Jehnny Beth on Oasis, working as a solo artist, and new album 'You Heartbreaker, You' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Jehnny Beth is deep in rehearsals. She arrives on Zoom fresh from a morning of vocal warm-ups, and for good reason. “This record, it’s quite difficult to sing,” she laughs, slicking back her jet black hair. “The songs go from whispers to screams. The notes are high,” she emphasises. A healthy balance of propolis spray and sleep are the antidotes. With nine songs clocking in at just under 30 minutes, it feels like she’ll need a healthy supply of both to summon the fierce spirit at play across new album ‘You Heartbreaker, You’ on the road.

A starkness lingers in this new collection of songs. Throughout her career, Jehnny has created music predominantly through collaboration. There was the storming Savages that put her on the map, before 2021’s ‘Utopian Ashes’ arrived, an album of duets with Bobby Gillespie - think Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood if they’d dressed more punk. While 2020 debut solo LP ‘To Love Is To Live’ saw her tagging in the likes of Cillian Murphy, Romy from The xx and IDLES’ Joe Talbot, its follow-up is stripped bare of guest stars leaving her raw and unfiltered with creative and romantic partner Johnny Hostile.

“It was time to look at each other and do what I call the Oasis trick,” she explains. “Which is to believe in yourself, they’re the kings of that. I really felt it was time. It was fucking about time to do it.” Gravitating around a volatile, reactive atmosphere, Jehnny’s vocals are driven into the red atop thundering drums and muscular guitar for the most part. Sonically, it’s a thrilling tapestry that references Nine Inch Nails and hardcore groups like Fugazi, Converge and Quicksand. Or, as Jehnny puts it, “washy guitars and music for the sad and horny. There is an urgency to the record and the lyrics, that’s for sure.”

Jehnny frequently adds to a series of ‘20 things I’ve noticed’ on Instagram; a list of small proverbs for the internet age that range from the profound to the silly. One of her wiser ruminations goes ‘don’t write to be read, write to breathe’. It feels as if she’s taken this in her stride across the often breathy, gasping delivery of her lyrics that are dipped in a carnal energy on the album. Some ring out like observations spluttered out at the height of pain or pleasure, and sometimes paranoia. “How can it be so complex / I just wanna see you undress,” she croons on ‘Out Of My Reach’, while on ‘No Good For People’, she proclaims, “You haven’t found a way to kill me yet”. Later, ‘Reality’ finds her boasting “I hit your G so hard, it made you fall.”

Another rumination that sticks out is perhaps less profound: ‘There are two kinds of people, those who have Oasis tickets and those who don’t’. She falls in the latter camp - despite having shared vocals with Noel Gallagher on his Gorillaz collaboration and Britpop-ceasefire-of-sorts ‘We Got The Power’.

“I haven’t been but I’ve heard amazing stories from people who have been. My friend always goes to the mosh pit. I go with her,” she smiles. “Apparently, there’s quite heavy pits for Oasis right now. She said there were middle aged men doing ketamine off each other’s heads. She’s very used to mosh pits but this was moshing from another generation. I think that what [Oasis] do, especially to men in the UK, is really important. They speak to a part of the population that sometimes feels not really talked to in culture, music or media. I think it’s great. They deserve that.”

“Songs are addressed to the world. It’s like in any conversation: don’t bore me, I don’t like small talk.”

Mosh pits would become an important part of the genesis of ‘You Heartbreaker, You’, in particular the circles formed among crowds during the Queens of the Stone Age tour Beth supported on in 2023 - alongside Viagra Boys. “In America, they really love extreme music,” she says. “There’s a real army of audience there, fans of Korn and Tool and now Turnstile. There’s a code to it. If you don’t understand it, it can feel quite violent at first but it’s not. It’s a dance. If you’re halfway into it, you’ll probably get hurt. You have to go all in. It’s one of those rare things in life that keeps you in the present - a mosh pit is that and for me being on stage is that.”

Jehnny returned from that tour with a rekindled romance - the guitar. “I realised [Johnny] was a riff machine,” she reflects. “I felt so excited by that.” Johnny Hostile has been involved at every musical juncture of her career. The couple’s fingerprints are over every part of this new era, even beyond the wax. “It’s just the two of us - every video, every photo, every artwork. Right now, we’re designing billboards,” she chuckles. “It really makes me laugh. We need to provide these formats and dimensions - technical things that we need to understand that we’ve never done before. For me, it’s so funny that we can do that.

“I think it’s also very capitalist,” she continues. “We live in a capitalist society and it’s pushed on you that you need to pay other people to do things. I wanted to go back to that DIY mentality, I wanted to get close to how it felt when I first started making music. I needed to find my focus back, and [Johnny] is the best collaborator for that.”

The album was forged in the brutal habitat of its creator’s own narrowing attention spans, a topic explored on ‘High Resolution Sadness’ - “I wanna take it all in / I wanna put down the screens,” she screams over a thrashing instrumental. “I’m like everyone. I’m a doom scroller,” she admits. “I get swallowed into the vortex. Some parts of it I like. My Instagram wall is full of comedy and food stuff. Our number one rule was if we’re bored, we delete.”

“It was time to look at each other and do what I call the Oasis trick: to believe in yourself, they’re the kings of that.”

That manifesto was penned ritually, ahead of Jehnny’s creative pursuits, ‘Don’t bore me’ becoming a mantra of sorts in the studio. “The music knows better than you know, and you have to get really good at listening, paying attention to what the world you’re creating is feeding back to you. You juggle subjectivity with objectivism. It’s a tricky balance. I don’t write songs to fix my own problems. I think songs are conversations. Songs are addressed to the world. It’s like in any conversation: don’t bore me, I don’t like small talk.”

It appears this restless nature extends beyond music too. Keen-eyed observers of Netflix would have spotted Jehnny in ‘Hostage’, a political drama starring Suranne Jones. It marks her first acting work outside her native France (where she featured in 2023’s broadly acclaimed Anatomy Of A Fall); now, having recently done a three week shoot in Brazil, she’s on the cusp of filming another movie back home.

“I try to do both. I’m always happy to sacrifice film for music because music is my art,” she says. While she doesn’t identify many crossovers between the creative acts - she turns down any musician roles offered to her - dialogue from the silver screen often bleeds into her writing. “Even ‘You Heartbreaker, You’ could be a line from a movie. I think that in songs, the more personal, the more people like it. And sometimes it’s true. Writing a song is kind of similar to writing for a character. It’s a perspective.”

This weaving between disciplines recalls another one of her Instagram proverbs - ‘There are many versions of yourself, just make sure they all get the right shoes’. “Well, right now I’m barefoot,” she laughs. “That’s really true though. I used to wear stilettos in Savages. We were afraid of being caught by the fashion police and not taken seriously as musicians because we were women. The only thing I would allow myself would be interesting shoes.”

For this upcoming tour though, sneakers are on the cards - a seemingly sensible choice to offset the intense physicality this new music will demand in the live arena. “I’ve got my Nikes or Doc Martens - something a little bit more comfy. [The] stilettos are not there anymore,” she smiles. “There’s an evolution in that.”

‘You Heartbreaker, You’ is out now via Fiction.

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