INTERVIEW: Jesse Jo Stark releases debut album 'Doomed': "It represents both sides of me, light and dark, heaven and hell, the duality that we offer as people"

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Maya Spangler

Los Angeles-based singer songwriter Jesse Jo Stark is an artist that drips with punk rock attitude but creates music that crosses across multiple genres. From rock through to experimental pop Stark has something for every mood, and today she releases her debut album Doomed.

The daughter of the founders of design brand Chrome Hearts, Stark grew up in a creative environment. She wrote her first song at age 7, and at 11 formed her first band, It’s Complicated. Inspired by underground figures such as Elvira, The Cramps and late 80’s horror movies, she launched her music career proper in 2017 with the release of the EP Driftwood. Her career quickly took off with her songs attracting streams in the millions and she performed as the opening act for major bands Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction as well as touring with The Heavy.

Written in the main by Stark and co-produced with Jesse Rutherford (The Neighbourhood, benny blanco) and Michael Harris (HAIM, Angel Olsen), Doomed is a remarkable debut album, with a varied soundscape which continually surprises as much as it delights. It also takes you on a musical journey - it kicks off with Stark at her punkiest with a clutch of rock tracks before dipping into quieter, poppier and experimental tracks.

Opening track ‘666 in the subs’ is a bumpy, stuttering track with a punk-rock feel and a distorted vocal from Stark that switches from one note to passionate, before ending on a scream. Second single ‘so bad’ is dark and moody, guitar heavy and with a gorgeously addictive chorus.

‘pussy cat’ brings a pop beat to the album, with a spoken word introduction that brings to mind new wave music. As the song progresses it amps up the beat and brings in swirling synths and while it is pure pop in its construction, Stark tempers the sweetness with a harder edge.

‘Slayer’ is an outlier, and highlight, on the album. A pared back ballad that plays with blues, soul and R&B, it positions Stark as a destroyer of relationships. ‘I’m a slayer / I’m a heartbreaker / Save your breath for someone who cares’. It is followed by another outstanding ballad, ‘love is a dream’, which begins with ethereal vocals and continues with a gentle, lullaby feel.

Latest single ‘lipstick’ starts with electric guitar and the sound of marching feet, before transforming into a powerful torch ballad which explores the concept of how love can cause both joy and pain: ‘I can’t do this anymore’ she sings. It features arguably Stark’s strongest vocal performance on the album and the introduction of strings towards the end of the track seals the deal on what is an exquisite song.

The album ends on what is quite possibly the highlight of the whole collection, the bouncy-yet-melancholic ‘trippin’. It almost a complete amalgamation of Stark’s sound. There are elements of rock, punk and pop rolled in with the sound reminiscent of the pop-punk crossover that defined the sound of the early 1980s. It is a song that is expertly simple but sweeps you away with its melodies and Stark’s voice which switches from a flat, almost disinterested vocal to an emotive, higher register as she sings ‘Doomed from the start / Falling apart’, gradually fading away as the song - and album - ends on a guitar riff.

Doomed is a brilliant debut album which really showcases Stark as a musical shapeshifter and extraordinary songwriter. It is a personal album, laying open Stark’s fears and anxieties as she travels along the path of self-discovery, but it remains an album full of stories anyone can connect with. An album to listen to as a full experience, and one you will want to repeat regularly, it is undoubtedly one of the top debut albums of 2022. We recently caught up with Stark to chat more about the creation of Doomed and her career to date.

Hi Jesse! You write one hell of a song! I've been listening to your album and it's shit hot!
I love that!

It’s so, so good. I can gush about it a lot, but I'd rather you tell me what this absolute delight of sound and vision is for you?
I've been waiting for this for a while there's been a lot of blood sweat and tears over this one. It finally feels like me. I know that's a silly thing to say because we're ever so changing, you know, we grow as people but it just feels right. It felt so organic and it's coming at the right time for me. ‘Doomed’ feels like a negative word, but for me it actually has a very strong positive meaning behind it. It represents both sides of me, light and dark, heaven and hell, the duality I think that we offer as people. I felt like I really spoke with the little girl in me, I watched a lot of home videos while writing this, kind of like checking in with her. It really offered and lent to my songs lyrically and I'm just fucking excited and ready, and can't wait to play. And that is Doomed.

It is so so good. A personal highlight for me is ‘Slayer’. I love this song - ‘you can't kill what's already dead inside. And the great thing about it is it's like a ‘later, loser’ while also being a shag jam. The contrast is absolutely gorgeous. And you also laugh and you hear the angel laughing It's so good. Can you break it down for me?
The lyrics are so strong and going back to what I just said, at the end that's actually a recording of me as a little girl at my parent’s ranch where I grew up. It's kind of like taking on this persona as the ‘slayer’ and really looking at myself and acknowledging who I am, fighting with my inner demons and just kind of really owning it. But there's something juvenile about it, there's something about owning who I am as a woman but also checking back in with me as a little girl, and that's why I put the recording of myself at the end.

Absolutely beautiful. The whole album is like a kaleidoscope. You've even got Gothic disco with ‘pussycat’, old Hollywood musical with ‘love is a dream’. It's just the most beautifully feminine album, in the sense that I feel like it represents women. Femininity is dirty and beautiful and angry and all these things that we've been squashing, but you've celebrated all those facets of it in one album.
Thank you that's so rad. It's so crazy that you say that because being a woman just takes a lot of like guts and it's hard to have the strength to go about your day but then also feel feminine by the end of it. It's confusing, I feel that we have both and yet we're not allowed to. I really did want to project how I feel and own my sexuality and own angst. I always say each track feels like a different mood because I feel we wake up in one mood and we end in another. One song I'm pissed off, one song I want to dance and one song I'm like my heart is literally fucking bleeding on the floor. And so it's all that jammed in one.

