This story appears in i-D 375, The Beta Issue. Get yours here.
written by DOUGLAS GREENWOOD
photography and styling RICHIE LEE DAVIS
Jesse Jo Stark was at an animal shelter recently. She looked over at a one-eyed cat, wounded and inviolable, and saw herself in its beady gaze. “I’m really relating to this little girl right now,” Stark said to herself, “so I need to take her home.” The somber-looking, jet black kitty was christened Scar, and joined the “animal kingdom” Stark has inadvertently built in her new home. There’s Scar, a new rescue dog called Fang, as well as four goats, and an uncountable scattering of chickens.
Her lean towards nature feels far from the metal and diamond-studded world Stark came from. A Los Angeles native, her history is rooted in rock—both as part of the Chrome Hearts dynasty, the sexed-up world of leather and diamonds born just before her in 1988, and as a rockstar in her own right. She grew up around the grizzled legends of the genre (The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and her godmother Cher), through her parents, Chrome Hearts owners Richard and Laurie Lynn Stark. Today, in between hitting the studio, she’s part of the brand’s fabric on a more granular level, as one of its creative directors. “Sometimes, when you’re so fixed on a project, you kind of lose sight of it,” Stark says. She’s telling me about her stacked schedule and her new “feral creatures” she tells me. “Whether it’s being with my animals, or going to the beach, I need things that pull me off the pedestal so I can [return] and bring something else into it.”
Stark has been drawn to the mic for most of her life. Now 34 years old, Stark wrote her first song at just seven, with the assistance of her vocal coach Evelyn Joan Halus (whom she shares with Cher). But she only started writing and performing her own songs properly in 2014, playing live and independently releasing EPs and singles. By 2022, she formed a sophisticated mission statement: her debut album DOOMED, released that year, is a genre-bending exercise that feels like a Lana Del Rey album recorded in a haunted house. In the time since, she’s been trying to figure out what might follow it, but has been pulled between the studio and the “campus,” as it’s called: the California factory where Chrome Hearts’ studded leather creations, including skinny jeans for Timothée Chalamet and buxom dresses for Kim Kardashian, come to life. “I’m going in to finalise a mix on a song, then all of a sudden I’m creating a custom outfit,” Stark says. She likes it that way: “I feel like they go together. I can’t have one without the other.”
Her next record seems to capture the push-and-pull of her lifestyle—and her desire for a clean slate. Last year, Stark’s four-year relationship with Brit-emo star Yungblud ended. She threw herself into music, pouring all her attitude and pain in. “I feel like I’ve been in hiding,” she says of that time. The name for the album in the studio had been Jesse Jo and Her Broken Heart for a while. But earlier this year, that relationship rekindled. “We are forever growing lovers and best friends,” she’d later tell me of her relationship with Yungblud. “There’s no end with us.”
“I’ve honestly only written with men,” Stark says. That changed with this record. She bonded with Liza Owen, a songwriter known for her work with Selena Gomez. “It feels like a very feminine project. I just needed a strong female by my side to be able to really write and talk about what I was feeling.” The hard edge of punk music feels more necessary than ever. Stark’s LA, far from being a woo-woo haven for health gurus and the rich, is the epicenter of wild fires and ICE raids. She posts voraciously about what’s happening on social media. She calls whatever’s in the air a “grim aura.”
At the same time, the punk and nu-metal of the ’90s and 2000s is raging again. Fans of Turnstile, Fontaines D.C., and Wet Leg are paying attention to the music their favourite artists are inspired by. Look into the crowd at any of their gigs and you’ll likely spot a Nine Inch Nails or Deftones T-shirt too. “We’re just starving for something authentic,” Stark says of the riotous sound’s renaissance. “A lot of what we’re fed in this modern age is very by the books and safe.”
Alternative music’s most palpable roots are felt less in the discographies of major label stars, and more in the music of the people who say shit that gets people in trouble. Stark loves the vocally pro-Palestine, anti-Trump Amy Taylor, lead singer of Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers, and rappers like Ken Carson, who take that energy to the moshpits too. “And there’s so many underground bands that I follow that I consider to be punk,” she says, like her friend Mimi SanDoe, who fronts the LA punk outfit Niis. “To me, she’s the spawn of Poison Ivy from The Cramps.”
Right now, Stark’s “lyrics are punk, but I don’t know if the sound is,” she says. For every rock show there’s a trip to the animal rescue centre; every gruelling vintage horror that shaped her aesthetic has a lustrous, Audrey Hepburn-starring counterpart (“My fantasy is to own an OG Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster,” she says, before quickly adding—“and a Bride of Frankenstein one!”). Shifting ceaselessly from music to designing at Chrome Hearts grounds her in that sensibility. That said, despite being a B-movie horror obsessive, it wasn’t until recently she saw Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, the 1989 movie her dad Richard Stark designed costumes for. Movies like that are a perennial source of inspiration for her—they’re just cut with something softer now.
Until her next record drops, Stark’s fixated on a few things. She’s figuring out how she’d like to decorate her new house (trying to find a vintage Italian bedframe with a bird intricately painted on its headboard). She muses that she’d like to farm honey in the garden someday too. If there’s anything to glean from Jesse Jo Stark’s current state, and how it’ll feed into the music, is that she’s carefully coddled between dark and light, her past and what’s coming. The new songs will be out soon, she says. “I can’t wait for you to hear them.”
In the lead image, Jesse Jo wears all clothing and accessories CHROME HEARTS
hair JAIME DIAZ USING SHARK FLEXSTYLE AIR STYLING & DRYING SYSTEM at THE WALL GROUP
makeup ZAHEER SUKHNANDAN USING MAC COSMETICS
nails CANDACE KIM USING ESSIE at THE WALL GROUP
photography assistant NOAH GALLAGHER
styling assistant TRENT VANN
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production manager CECILIA ALVAREZ BLACKWELL
location AGP WEST