If the term “chameleon” is not yet reproached in criticism, then we could (and should) certainly apply it to Jane Remover. Though, if you ask me, “shapeshifting” feels far more apt and futuristic a label for them—they certainly say as much on their new track “Experimental Skin.” Since putting out an EP called Teen Week in February 2021, which featured the Kmoe-assisted track “Homeswitcher” and logged 100,000 streams in just two weeks on SoundCloud, Jane has remained a sage for avant, mind-boggling music—working in drum n’ bass, Jersey club, shoegaze, grunge, drill, and glitch-trap in their ambitious, albeit small catalog spread across multiple projects. Their songs are montages of dopamine hits, intimidating to comprehend yet brazenly fascinating to absorb. Jane Remover’s debut album, 2021’s Frailty, featured brightened and niche “core” music, like dariacore and Nintendocore, while conjuring the likes of Glaive or Skrillex through obliterated EDM. Jane’s second album, the shoegaze-and-bedroom-pop-blended Census Designated, offered a sobering enterprise of art-making. It made them a Gen Z rock star, even as they distanced themselves from the abbreviations and portmanteaus other critics and I affixed to their music.
After releasing three great singles in 2024—“Magic I Want U,” “Flash in the Pan,” and “Dream Sequence,” the latter of which ended up on our year-end songs list in December—Jane kept themselves busy in 2025’s Q1, hinting at the release of LP3, Revengeseekerz, with “JRJRJR” right after New Year’s. The big, breakbeat-enlisted pop singles from 2024 foreshadowed Jane moving towards a clubbier wardrobe—as the Miami bass and grunge hooks on “Magic I Want U” collided head-on with their synthesized breakdowns and trap gang vocals. In February, as the tease of Revengeseekerz remained ongoing with the release of “Dancing with your eyes closed,” Jane’s side project venturing dropped a new album, Ghostholding. If anything, Ghostholding proved Jane’s ability to make a pedal-consumed rock album, as songs like “Famous girl” and “Recoil” were these pleading, stitched-together, snarling waves of intense, distorted guitar music that bridged the gap between emo and indie rock with occasional splashes of sampling and vocal manipulation—think American Football, but really fucked up.
Revengeseekerz is the most straight-forward Jane Remover release yet, and sort of a combination of those 2024 singles and Ghostholding, though this record is lighter on the rock part. For 12 songs, Jane is a self-referential tornado rummaging around in a maximalist ether, embellishing micro-genres and splitting continuums into their own playground of crushing techno, EDM, and blazing hyperpop. The album begins with an exorcism—likely for the end of the Frailty era in early 2022, which is also when Jane Remover came out as trans. “Three years ago, I could’ve touched a million,” Jane sings. “Three years ago, I had that magic in my hand.” The braids of emo and shoegaze music they funneled into obvious Porter Robinson homages at the beginning of the decade have collapsed into bitcrushed sinkholes and kevlar-thick tunnel systems of disorder and immersive, stabbing, cybering clutter. On “TWICE REMOVED,” Jane likens themselves to ‘03 Avril Lavigne before pulling out phrases like “jack my swag” and “grim reaper on my ass” and “speak on me and kill yourself and go home,” pronouncing them as vestiges of love. The intervals of stillness that balmed Census Designated have vanished, as Jane stacks diss upon diss, vaunting through rap templates that have been submerged beneath mayhemic, static-walled cyphers. “There’s two of me, I’m cloning out,” they bawl. “Dead man flexing, show some ass now.”
On “Psychoboost,” Jane lingers in the overlap of desire and dysphoria (“Out of my body but want inside yours”). It’s a native tongue for them, to contemplate the blurred lines between dick-bouncing, faith, begging for more, “bitches getting burned,” and the temples we keep. MC Danny Brown shows up here, continuing to do cool side-quests in the aftermath of his great last album Quaranta, adding Revengeseekerz to his CV of recent features, which has included appearances on Joey Valence & Brae’s “PACKAPUNCH” and a remix of IDLES’ “POP POP POP.” Brown, referring to himself and Jane as “Danny and J-Dog,” hits his opps like the mafia, promising to make haters disappear before he bends himself into body-bound lyrics that Jane props up with their “It feels like you are a part of me” chorus. Interstices of annihilating techno blade against pitch-shifting vocals; “We burn the sun out” is full of grace until it becomes a warning: “Don’t get too greedy or you might get hurt.”
“Star people” is lush, coasting through ecstatic texts of love and hailstorms of pressure-cooker dubs before thinning out into this blissful, 90-second outro of sweet vocalizations, clips of broken glass, and fluttering bloops of faintly distorting synths. Cities burn, sex tapes get filmed, hearts break. “I blew up fast,” Jane insists, “grew up faster sleeping with the dead.” Five or six songs play out at once during “Experimental Skin,” each thread packed with dense verses and building up into a blown-out, Auto-Tuned drill splatter. The track is a failure in communication, as Jane sings like they can’t get a word in against the club’s pile-on volume (“I can’t hear you over the band, I wanna sin, blow the city up”), but it (and Revengeseekerz) is colloquially thrilling. Jane may rap like their shit is whack, but the poetry they’ve siphoned into “Experimental Skin” vibrates through the sensory overload: “I taste all the past, present, future too”; “I’d give you all the stars along a tightrope / Thing God became a part of you”; “I been the same bitch you went missing for.”
