Urgency. For those who have experienced the volcanic output of creative force Jehnny Beth, this quality burns brightest. From her days with postpunk group Savages, to her solo career and extra-musical endeavors, Beth gives voice to the matters of ultimate importance: love, community, meaning.
For her new album You Heartbreaker You, she commands a muscular, punk-inflected attack that builds and diverges from her past. As the heat of these nine tracks courses through our speakers, we review five points in this genre-defying artist’s discography to discover the winding and defiant path she’s taken to arrive at her latest peak.
Any discussion about the impact and characteristic style of Beth’s career has to begin with this track. In the silence before the music begins, we survey, through her spoken word intro, a world of meaningless distraction that is still recognisable as our own. And like any great polemicist, Jehnny presents us with the antidote and the challenge: If you are focused, you are hard to reach. Silence yourself!
Though the music comes in with a relentless beat, spidering guitar lines and darkly shining bass, it’s only a reverberant echo of the fury and precision of Beth’s words. These words have an elevated quality because of the way she spits them out—as if they were a poison, or a deliverance. What happens when this voice hears itself after the silence? The world would be privileged to find out.
This track, from the 2016 album Adore Life by Jehnny’s band Savages, is a distillation of both her restless sonic approach, and a statement of purpose for her vision of the world. The sound is different from the relatively traditional postpunk sound Savages had perfected: the guitars are subdued, the rhythm looser. The shimmer of vibraphones appears as the song builds intensity, and this ambience produces the perfect cavernous space for Jehnny to expound on her shifting relationship with life and the senses.
While it is chapter and verse for postpunk bands to evoke gloom, Beth takes the opposite tack: the persona of one who is desperately in love with life, while remaining clear-eyed about the pain in such an affirmation. Is it human to ask for more? The realisation of our radically finite nature and our infinite desire—this tragic and furious sense of life remain central to Beth’s catalog.
Beth’s debut solo LP, arriving in 2020 after the end of Savages’ dissolution, was a further break away from traditional rock dynamics. In its place was brooding, volatile electronic textures. The lyrical preoccupation with physical love and freedom continued to grow. In We Will Sin Together, the rhythmic impulse is little more than a dark synth pulse and a snare. Beth’s question in “Adore” has now turned to the command of the title. I take you down with me / Hold my hand and we swim. Also in 2020, Beth would release Crimes Against Love Memories, a collection of erotic pieces that served as another kind of manifesto for the world she seeks to reflect and create.
By this time in her career, Beth had established that the usual genre tropes were not going to constrain her as an artist. On her 2021 collaboration with Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie, Utopian Ashes, her creative reach extends far past the relatively monochromatic sound of Savages into a lush, technicolor world of 70s inspired orchestral pop. Strings and electric guitar squawks feature prominently, with an acoustic guitar intro.
The percussion swings in “Chase it Down”, Beth provides a counterpoint to Gillespie’s vocal lines. While the sound uses styles of the past to evoke a louche atmosphere, this is no easy listening track. Lyrically, Beth’s themes have never shone through clearer, though it comes only in response to Gillespie’s verses. Who is gonna come and save us now?, Beth asks. The lens may now be explicitly personal now. We are not listening to a screed on society, but only the impulse and demands of love. Beth’s great skill is to treat the two arenas as both demanding the same care, the same attention—total commitment to a single moment.
You Heartbreaker, You shows a command of Beth’s signature snarl and yearning vulnerability. At the same time, it’s an escalation of her sonic firepower. “Broken Rib” with its corporate workplace-skewering video, the strobing “High Resolution Sadness”, the electronic thrash of No “Good for People”, and the slower-burn psychodrama of “Out of My Reach”: these tracks are just a few that deliver shrapnel to your chest and brain. They hearken back to the best of Savages and her solo output, while flashing a new level of muscle and frenzy. Beth commandeers the musical grammar of punk, electronic and industrial to create one of the most compelling musical statements of the year. You feel that inimitable gaze on you, demanding your attention, demanding you live. Urgently.