soft and malleable in the movement of the crowd. Her crowds are charged with energy unbridled. Reverberating against a bass that leaves ear-drums buzzing, Jessicunt builds harmony through the chaos. Though introverted in her own right, Jessicunt is emboldened behind the booth, fortified by the wall of sound she builds and scales with grace.
To her, music has been a means of strengthening identity and building freer ways of being. With early inspirations like M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, Kelis, and Venus X, Jessicunt’s main objective is to empower. In doing so, she expands the listener’s ears to new sounds and cultural pockets within the scene. Her own practice is fueled by travel, picking up sounds like Amapiano from South Africa, and the resurgence of drum & bass from the heart of London’s diasporic DJs. Her music remixes tradition and predicts trends to create a work that operates in its own time.
Jessicunt invites listeners to be bold, adventurous, and find a piece of themselves in each new sound.
Check out Jessicunt's exclusive mix and interview with office below.
Can you walk me through this mix, what were you feeling when you put it together? What are some of your favorite tracks?
I was feeling ANXIOUS AS FUCK. I was in London battling the birthday blues as well as general imposter syndrome and after several days at the studio, I still didn’t have a mix. After several hours at my homies crib, because I was tired of wasting my money, I STILL didn’t have a mix. It wasn’t until I got back to where I was staying after all the failed attempts that I sat down and thought “okay. what is this going to give?” I knew that when I listened back to this I wanted to feel like I was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A timeless, borderless, hair-raising, sonic experience. From there I was able to weave together a pool of tracks I loved but it wasn’t until I got on the plane leaving London that I was able to record this mix. I was two cups of wine in with no regard for my seat neighbor and that’s when I dragged. I have more so a favorite section than individual tracks, and that’s the part from “INDIAN BOOKSHELF RIDDIM” all the way to “Punani (BAE BAE Edit)” at that moment I was living my fullest dancehall queen dreams.
Where do you find new music?
Anywhere really, you just have to be ready for a very long wormhole/rabbit hole, either of the holes. Depending on the genre, I will use certain platforms. If I'm looking for a very good hidden gem of a dub, I'm going to YouTube. For house deep cuts, I'm going to YouTube or even fucking Reddit. Places where the nerds gather are where the bops are, usually. For edits, I love Bandcamp and SoundCloud. I usually start with artists that I'm already listening to, and maybe people that they've worked with or featured because they tend to work within a similar world, or maybe one that's even better that they're trying to invite their fans into. But I love a good SoundCloud deep dive. You start with one track, go to the related tracks, go from the related tracks to the artists of the related tracks, go from the artists and the related tracks to the artists that they've collaborated with. And so on and so forth. There are just so many talented people out there, and you have to look past the numbers. So many of the greatest tracks have pretty much no plays. And a good DJ is not going to pass up a track because no one's salivating at the mouth over it in the comments, you know. So yeah, just I go through very extensive deep dives.
What makes your ears perk up, what makes you want to use something?
I will say, for playing out, I look for things that are percussion-heavy, or tracks that I can turn into something percussion-heavy, like the Rihanna track in this mix, “Woo” that's not very fast-paced. It is high-energy, but it's not fast-paced. It's not something somebody can shake their butt and break their back to but you throw those drums over it, and it's a whole different vibe now. So I think for playing things out, I look for strong elements of percussion, or the opportunity to overlay another strong element of percussion. As far as what might go in a mix, I think the energy of a live set versus a mix can be quite different. For mixes I use anything that I can get into a groove with, even if it's slow. I love to find a good pocket for a mix. I know that you're not always going to be in a rambunctious setting, maybe you're at home, maybe you're commuting, I like tracks sound hypnotizing, almost monotonous, then maybe there's a break and I can slip a groove in, but not as out right, in your face as a track that I would play in a party.
Deep cuts versus fan favorites, where do you fall?
Okay, deep cuts versus fan favorites…I am a deep cut girl I can't lie. I find that I have a pattern of playing a bunch of deep cuts then introducing a fan favorite just for rewarding you for literally making it through that hell. Especially if you don't know any of the songs that I'm playing, I'm sure that's so annoying, but I usually know when it's time to introduce a quick popular song.
What’s your favorite thing to see in a crowd?
