Jane Remover Reconstructs Herself Through Trust

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“I’m very defensive about my art.” Jane Remover tells me “So it’s like: nobody’s gonna make the music how I want to make it except me.” Little is known about Jane outside of what’s in her art. She was born in 2003 in New Jersey, spending the first seven or eight years of her life in Newark before moving with her family to Clark, a small suburban area of Central New Jersey. She started making music as early as 2011 and, by 2019, was starting to write and produce her own original work. She released two EPs and Frailty under a different, now retired moniker; in 2022, she came out publicly as a trans woman, announcing that she would change her artist name to Jane Remover. Census Designated is the first project she has released as Jane Remover. As Jane describes it, the record is a journey from sundown until dusk; its 10 tracks span over an hour of deliberate buildups, frenetic breakdowns and visceral, wry lyricism. It serves as both Frailty’s thesis and its logical next step.

And make no mistake about it, Census Designated is an album of destruction. It exists only in the wake of who Jane Remover used to be. It would not, and could not, exist had she not set fire to her past self. Sure, it might arrive to you like an album of reinvention, not of destruction. It’s about what she’s trying to build. For that, I usher you towards Jane’s elusive and forthcoming third album, whenever that may be and whatever it may look like. I’m sure it will follow suit in the standard of excellence she has set with her first two projects. But we aren’t there yet. Right now, we are watching Jane Remover’s real time self immolation; she knows it, we know it and anyone who takes the ride from dusk to dawn on her sophomore project will quickly be made aware of the same truth.

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Census Designated is the night to Frailty’s day. Whereas I pictured Frailty as the sonic equivalent of colorbars lit up on a television screen flashing no signal, Census Designated appears to me, not as the void of a black screen, but as a blank-screened television doused in gasoline and set up in flames. Jane recognizes the weight of this enterprise, too. “I wanted to give the impression that this is something a lot more serious and a lot more big than the first time around,” she says. “When I first started making music, it was definitely a lot more derivative. It was a lot more of me trying to find a style that I would fit in the most.”

Critics have found it impossible to talk about Jane’s music without grasping at the straws of comparison. There’s little singularity between the names that have been thrown around, even in talking just about Census Designated: Slowdive, yeule, Ethel Cain, my bloody valentine, Deftones, Midwife, Ethel Cain again, Bladee and Ecco2k, Porter Robinson, Puce Mary, A.R. Kane. It’s hard to talk about Jane’s music without making references to those other artists who have influenced and been influenced by her style, but it’s also hard to talk about her music with reference to the people who surround her. The truth is, she just doesn’t sound like anyone else. Census Designated is so masterfully disconcerting that, even as we try to grasp onto snippets of sound that could possibly remind us of something familiar, we fail to clasp our fingers around a single beam supporting our feigned acquaintance with her sound.

When I talk to Jane, she’s deliberate with her words, taking care not to usher herself back into the boxes inside of which she has previously been contained. In our near hour-long conversation, words like “hyperpop” or “glitchcore” don’t surface once. Even terms like “shoegaze” or “rock,” the latter of which Jane has been more eager to embrace as a baseline descriptor of Census Designated, are set aside, replaced by ideas like “art-making,” “fulfillment” and “community.” The way we talk about and classify music in the age of the internet is steeped in an abbreviated ephemerality. “Hyper-,” “digi-,” “glitch-,” “chill-,” and “break-” get attached to “-core,” “-wave,” “-gaze,” “-step” or “-beat” in some sort of do-it-yourself genre of mad-libs that, in a search for uber specificity, ends up becoming utterly meaningless. These clipped word labels get cycled in and out as fast as attention spans wane, and internet kids get tired of one thing and madly seek the next amalgamation of clips and fragments that excites them.

Jane describes Census Designated as primarily a rock album—experimental rock most specifically. One of the projects of this record is Jane distancing herself from the labels that were previously attributed to her work. She rejects abbreviation and transience, offering an artistic vision that isn’t afraid to run the full course of its development. There isn’t a single track on Census Designated that runs for less than four and a half minutes. Most of them sprawl, spanning upwards of six minutes each. The very first sounds on the album are vocals so distant they become reduced to a remote buzzing, followed by a guttural croaking. The record’s tracks take their time to build pressure, from a slow, gently vocalized intimacy to a frenetic amalgamation of whirring and grinding guitar and noise and screams. Of course Jane wants to distance such a project from the cycles of “internet music”—whatever that term even really means. Her longer and more sustained feats of sonic world-building force you to slow down, to pay attention to how they rise and fall over their course. She begs you, at least for an hour, to fight against how deeply the internet has fried your attention span, and walk with her.

This is not to say that Jane doesn’t have a particular style in which she works, nor that she isn’t keenly aware of cultivating something novel and exciting. “Now, I kind of found the lane that I want to stay in.” she tells me “Genre-wise, there’s not really a lane, but more a style of production and the way I work.” Naturally, I ask her what she would say that style of production is. She just looks at me. “I don’t know,” she answers earnestly “I never really thought about attaching a name to it’s kind of just the Jane Style, you know?” I laugh. I suppose that’s the best answer she could have given to such a foolish question.

