The Friday Dispatch
Carly Rae Jepsen, Jungle, Julie Byrne, Claud and Cafuné
Carly Rae Jepsen talks exclusively to Best Fit for this week’s digital cover, and reveals how her new record The Loveliest Time – out today and the third in her line of ‘b-side’ projects – reflects the comfortable and confident place she has in life and music right now
Since releasing her breakthrough album Kiss in 2012, Jepsen has built a close circle of progressive and inspiring collaborators. Working with the likes of Ariel Rechtshaid, Rostam Batmanglij and recently James Ford, she’s broadened the boundaries of her pop approach. On 2015’s Emotion she dug into 80s and 90s sonic aesthetics, while 2019’s Dedicated tilted towards disco. But it was on last year’s The Loneliest Time that her songwriting excelled in its intimacy and elegance.
“I think the idea of getting to this place where you have a life and a career is kind of what The Loneliest Time was been about for me,” she tells Best Fit. “Realising that if at the end of the day you’re home alone and you don’t feel like you have friends that really know what’s going on with you or family that you’re really connected to or a significant other, then what is all of this about? I don’t want to write another song on love and not know what love feels like.”
The Loveliest Time sees Jepsen working again with Rostam Batmanglij as well as Swedish producer Patrik Berger. “Patrik is probably one of my favourite human beings in the world,” she says. “He’s just such a unique, odd creator, truly genius, quite capable of doing what my favourite thing is, that trick that happens in studios where we all turn into children in wonder of this thing we’re making. It feels very joyful. I think Rostam and Patrik both have this way, which is why I love collaboration, of just bringing out a more confessional side of me”
Claud opens up the pages of their diary
On the day Best Fit talks to Saddest Factory-signed Claud, they post a smiling photo of themself on Sunset Boulevard, posing with a billboard advertising the imminent release of their second album, Supermodels.
It’s a big moment for a record that zooms in on the smaller things in life, all the awkward moments and in-betweens that find their way into their diary, decorated with stickers of ladybirds and polaroids of friends dancing in their bedrooms.
“It's more like journal entries than it is like a cohesive story,” says the 24-year-old of the album, which was written over a period of significant change. Life and relationships in your early twenties are confusing enough to navigate without the added complication of months spent touring around North America in a minivan, and Claud has been working it all out in words. Each song on Supermodels sounds like a conversation between close friends discussing their love life and attachments gone awry.
Claud’s first album Super Monster was released in early 2021; at the time, they were the first artist to sign to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. The separation between Super Monster and Supermodels is “more like a confidence thing,” they explain. Graduating to 'apartment pop', Claud has left the days of recording in their childhood bedroom behind, creating Supermodels in their own space with a vintage acoustic guitar and a wonky secondhand piano. They’ve also been learning the dark arts of production as well as opening up their creative process to new people, most notably Semisonic’s Dan Wilson. Claud has been a huge fan of Wilson’s band since high school and spent hours of their time together asking him questions. “He’s like an encylopaedia of information,” they say. “It was an honour to be able to work with people that I had been wanting to work with for a long time.”
Cafuné is on the rise
Cafuné are tectonic plates. In coexisting, Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat have managed to build something bigger than the sum of their parts through the creative friction that bristles between the pair.
Finding each other in 2012, after joining NYU’s music production course, these kindred spirits bonded over a joint love of 00s indie and ambition. While their divergent paths by all rights should’ve been incompatible (Schat aimed to be a singer-songwriter, while Yoo held EDM in his sights), the pair found the unlikely matchup made sense.
The duo are driven by an insatiable love for their craft; Yoo’s stems from his time in various bands in high school, directly opposing his classical violin training as a young boy. He eventually found his way to electronic and dance music, “because it was so exciting and different from all the indie rock and alternative music that I'd grown up listening to.” The flip side also was the representation. Of Asian descent, he found more familiarity in dance than the whitewashed 00s indie.
“I feel like it's easy to forget now, but at the time there weren't any Japanese Breakfasts or Mitskis, or people who necessarily looked like me,” he says. While Yoo was seeking a homestead, he soon found that you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole. “I quickly became disillusioned with it around 2013/2014 as things shifted, and I realised the reasons I like this [music] aren’t the reasons that many people seem to like it, and so I returned to my roots, so to speak.”
