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In the fall of last year, Jane Remover returned to their home in Chicago after a month on the road supporting rapper JPEGMAFIA, and decided, finally, they needed a break. Having accelerated into the internet’s consciousness four years ago with their breakout EP Teen Week—released when they were just 17 and still living with their parents in New Jersey—the now 21-year-old musician has had an astonishingly prolific few years.
In 2021, Remover released their debut album Frailty, a head-spinning rollercoaster ride through a distinctive and unruly sonic landscape of glitching synths and “digicore” bit-crushed vocals. In 2023, they returned with one of the year’s most stunning albums, Census Designated, inspired by a road trip Remover took through a blizzard. It represented a surprising—and utterly sublime—pivot to shoegaze-y indie pop that brought their expressive, crooning vocals to the forefront. (And that’s all without mentioning their various side projects, released under the pseudonyms Leroy and Venturing.)
Given the sheer volume of their output thus far, it’s probably unsurprising that Remover’s intention to take some time off didn’t quite go to plan. “I was like, ‘You know what, let me take a break,’ and then I did the exact opposite thing,” they say over Zoom from New York, letting out a mischievous laugh. “I was like, ‘You know what, let me make two albums.’”
The first, Ghostholding, was released in February under their Venturing moniker, and continues the avant-rock thread they mastered on Census Designated. The second, Revengeseekerz, arrived by surprise this week—and marks a hair-raising return to the style that first made their name. If you need a primer, just listen to lead single “JRJRJR”: a furious, fiery explosion of polyrhythmic synths glittering like space debris, with Remover’s gleefully anarchic bars over the top: “Feel like Jesus in the mosh pit / Mary on the cross with her friends.” Where Census Designated was consciously “serious” in its approach, Revengeseekerz is the sound of someone dropping a Nintendo 64 into a nuclear reactor.
The album, Remover explains, flowed out of them in a way that felt almost divinely preordained. “I had entire songs in my head,” they say. “When I was writing ‘JRJRJR,’ I could hear exactly how it sounded from start to end in perfect quality, and then I just made it exactly how I imagined it. That’s partially why this album was so easy to make, I think: all the songs were perfectly clear-sounding in my head, front to back. I was like, ‘Oh, I need this song to be exactly five minutes. This is how it starts, this is how it ends.’ And that’s exactly what I did. I almost felt like a psychic.”
The quasi-mystical air with which Remover talks about making the record may also have something to do with its subject matter. While the record might sound like a whole lot of fun, listen closer, and the lyrics betray a darker underbelly: of pushing their body to the brink while touring on the gloomy “Fadeoutz,” or a failed romance recast as a Miltonian battle between heaven and hell on “Angels in Camo.” (Remover came out as a trans woman in 2022, and more recently began going by they/them pronouns.) When I describe the album as more exuberant or upbeat than Census Designated, Remover quickly corrects me: “I feel like I would describe this album as blind rage, almost.”
Was the process of making the album cathartic in any way, then? What was the rage they were trying to release in the process of making it? “I mean, there are times where I’m mad at literally everyone,” they share. “I’m mad at my fans and my contemporaries and I’m mad at the people in my life. I’m mad at all my relationships. It’s like I can never just be mad at one thing. When I’m mad at one thing, I’m mad at everything all the time.” Remover pauses to collect their thoughts, running a hand through their shaggy black curls. “Obviously, I don’t consider myself an angry person—I don’t even act upon my anger most of the time. I feel like this album is a result of bottling everything up—it’s a release.” That’s probably healthy, I suggest; it sounds like something a therapist would recommend. “That I wouldn’t know,” they deadpan. (For all of the righteous fury contained in Jane Remover’s music, they’re also prone to moments of cheeky, puckish wit.)
A year ago, you could have looked at Remover’s career and traced a trajectory of increasing maturity. You could follow the throughline from the extremely online electronic chaos of their early releases—which cut across everything from goofy meme rap to the sample-heavy “Dariacore” genre Remover themselves invented—to the “grown-up” indie rock of Census Designated. “I mean, that’s literally how I branded it, I was like, ‘It’s time for me to grow up,’” Remover says, with a raised eyebrow. “Mind you, I was like 19.” Revengeseekerz, on the other hand, deliberately complicates that narrative. Even if the sound harks back to the music that made their name, it’s a step forward rather than a regression—partly thanks to the increased self-assurance Remover now feels across both the process and product of their music-making. “Compared to my first album, that whole album’s about being a kid. It’s definitely shifted in some way. This time around, it’s like a return to the old sonic ideas, but with the skills and the experiences and everything I know now.”
