Young Jesus Draws The Fool
John Rossiter navigates mental health, male socialization and leaving his comfort zone on his powerful seventh album as Young Jesus.

When drawing from a tarot deck, The Fool can be an auspicious pull. Despite the imagery—typically depicting a carefree gent perched precariously atop a cliff—the Major Arcana card symbolizes a push into the unknown and the embracing of new beginnings. If you’re in a place of confusion, or you’re feeling defeated, drawing it can be your sign to carry on. At the end of the last session for an album he never thought he’d make, John Rossiter drew this card.
After releasing 2022’s subdued and experimental Shepherd Head, Rossiter had become disillusioned. The album had been an exercise in acceptance, a project he made himself after the lineup of his band, Young Jesus, winnowed down to just himself. A chilling sonic collage, embellished with field recordings capturing both friends and strangers alike, Shepherd Head was a departure from the sprawling, maximal marriage of emo and post-rock that came before it—2020’s Welcome to Conceptual Beach. Though Rossiter bent sounds to his will, like the pitched down piano keys of “Rose Eater,” his rich, bellowing voice remained fixed at the project’s center. After releasing this unique piece of work into the world, he stepped away from music, choosing to pursue a career in landscaping instead.
Shepherd Head would not be the last powerful artistic statement from Rossiter, though. His new routine was disrupted by a chance email from the musician Shahzad Ismaily. The pair met and struck up a friendship, ultimately leading Rossiter to New York to work in Ismaily’s garden. Their time together there led to some low stakes songwriting, and the songs Rossiter began there were unlike anything he’d done before. Eventually bringing Alex Babbitt, Alex Lappin and Phil Weinrobe into the fold, Rossiter moved out of his comfort zone, kneeling to the needs of the song rather than focusing on those of his own. Named for the card he drew, Young Jesus’s seventh album, The Fool, is at once a happy accident and the most moving and considered work that Rossiter has ever put out.
The Fool is often a blank canvas for Rossiter to sketch out stories. Writing songs full of characters isn’t new for him, and the two most prominently featured here aren’t either. Though he isn’t sure why, the characters of Eloise and David—about whom early Young Jesus projects Home, and Young, Innocent, & Hairy are written—are revived here. Amidst the quiet-loud lurches of “Rabbit,” Eloise looks out into a rainy night listening to the splash of cars driving through puddles. It’s a song that, when Rossiter isn’t in the throes of some impressively voice-straining screeds, paints a beautiful picture of quiet, dark spaces and the drama within them. David appears here only in name, in a reference to a strange interaction he had with Eloise that is made towards the song’s end. On “Moonlight,” we’re given more insight into what happened: David, who is Eloise’s doctor, sought her out online and liked a picture she’d just taken late at night. The boundary crossed here is clear to Eloise, but she thinks of the men in her life—that they’ve probably done things this questionable as well. Judgment falls no particular way, it’s just an action that’s taken place and left as such, as though it’s more important we reflect on it in our own time.
The interaction between Rossiter’s unnamed narrator and two middle-aged women on “Brenda & Diane” is similarly fleeting. The propulsive, Springsteen-indebted rocker is a new form for a Young Jesus song to take, but the high-energy pacing underscores the pressure and urgency every character feels. Brenda and Diane are on the run, spending money and gambling themselves into oblivion. Our narrator joins them for a drink, and Diane immediately calls out the pity she senses within him before imparting some wisdom: “Your life is a gift / And you act like it’s a joke.” Brenda and Diane don’t show up throughout the record, and it’s better that way. Their presence is a chance encounter, the kind where both party’s paths could never cross again, and that they did at all is special.