Jockstrap Say Goodnight to Jennifer B

Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye have had a hell of a year. In September 2022, the London duo unveiled their debut LP I Love You Jennifer B and they’ve been touring relentlessly since—which seems particularly miraculous, given that Ellery is also 1/6th of Black Country, New Road, who are also touring relentlessly. But since I Love You Jennifer B came out, Jockstrap have shared bills with folks like Blur, Sleaford Mods and Kirin J Callinan. They’ve awed crowds at festivals across the globe, making stops at SXSW, Pitchfork, Roskilde and Glastonbury, to name a few. When Ellery and Skye were awarded a spot on the Mercury Prize shortlist this past summer, it was becoming crystal-clear that their monumental cultural ascent was immune to limitations. When they announced I<3UQTINVU—a companion remix to I Love You Jennifer B—a few months ago, they cemented the truth of their own destiny: Jockstrap can go wherever they please, and acclaim, adoration and brilliance will all surely follow.

When she’s performing with her BCNR bandmates, Ellery plays violin and provides harmonies. She’s a key fixture in the group’s sound, as her strings prove to be poignant, charming and crucial—especially on tracks like “Laughing Song” and “Basketball Shoes.” What’s always been perfect about the sextet is that, no matter who is singing lead—be it Lewis Evans, Tyler Hyde, May Kershaw or the now-departed Isaac Wood—there are no background pieces. But, when she is collaborating with Skye as Jockstrap, she is vaulted into the limelight she so greatly deserves. It’s a marvel to watch both parts of her artistry unravel and become actualized, as Ellery has played a crucial role in three of the best albums of the last five years (Ants from Up There, I Love You Jennifer B and Live at Bush Hall)—and all of them have come out in a 20-month span. Throw I<3UQTINVU into the mix and you’ve got an emphatic punctuation on the first post-lockdown wave of music.

But when I get on Zoom with Ellery and Skye one Friday (morning for me, afternoon for them), it’s clear that both of them are exhausted. It makes sense; Ellery had toured all of September with both of her bands. And before that, she was ping-ponging back and forth between projects for months. “I’m really glad that I did it and I’m doing it,” Ellery says. “I’m really busy, and a little burnt out. But, I feel really lucky to have been able to be part of both and pull it off.” The Jockstrap wave of pandemonium can be distilled into the chaos of their SXSW set at the Bose C23 showcase at Inn Cahoots this past March, when a spontaneous thunderstorm upended the schedule, and Ellery and Skye were forced to wait for two hours before going on. When it was finally time to resume the music, not everyone who’d already been at the venue was allowed back in. All of a sudden, a big-time gig became a low-key performance, and the hype of I Love You Jennifer B was delivered to a crowd the size of a show the duo might have played three or four years ago when they only had 10 songs to their name. I doubt we’ll ever get such an intimate moment like that with Jockstrap again.

Skye grew up in Market Harborough and started playing piano when he was little, while Ellery hails from Cornwall and began studying violin when she was five. It wasn’t until years later, when the two musicians were teenagers, that they’d find the riches of dance music and become floored by it. When Ellery and Skye met while studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London in 2017, Jockstrap was born. Georgia’s concentration was in jazz, Taylor’s in electronic composition. Immediately recognizing their chemistry, they got right to work. They’d put out two EPs—Love Is the Key to the City in 2018 and Wicked City in 2020—and the work, which arrived mangled, ambitious and sometimes baffling (in the best way). It led to one of Ellery’s instructors at Guildhall calling Jockstrap “ironic.” But the two musicians, both 25 now, are anything but that. In fact, there was never a moment where the project had some sort of magical evolution from a passion project to a bonafide career vessel. The focus never snapped into place; it was always present. “We just had that straight away,” Skye tells me. “We just started working on a song that we then finished and then released. And then we did more. It was pretty focused from the beginning. We weren’t chilling and then just thought we’d make a song. It was quite a concentrated effort to try and make songs from the get-go. And it’s remained like that, really. We were pretty conscious of the job that we wanted to do from the start.”

Given Ellery and Skye’s academic roots in jazz and electronica, it came as a surprise to no one when their first LP, I Love You Jennifer B, arrived as a masterpiece. It was the best debut record of 2022, and one of the greatest debut records of all time. It’s often not germane to level such a weighted distinction onto a project that’s barely a year old, but so few releases have been as enigmatic and worthy of reverence with such ease. I Love You Jennifer B is timeless and unbound to era, surreal and puzzling and autonomous. To have such intricate elements of jazz, pop and electronica, the album was incomparable from the jump. Truly, no other record sounds like it and, in an industry landscape where the same genres and techniques and styles are being tapped into over and over again, that originality is worth its weight in gold.

