watch my blood swirl down the drain
flush another month off my age
spring is passing
Some songs arrive like falling leaves that shouldn’t fall yet. owed to spring is one of them. Artist jess joy, who lives somewhere between New Orleans sidewalks and interstellar transmissions, sings as if plucked from a wax cylinder, dusted off, and thrown into the boiling heart of 2025. Their voice warps and wails like Ada Jones in a wind tunnel, or Carol Lipnik and Jeanette MacDonald echoing through a cracked calliope. This is a séance.
owed to spring begins in a murmur, a rudderless showboat on silk-smoke seas, drifts through feverish anxieties about birth and death, love and lineage, then collides with a cosmic conductor urging them back to the score. One voice worries. Another interrupts. Ego, meet extinction! Conscience, meet carnage! The lyrics bloom like overripe fruit: lush, bitter, nearly bursting. Marches toward motherhood twist into elegies for the earth. The ocean, the guns, the petals, the heat. A welcome and a warning, sung through browned leaves and blood swirling the drain. owed to spring is a lullaby for an anxious age, a cradle song for a burning crib.
“They converse with their higher self on whether or not to follow their desire to give birth,” joy says. “Is giving life truly a gift, or is it a selfish act that contributes to over-population and may result in a life of suffering for any child born into late-stage capitalism? They wonder.”
Directed by jess joy, the video for owed to Spring lands somewhere between a fever dream and a vaudeville séance. It opens on two figures in VR headsets, dressed in Edwardian garb – as if yanked from the giddy precipice of the 1910s, when new technology promised wonder and delivered the most horrific war yet known to man. What follows is a parade of papier-mâché surrealism: a cardboard ship adrift in nowhere, a grim reaper, a dialogue with the id, dressed for burlesque.
It feels like stumbling into a basement theatre below a club in the East Village, where the ghosts of fourth-grade health class warnings share stage time with Jungian archetypes and absurdist whimsy. joy’s vision straddles the line between handmade innocence and psychological excavation: childlike, but never childish. It crackles with low-fi charm and high-concept intent, a reminder that the real world never quite left the rehearsal stage. Reality, after all, is just one poorly fastened strap away from peeling off. If you’ve got PMS right now, consider this the soundtrack to your grumbling reproductive organs.
Watch the video for “owed to spring” below:
Somewhere between Eden and an empty nightclub, between Genesis and the end of the world, jess joy sings WON’T BE KICKED OUT THE GARDEN, a record that ripens, splits, and weeps like overripe fruit in late summer sun. They are a mythmaker in motion, a rebel cherub with glitter in their eyes and ghosts in their throat, spinning parables out of polycrisis.
Since PATREEARCHY and the searing visual spell of SOURCEHEIRESS, joy has become a name whispered through speakers like a secret passed down in code. Their voice is light and jagged, part sparkler, part sermon, leaping registers like someone trying on selves.
In this new record, they cartwheel, they slip, they stammer, they shimmer, then drop to whisper. Berlin techno tantrums spiral into saxophone sighs; folk goes baroque, then barrels toward outer space before crash-landing somewhere between sorrow and siblinghood. At the center: a quest, not for innocence, but for reunion. Not with God, but with feeling.
Producer Greg Saunier helps shape the storm, with Laura Fisher and Alex Brownstein joining joy on this cosmic detour through Tucson desert heat and emotional debris. “To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return,” said Ursula Le Guin. This is the map. This is the ache. This is the anthem for those who still believe in coming back.
jess joy spoke with Post-Punk.com about the album, collaborations with other artists, and the striking video:
This album is described as a “psychological, romantic comedy-drama.” What inspired you to frame it in those terms, and how do those genres come through sonically or lyrically?
I think, maybe, I wanted to convey with four film genres that the album has a story arc—the way a film might—and that it’s emotionally complex. I want someone to listen to it from beginning to end, which I understand is a big ask in 2025, since our brains are being retrained with algorithmic playlists/feeds/empty Netflix content not to focus, not to expect continuity or process, but to be able to multitask while being spoon-fed a mood that will get us through the moment in life we’re trying to barrel through instead of feel. And this is not that.