It's gorgeous. You mentioned going back to the ranch, and I can't help but think of ‘tornado’ because the song feels like it should be sung from a saddle during the closing credits of a Tarantino film. Can you talk to me a little bit about that track?
Yeah, you know, it's crazy, because ‘tornado’, and ‘love is a dream’, a couple of these I wrote about four years ago and had recorded before COVID and we messed with them a bit for Doomed to make it all cohesive. ‘tornado’ I wrote a while ago with my friend Roofeeo and it kind of just spilt out really organically. It's about fixation and love and this otherworldly love, and not really understanding what it means. It kind of ends before it begins. I feel like a tornado kind of picks up the chaos as it goes by, and so it represented the meaning of the song and so we called it that.

It's absolutely gorgeous and also on this album you really play with melody to reflect mood. Was there any particular song that you wrote that you struggled to connect with sonically at the beginning? It was a sound or a style that you weren't comfortable with that you then had to learn to love?
I think all of this was really uncomfortable. ‘love is a dream’ is quite natural to me. But ‘666 in the subs’ was a nightmare. I had to be behind the beat and Jesse Rutherford, who I worked on this with, really challenged me vocally and melodically. We were just jumping all around and I always complain, ‘I want to sing, I can sing,’ and my comfort is really how I speak, it’s just chill and quiet. With this, I really discovered my voice, like on ‘lipstick’ I'm yelling out more in patterns. I'm angry and yelling. So we really tried a lot of things, we tried 808s, I’ve never experimented with 808s, so this whole album was really quite frustrating. But when I nailed it, I just wanted to do it again. So it was really fun.

I love that. Have you always sung and written your emotions down?
Oh, always. When I was younger, I remember writing poetry. I was like ‘okay, I'm gonna write poetry, I'm gonna write in my diary’ and I was very intimidated by the thought of it being a song. I just didn't know how to turn it into that. When I took my first vocal lesson, my teacher was like, ‘let's just talk about how your day at school was’. I remember talking about a boy, and the song was called ‘My Heart’s On Fire’, that was the first song I ever wrote. It was so cute and silly and really short. Then I just wanted to write, write, write. It's like therapy, it’s almost like I'm ill when I have these ideas in my head, and I need them to be sung. I don't really know if I'm great at communicating, but when I sing, I really mean what I sing, so it's better for me.

How old were you when you wrote ‘My Heart’s On Fire’?
I was about seven or eight. My first vocal. I have the recording, I wanted to put it on this album, but it was too late to by the time we found it. It's really great, because when I was 22 or something, I wrote a song called ‘Fire Of Love’, and it's like her then and her now.

You are so hands on with your work, both visually and sonically and writing. That's must be both liberating, but also quite a constraint, because you can quite often feel like it's all on you, that creative pressure. Do you thrive in driving your projects as a solo artist, or are there sometimes some pitfalls?
There are pitfalls. It's quite frustrating, sometimes I just want the support or you know, to talk it out like I want to, and it's hard to trust your collaborators. That's why this this album has been amazing, because with Jesse and with my guitar player, and with my engineer, I really, really trusted them, and we got to talk about it and we got to take chances. I am a detail freak and a control freak, so I kind of stepped back. I never really gave up all the control, but I really listened and I let that soak in, and I was like, ‘okay, I'm going to say that, I would have never said that before, but I'm going to say that, why wouldn't I have said that?’ They allowed that they really saw me, and that's when it's easier. A video I just did with this woman, Bethany, for my next single, I did the same thing. I was there and present, but I heard her in a different way. When you find those people, you gotta hang on to them. You know if they're right. If they're not right, I'm just gonna be like, ‘Nope, can't do it’. When you find those people that you really respond to, it is liberating, because it's so tiring doing everything yourself. It's about the people you surround yourself with that really believe in you.

And letting people bring their their creativity to your job.
It's limited because I'm a punk. I'll fight you!

You said you had to keep checking in with the little girl to create the woman. Who was the woman you looked up to as an artist when you were a little girl?
I would say my mum, but as a little girl, Britney Spears. But I was around so many powerful adults, and that was really intimidating. Because I was like, ‘I'm gonna have to figure it out, I'm gonna have to really do my job, and I don't know what that is yet, but I can't mess around, this is a serious crew’. Even though they never pressured me, I felt pressure to succeed and really make it on my own. I made it hard for myself in a way. But I would say my mum and my godmother and my vocal teacher, would be the three women [that inspired me]

Britney Spears is not a bad choice at all, because she is as punk as hell
In terms of someone I didn’t know, yeah, she was like God, I mean, she still is. My new video coming out is my Britney moment. I said that this is going to be high glam, because the last few videos I did were really chill, and this is like high glam. I was like I'm gonna have my Britney glam moment!

I think everyone needs that in their life! I can't congratulate you enough on this album, it's so beautiful. Tell me what else are you looking forward to for the remainder of this year?
I'm just excited to play shows, and my own shows. I have four album release shows and I'm just to play the album because I don't know what people think yet. I kept this one under wraps. I usually play them to my friends and ask them their opinion, and this time I just was like, ‘they can come to the show and hear it’. So I've not really played it for a lot of people I played one song to my mum the other day that hadn't been out and she was just like, ‘when did you do this?’ She was confused because she loved it so much. So I'm just really excited to see how people react and play to people again, and tour and write more songs. Just really see this come to life. I don't even know how I want to move my body to some of these songs yet.

Doomed is out now. You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Jesse Jo Stark you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.