It feels well-timed, too. The hard-to-define sound that Remover pioneered (its roots lie in 2000s emo, then filtered through the crunch and whorl of 2010s hyperpop) feels poised to spill over into the mainstream, with the rising profiles of Remover’s peers Brakence, Glaive, and Ericdoa, as well as the rapid ascent of newcomer 2hollis. For Remover, though, it’s less about any kind of scene, and more about embracing a sound that they—for a period, at least—turned their nose up at. “I feel like for a long time, I was taking myself way too seriously,” they say. “I think I felt like I was somehow better than the sound I had come up with. But at the end of the day, who cares? I like that sound. So I was like, ‘Let me just embrace it rather than trying to keep fighting it.’ Because that wasn’t getting me anywhere.”
Indeed, Remover also has something of a reputation for disowning their previous music, being known to scrub songs from streaming services and publicly express their loathing for sounds they once explored. (It’s something they even reference on “JRJRJR,” with a lyric about rehearsing songs they hate in Silver Lake, “trying not to cry.”) So what changed? “I feel like I’m just way more confident than I used to be,” they say. “I think it just comes with getting older. I feel like I’ve been historically unsure in my decisions and this whole era of the album essentially is the first time I’ve been sure of something.” They’re always going to resent their past work at least a little, they explain, but they now have a workaround: “I figured out the solution was just to drop more shit,” they say, with a wry smile. “Just keep putting out music, and you can drown out all the things that you don’t like.”
That greater sense of confidence is also palpable in the fully-fleshed out visual world they’ve built around Revengeseekerz. Look to the the arresting album cover featuring Remover, wearing a leather jacket and kneeling in front of a flaming sword, and to the video for “JRJRJR,” which sees Remover in a series of sleek all-black looks toting a gun, smoking a cigarette, waving an enormous white flag. Where previously Remover would commission out their visuals, this time around, they took a more hands-on approach, collaborating with the musician and artist Parker Corey to create a time-warp aesthetic universe that spans glitchy camcorder footage and Gothic lettering. (Naturally, Remover took the video editing process into their own hands.)
Photo: Athena Merry
They also wanted to be more ambitious with their fashion: “It’s definitely a step-up from before,” they say, noting with amusement how their uniform of a white tank top and blue jeans for Census Designated ended up becoming something of a meme among their fanbase. “I’ve got money now, so I can actually buy some cool shit to wear instead of just hand-me-downs,” they say, sharing the Hood By Air jacket they wear in the “JRJRJR” video and a pair of Walter van Beirendonck boots they’re currently obsessed with. “I low-key wear them all the time because they make me feel so tall—whenever I go to a show, I put those on and I can just chill at the back and still see the stage.”
It feels like a neat analogy for where Remover is at more broadly. Where once they seemed more comfortable working in the shadows, they now feel ready to step into the spotlight—and to own the fact that, yes, they’re an artist forged in the internet’s furnaces, but their music now has its own, independent life in the real world. (You need only see a few seconds of footage from one of Remover’s mosh-heavy live shows to know there’s an active IRL community here.) “For a long-time, I low-key took offense to being called an internet artist, or people calling it internet music,” says Remover. “But now, I’ve realized that this music genuinely is a product of the internet. It’s very online, for lack of a better term, but that doesn’t mean nobody fucks with me in real life.”
Because their music is more uncompromising than ever—still wild and darkly funny and, at times, wilfully abrasive—if their audience grows, they can rest easy in the knowledge it’s happening on their own terms. “I can celebrate things now, rather than worrying,” they say. “My mom used to always be like, ‘This could all go away tomorrow. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ But it’s like, girl, I have no other skills other than this.” Remover breaks into a final, full-throated laugh. “Now, I finally know I was destined to do this.”