This is also not to say that there isn’t a great deal of fragmentation on the record. Both sonically and thematically, there is a sense of breaking apart, dismembering and blowing up that sits at the core of Jane’s destruction as it appears on Census Designated. On opener “Cage Girl / Camgirl,” she sings “Chew me up, spit me out before you can swallow,” immediately and provocatively priming the listener to make themselves complicit in her destruction. On “Lips,” the album’s third single, she sings “Take a knife up to the belly, slide it up to where he kissed me,” opening up the second verse and bringing an interlude of digitized sounds back down to earth, down to her body. On “Idling Somewhere,” one of the album’s darkest and most frenetic tracks, she first sings “How to eat myself alive, you taught me everything,” then ends the song on the lyric “I just want to be the same / In a video of my corpse online – tampered.” On “Contingency Song,” the brooding final track, she laments: “I chop myself up and shut myself out / Until my body shuts itself down.” Census Designated’s Jane Remover is a body disembodied, the fragments of a person just before she forges her new self-definition.

Though Census Designated is a wildly rich, incredibly dense album, Jane reveals that much of it stemmed from a vision of emptiness. “I kind of just had this idea of an empty plane, and dilapidated houses and just like decay and nothing,” she tells me of the album’s visuals. Posts on her social media leading up to the album’s release depicted Jane standing in empty fields of wheat, in front of board-bare, house-shaped buildings, outside an empty room’s window in an even emptier desert landscape. So many of the visuals were shadowed in shades of beiges and grays, harsh and warm angles of light limning through glass panes and cloud breaks. Much of the barren naturalism was interrupted by Jane herself, carrying with her objects of violence. Blood drips from her hands and lips, onto the wooden floors. A handgun hangs between her fingers. The dismembered head of a deer rests between her arm and her hip.

“I had the imagery idea for this album a really, really long time ago—probably the moment I started working on it, musically,” she reveals. But, going into it, I didn’t think that I was actually going to, like, be able to go out and do shoots for this album. It feels so fulfilling for me.” Much of what fulfilled Jane’s longing for this sort of barrenness came from her first time traveling the country, on tour this past year with experimental group brakence. “What I enjoyed the most about the tour was the stops in between the cities,” she says “Like staying at a random B&B in some town that’s, like, a mile away from literally anything.”

Jane tells me that it was a near death experience which fully solidified the visions of desolation that informed the creation of Census Designated. She was driving to Seattle, late at night, through a blizzard. “We ended up having to make a pit stop, because the snow just got so bad,” she recounts. “And we were in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And what really struck me was—because a lot of what this album was centered around, idea-wise—this exact thing happening to me, like, by choice, wanting to go to the middle of nowhere and disappearing and just falling off the face of the earth. Now it’s like, I’m actually in this situation and, yeah, this is exactly like the picture that I was trying to paint. Because there’s a little bit of fear. You can feel your heart beating in the backseat of the car. I think what made it funny, though, is that we were Listening to Syro by Aphex Twin in the car. It was out of a movie.”

Being on the road with brakence was Jane’s first official touring experience. Before that, she had only played a few shows, recounting her first ever live performance being a Connecticut College show, playing right after Iyaz—most well known for his 2009 smash hit “Replay.” “The bill was really random. I think it was based on a playlist that the students had. And I think what the funniest part was that Iyaz played before me. ‘Replay’ was on the setlist three times. And I think he also covered some Sean Kingston songs because the students couldn’t tell the difference,” Jane notes.

Following that, she only played two more shows before embarking on the 2022 Hypochondriac Tour with brakence, where she opened for them on just over a dozen shows across the country. When Jane tells me about her plans for performing Census Designated live, her face lights with excitement, even if it is colored by some nerves. “My stage fright has definitely gone down,” she admits, “but it doesn’t really go away, you just get used to it.” On the Census Designated tour, she tells me she is going to try to get a band set up. “And I definitely want to make the show more interactive,” Jane adds. “I kinda had this picture in my mind where, during ‘Video,’ I’m going to go into the crowd. I definitely want to start screaming during the live session. I think part of what makes the experience of going so far is there’s a different level of emotion and connection that you’re able to experience. I want to make it like a really good performance, both for the fans to feel fulfilled after it but, also, I want to feel fulfilled after performing, too.”

As for the fans, Jane has to strike a delicate balance—for her own sanity more than anything. Parasocial dynamics are almost a prerequisite of prominence, especially for young artists who are coming to find that attention in the internet age. “I’m definitely more hands off when it comes to interacting with fans these days,” she says, “just because I don’t want to overwhelm myself with things like ‘What, if this isn’t what the fans want.’ But I think, at the end of the day, nobody is going to make them music like that. If this isn’t what the fans want, or if this isn’t good, like, algorithmically, or something like that, this is something I like. I think it sounds exactly like how I want it to, and it’s something that I feel is my body of work [that] I’m ready to put out.”

As Jane describes it, she is painfully self-aware. She knows that she positions her art—and, therefore, herself—as an object of consumption. Census Designated’s title track features a hook where Jane sings “I’m young blood, fresh meat and I like that.” There is a tongue-in-cheek sort of cognizance here; she knows that she’s young and hungry and ready to experiment. She knows she sounds like absolutely no one else. She knows exactly what she’s doing—and she’s doing a damn good job of it. Because, for Jane Remover, at the end of the day, that’s what it all comes down to. “I think trusting yourself with your art is probably the key component in engaging with fans and giving them what they want,” she says. “Trusting yourself with your art also just changes the way you make art. That’s just what happened with Census Designated.”

Jane Remover Reconstructs Herself Through Trust

The Chicago experimental rock musician talks putting more intentionality into production than genre, self-awareness, fan expectations and her sophomore album, Census Designated.