This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Royalty Issue, no. 370, Winter 2022. Order your copy here.
Jockstrap lives by one simple creative rule: “Honour your first idea, no matter how strange”. It’s a guiding principle that has seen the disruptive pop duo grow into one of the most exciting and unusual bands in the UK today, emerging as daring outliers at a time where the demands of commercial viability and fleeting, fifteen-second TikTok trends rule the music industry.
Their music is like diving headlong into beautiful sonic chaos, where out-of body production mixes everything from glitchy electronic club music and sweeping orchestral arrangements, to doomy body-shaking dub and joyful Bhangra strings. In an equally freewheeling way, their lyrics navigate the ups and downs of young adult life with heart-wrenching honesty and humour, deftly switching lanes from the poetically surreal to the disarmingly relatable. Sometimes jigsawing genres together, and other times inventing entirely new ones, Jockstrap’s sound is dizzying, big, bold, completely their own.
The pair — 24-year-olds Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye — formed the band in 2017 after meeting at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where Georgia was studying jazz and Taylor electronic composition. In the years since, they have dropped two EPs to critical acclaim – 2018’s Love Is the Key to the City and 2020’s Wicked City – before the arrival of their anticipated debut album, I Love You Jennifer B, in September. “It’s nice to share it with everyone, because we’ve been working on it for so long,” says Georgia (who is also part of Mercury-nominated band Black Country, New Road), over Zoom from her home in Finsbury Park, while Taylor nods in agreement from his flat in Lower Clapton. “We had a lot we wanted to fit in it,” he says “But it had to come naturally; we couldn’t force it.”
Three years in the making, the ten-track record is packed full of big ideas and bigger feelings. Marrying Georgia’s soaring, ethereal voice with Taylor’s unpredictable production, I Love You Jennifer B works through feelings of longing, anxiety, and raw female sexuality, while riffing on disparate inspirations plucked from artists they were listening to through the making of the record, which include everything from Abba to Kanye West, Massive Attack to Joni Mitchell. I Love You Jennifer B is an album that is confoundingly complex and totally human.
Subscribe to i-D NEWSFLASH. A weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
When we speak, the pair are a little tired from rehearsing for their upcoming tour, but it’s clear that their harmonious relationship stretches beyond the studio into real life. Both talk in a quiet, thoughtful manner, never cutting the other off, politely listening and jumping in only at the right moment. It’s a dynamic that is felt not only in their amorphous songs, but also explained by their uncannily parallel childhoods – Taylor grew up in Market Harborough and Georgia in Cornwall, in families where music was everything. “Music was a big part of both of our lives growing up,” says Georgia, whose mum is a trained music therapist. “I started playing violin when I was five and it was the thing that defined me as a child, I guess.”
“It was just part of life really,” Taylor adds, who started playing piano at a similarly young age, and whose parents and siblings are all musicians. “The first person I went to see live was Stevie Wonder and that was the performance that got me excited about music. My parents listened to everything from Muse to Michael Buble,” he smiles, “who is actually quite a good songwriter.”
Then as teenagers, both Georgia and Taylor became obsessed with dance music. Still too young to go out to raves and club nights, their experiences were confined to the internet and the four walls of their bedrooms. Taylor began experimenting with electronic equipment in the hope of getting a song on the UKF Dubstep YouTube channel, while Georgia spent hours on SoundCloud hunting for mixes ripped off Radio 1.
Though they both jumped into nightlife scenes as soon as they could – with Georgia attending raves in Cornwall and Taylor hitting James Blake’s 1-800 Dinosaur nights after moving to London – that outsider’s perspective has shaped the club sounds in their music to create something wonderfully skewed; where tracks patchwork the vibes of Skream to Studio 54.
“An unspoken goal when we were writing this album was that we wanted music that we could dance to,” Georgia explains. “It’s a physical experience,” Taylor continues “the way the sub trembles your body. It’s a nice release when you’re in love with songwriting to then go towards something very instinctive. It’s almost like boxing and chess, two things that are quite similar but also the opposite of each other.”
For Georgia’s lyrics, she takes stylistic cues from confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, laying her personal experiences bare, both positive and difficult. Uplifting banger “Greatest Hits”, for example – a hypnotic disco track that meditates on sex, dreams, and Madonna (both pop icon and Christian matriarch) – is a love letter to her old flat and the radio station of the same name. “Greatest Hits exclusively plays songs from the 70s, 80s, and 90s,” she says. “The song is inspired by this flat that we lived at in Soho which had all this elaborate Liberty wallpaper and a radio in every room. It was quite a vibey place, and sometimes we’d turn all the radios on at the same time for fun.” Other songs, meanwhile, explore darker themes in unexpected ways: “Angst” uses the metaphor of birth to illustrate a panic attack, as Georgia’s mum described her anxious fits as a child as “laying an egg”; while “Debra” simmers in feelings of love, pain, and grief from the viewpoint of an Animal Crossing character.
One of the most striking things about Jockstrap, though, is the frank way in which Georgia talks about sex and female desire in her lyrics. She’s confident without sounding forced (with lyrics like, “For the first time / I like it when he’s inside” and “Anything to fuck you”) and isn’t afraid to get vulnerable (“I touch myself / Every time I see what’s missing from my life”). “Songs are a way for m|e to express my sexuality,” she says. “But there’s a lot about holding back as well. You can read all of my lyrics back through the different things that we’ve done and it’s very on the nose, giving you exactly what’s happening in my life. I’ve been more sexually reserved in this period of my life than before when there’s been lots of outwardness and, you know, big statements. I don’t think it’s a bad thing or a good thing, but it’s nice when people want to talk about it. It makes me feel like they can relate to some of my experiences.”
Things are equally personal for Taylor when it comes to producing the music, and the rollercoaster of feelings their music takes you on, where a song could start in a celestial melody and end in a rage-fuelled explosion of sound. “It’s how life can be sometimes; you go from one thing to another really abruptly. I think it’s why we work well together, because we hear changes in the music that we can’t justify intellectually to each other, but we accept them.” It’s this absolute mutual acceptance, creatively and beyond, that is the key to Jockstrap’s beautiful music; a total trust which allows them to distil the joys and hurts of young life today in glorious, chaotic clarity.
Above all else, Jockstrap wants to bring something new into the world. “For me, the most exciting thing is when music makes me feel positive about life, like there’s hope for good things to happen,” Taylor says at the end of our call, when I ask the pair what they hope the album might mean to fans and those who will experience it for the first time. “You know, once I hear something new it gives me faith. So I hope we give them faith.”
Credits
Photography Peter Smith
Fashion Louis Prier Tisdall
Hair Claire Grech using Davines
Make-up Thomasin Waite at Julian Watson Agency using Charlotte Tilbury
Nail technician Teodora Budimir
Photography assistance Hector Marshall and Morgan Shaw
Fashion assistance Connie Ng
Production Nicole Chan at Lock Studios
Retouching James Midwinter
Special thanks Josh Taylor-Moon
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING