You and your band recorded Death of the Heart semi-live off the floor with Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden Recording Studio. You said the decision to record this way was inspired by The Specials. What was that experience like?

It was awesome! It was the first time that I’ve ever recorded simultaneously with other musicians. Oftentimes, we go into the studio and it’s just drums, then just guitar, then just bass, but I was really inspired to do it live by the experience of the live band. The first record, BOTHERED / UNBOTHERED, was recorded in the modern way of one instrument at a time. When we started playing those songs live, they started to breathe more and have a sense of life to them, where they felt like completely different songs than on the actual recording. I was like, “How do I capture that energy?” Especially that energy that is being brought not only by the JER band, but how they feed off of each other.

Then I realized that The Specials did the same thing. I tried to flip one of their songs into a beat and I couldn’t get the BPM down. Then I realized there is no BPM because they were just playing. They might speed up or slow down by 10 or 15 BPM in a song, but you don’t feel it when you’re listening because you’re just feeling them playing off each other’s energy. It’s those differences that happen that give those songs so much life. I think The Specials have withstood the test of time and sound so timeless because of those elements, so I wanted to try to recreate that.

Then I found out that a lot of artists that I really was inspired by, like Gouge Away, Jeff Rosenstock, Omnigone, recorded with Jack Shirley and they recorded by hitting record and playing the song in the studio. I was like, “Well, this engineer is creating these records I love the sound of. I’m sure I would love the sound of my record if I worked with him, too.”

You’ve been playing live with a variation of the core lineup for a couple years now. How did the JER band come together?

They’re all friends that I’ve met throughout the years playing music in different bands. I played in We Are The Union with Ricky. Esteban is all over the scene playing in multiple bands. It just kinda landed with these musicians. I really enjoy how they play, but I also trust their ability to not only play the styles authentically, or how the styles should be played, but they are also able to switch it up.

There’s a lot of times where I’m mixing traditional ska with post-hardcore, and it’s like, “How many people can actively pull those genres off?” [laughs] The pool is not very large because most people who are listening to each genre only listen to that genre. It’s about finding musicians who are so versatile as well as people that I love being with. I think it’s important to make music and play music with people you love. It’s the mix of that and the feeling of making music with them that has kinda solidified that core lineup.

You mentioned Omnigone earlier, and Adam Davis is on the record along with Linqua Franqa, ThatDjVega, and Candice Maritato of Woolbright. How did these collaborations come about?

When I was writing these songs, I knew that I wanted some sort of feature and I was trying to think of who the feature could be on these songs. It almost kinda felt natural. As I was writing “Capitalism Breeds Devastation” I was thinking about the messaging of the song and the messaging I wanted to bring out. Linqua Franqa is an artist that I love and admire, not only for their artistry and for the way they convey these political ideas in their music, but they are also an organizer. They’re a union organizer and a community organizer. Their day job quite literally is doing the things that are moving us toward revolution and towards more people power. I wanted that to be kinda the takeaway of the song. It’s one thing to just say things are bad, but it is a whole other thing to say how we can fix them. I felt like Linqua Franqa would be such a perfect fit for that and they were down. I think it’s one of the coolest collaborations that I’ve ever been able to do.

Same with ThatDjVega. It was just for an interlude track, “DO SOMETHING”, but I always wanted scratching on the record and to pull some of those hip-hop elements into the music because that’s a big part of the music that I create. I was like, “I feel like an interlude here would be really cool and to have him scratch over it would be awesome.” We’ve followed each other on social media for quite some time and I just reached out and asked.

Same with Candice on “Log Off”. I knew I wanted someone to sing it. I didn’t know who at first, but I was thinking about what Woolbright is about. Candice is a close friend, who I actually went to high school with, and a lot of her ethos and way of life is to fill your cup and preserve your peace and make space for what matters. That’s a big theme of that song.

It feels very natural when I’m thinking about who can do the thing technical-wise that I think the song is calling for, but also who has the ethos and the chops. For “Cult of the Lonely”, I was already writing the song, and Adam and I were having a back-and-forth. Some of the things we said in our back-and-forth became lyrics or inspired me to start writing the lyrics for that song. I was like, “I think there would be a cool feature in that breakdown. Adam, do you wanna record on this song? I literally based it off our conversation.” It’s always been natural; it kinda just happens.

