Jane Remover Takes Their Place as Hyperpop’s Vengeful Superhero on ‘Revengeseekerz’

Just a few years ago, Jane Remover was an introvert recording alone in their childhood bedroom, trying to sing quietly enough so that their family wouldn’t hear them. Back then, the teenager from suburban New Jersey was a hyperpop prodigy who used digital wizardry to crack open their emo heart. “Go to college, have a shit time,” they predicted on a fuzzed-out early song called “Seventeen. “I’ll get a job and I won’t be happy/But if you ask I’ll say, ‘I’m fine.’” 

That vision of cubicle hell did not come to pass. In 2021, during their first semester of college, Jane released Frailty, a neverending smash cut of glitchy samples, acoustic guitar, bitcrushed beats, and coming-of-age angst that still stands as one of the decade’s most head-spinning debut albums. They were making music that sounded like the future for a generation that—faced with pandemic woes, climate collapse, and a host of other societal ills—seemed in danger of not having one.

Soon enough, Jane dropped out of school. They came out publicly as trans. They started motoring through America on tour, singing—loudly—to fans who were beginning to bring color back to their lives after lockdowns. They were making their own way, on their terms. It didn’t seem ridiculous to think they had the potential to be a totemic modern originator like Skrillex or Lil Peep, someone who jolts pop music off its conservative axis, if only for a moment.

Revengeseekerz doubles down on that promise. After releasing two brooding—and relatively retro—rock records over the past couple of years, Jane, now 21, is returning to the digital mayhem that gave terminally online listeners such a thrill in the first place. But this isn’t some corny capitulation to market trends, or a “back to basics” regression. This is unrelenting music that pulls together all of the sounds they have experimented with thus far—the EDM blasts, the grunge guitars, the digicore static, the trap theatrics, and yes, the rampant Pokémon samples—and blows them up into a fireworks display you could see (and hear) from outer space.

“Dreamflasher,” the album’s centerpiece, is an instant song of the year contender. It distills Revengeseekerz’s fame-fucked themes into a riot of video game snippets, glass-smashing hits, and gargantuan bass—listening to it feels like going on a god-level speedrun or an untouchable Fortnite spree, as your high score dings up and up and up. It’s equal parts horny and needy, with Jane using their limitless talents—they wrote, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered the entire album—to turn vulnerability into invincibility. It’s got the most bone-shaking drop I’ve heard in ages, with bolts of bass raining down from on high, as if conjured by Zeus. On the hook, Jane expresses the paradox of love and fame in two perfect lines: “A thousand people scream my fucking name/It don’t mean shit if I don’t hear you say it.” At its core, the song is a cry for attention, and an extremely successful one at that.

Throughout Revengeseekerz, Jane reckons with the mindfuck of going from a bullied little kid with no friends to an alt-famous Gen Z idol—from wanting love to getting love to questioning what love really means. It sounds exhilarating. And harrowing. On “Star People,” which could have been called “Star Fuckers,” they let off a spray of chest-puff threats, compare themselves to George Michael at his freakiest, and quote the motherly advice hanging over their psyche: “Don’t let that fame sleep in your bed.” At four-and-a-half minutes, it’s not a terribly long song, but it feels grand in scope thanks in part to a breakdown about halfway through, where the clubby bass and cash-machine hi-hats skid out and stringy grunge guitars creep in. Amid this extended outro, Jane offers up some of the album’s realest real talk: emo-rap bumper sticker fodder like “I’m never broke, can’t the same about my heart” and “Love’s fleeting, but you’re still getting fucked.” It’s both hard and soft, the inner monologue of someone trying to maintain their soul in an industry (and world) hellbent on hollowing it out.

As a songwriter, Jane has often sounded like a wounded spirit destined for a life of disappointment and heartache, even as their music hit dizzying heights. Things are more complicated on Revengeseekerz. Here, Jane alternately comes off like a doomed hero and a supervillain seeking vengeance upon those who have wronged them. This internal battle reaches biblical proportions on “Angels in Camo,” a glorious rap shockwave that out-rages pretty much anything on Playboi Carti’s new album. “I just wanna get haunted, I don’t want that fame or money,” says Jane, who has released all of their music thus far on the small, homegrown independent label deadAir; elsewhere on the album, Jane hints at turning down major label dollars so they could maintain control of their own art. But they’re still pissed at the unnamed trend-hoppers, copycats, and leeches who have tried to co-opt their style and power. “Stalemate, you can’t break your bread with me,” they snipe in between supernatural bars (“I share names with demons/Tell me that you see them”) that could be spun off into a gothic horror flick. The song ends with a simple and effective repeated declaration: “I can’t let you bitches win.” Mission accomplished. 

Another massive highlight is “Fadeoutz,” a hungover peek into the mirror. It’s the closest the album comes to a ballad, with cascading piano and lonely strums bringing out a wrenching vocal performance. All of the issues and contradictions that come with being a college-aged musician on the rise are layed out here. There’s the fan adoration—and the shame of fans seeing a wasted Jane stumbling and vomiting at a show. There are the unruly joys of drugs, sex, and people losing their shit to your music—and the associated crush of unrelatability, of living a life your friends can’t comprehend. There’s the realization that pop-star dreams can be intoxicating and nauseating. It ends with a guitar solo worthy of a sea of cellphone lights followed by a screwed-down denouement that brings the party to a queasy halt. 

For all its thematic thorniness and self-reflection, Revengeseekerz is an utterly life-affirming album. For 50 minutes, the ideas, genres, effects, drops, and choruses never let up. Crucially, they never become too much, either; there’s always a purpose, even if that purpose is to just get you wildly hyped for the next left swerve. It reminds me of the heyday of digital maximalism in the early 2010s, when producers like Rustie, Hudson Mohawke, and Skrillex channeled the excesses of modernity into their DAWs, focussing them like a laser beam that could melt steel. But those producers often needed to collaborate with other vocalists, or to mix together other people’s songs, to make their most ecstatic work (see: Rustie’s staggering 2012 Essential Mix). Jane Remover can do it all on their own. They represent the next stage in digital maximalism—a best-case iPad kid allowed to run amok in a world where technology is advancing faster than our feelings. They are hyperpop’s one-time wunderkind, here to breathe new life into a style many critics have left for dead. Despite their dire teenage predictions, they’re the antithesis of just another office drone drowning in discontent. They’re living life. The good, the bad, the demonic. All of it, all the time.