The work of Jockstrap has grown from more avant-garde offerings to song cycles that explore glitchy soundscapes and classical concertos. From the sublime discotheque pulse of “Greatest Hits” to the glamor of stringed, folk delicacy on “Glasgow,” I Love You Jennifer B marked the edge of two musical minds that very well may be the most important act of my generation. When assembling a project that is so wide-ranging, the variety is a dichotomous mark of intent and varied interest that organically shows itself. “We use what our skills are,” Skye says. “Because Georgia plays violin, it makes sense to use strings. It’s therefore the same with the stuff we listen to. If we’re aware of it and we like it, the natural instinct is to want to be a part of it. We took it song by song and didn’t really have an overall objective about things that each song is to have. That just wasn’t the headspace we were in.” Skye has produced other artists’ work in the past, but getting to work with Ellery and knowing that he is going to get to affix an instrumental to the salve of her voice raises the stakes completely.

“I have done a bit of work with other people since doing this album, and something that you do realize is there’s very few people that you can make stuff with and they’re not bemused by it or don’t like it,” he adds. “The best thing about us working together is that the majority of things that I choose to do aligns with what Georgia likes. There doesn’t have to be too much justification or explaining. It’s the similar tastes we have, and we don’t have to try too hard. That freedom, it’s really cathartic to be able to have.”

After humming around with smaller releases, Jockstrap knew that a full-length album was next. But it wasn’t a matter of doing the labor of slowly lulling folks into their sound; Ellery and Skye had, essentially, put out an LP in two parts as a means of survival and productivity and decided that they weren’t going to do that twice. “We thought, ‘When we make the next set of 10 songs, we’ll just do it in one go,’” Skye says. “Although things are changing in the music industry all the time, it was still a good way for us to get a record deal and make a living and just go on tour. When we decided to do that a few years ago, that was still the best way to do it. It’s a very practical way of doing things. It was almost just that, to be honest.”

The songs have gotten longer, too, which, as Skye puts it, is a result of Ellery’s writing taking on a metamorphosis of not adhering to any sort of textbook structure or blueprint. Verse-chorus-verse, sub-three-minute tracks aren’t in the Jockstrap playbook much these days, which can make for more complicated production. “It’s harder to use loops like that when there’s time-signature changes or there’s dropouts,” Skye explains. “It’s a bit of a different way of making stuff than I was used to, because some of our early songs have a bit more of a drum beat that continues throughout the whole thing. And there’s bits of that [on I Love You Jennifer B], but it’s a new challenge.”

I Love You Jennifer B is Ellery’s audition tape for the rest of the world. It’s on this record that she gets to sing her heart out and prove, once and for all, that she is, just maybe, the brightest and boldest multi-hyphenate in the business. When she’s performing with Black Country, New Road, the shows become fluid and are never replicated. Every night Jockstrap takes the stage, each performance is fine-tuned and intentional, in that she and Skye use backing tracks that they produced and refined together. It sounds exactly how they want it to, and it allows them both to fully assimilate into their collective mission of inspiring audiences to get up on their feet and move. “We make music that you can dance to, and that’s what I enjoy,” Ellery says. And that’s what I Love You Jennifer B exudes. “Neon” is sensual and rigid; “Angst” is an emotive slow-dance; “Debra” adopts a kaleidoscope of big feelings, told from the perspective of an Animal Crossing character.

And then, there’s Skye’s production, which is as daring, bold, chaotic and instinctual as anything. It evokes tokens of 50 years of club music and nightlife orchestras, yet it is washed aglow by a startling modernity. His instrumentation is approached with a keen eye for melody and a sonic equilibrium, as he’s developed a penchant for crafting songs that can simmer in delicacy just as quickly as they might explode with angst. It’s a balance he’s perfected, and one that greatly emphasizes the wide spectrum of Ellery’s lyricism, which projects pastorals of sexuality and interpersonal tumult.

I Love You Jennifer B pulls influence out of everything from DOOM music to Joni Mitchell to Massive Attack to ABBA. Just like its sonic pastorals don’t bend to any particular shape, the album is a convergence of experiments and homages that surface as balmy, complex and deep-rooted in a wide equilibrium of talent. “We love songwriting, so if I’m trying to take influence from [Joni], I’m trying to write as well as her,” Ellery says. “That’s always the goal, to write a really good song. DOOM music, we were listening to a bit of that, picking and choosing things that we really liked—because we listen to lots of different types of music, and Jockstrap isn’t just one genre to us. I don’t think it’s ever been. It’s not not dream pop, it’s not indie folk. It’s an amalgamation of everything we like.” In that sense, the genre is Jockstrap.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about I Love You Jennifer B—and it’s something I think about and admire every time I tap into the record—is that its 10 songs delve into experimental realms without losing touch with the simplicity of a groove. Everybody has a different relationship to club music, but I Love You Jennifer B evokes intentionality on all of the parts of it that are rarely romanticized. It doesn’t aim to talk down on those who just want to move, but it also offers thematic throughlines and stories that, while your feet are gliding, you can find resonance in—which is a direct byproduct of Jockstrap’s desire to strike a balance that is accessible while also embracing its own eclectic flourishes.