Death of the Heart takes its name from a James Baldwin quote, and the quote appears in full at the end of “The Way You Tune It Out”. What does this quote mean to you?

The quote talks about the moral apathy, the death of the heart. James Baldwin, being both a gay man and a Black man, was demonized and dehumanized by society during his day - this quote is from the 1950s or 1960s - and it rings so true now and is also applicable even to more groups of people. In the full speech that he made, he talks about a lot of things and it basically boils down to: How can human beings watch other human beings suffer at the hand of very intentional violence? It’s not even like they suffered from a natural disaster and we don’t care; this country is actively doing things to cause harm to these people and this country has decided that’s ok because they’re letting their heart die.

I think that extends beyond just systemic issues. It extends to people who are generally ok with people losing their lives over simply existing for who they are. The record was halfway written when I found that name, and a lot of the themes of the record talk about things like how our economic system causes suffering, so some people can get more rich because they’re exploiting the land and people for the resources that they have. It fits into that. It’s the death of the heart to be ok with children mining stuff so we can have smartphones. It’s the death of the heart to be ok with a company that is rolling back their DEI because it’s more convenient. That convenience is killing the heart because anyone with a heart would not be ok with these things.

How do you feel we can push back against moral apathy?

This is where the back half of the record takes shape a little bit. I think there’s a level of empathy and openness that needs to be had with people. With the front part of the record, I think a lot of people hear those songs and assume, “Oh, you’re definitely talking about conservative America,” and in some ways, I’m talking about people in my own community as well.

There are people who will write somebody off because they might have voted a certain way and never want to talk to them again. It’s very common to hear from people, “I’m cutting my family off. I don’t wanna talk to them ever again.” If you won’t talk to your family, who will? The people who will are the people who are going to drive them further down that pipeline and there’s no voice of reason in that echo chamber that they live in. I think what’s important is having those hard conversations. If 100 people chose one person in their life to really have those conversations with, allow that nuance to be there, and find those points of contradiction in their belief systems. I think that’s more effective than 100 people just cutting people out of their lives and going to find people who agree with them and talk about how much they agree with them.

But there’s a flip side to that. With the conversation that’s being had, people have to have the drive to want to get better. I think that’s also an important thing to understand. It is important to protect our peace, it is important to make sure there’s some point to what we’re doing, but I think the most important thing we can do is understand that, at the end of the day, we’re all humans. I firmly believe that humans want as many humans as possible to have their needs met and live and be comfortable. It’s just understanding how our system doesn’t allow that to happen and what we can do to make people see that and help dismantle the system that thrives off of exploiting other people.

You talk about having compassion and empathy for people during a state of growth. How do you access that compassion and empathy during a trying time or a hard conversation?

I think it takes a lot of work and willpower because it’s very easy to be overrun with emotion. For me in particular, I find it hard when people are, in a trying time, trying to justify a very obviously bad thing, like families being torn apart by ICE. For some reason, that is not seen as a tragedy, it’s seen as very justified. How do you make someone see that throwing someone in a cage is not a good thing?

I think bringing up the fact that we are all products of our society is super important. It’s also acknowledging that we ourselves are not perfect. At some point, we didn’t know this information. At some point, we really leaned into other ideals and it took exposure and contrasting viewpoints to start to make us ask questions. I think that putting yourself in those people’s shoes and being like, “Well, they think this way, what have they been exposed to? Has anyone even told them this? Do they think trans people are dangerous because they’ve never met a trans person? What anecdotes in my life can I use as connections to their life and what parts of their life are similar to my life?” We’re not as different from these people as we wanna believe we are. I think understanding that at the end of the day, society has told them to think this way, so what can we do to make them realize that there’s more than what society is telling them?

On “Claim Yr True Feelings, Wounded Child”, “Tryin, I Really Am”, and “I’d Like To Be Better”, you talk about confronting the full spectrum of your emotions in order to grow. What’s helped you to confront your emotions?

