EP Review: Pills | Jade Ring

It’s Sunday, the weather looks like an apocalyptic battle between the sun and the clouds, which makes for a good opportunity to stay at home and explore new music. We have some long-awaited ones like Ladytron and Raye while there’s also new discoveries like Jade Ring on the menu. Trusting the single thing one will discover searching for the latter’s background, his debut project Pills seems to be entirely created by his own hands. This suggests a mind driven by curiosity, a creator who values freedom and creative control as well as an EP that holds personal stories. Let’s see if Pills justifies any of that.

In the opening Renaissance we are immediately hooked up by a phone call followed by a rascally female voice that introduces Pills as an exploration of the artist’s life and conflict through the lens of prescription medications, best enjoyed under mind-altering substances - which we will avoid for now hoping our sobriety won’t affect the experience. The true introduction comes with Brash, featuring subtle operatic vocals and classy atmosphere before it’s all violently shattered by screaming over harsh kickdrums. This is an ongoing dirty mix of rock and punk about existential dread and feeling disoriented which surprisingly lands into a pop chorus ‘I don’t know who I am anymore…’, leaving you wondering how many personalities are crawling their way out of Jade Ring. The pink, fluffy last minute of the track is the cherry on top and literally had me thinking of Rachel’s famous English Triffle (If you know you know). Brash is an unconventional 8-minute ride consisting of many conventional stops, like those dreams where the place feels familiar but the events are illogical and inconsistent.

Then we have Coral, where the performance reminds of Brian Molko and the instrumental sounds like an abstract, pop brother to Placebo. Once again, we find major transforming moments and contradictions, going from jazzy vibes to sensational guitar chords and from there to an almost gothic territory with Jade Ring speaking about surviving in pain and suffering. Coral is as unsettling and multifaceted as it comes carrying the legacy of Brash and establishing the rough sound of Pills audaciously. Perhaps the whole point of Jade Ring’s debut is to highlight the mess this planet has come to be: ‘Never needed pills to continue this fight until now…’. Ghost Machine makes for an eerie anthem soaked in philosophy and rebellion, standing between the analogue age and the immaterial future where humanity’s reality is formed by algorithms and the lack of connection. We are called to think ‘What does it mean to be human? What does It mean to be us?’ as we struggle to move through this merciless avalanche of a track. Lyric-wise, Ghost Machine is a powerful statement in today’s existential crisis and a hard-listen if your main concern is your next post on Instagram. Having said that, the mysteriously cheerful lady from before invites us to take a breather with The Bitter End over a restful harp and minimal percussion. Is this revolution over of has it just began?

To sum up, Pills is bumpy, unsafe and thrives in its Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). If you could keep the music and avoid its substance, you would have a wild American-style fraternity party where beer is spilled and bodies are sweating. However, the opposite is true. Jade Ring made a piece of music about the restless ones who dare to ask the bigger questions, who are highly sensitive and exist in a state of hypervigilance. The nervous character of Pills is an accurate reflection of the attention deficit we all struggle with at this point in time, and as a 38-yo man who’s witnessed the birth of the internet in the 90’s, I’m really curious to see how this new reality will affect music in the near future. Until next time, take care!

Listen to Pills here:

https://jadering.bandcamp.com/album/pills