Schat’s story begins more vocally. After piano and guitar lessons when she was younger, it was in high school she began writing songs. Inspired by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, she had what she calls her “vocal jazz” phase. While this inevitably led her to NYU, Schat knew something else was required. “I needed help to make music that was more interesting, and had a bigger reach than simply, ‘Girl writes emotional song on guitar’,” she laughs.
Jungle are keeping to what feels good
For fans and music-lovers, following Jungle feels like a treat. In a culture where musicians often feel more like influencers than artists, personal-agendas are noticeably absent from Jungle projects. J Lloyd and his Shepherd's Bush-raised childhood friend T are more focused on building an immersive world for their art than hopping on fleeting trend-cycles. As Lloyd tells Best Fit, “We wanted to create worlds and create things that we could view as the audience and get excited by.”
“We’ve always produced music and written music and been a production project more than anything,” he continues. “A concept production project is probably the most accurate format of what Jungle really is. It loosely ties into the visuals and the whole world. We like to create these sort of places to be in and experience the music from.”
New record Volcanoes - released on 11 August is a record born out of that feeling. A first full listen through the project feels like taking a bath in sunlight: it's warm, organic, analog, and earthy, a sound likely achieved through Jungle’s choice to almost exclusively feature original sounds on the project – the record only has one sample. Old-school 60s and 70s influences abound, with Jungle leaning farther into that element of themselves than ever before. It also, like Jungle, feels free.
“On our second record, we lost our fucking minds,” Lloyd explains. “You kind of overthink the second record because you’re trying to do something mad new [...] and I swear to God, like, I just wouldn’t lose my mind again on making music or make it hard. It was quite emotional and difficult that second one. So from [then] on, I was like, we’re just getting them done. And in doing that, there’s an element of it ain’t that deep.”
Something old, something new
Every week, one of Best Fit's writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Best Fit writer Sophia McDonald on In Ear Park Mills (2008) by Department of Eagles and The Greater Wings by Julie Byrne (2023).
Incredibly vast, In Ear Park is powerfully playful and shows how satisfying a good old minor chord can be. Department of Eagles’ – aka Fred Nicolaus and Daniel Rossen – project is the opposite of confined – it’s a free-flowing record that sees what must have been every idea of him and his bandmate work perfectly in sync.
Beginning with impressive handpicking, this could be mistaken for a folk album, something carved from the late nights in an American dorm. The result is an excellently crafted album which combines the beginnings of electronic that is melded with indie alternative. “No One Does it Like You” possesses a radio friendliness about it but its kooky edge and tambourines show its mischievous side. With truly melodious guitar, grounding piano and authentically emotional vocals, it is an album of being out of sorts and yet it comes together so smoothly.
A quest to meld brass, strings and indie alternatives is completed with flying colours. Rossen’s and Nicolaus’s vocals are chalk and cheese. Rossen navigates gently with the melody where Nicolaus carries an ironic tone to it especially on “Teenagers”. Closer “Balmy Night” still brings a tear to my eye and deftly finishes a record that encapsulates the word timeless.
“Was it always or never before?” sings Julie Byrne, setting the tone of retrospective folk for her stunning record.
Ethereal and gently lulling The Greater Wings finds Byrne delivering a record of painful remembrance, her voice full of trustworthy reflections. Following the death of her longtime collaborator, the album turned from a two-person project to a solo endeavour to remember a dear friend Eric Littmann which she does with grace. Its title track is as calming as the sound of raindrops on a roof whilst “Summer Glass” sees the orchestral gain an electronic edge. The windchimes on “Summer’s End” help the calming reflective atmosphere along on the record. You can see slanted light coming in through on a sunny afternoon, the windchimes caught in a gentle breeze. The piano is replaced with synths and the harp is replaced with a cascading keyboard plug-in. Desire in the most heartbreaking way, Byrne doesn’t claw to the thought of bringing someone back but instead expresses her inherent want: “I have no right to want you…I want you anyway.”
Mourning could have seeped into The Greater Wings and taken over the record, a wail at how unfair life can be. Yet Byrne achieves a more angelic way of expressing sorrow. The record began with Littmann and she built from his foundation a testimonial to him.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our 20-track playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists.
These are the songs our editors and writers have on repeat right now, taken from the hundreds of tracks released in the last seven days. Leading the selection this week are amazing cuts from Scrounge, Cruel Sister, Samantha Urbani, Del Water Gap and and coverstar ratbag.