Chilli Jesson talks growing up and processing grief on new project Dead Dads Club • Interview • DIY Magazine

For Chilli Jesson, Dead Dads Club is a project that’s been decades in the making. After a successful stint as frontman of indie darlings Palma Violets, his later project Crewel Intentions, and a period spent in the wilderness of pop songwriting, now the Londoner has found his way back to the raw, pulsating rock that defined his youth; all to tell a story he’s finally ready to share.

Travelling through Chilli’s memory of the loss of his father at the age of 13, the self-titled effort, ‘Dead Dads Club’, is an 11-song concept album that considers grief with a stark honesty and lyrical bluntness, rising and falling in unexpected places to mimic the uncertainty that defined Chilli’s teenage years, from the crushing pain of his father’s passing to the euphoric peaks and ultimate freefall of Palma Violets.

“[Dead Dads Club] was an album I’ve always wanted to make, but I never felt confident in writing it,” explains Chilli today, as we catch up with the frontman. “I wanted it to be delicate, to represent this transformative moment. In the past, I didn’t have the tools to tell the story, I would hide behind metaphor or be non-serious to hide sadness. Now, I feel I have the equipment to write it; it feels like everything has fallen into place so that I can physically do it.”

The spark that ignited the Dead Dads Club fire might be years old, but it was a much more recent flame that lit the touchpaper upon which this project came to life. Touring the world with Fontaines DC during their 2023 support run for Arctic Monkeys broke him out of a dark spiral and back onto an inspired path.

“It was luck, really,” he recalls, “I was working in a bar, worried that I was at the end of my music career. I started writing pop songs and got signed, but it made me really depressed because I was making music I truly despised. Suddenly, Fontaines asked me to tour with them, and just spending time on the bus and at shows switched something in my brain which got me back to the place I wanted to be. It was the most pivotal moment for me musically for many years.”

“In the past, I didn’t have the tools to tell the story.”

— Chilli Jesson

That inspiration soon went beyond life on the road and found its way into the studio via Fontaines’ own Carlos O’Connell, who used his production talents to dial up all the crunchy, glitchy moments within Chilli’s new tracks. “Carlos is at the height of his powers,” Chilli nods, “no one can touch this guy. He’s old school, but it’s his experimentation that I found so exciting. Honestly, he’s a fucking wizard!” Thinking back to how this collaboration started, he adds: “It’s so nerve-wracking to play your peers something you’ve made in case they think it’s shit!

“We had a few beers, and I played him some demos, then the next day he asked if I wanted to cut the record. I was just gonna record it myself, but it all came together in such a natural way. He did the whole album in, like, four days. I explained to him before that I wanted to create an environment that felt like the disjointed franticness of loss, and I think he really understood and got excited by that. I gave him total freedom, and I think you can really hear that.”

With the project being so informed by a portion of Chilli’s life which has, in many ways, defined him, he was keen to hark back to his youth, taking cues from some of the biggest names of late ‘90s and early ‘00s indie-rock and alt-folk, combining guttural catharsis and lyrical honesty to mimic the off-kilter journey of grief and loss.

“When I was thinking about influences, I kept going back to being a kid being surrounded by my cousins who introduced me to Smashing Pumpkins and Elliott Smith, so I wanted musically to have elements of that. I went into as much depth as I could to build the picture of me at that time, to have a philosophy alongside the sounds.”

“All the vocals sound wonky because we recorded everything live,” he continues, “I was rejecting that pop world in any way that I could. I didn’t make many decisions musically except that if there was anything where I remotely cringed, it didn’t happen; me and Rudy [Greaves, Dead Dads Club co-founder] only did stuff that truly excited us.”

This is an album that Chilli would have never wanted to be in the position to write, of course, but it’s hard to feel as though this moment in his career isn’t designed by destiny.

“Becoming a dad, being inspired by the boys in Fontaines - I don’t want to descend into being cringe - but I do feel blessed. Everything collided at once in such a brilliant way. People say it’s never the right time, but I can’t tell you just how much it is the right time for me to do this.”

‘Dead Dads Club’ is out 23rd January 2026 via Fiction.

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