When Jane Remover surprise-dropped “JRJRJR,” the sky screamed with the last fireworks and a sulfurous haze hung in the air. It was midday on January 1, 2025, and the song felt something like a war cry—instilling fear in enemies and glee in digicore OGs. And if you thought the glitch-wracked “JRJRJR” was overwhelming, then brace yourself for the apocalyptic “Psychoboost.” Named after an attack move associated with the Pokémon Deoxys, this song hits like a laser shooting through your brain. In the video game’s lore, Deoxys spawned from an alien virus that descended from outer space—I wouldn’t be surprised if the same scenario brought us Revengeseekerz. Rather than continue with the dustbowl shoegaze and soft balladry of Census Designated, the album does a complete 180. This is some of the most all-out intense music they’ve ever made, an inferno of raw thoughts that pushes everything—rap, pop, voice, their artistic persona—to the breaking point.
What kind of revenge is being sought here? Maybe revenge against industry shenanigans, revenge against people trying to see Jane fail, revenge against the world. Or maybe this is revenge without a referent, revenge as a state of mind. There are so many reasons to be defensive as an artist now, especially one with a very online, parasocial fanbase. Revenge is like an attack stance, a vehicle to talk their shit and go berserk. Jane’s singing and screaming, shapeshifting and sinning, telling haters who dare speak ill to kill themselves. They’re spamming Palkia battle cries and comparing themselves to Avril Lavigne. “Three years ago I could’ve touched a million/Three years ago I had that magic in my hand,” Jane declares at the start, knowing they’ve struck it again.
“Hyper” and “maximal” aren’t enough to describe the extreme overload here. It reminds me of the way a computer with a low-level GPU shudders while straining to render something high-res. The flash-fire finale to “Professional Vengeance” erupts like a motherboard under magma. Sprees of giddy rap bleed into EDM pop with layers and sublayers of screams that ripple into pure noise. Every empty inch is thronged with chants and record scratches and video game samples that sound like personal heirlooms. It captures the same live-time thrill I get listening to Jane’s leroy mashup tapes and NTS sets—a wonderfully unpredictable anarchy. “Experimental Skin” judders so frenetically it sounds like they recorded the song and then let five DJs tweak it out by jitter-clicking every button at once. It’s hard to fathom that just two months ago Jane released an album of patiently unfurling rock under an alt account.
What makes it work so well is that this anarchy is not an anything-goes anarchy: These songs are so carefully composed, so intentional, that every cyborgian burp and steel snare fits perfectly. Everything and nothing tramples each other. Jane sculpts the songs like an animator making sure every pixel of a motion graphic is properly textured. There’s the wah-wah guitar on “Fadeoutz,” the heavenly stutter-choir to open up “angels in camo,” the yawning harmonica across “Dreamflasher.” Jane practically hosts an Easter egg hunt for longtime fans, littering songs like “JRJRJR” with samples of their old music. The length of the tracks (a five-minute song could qualify as an EP in the rage rap scene) could be tiresome if not for Jane’s increasingly expressive vocals. They flutter out into sweet pop melodies and contort in new and weird ways, like the maniacal laughter on “Experimental Skin.”
Inside the maelstrom is a mind sprinting just as fast, snapping between highs and lows while struggling to keep up with a lifestyle that’s constantly changing. It’s such a contrast to the Jane of yore, who was too afraid to record vocals at home in case it disturbed their parents. Now they’re performing to thousands of feverish fans but also wracked by anxiety and trying to hold on to the relationships they cherish. There are moments of unhurried beauty, like the gothic comedown of “Dark night castle,” but the most frequent feeling is a kind of ravenous unburdening, a brain at the brink. On “Dreamflasher,” Jane desperately tries to cling on to the feeling of being loved by the one person who matters. Maybe the solution is to give it all up, they wonder: “I’d put down the mic just to feel that way forever.”
Instead of the tender working-through-differences approach favored by other introspective singer-songwriters in Jane’s generation, the Revengeseekerz approach is catharsis via chaos. When you feel like your life’s falling apart, fuck it—let’s dance all night. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and passive aggression, let’s explode some brains and give these “dead bitches a proper sendoff.” Jane’s lyrics could be frustratingly opaque in the past. Here they mostly manage to balance the cryptic and direct, darting from blurry vignettes about relationships gone awry to gems like, “Jesus never had it with a freak bitch.” Jane’s voice pierces the hazardous noise at moments of max impact, like when they shriek, “I can’t let you bitches win!”
Everything begins and ends with “JRJRJR,” the lead single and final song on the album. Jane’s swerving through Silverlake and self-doubt, talking about balling out on a new face, a new name, a new city, while the music convulses like a power plant in the early stages of implosion. Its self-possessed recklessness distills Revengeseekerz into a single concentrated blast. It’s almost like a taunt: Nothing you know or think about Jane Remover will ever stay static. They can’t be bound to a genre, a scene, a geographic location, or even a name.