A big part of confronting emotions in particular is realizing that, like I kinda said earlier, you are not absolved of really anything. Everyone is capable of experiencing any sort of emotion or being in any sort of situation and I feel like a lot of the time we never want to acknowledge a bad feeling within ourselves. I think it’s important to acknowledge those bad feelings and acknowledge why these feelings might make you feel a certain way and what you do with those feelings; are you going to push them down, run away from them, and never acknowledge how they might be shaping you, or are you going to confront them and use them as a tool to grow? That’s a big part of “Tryin, I Really Am” in particular. That song kind of has two viewpoints: it could be a song about oneself, or it could be a song about analyzing how someone else is viewing somebody, especially in the bridge: “Sink your teeth and breach the skin / I can’t lose if no one wins.” If someone is saying to somebody else that they are irredeemable for their actions, then at the end of the day, who is winning from that? Nobody is winning from that. The person who is trying to atone for their actions isn’t given the space to.

A lot of times, when you make that the situation, those people fall into the only community they have, which is unfortunately the community that perpetuates these systems of violence. But in the same breath, that line can also be about oneself like, “There’s this negative feeling that I may have caused, am I going to let it go? Am I going to accept it? Or am I going to sink my teeth in and bring everybody down with me? If someone’s calling me out on something, I’m just going to bring everyone down; that way, nobody wins.” To me, there’s really not much of a difference. It could be a difference whether the finger is pointing at you or you’re pointing the finger, but at the end of the day to me it’s the same thing because everybody loses. How do we move away from that? I think working on oneself before trying to work on others is the best thing that you can do.

What’s helped you work on yourself in that way?

By acknowledging them, it’s really helped me process a lot of feelings that I have avoided within my personal life. It’s really helped me work on not being so angry about things all the time as well. Not only did it help me process and move through feelings that I’ve dealt with, but it’s also helped me find more peace whenever I see other people who are going through x, y, or z and understanding, “They’ll all going through something and their responses are just a reaction of everything that’s happened.” It’s allowed me to have more compassion for myself as well as more compassion for other people.

Along with the James Baldwin quote, you have some other clips on the album. On “What Will You Do?” there’s clips of people talking about the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia and the interlude “DO SOMETHING” has clips from The Truman Show. Why did you decide to include these clips in particular?

That clip in “DO SOMETHING” was more so included as a transition. The first couple songs on the record are talking about all of the issues that are happening in the world and people not really seeming to care about it and then after this interlude, it moves into part of the record that’s about why you should care about it, why this is harmful. I wanted that interlude to convey this message of, “We’ve gotta do something.” The clip is chopped up and scratched, but you hear the voice of society being like, “You need some help, what’s wrong with you? You need some help,” and then you hear the voice of Truman being like, “What are you talking about?” To me, that’s kind of a perfect representation of what it feels like to be in our society right now. You’re seeing ICE tear apart families, the military taking over cities, people dying, genocides happening left and right, and if you have any sort of emotional response about that, society is like, “You need some help, are you ok? You seem like you’re not well.” It’s like, “How are y’all not ok? You need to do something.” That’s a big part of that.

“What Will You Do?” was inspired by the amount of apathy and inaction about watching a genocide that, at the time of me writing that song, had been going on for a few months, and as of now, has been going on for two years. People watch it as if it’s everyday stuff and justify the reason why it’s happening. Someone asked me back in November or December of 2023 - and they meant it in a facetious, kind of gotcha way - they were like, “You’re putting all this energy into Palestine, but what are you going to do when they do that here? Palestinians aren’t going to help you.” My response was, “Well, not only has Palestine stood in solidarity with Black America over the years, but they already did that here. If you were aware of the history and true sick nature of this nation, then you would understand that Black people have been bombed, carpet bombed, in the same way Palestine has been carpet bombed.” That is not new to Black America or Palestine, so that’s the reason that solidarity is there and that’s why I included those samples and those clips. The MOVE bombing isn’t the only time; there was the Tulsa massacre, the Rosewood massacre, there’s so many massacres and destructions of Black communities that have historically happened in this nation.

That one happened in recent times and was televised to the world. We saw it happening. We saw children running out of burning buildings and the police firing rounds at them and our society decided that that is not actually a bad thing. Philly should have been torn apart and the police should have been dragged into the streets and there should have been some sort of justice for those actions of shooting children running out of burning buildings or allowing them to burn alive. Again, it’s the death of the heart to not even be moved by the MOVE bombing. That to me is the symbol of the death of the heart. It’s the same sentiment from 1980s America that has only grown going into modern day, where I think the clips of the MOVE bombing still resonate very much.