This character embodies polycrisis/dysregulation. They oscillate between criticism and empathy, romanticism and despair, drama and levity. The sound palettes vary (raw, metallic, gravel, air, harmonic, dissonant), as do the rhythms (sweet waltz, sparse reflection, chaotic, bouncy). I hope that lyrically the story comes through: the character is getting to the root of their ambivalence in relation to all that’s outside of them, and through risking relationship, they change. WON’T BE KICKED OUT THE GARDEN means there is a fight to stay grounded—and it’s an internal war. I’ll never take someone into a hole if I’m not going to pull them out again, so while the album might be uncomfortable and maybe at points barely tolerable, it’s a sincere attempt to merge a fragmented worldview into something more non-dualistic.
You directed the “owed to spring” video and have created over 20 music videos. What’s your process like when shaping the visual language of a song—do the images arrive before or after the music?
Usually, images come after recording, while listening and daydreaming. For owed to spring, I didn’t think I had enough energy to make a video—I’m working full time while in school for mental health counseling and expressive arts therapy—but I got inspired from a philosophy class.
We were discussing how, when a person walks into therapy, they come with their own interior landscape. Some people’s interior movie is all thunderstorms and shrill violins, or is slow motion, or hyperspeed, etc. They have stories that validate their experience. Our job is to go into that person’s world, investigate it with them, and look for the cracks—perhaps share empathy and point out inconsistencies in the story.
The image of a person with VR goggles in a psychoanalyst’s office came to me—something we can all relate to in our isolated, custom-curated social media worlds. I see owed to spring as a dialogue between different parts that don’t agree, so it seemed like the perfect fit. What the character needed was connection with something real, so their hands accidentally touching the psychoanalyst’s brings them out of their isolated virtual reality and into physical life.
My bandmate Laura Fisher, who arranged and performed keys, bass, and vocal harmonies on the album, plays the psychoanalyst. The kiss is an absolutely unethical idea in an actual therapist’s office—do not do it.
Greg Saunier produced much of the album, with contributions from Laura Fisher and Alex Brownstein. What did their energy bring to the process that helped you shape this particular sonic world?
Laura, Alex, and I drove to Tucson to record this record in Greg’s living room. Greg wasn’t sure at first how to mic the drums, then he had the idea to pump up air mattresses to use as a sound buffer so that we could record the songs as a group and capture that live, moving energy…he’s 100% irreverent to how something is “supposed” to be done. He trusts his ears, and he’s wicked fast and prolific…Greg is so creative that he can absolutely make anything sound interesting.
He is also unpredictable. He played drums on owed to spring. I encouraged him to do whatever he wanted—to go off—but instead, he spent an hour learning to copy the beat of the drum machine I had sent to him on the track demo. “No no no!” I said. “That was just for the demo!” But he insisted. Greg is a virtuosic drummer capable of complex originality, but what he did was create an environment for the song where you might not even notice that the drums are subtly shifting back and forth between this electronic drum machine and analog drums. He kept on his producer hat.
…Laura and Alex are original artists I found in New Orleans who have incredible, distinct sonic worlds in their solo work. Laura Fisher has this thick, cat-like, cosmic attitude—it’s deep and mysterious, broody and daring. She has a freaky intuition that sees patterns and connections everywhere she goes, including in her dreams. I don’t have to count during songs with her because she just organically slips into the conversation musically on an emotional, psychic level.
…I first saw Alex Brownstein playing a Primpce show, which was his angular, avant-garde project that is more shapes than narrative, using conveyor belt machines to inspire wacky rhythms. It sucked me in. The sounds are constantly in tension and release and move in and out of melodic phrases and complete nonsense. He is skilled in refining irregular rhythms, which helped us organize the parts. Once we were done with the planned instrumentation, he layered on sparse electric guitar parts that were so tasteful—just a few subtle notes here or there that I think expertly magnified anxiety, dissociation, humor, and hopefulness.§
Listen to owed to spring below and pre-order WON’T BE KICKED OUT OF THE GARDEN here.
Catch jess joy live on June 8 at Big Couch in New Orleans. Tickets are available here.
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