Listening to Brooklyn-based electropop artist and producer Laura Jinn’s debut EP Sick! is an experience somewhat akin to watching a dark comedy. Full of sass and detailed scene-setting, the EP covers dysfunctional relationships, paranoia, and encounters with quirky characters.
Jinn’s lyrics are simultaneously fun and incisive, playful and poetic, with an underlying theme of sickness, broadly defined. “I wrote the songs before the pandemic, so my concept of sickness has expanded a lot, but I was just thinking about what it means for someone to be considered sick,” she says. “I was thinking about the politics of sickness in general, and also, I think I’m kind of a paranoid person, so that is always oozing out.”
Each song is almost a movie with a full storyline unto itself, beginning with the nostalgic “I’m driving to Target,” where Jinn vividly describes the random shopping list one might have in mind: “Lipsticks/lipgloss/mascara tubes and crop tops/Flip-flops/knee socks/glitter glue and card stock.” Despite the ingenuous subject matter, there’s a darker undertone to the song — if you listen closely, you’ll realize it’s a glimpse inside the mind of a kleptomaniac, with lines like “I’m gonna take this lipstick and that’s just the beginning.”
“I was thinking about all these ways how, when people are considered sick, it’s often people who are on the fringe — so women in general,” she explains. “You have something like kleptomania, which is a way to pathologize a certain behavior that may be more common in women, when there might be other motivations for doing that.”
The eerily repetitive, nursery-rhyme-like, almost tropical-sounding “Memories of trees” similarly contrasts idyllic scenes from Jinn’s childhood with an unsettling darkness that colors those memories. “I was just thinking about how a lot of the things that happened, a lot of my attitudes at the time, were incredibly messed up — there was a darkness and a danger that was always present,” she says. “There was a lot of paranoia and fearfulness.”
The sardonic title track “Sick” plays on the multiple meanings of the word, imagining a conversation where someone declares that they’re sick “as in cool” but slowly reveals that they are also literally unwell. “I knew I wanted to write something fun and poppy, so I think the most natural way it came out was just this bratty, confident singer who sang ‘I’m sick,'” Jinn recounts.
The highlight of the EP, however, is “I’m beginning to think,” which narrates a series of events that sound like they’re out of a Broad City episode — “He invited me over, and when he opened the door/He was wearing an entire Adidas fit/We took an edible and he started crying/We watched 30 Rock, he kept crying” — as well as the inner dialogue of someone debating whether to stay in a relationship. The song was inspired by a short story Jinn wrote, where one character is venting to a friend with a line that became the song’s refrain: “I’m beginning to think I made a big mistake in loving him.”
“I was thinking about how dangerous it is to date a man based on statistics and how it’s so crazy that we accept that and live with that, but it is our reality of how we live with people in the world,” she explains. “I wanted to capture that dissonance of ‘I’m saying this fun thing to my friend about this guy’ and ‘I have to say this scary violent thing about this guy.'”
In keeping with the theme of sickness, she also threw in an electropop cover of Harvey Danger’s 1997 hit “Flagpole Sitta,” her version full of snappy percussion. “I just felt like in so many ways, the bratty, silly energy of the singer in the song fits with the energy I was trying to capture,” she says. “What I like about it is that the speaker is kind of reflecting on themselves and critical of themselves, and it kind of throws that critique back onto the world and is looking for someone to blame like the whole song, but it always ends in that place of ‘I’m responsible, I’m culpable.'”
She and co-producer Tatum Gale made the album almost entirely digitally, minus some acoustic drums and analog synths, while they were quarantined together in Brooklyn. “I would work during the day and then at six, I would close my work computer and we’d go into the home studio,” she remembers. “I feel like when I went into the EP, I didn’t know who I was as an artist. I was just exploring a lot of different styles and also trying to cohere them and present them in a clearer way.”
Jinn started making music just a few years ago, teaching herself how to produce on GarageBand and then working up to Logic. Genre-wise, she considers her music “electro goth pop,” incorporating dark, catchy, and electronic elements. Her sassy, flirty singing and prominent percussion tracks evoke The Blow, though she cites emo as a major influence.
By day, Jinn is a software engineer, which she says gave her the confidence to start producing. “I know that I can do hard things, and I know that I can come up against something when think I don’t understand it and work hard and understand it,” she explains. “That has helped me when I’m working on music and come up against things I don’t understand — working on Logic, starting that process, and being like, ‘How am I gonna do this?’ I can be like, well, I didn’t know how to code and now I know how to do that. And it’s a very different part of my brain I use all day. So in some ways, it’s a relief to scratch that other part while working on music.”
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