With his singular sonics and seminal 2019 debut album, Jerkcurb was poised to be dream pop’s next heavyweight. But the passing of his father took its toll, driving the artist to reshape his ambitions. Now, his resulting new sophomore album shows that even from the depths of despair, beauty will always prevail.
It’s been six years since the South London multifaceted musician, painter, animator and producer Jacob Read, aka Jerkcurb, unveiled his alluringly surrealist debut album, Air Con Eden. Since then, he’s put out a record with art rock outfit Horsey, noodled in industrial jazz with Findom and supported King Krule on a run of North American tour dates, all whilst prepping for his follow-up, Night Fishing On A Calm Lake.
Distant, noir-tinged notions of the American psyche have been a consistent through line throughout his work. “I had the idea of making things bigger when it came to this latest project, like a grandiose version of an old Hollywood film set from the 40s or 50s,” says Read. “I think there’s a romantic aspect that ties me back to these eras. A lot of my previous album involved me trying to figure out why certain nostalgic things appealed to me, and I traced that back to my mum’s side of the family who were American immigrants. Their vision of America was very utopian back then, and I attached a similar, dreamlike lens when it came to making this latest music, both musically and visually.”
Things were beginning to take shape. However, in the summer of 2022, Read’s life changed completely. After long bouts with illness throughout his life, Read’s father Stephen sadly passed away. Their father-son relationship wasn’t always one of many words, Read explains. Instead, it was one of art, creativity and encouragement to pursue the things that brought them joy in life. “We had a lifelong relationship with music and art. He was really encouraging from an early age about this and pretty much nothing else,” Read smiles. “He was the only person in his family growing up who did art. When he was 18, he got a scholarship grant to move to New York for his painting, where he also met my mum. Yet, when he came back for Christmas, his parents had chucked away some of his paintings. They just did not understand why he did art. So I think when he had me, he must’ve thought ‘I’m going to take him to exhibitions, show him music’ etc., and he did.”
For Read, his father’s inspiration and influence was unparalleled. So much so that after he passed, he decided to not only move back to his family home, but into his father’s old room. “I’ve been trying to figure out whether that was the best reaction to the grief,” he ponders. “I was never too far away from him and in the moment it felt like I couldn’t exist anywhere else. I had to go back there.”
The grief of losing his father still haunts Read. With time though, it has also birthed a new clarity within him. He tells me of the feeling of undergoing an ego death whilst grieving; his previous grandiose ideas for the album no longer felt right, as though they had come from a different person. “The poetry of death becomes obsolete, when you deal with something real. You can’t wrap it up in too much poetic imagery,” he affirms. “The loss was a monumental turning point for me. We get so consumed by a lot of meaninglessness in our day-to-day lives, and this allowed me to cut out a lot of the bullshit. It left me with a clear desire to make stuff.” This creative flourishing amidst the emotional turmoil changed the album’s outlook, allowing it to take a completely new shape. “I’ve been doing this project since I was 16 and have been cultivating a very specific vibe that’s David Lynch, noir-inspired stuff. But after my dad died, I thought ‘why does it have to be that?’ This project could be anything.”
Night Fishing On A Calm Lake embraces this sense of freedom. Split almost in half between songs written pre-and-post-grief, it channels the journey of Read’s life over the last six years into a remarkable collection of work. It was produced and engineered mainly by himself, on his laptop at home in his father’s room and at Arcus Studios in West Ham. Here, he would become obsessively attached to his recordings, spending marathon several day sessions bringing his ideas to life and revelling in the solitude of the isolated studio. “I’m a total perfectionist,” he says, “but I’m also not really a musician. I studied art, my parents were artists. With music, I wouldn’t say I’m that good, so it takes me longer.”
While this sounds self-effacing, Read explains that bringing in collaborators later down the line, including producer Dilip Harris (Mount Kimbie, Little Dragon) to mix the album, helped him to validate his work. Its first woozy taster, “Larchmont”, was released in September. Eerie and atmospheric in equal measure, it illustrates Night Fishing’s myriad qualities best. “If I was to pick one song on the album, I’d say this has everything in it,” Read summarises. “”Larchmont” was inspired by a couple caught between loving each other and fighting. A constant pendulum swinging. It’s about those conflicting emotions. That’s where the nostalgic candyfloss colours come in with the single cover, then also the cold emptiness in the darker colours of feeling, cut off from someone. I tried to feed that into the video too, these contrasting emotions.
“It’s funny though, because it’s not my favourite song! I can hear how hard it was to make. It took me almost two years to finish.” Instead, Read’s newer, post-grief ideas poured out of him much quicker. The abstractness of “Mothematics” and “Loss Dub” reflects both the confusion and the eventual solace of his grieving period. Other standouts such as “Hungry” showcase a less escapist, more realist side to his work: (“I’ve been hungry for life again / How much time does grieving take? / I don’t know…”). “Home on the Ranch” sees experimentation come to the fore. “There’s a side of me that’s restrained, and there’s another that’s like ‘fuck it, let’s just do anything!’” he laughs. “Channelling my instincts then to just play random instruments and go a bit mad has resulted in some of my favourite stuff I’ve ever made. I’ve never delved into synths before, but I got obsessed with this one from my childhood called the Roland JD-800. It was used in the original PlayStation startup music, and its sounds were a very nostalgic thing for me.” Simultaneously, the song was also inspired by Read’s forays into video games that he played while living in his dad’s room, such as Red Dead Redemption. “It sounds cheesy, but there’s something very beautiful about the shimmery sound of the synths, juxtaposing this 19th-century, wild American frontier that posits the ‘American dream’ etc. It just fitted with the sound.”
Amongst recording, Read also inherited his late father’s art studio in Camberwell. He now works there with his childhood friend and Horsey bandmate Jack Marshall, brother of Archy Marshall (King Krule), and it was here that Read painted the album’s fittingly dreamlike cover. Similarly to his music, Read embraced new techniques here by painting in oil for the first time. The finished piece’s blurs, blues and blacks all complement its accompanying sonic tapestry. He says that the 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter was a core visual inspiration, with its conflicting emotional themes of love and danger embodying the same essence of his latest project.
Night Fishing’s metaphorical lake may not always be the calmest place to inhabit. Rather, it casts its hook in search of the emotions lurking below the surface; those most vulnerable, challenging and inimitably personal. “I’m all over the place with whether I think it’s good or bad,” Read worries. “You never quite know how it’s going to be received. I just have to keep coming back to the fact that when I did it, I really believed in it, and I believed in those feelings.” Evidently, the last six years have been a time of turmoil and renewal for Read. The latter, he explains, is what’s spurring him on into the future. “When I finished Air Con Eden last time round, I felt like I had nothing left to say. Now, I feel a lot more inspired about the future. I have leftover material which I could use; I feel really capable of making more stuff. I just want to have fun with making music, because I really love doing it.”
Night Fishing On A Calm Lake is released on Friday 28th November. Listen below…
Words – Jamie Wilde