All of your videos are shot in black and white and “I’d Like To Be Better” fully turns into colour at the end. What inspired this visual direction?

Part of the black and white aesthetic at first came from the fact that there is JER vs. Skatune Network. People often get the two confused, so I kind of built an aesthetic around Death of the Heart where it’s mostly black and white with pops of colour throughout the record cover, tour flyers, and everything, as a visual way to set them apart, but also to set some sort of cohesiveness to the record itself.

From an artistic standpoint, I kind of leaned into that more and when I finished writing “I’d Like To Be Better” I knew that I needed a music video for that. I knew that I wanted that ending to be in full, vibrant colour, almost as a representation of the fact that life is nuanced and we often see life in black and white in many ways. A lot of the first two videos is also that and was also done in a nod to The Specials, especially with “Capitalism Breeds Devastation”. The pop of colour in that video is red; red, the colour of blood that is shed through the system of capitalism.

But going into the end of “I’d Like To Be Better”, you get that full colour, that realization that as much as excuses are made for the system we live in, I’m also making excuses for myself and I want to let go of those excuses and actually take the step to be better. That’s the full-colour realization. That’s the moment peace can be found. If we allow other people to also have that step into full colour, we could probably move a lot closer towards finding peace.

You’ll be playing the US and Toronto in September; touring Japan, the US, and playing FEST in October; and playing No Earbuds Fest in December. What are you looking forward to about these shows?

I’m looking forward to being able to play these songs live in front of people. We’ve only played 10 shows in the last year or so, so we’ve had a few opportunities to play these songs live and when we have, people have received them well. We haven’t played any of these songs since the record has come out. Well, we played a couple of them at one show, but we didn’t have the full band, so we couldn’t do everything. That being said, these are the first shows where we have the full band playing these songs for people. Being able to amplify the energy of the set, both musically as well as the actual message being said, is what I’m most ready for.

These songs are a lot of fun to play live and we’re also opening up for the Bouncing Souls in September. We’ll be playing to large crowds of people, which is an opportunity that we don’t get often. To be able to be on a tour like that, where we get to tour with legends and open their shows to people who have not seen us before, is always an exciting move. Same with No Earbuds Fest and FEST.

No Earbuds Fest being a collection of artists and bands from across the alternative zeitgeist that I really love. Prince Daddy is a band I saw for the first time over 10 years ago, and they’ve always been killing it. I love their energy and their craft. I’m really excited to be able to play a mixed genre bill like that, exposing me to different worlds of alternative, and the same thing can go for FEST.

FEST is such a diverse festival and even though the show we’re playing has a ska lineup, the entire festival is accessible to anyone with a pass. I’m equally excited to play with so many friends and homies within the ska scene, as well as just homies in general within the punk scene. FEST is also going to be the Death of the Heart release set, so we’re going to be playing some songs that we probably will only play at FEST because we need multiple guitars and Esteban is going to use multiple keyboards and stuff. I’m excited for that.

Which part of Death of the Heart are you proudest of?

I’m definitely proudest of the middle section of the record, which I know is a big chunk of the record. “What Will You Do?” through “I’d Like To Be Better”, or at least until “Claim Yr True Feelings”, because I feel like there’s a lot of in, my opinion, the best lyrical work that I’ve done. I worked really hard on those songs in particular, as well as the messaging.

The music itself starts to lean into these different genres. A lot of people were telling me, “I did not expect your record to go in these directions, but it works,” and they love it. As a composer and someone who loves not only ska music but all these other music genres, to be able to incorporate them in is great, with the hardcore, grunge “What Will You Do?” and “Cult of the Lonely” then going into whatever you call the title track. [laughs] I don’t even know. It’s like Touche Amore in the choruses, but then it has this syncopated, almost Latin rhythm in the verses with asymmetrical freestyle over it, then going into “Claim Yr True Feelings”, which is like a Midwest emo track.

I don’t know many people who have listened to a record that can cover that much ground within 15 minutes, but I don’t think it feels unnatural. It took a lot of workshopping to make it feel like it flows well, and I’m glad that the final product does flow well. And the fact that we recorded all the songs live and had to get it basically in one take was huge because “Death of the Heart” was the bane of our existence in the studio. [laughs]