An Interview with NYC’s Victor Jones on subculture, dance punk, and the performing art

Vicgor Jones New single I Get Hurt

By Hannah BArret

Vibrant frontman and soloist Victor Jones crashed onto my For You Page. The first words that came from his mouth were ‘Lost my shit in the shower’, paired with sprawling, Talking Heads-esque dance moves. Instantly, I was intrigued – and it looked like many others felt the same.

But beneath his brash persona, the songs took on a deeper meaning. Lyrics about reckoning with self-identity were paired with crashing drums, synth, and, in some cases, bongos. I had to reach out to Victor to see how he paired the chaos with the vulnerability.

Hannah: For many people, you appeared suddenly on our feed as a fully fledged musician. But how did you get started?

I was very young. My parents took me to one of those one-year-old classes. They were like, “The teacher came up to us and said you had rhythm unlike any one-year-old they’ve ever seen”. [This part was half-joke, half-truth on his passion for music.]

I didn’t start doing rock songs until I was 11 or 12, when I got Green Day’s American Idiot. I’m 28 and I feel like it’s a lot of people my age’s first rock CD. The first CD that wasn’t their parents. I was a piano rock guy for a long time and eventually pivoted. 

In college, I got so into standup comedy that I dropped out of music school and headed to LA to do screenwriting. I came back into music during the pandemic, and I’ve been very focused on it since. 

Your first EP, With Fire, is a lot more muted and melodic. Your sound has gotten bolder and louder since then. What’s changed?

I wrote With Fire when I was 18 in the freshman year of college, played it live with a band, and then completely shelved it when I went to do comedy. I was listening to a lot of garage rock and dance punk, which are still hugely influential to me. You had The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, The White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 

It’s very clear if you go from that to the next one that years have passed, and I’ve figured out what I want as an artist. It’s a hard left turn. 

With Zookeeper, there are four chord progressions on that whole record. There’s one pit orchestra, which I think is very clear. It’s the same five Latin percussion instruments, snare drum, kick drum, bass, guitar, piano, synth, and synth choir. That is the case on every track; I never deviated from that.

Victor Jones by Eric Korenman

It looks like you’ve taken on this frontman persona in the past year. What influenced you?

I have a comedy background where I played this character, doing solo sketches. Very absurdist. I have this real confidence in being completely alone on stage. I was doing pretty well in my standup when the pandemic hit, and people were coming to every show. So there was always an element of ‘I wanna do the frontman thing’. 

The dancing, the groovin' and movin', the proper ‘Mick Jagger’ing – I started doing that post-New York. I think it was once I got people playing with me. I started just singing. When I sang without an instrument in my hands, I could focus on my performance in a way that deeply enhanced my singing potential. I was able to be more pitch correct, and I could think about delivery.

I'm very fascinated by Pentecostal and evangelical preachers and televangelists. Compelling an audience from a podium. I mean, now they've got their little head pieces and stuff. But if you look at Billy Graham, he's a big deal. That guy would just stand behind a podium and wave his hands. I mean, he's a monster, not to get political, but he's a hard-right gay-bashing bastard.

But he's fascinating in how he has almost a cult. I feel like David Byrne clocks into that a little bit where he's flailing about, which I love. It's a little different thing where he's just so planted and confident. So there was that. And then I was like, ‘Well, I could dance. ’ 

If you had to label your music, it would be dance punk. Is this a re-emerging scene in New York?

I find it to be a very reductive descriptor of my music, but my social media guy, who’s been helping me a lot, was like, ‘You’ve got to have something that people can latch on to as an identifier.’ I hope there will be a point at which my bio can change to ‘I don’t exist’ or something.

In terms of dance punk, there’s a big revival. Not just in New York, but in all sorts of places. It’s funny because it’s a revival of a revival. It’s dance rock, it’s post-punk, it’s slightly edgier, groovy stuff which you had in the 70s and 80s in the underground scene. 

Is there a tangible scene, or is it more online?

There’s not a scene, at least not in New York. New York is a huge music city, but you’d have to go to Akron or Philly or a city that’s big but not like [this]. New York is so sprawling that I don’t feel like there’s a scene anymore, in the way it seems like there may have been. 

There are these local journalists, and one of them has been really hyping the idea that we’re in a ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom 2’ era. I’m like, ‘No! If we were in a Meet Me in the Bathroom 2 era, we wouldn’t be calling it Meet Me in the Bathroom 2.’ We’d just recognise that something special was happening. They didn’t call it New York Punk 1980s 2 era. They didn’t call it fucking anything. They were just in a thing and they knew it was special, you know?

Is tangible subculture a thing you want?

I long for that. I think it would be great. I tried a little bit. But a scene can’t be spearheaded by even a handful of people. I would love to be a part of something where I’m not doing all the work in a group project. But I’ve yet to encounter that. 

Victor Jones By Arielle Domantay

Back to your songs – one of your most popular, Shoulder Song, combines a bold punk sound with vulnerable lyrics. How do you strike that balance?

That's the whole thing with me. I have bipolar disorder. My diagnoses are bipolar and OCD. I get all these really absurd intrusive thoughts that are almost sonic more than logical. And they're what they call ego-dystonic, which means they feel like they're coming from outside of me. 

[With Shoulder Song], there’s a duality between shouting ‘I like mean women, I like soft men’ over this confident rock beat, and then the next thing you know, you've got just cellos, and I'm like, ‘You slide like a marrow through a broken bone.’ It's almost an existential meltdown. That duality, that polarity, is something that I am – it's like my life's work to play with and bring light to.

How do you manage this in production? Tell us about Mother Theresa, your more recent release.

So Mother Teresa’s production is on me. It started with the groove. It popped into my head, specifically the drum part. It's not a traditional drum part. The organization of where the snare and kick hits is not conventional, but that groove came to be. I looped it, and all the lyrics flew. I wrote that song in 25–30 minutes, and I didn't do much editing. I wrote it at the end of July, really recently for me. Normally, I sit with it longer.

I do it all on my computer. The guitar is real, the bass is a synth bass, and the drums are synth drums. This one was pretty digital. I'm recording vocals here [in his apartment], so not much soundproofing. I turn off the AC; that's about the most soundproofing I do.

How about your latest single?

The song is called I Get Hurt. This one I'm really excited about. It's inspired by Steve Reich's Different Trains, a string quartet with amplified sound effects. I tried to make that into a rock song. I took strings from Shoulder Song, one chord with an effect so it became tremolo, pulsating instead of one long thing. I added synths. I flew bongos in from another Zookeeper track. 

I wrote it, then cracked my ankle at a subway station two days later. Everyone asked if it was about that because I was in a boot in videos. But I wrote it before that happened. It's funny.

Catch Victor Jones at his next gig: LOVES CLUB, NOVEMBER 7th