Revengeseekerz is not just a horizon of touch or an appetite for wrongdoing, but a portal. From the haunted “Of course you can touch my body” anaphora in “angels in camo” to the “Bitches dick suck then they go and bite my sound” sneak in “Dreamflasher,” Jane presents a complicated, scornful world. These songs contradict themselves, peddling a fast living while the bodies in motion ache to settle. “Dreamflasher” is the skeleton key for Jane Remover, a condemnation of success in the sprawl of good dick and the messes we make when the lights go down. Fame is irrelevant if there’s no one praying on your name back home; In their cybernated mysticism, Jane sings, “Baby tell me what’s the point of preaching to the choir if I can’t see you in the crowd.” “TURN UP OR DIE” jerks and tremors like edits in a grindhouse cut-scene, dropping gauzy, compressed melodies into a melange of chipped and shredded circuitry. “Give dead bitches proper sendoff,” Jane raps, before the song crescendos into the best beat drop of 2025 so far. Out of a pocket of futuristic, siren synths awakens a motto: “Make some noise, do it live, save the file, do or die.”
“Professional Vengeance” sends Jane Remover back into the pop lane they dominated in 2024, and it’s the tightest track on Revengeseekerz, full of answered prayers and “dollar bill dreaming.” Yet the song is also an epitaph for the self’s brutal hierarchies. “Until the grave I feel the shame of an army,” Jane sings. “Feel the worst pain and let it turn you ugly.” They use found audio clips to brighten the early corners of an ever-escalating drip of alt-rock and bubblegum pop; there’s a vignette in the song’s breakdown that sounds like Paramore turned inside out. “Dark night castle” and “Fadeoutz” (the latter of which samples the Fortnite waypoint ping) both denature their own bliss-outs with rupturing codas of techno-shaped post-hardcore, while “Dancing with your eyes closed” promises an opening line that’ll make your heart pale: “Unseen forces, they been spreading me thin. Post it, pawning off dreams that you had. Promise, baby, I just wanna make you sing.” There’s an anti-capitalist undertow pulling us into Jane’s humanity on the track; all we have is each other while the powers that be still murder us cold. “Dancing with your eyes closed” isn’t just party music that’ll break the queue, it’s party music built like a sanctuary.
Closer “JRJRJR” rages into focus, cycling through strobing trap beats and metallic hyperpop. It’s textbook Jane Remover, in that it’s violently heavy-hearted and punishingly confident. Ken Carson would love this, and the song tugs at the threads of Frailty and Census Designated, letting electronica wash away in heavy strains of rap chaos. Read between the noise and “JRJRJR” is a meditative, if not blown-out brag and lament for trans life, as Jane, likening themselves to “Jesus in the mosh pit,” sings about starting over, changing their name again, being cool with having “no brothers, no sisters,” and losing trust in the people around them. “I don’t believe a single soul no more, not even you,” they sing. “Let the DJ save your life, bro, we cheated death again.” Yet there is resolve—“I do whatever the fuck ‘cause I’ve been whatever the fuck”—and pleasure colored by skepticism—“Girls like me get to be lucky.” The song is purposefully disorienting, a digicore enmeshment of everything Jane Remover does so well, fit with a Homeswitcher sample and arriving so non-categorical that your best bet is to just call it what it is: “JRJRJR.”
The Jane Remover we hear on Revengeseekerz is flawed and vulnerable, even in the perfect, muted melee of their greatest curation yet. This music hemorrhages with pleasure and regret, yet it aches just to love. Fast living, pop stardom, fandoms, changing cities—it’s all a gas and it all unravels. Second guesses come aplenty; drugs help put the room back in color. The stylistic choices of “TWICE REMOVED,” “angels in camo,” “TURN UP OR DIE,” and “JRJRJR” might give you whiplash, but Jane Remover’s poetry is the big door prize that awaits you. “I never felt this beautiful and gifted, forgive me if I feel myself tonight,” Jane sings, winking at their habit of reinvention.
Because Jane is always disembodied but never one-dimensional. One moment, they sound like the kind of person to wear racing gloves in the club. A minute later, they’re proselytizing on behalf of 2010s Aphex Twin. You can hear their heartbeat in the lifetimes of these songs, where godhead rap bars let big brags surge with bombast; dead bitch eulogies chasm in EDM medleys; and techno and dream-pop tangents are maddening yet addictive digressions. And yet, every switch-up seems to punish Jane Remover more, no matter how widescreen the music gets. Maybe you really can’t have your celebrity cake and eat it, too. Revengeseekerz isn’t just a record about getting your rocks off—it’s a record about survival in the darkest rooms. “Might close up shop if it means I can live my life,” Jane admits on “Fadeoutz.” Still, the beats break like bodies against a current.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
