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.
Photo by Brendon Burton
“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.
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.