When there’s nothing all around you, you might need to make a lot of noise to fill it up. There are so many kinds of nothing in this world and so many kinds of noise. In physical space, there are just over 150 miles between the tree on the cover of 1000 Gecs (543 E Algonquin Rd., Des Plaines, IL) and the house on the cover of the first American Football album (704 W High St., Urbana, IL). It might take you less than three hours to drive from one to the other if you don’t get stuck in Chicago, where three major interstates knot together. Jane Remover grew up in New Jersey, not Illinois, but in 2023 they talked about moving to Chicago, and anyway most American interstices share a common parlance. The only highway Remover mentions on the first album they’ve made under the name venturing is I-15, which courses from San Diego up through Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City before terminating in a town called Sweet Grass at the northern edge of Montana. In 2020, 65 people lived in Sweet Grass. On their 2021 track “Seventeen,” Jane Remover sang, “Wish I could escape this shitty place.” It’s easy enough to escape a place, harder to ditch the shit. As Jason Molina sang on an album he recorded in Chicago, “Why put a new address on the same old loneliness?”
Nearly four years ago, Jane Remover’s first full-length record Frailty heralded a watershed moment in the amorphous, emergent subgenre that some people agree is called digicore. That album rendered its huge teenage feelings with corroded digital artifacts stacked high, never drawing much juice from any one sound in particular, but drinking deep from the contrasts between them. The 2023 follow-up Census Designated dove into what Remover called “straight up rock,” casting their singing voice as a weight-bearing pillar for the first time amid tectonic shoegaze guitars. Last year, a chain of vibrant singles like “Flash in the Pan” and "Magic I Want U" emphasized the bright, spiky hip-hop strains of Jane Remover’s DNA. Ghostholding, by contrast, tracks back to the midwestern emo marriage of snaking guitar riffs and melodic, introspective singing, with occasional shoegaze blasts interspersed for good measure. It’s an album full of sprawling, fearsome beauty, both compositionally tighter and texturally coarser than Remover’s past forays into rock.
Ghostholding furthers Census Designated’s fascination with the long open road and the empty space all around it. “There’s so many places, especially the Pacific Northwest, where there’s just so much vast nothingness, and that’s really beautiful and I wanted to capture that,” Remover told Them in 2023. “I was all over the country/Didn’t even want to go back home,” they sing on album opener “Play my guitar.” The decidedly emo setting proves to be a springboard for the most daring vocal melodies they’ve written. Remover ripples their syllables way out across measures like Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas and flips registers in quavering yodels as eagerly as the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. Their newly showcased vocal athleticism heightens the surreal intimacies of their lyrics. When they ask, “I believe everything, do you believe in me?” on “Believe,” it feels like all the time left in the world hangs on whether the answer is yes.
Throughout these songs, Remover fires their voice out to people, places, and states of mind that perpetually threaten to slip away. If American Football used those endless Illinois plains to ruminate on regret, misunderstanding, and the general overwhelm of having to share your life with others, venturing probes American space as a site of both decrepitude and charged possibility, a place where things might actually start to happen if only they could get a grip on them. Their ties to other people are frozen oceans: so big they slope past the horizon, so fragile they might shatter under the next step.
Maybe they’ll fall in love out there, or maybe they’ll kill everyone they hate, or maybe they’ll kill everyone they love, or maybe they’ll die behind the wheel in a blaze in the early hours of the morning. “Feel like a runaway dreamer runaway dreaming,” Remover muses on “Famous girl” over giddy, skipping guitar chords, their voice practically spinning out across the asphalt. “Kill ’em all for me, baby/Kill ‘em all in my name,” they tease on “Recoil.” Occasionally, they cast their pleas straight up instead of far out: “Please, God, save me,” they implore on “Something has to change” before they scorch their voice into a roar. Each song unfolds as a devotional to intensity for intensity’s sake: It doesn’t matter what it is as long as something, anything, cuts through the fog.
By largely restricting their palette to concrete instrumentation (save for a few scratchy samples and a couple bleeps and bloops), venturing tightens the conceptual distance between “electronic” music and rock, emo, or anything else you make with a voice and guitars and a drum kit. Tons of artists have synthesized rap and emo over the past decade, but the connection is older than that. Listen back to “Never Meant” and you’ll find that a good part of its punch comes not from the melancholy guitar chords or pained vocals themselves, but the way they’re stitched together: the strange, dislocated production on the “there were some things that were said that weren’t meant” refrain, the way it creeps through the air on tenterhooks like an all-natural voice never could. Ghostholding trains Remover’s sharp producer’s ear on the scrape of guitar against guitar, pedal on pedal, snare against snare, vocal on vocal. You don’t need much to start throwing sparks; you just need to smash it together with enough violence.