I love a good rave girl, main character moment. When there's someone in the middle of the dance floor or maybe off to the side, and they're just getting their life, they may not even be dancing with anybody, but you can tell the music is literally taking over every fiber of their being. That's what I love to see. I also love to see people making out in the club because that would literally never be me, too many germs. But I love that for you guys. I'm living vicariously. Ultimately, just seeing people being their full, unfiltered selves, within reason. I love to see people at the height of their personalities. Like, if you're that friend who's kind of anti and it's just gonna be like, off to the side being anti, I kind of love to see that, but times a billion. If you're the social butterfly friend, who gets drunk and then goes and makes an entire new group of friends. I love to see that too. The only thing I really hate to see in the club is people making other people uncomfortable. People making people feel generally unsafe. I also hate name-dropping in the club and people taking pictures of everything they do. I personally don't care for certain vices. But at this point, we should not be photographing every time we see somebody take a bump or like do some K. Like it's not for the finsta every time, you know. I love to see authenticity. I hate to see discomfort, overzealousness.
So what did you listen to growing up?
Growing up, I listened to a lot of Soukous music, Highlife, Afrobeat, Afro beats– because there are people like Fela, but then there’s people like Wizkid and Burna Boy. I also listened to Dancehall. I was very diaspora-focused, because, my parents came over relatively young, so they were trying, I believe, to hold on to certain elements of their culture. Because of assimilation, there were a few things that would slip through, like my father was obsessed with Michael Jackson, both of my parents actually. So we were listening to Afrobeat and dancehall and all these things. And then occasionally other things would slip in like "Funkytown" I forget who sings it, but it's like, “why don't you take me to Funkytown,” stuff like that. It was very much immigrant, but that's also trying to assimilate in a way, so it was weird. Even in the car with the radio, my mom, would maybe listen to the radio the first 10 seconds we’re in the car, but then she would just put in a CD that we had heard a billion times.
It wasn't until fifth grade for Christmas, I got an mp3 player. I had begged and begged and begged and I got it. My brother's computer was the only computer I had access to in the house. So I just connected it, and downloaded whatever I could before I could get caught. It was like Jay Z's second Blueprint, and a bunch of Lil Wayne. That's how I got into Lil Kim and Biggie. I took it way, way back, and started researching. And you know, from that moment, I kinda was able to identify more with what I was hearing outside, I was able to connect with kids because I could listen to what they're hearing, I could hear what they're listening to. And at a point, I lived in Langley Park, which was predominantly African and Latin immigrants. So then, if it wasn't Afrobeat, and it wasn't Hip Hop, it was Reggaeton. So my sonic world started to kind of cement itself from that point. That coupled with like, the pop and the random funk and all these things that my parents would slide in. So it was weird, I heard so much from a young age. But certain things didn't get introduced until later.
Ok–can you explain the Afrobeat, Afrobeats distinction? I feel like so many people don’t know that and just use them interchangeably.
So Afrobeat is more so an overarching genre and identity that encompasses Western & Central African music, jazz, highlife and funk. The more popular regions are Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon. This sound is also much older than Afrobeats and its most notable pioneer is Fela Kuti. Now - Afrobeats is an umbrella term for contemporary West African popular music. So when you hear Afrobeat, think Fela Kuti and Manu Dibango. When you hear Afrobeats, think WizKid and Davido.
What are you listening to now?
Yeah, fast forward till now, I think my sound is just an amalgamation of all of these things. I'll play the hip hop, play the afrobeat, and now that I travel so frequently, I'm exposed constantly to different cultures. I'll throw in the jungle. I’ll throw in the baile funk. Fuck, you know, I'll throw in the Parisian trap that I heard these kids singing along to the time I was there. They all play a part. I've been able to build this world where it's almost like we're constantly traveling, where we've never really arrived.
Where do you want people to arrive through your music?
I want people to arrive at a state of pleasure, confusion, introspection, maybe even a bit of sadness but overall - euphoria. I want them to feel how you do at the other end of a shroom trip. The experience that I strive to create is one that's out of body. I always want for people to be changed. Honestly, whether it's for the better or for the worse is totally up to them. But I want them to come out of the club, like "I don't know where the fuck I just was, and I don't know what we're doing after this, but like, I need more of that." Because I would have to say my favorite feedback is a person saying, “You gave me everything.” I am well-rounded and I am chaotic. And I honestly kind of like for that to come out. I like for people to have headbanging whiplash moments where they're like, “No was that this over blank, like, that's insane!” And I want people to just kind of re-approach the way that they interact with and perceive music, or even songs that they've heard before that are being presented in a new way. So yeah, I just want people to come from a site of experience that I lead, and be changed and transformed completely.
This piece is part of a three-part series profiling the NYC music scene.
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