On July 11, Jer released their second single for the upcoming album titled “Death of the Heart”. The single is a smooth, danceable blend of two-tone influences, with a ska-inspired chorus and a rapped second verse, and features Georgia-based rapper Linqua Franqa. Ska has often been a politically rich genre, and Jer has been politically outspoken throughout their career. Linqua Franqa, in addition to being a hip-hop artist and county commissioner, is also a labor organizer. It goes without saying that this song has strong political themes, even before you discover that the song is titled “Capitalism Breeds Devastation.”
The two-tone rhythms in this song are just fucking incredible, specifically the keyboards. Seriously, these rhythms and grooves are so damn good, it’s hard to stay still. But let’s not fool ourselves; no matter how good the music is, the real centerpiece of this song is the lyrics —a call out to profits over people and profits over planet. Destruction of habitats of nearly every species all across the globe, wars over access to resources killing women and children to control the fossil fuels or the lithium for batteries, or the rare earth minerals for microchips, destruction of the land, the air quality, the water, all to line pocketbooks.
The instrumental breakdown after the first chorus is solid. It gives us our only real celebration of horns in the song. Still, then Linqua Fraqa comes in with their rapped vocals, adding more texture and speed to the song, making the message feel more urgent. Several lines in this portion end with the word greed, which is repeated through the second half of the song. A constant echo of “greed” gets louder and louder throughout the last half of the track as the chorus repeats. Greed, greed, greed, as the pace feels like it’s accelerating. Greed, as the lyrics remind us, bombs are dropping on children for access to fossil fuels. Greed, as we are reminded, is that mothers are evicted for profit when housing is not a human right. Greed forces us to compete against one another instead of working together. Greed. Greed. Greed.
I can’t even begin to capture the tension building and rising action through the end of the song. It’s flawless.
But, as I mentioned, this is the second single off the upcoming album, and I was way too busy in June to cover the first single, so I’m going to cover that now, too. On June 13, Jer released the single “The Way You Tune It Out” and with that, also announced the upcoming album “Death of the Heart”. This is the long-awaited follow-up to 2022’s “Bothered/ Unbothered”. That album was one of my favorite albums of the year and has been in constant rotation in the three years since.
The premier single, “The Way You Tune It Out,” begins with a jolt of drums, guitar, and horns, and we immediately jump into a quick-paced, clean-sounding ska punk track. This isn’t Reel Big Fish or Less Than Jake. Instead, it is based on more modern ska and punk; however, when I say it’s a fast-paced ska punk, I also don’t mean to confuse it with ska-core or crack rocksteady. It’s just a somewhat aggressive, faster-paced ska-punk with a nice clean tone, falling into a solid upstroke ska rhythm during the verses. The tempo changes several times through the song, including a fade, drop to a slow instrumental portion that that slowly adds in more instruments through each phrase, building tension and aggression until the vocals come back in layering the song title repeated over a stanza from the chorus to bring the song to a close in a way that feels simultaneously structured and chaotic. The song is incredibly dance-y but much faster than “Capitalism Breeds Devastation”, and the blending of genres and tempo changes, plus the relatively short run time, prevents the song from ever feeling remotely stale.
Unsurprisingly, the most important aspect of this song is once again the lyrics. The Way You Tune It Out is a reference to people normalizing and turning a blind eye to injustice. Lyrics specifically refer to commodifying human life, and whether that is a reference to capitalism, for-profit prisons, or immigration is irrelevant, because they are all interconnected- symptoms of the same disease or the disease itself. Then the second verse begins with comments about global warming and the profits of “oil men”- the line is repeated later in the song in both singles. Jer discusses the injustice of global warming and ties it directly to capitalism in both cases, because the two are inseparable.
Finally, the track ends with a clip from James Baldwin’s “I am not your Negro” that perfectly aligns with the themes from the song- “I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”
I think the clip is perfect for describing the song and putting it into context, but releasing this audio clip with the song as the first single also reveals a lot about the album’s content. The album title- Death of the Heart- comes directly from this quote, and James Baldwin is one of America’s great philosophers, writers, and civil rights leaders, who was an important leader on intersectionality while often writing lead characters that were Black and Queer. With this clip at the end of the track, Jer isn’t just describing this one song, which perfectly explains it, but is setting up the themes that I expect to exist throughout the album.
The album is set to release on August 15 via Bad Time Records, with pre-orders available now. Jer will be playing live shows in Toronto, the US East Coast, and Florida in September, Japan in early October, and Texas and Louisiana in late October. Be sure to check out their social media and support them in any way you can.
Written by Gimp Leg
