Jockstrap on their debut album, I Love You Jennifer B

When you press play on a Jockstrap song, all you know is that you will be transported into a parallel sonic world where established forms of music are warped, stretched and deconstructed into new, mutant hybrids; what you hear is somehow familiar, and yet it is electrified with the shock of the new.

Even for the London-based duo themselves, whose debut album I Love You Jennifer B is released on 9 September on Rough Trade Records, the surprise of what they produce leaves an impact. Singer Georgia Ellery, who typically sends a raw demo version of a new song to producer Taylor Skye, is never sure what will have become of the track by the time she gets it back. “I’m scared to open the file, sometimes!” she says. “In a good way, of course. The reaction I get when I hear what Taylor has done with it, I always feel something, and that’s good. A lot of the things he does are really out there.”

Take the single Concrete Over Water, for example. The finished track is a ghostly, disjointed, extraterrestrial beast, ranging from eerily isolated vocals to incongruous towers of processed strings and searing synths, swinging dramatically, often frantically, between the two. It is one of the most intoxicating, beguiling songs of 2022, and yet when Ellery sent Skye her initial recording, it consisted of little more than a group of lyrics, a harmony and a light, percussive rhythm. “When he sent it back to me,” she says, “He’d filled it out with all the synths, and hearing that for the first time, with all that tension and space, but with so much mass to it? I remember hearing that and just being wowed.” 

Skye rightly prefers to focus on the brilliance of Ellery’s original composition as the key to the song’s magic, and to the album at large, but he does accept that his contributions bring Jockstrap’s music into an intriguing new musical space. “I’m just always trying to do something new,” he says. “I like to make music that I want to hear that I don’t think I am hearing. The more songs you do, the more exciting it is to try different things.”

The duo share a love of the classic songwriting of the 1960s and 70s, but they first bonded over their mutual admiration of the original dubstep movement of the late 2000s (Skye’s mum took him to Skrillex gigs and his dad introduced him to James Blake), so conceiving a musical project that breathes cutting-edge dynamism into vintage song structures could be said to be the natural combination of the two. “That’s what all of my favourite music is like,” says Skye. “That’s what Bob Dylan did, he looked at the people he was inspired by and he put it through his voice. Everybody does, they grow up listening to something and they regurgitate it in their own way.”

After meeting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where Ellery was studying jazz and Skye electronic composition, they first made a major splash with their stunning Wicked City EP in 2020. Now, this album is the result of three years of diligent work, during which they both allowed their influences to continue to expand.

For Ellery, one influence came from an unexpected source. “We moved into this flat in Soho and it turned out there was a radio in every single room. We would flick through all the channels – it would be World Service at night – but we discovered Greatest Hits Radio and it was great!”

So taken was she by her discovery of new favourites by the likes of Pet Shop Boys, Sister Sledge and Rick Astley that there is a song on I Love You Jennifer B titled Greatest Hits. The retro nostalgia also carries over to the track What’s It All About?, and its invocation of the unforgettable opening to the Bacharach/David classic, Alfie.

With that in mind, you could be mistaken for assuming that Jockstrap’s music veers towards the arch or ironic, but that would be to misunderstand Ellery’s writing, which on a track like Angst finds her describing her inner turmoil via the metaphor of a difficult birth. “There is always a lot of me in the lyrics, usually I write from experience," she says. "Angst was difficult to work on, because of the baggage it carried.

“It does feel vulnerable,” she admits, when talking about putting such personal material into the public arena. “That’s why I’m uncomfortable listening to it. But I don’t mind that, it’s very cathartic to put it out and for people to hear what your experience is.”

As if Jockstrap wasn’t enough, Ellery is also the violinist in Black Country, New Road, but it is a testament to the heights that Jockstrap reach on this debut that they should already be considered comfortably on a par with her other band. With two such hungry, adventurous minds continuing to invent a new future together, the potential for Jockstrap is scary.

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I Love You Jennifer B is released on 9 Sep via Rough Trade Records
Jockstrap play Stereo, Glasgow, 30 Sep; The Mash House, Edinburgh, 1 Oct