“My favorite music is the stuff where I feel like I’m being intellectually nourished at the same time as really wanting to listen to it,” Skye says. “Everybody likes that, so they feel like, spiritually, that they’re getting something from it. But, at the same time, they’re not going to try too hard. And I think there’s something in the way we have drops and build-ups and banging drum beats that connects with people in a way that is really, instinctively, enjoyable and pleasing. You don’t want to indulge too much that it becomes like a version of McDonald’s and we’re just giving people shit. But then, also, you don’t want it to be just some intellectual exercise. The dance music part satisfies that for us, at least. It’s not very ‘thinky.’”

Ellery’s songwriting, in particular, sees a merger of electronica and folk ethos, in that the high-octane beats are paired with mosaic, tangible storytelling. And dance music doesn’t always get to revel in that kind of complexity, where the instrumentation isn’t the full scope of the number. Ellery pulls out her phone and cites a song like “Point of View” by DB Boulevard as a reference to a dance track carrying a message that she likes. But her inclinations to do the same, to employ such a symbiotic ecosystem on I Love You Jennifer B, are not always an intentional choice. “I don’t think I was consciously thinking that when we were making music, but because I think, sometimes, a song can come first and the kick-drum and the dancier elements can come later,” she says. “When Taylor has already made a beat and it’s dancier, I wonder whether I try and not be so narrative-led and more of the opposite. There’s something interesting about merging a song and a groove. It’s the same with Madonna songs, the early ones, they’ve got a groove throughout, but it’s definitely a narrative in a song, as well.”

Be it through a cauldron of references to everything from Sylvia Plath’s writing to biblical imagery to Marie Antoinette, the work of I Love You Jennifer B never feels forced. These images never arrive disjointed, instead forming a composite sketch of soprano-singing disco rat and her trusted, sequin-covered beats chef co-collaborator. Ellery calls upon themes of sex and grief and anxiety in her writing, while Skye ensconces them in soundscapes that project everything from sun-soaked snare drums to laser-beam synthesizers to sludgy guitar tones. I Love You Jennifer B still hits a year later, and the duo’s relationship with the work remains unshaken—though, after 365 days of talking about and touring them, the songs stand on their own and speak for themselves more than Jockstrap could, or want to. “I’m still enjoying singing them,” Ellery notes. “And they still feel relevant.” “The music that I make, I don’t even have enough of a grip on it to talk about it,” Skye adds. “I find it just way too complicated. I find it’s best to just do things and not think about them too much. I don’t know if I’ve found it that useful to reflect on it too much, because it will change within microseconds, what I think.”

I have no choice to respect Skye’s honesty, in particular. It’s the crux of an end-of-cycle interview, especially when the interviewees are on the tail-end of the album cycle. Rather than extend a parting gift of some grand, epic commencement speech, Jockstrap have instead opted to release a full album of remixes—I<3UQTINVU—just like they did with their first two EPs, as a way of saying goodbye to this last year of I Love You Jennifer B. Jockstrap called upon folks like Babymorocco, Coby Sey, ERSATZ, IAN STARR and Kirin J Callinan (most of whom they’ve played gigs with) to fill out the tracks, and it’s another opportunity for their fans to hear some of the creativity that was surrounding the process—and, some of the construction is so different that you’ll likely be unable to piece together what original song they’re remixes of. “It’s quite nice to just figure out where the original starts and it stops and where the remix starts and stops,” Skye says. “It’s so fluid.” He made all 10 of the mixes at the same time he and Ellery were putting together I Love You Jennifer B, finishing them in a day and then, six months ago, returning to the recordings to put finishing touches on each composition.

“Making the songs [on Jennifer B], and then especially while mixing them, it can just get really, really tiring,” Skye adds. “And this is really cathartic. And it’s fun to try things that I might not usually do or have a go at playing around with different genres of music in a bit more of a face-value way. It’s very much for myself that I’ve made these. It’s gonna be a thing where some people will get something from some of them, each person will have their opinions of each song and it will be a nice, playful reimagining. It kind of marks the end of [I Love You Jennifer B], in my eyes.”

They’ve played a few of the remix tracks, like “Good Girl” and “I Feel,” live on their recent string of shows, and there are no plans to ever tour I<3UQTINVU as its own celebration. In fact, the European dates they have on the itinerary this month are likely going to be the last set of gigging Jockstrap does for quite some time, as there are hums about a new Black Country, New Road album being in the works and, as Ellery puts it, she and Skye “need the perspective” to think about what they want to do next. For the first time in six years, it seems that the two musicians are going to take the break they’ve more than earned. Given how brilliant I Love You Jennifer B was and how it took Jockstrap three years to finish it, I’m more than cool with waiting for them to make a re-entry whenever the music and the groove calls for it. Until then, it’s au revoir to Miss Jennifer B.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.