It’s very easy to slip into Jadu Heart’s atmospheric electronic beats and the evocative quality of Diva Jeffrey’s voice, one half of the musical duo consisting of her and Alex Headford. Their songs seem almost to have been crafted to cushion you in the comfort of falling rain, almost mimicking ASMR in early release Cursed; the duo seem to urge you to simply listen to their songs’ ebbs and flows of music rather than pay attention to every single word – which they actually don’t use much of, instead working sometimes with a few relatable lines.
Amateur camcorder videos and early computer graphics painted a grainy picture of their lives, intertwined romantically as they also were in songwriting. In an uncanny way they seem to have measured out their lives in albums and songs of every stage with Hyper Romance in 2020 to now, Post Romance where something seems to have shifted, in the making of this album Post Heaven a few months after they broke up. A general ennui about love and life in experimental lo-fi still permeates everything, but there’s an intense bubbling energy within it all with U reading as more pop than what the duo has ever ventured into. Jadu Heart feels the same, yet different. Here, METAL sits down with Diva to get into everything about song making and the new album Post Heaven, out today 11th April.
In the past, your albums have dealt significantly with a general dissatisfaction with life, the highs and lows of being in love and living with mental illness. What made you want to return to these aspects in so many songs?
On almost every occasion that we’ve written an album it’s been like, I don’t want to write another love song, and I don’t want to write about feeling existentially ill anymore, but somehow these themes just always make their way back to us. We’ve come to accept that it’s what we know the most about, probably, and it’s the thing that relates us to people listening, who are going through the same experiences.
It's also interesting that your band is called Jadu Heart, Jadu meaning magic in Hindi. I harp on this as, in your video also I'm a Kid you used Hindi subtitles. What prompted that choice?
When we made the video for I’m a Kid, someone had messaged us saying that Jadu meant magic in Hindi – we hadn’t known that before and it was total chance – but again, we always seem to engage in some sort of magical thinking, so it seemed completely fitting.
Going back to the early years, what made you want to form a band, right after studying music at university? Over the years, you've also collaborated with other artists like gglum aka Ella Smoker. How does collaboration, while working on your own music as a band work?
I don’t know what exactly made us form the band, to be honest with you. It happened almost subconsciously and I'm not sure it was ever fully discussed between us. It felt like divine intervention and years later, I guess we’re still here. Although the band itself has never really done official collaborations, Alex has produced a lot of songs and records for artists, one of which is our friend gglum aka Ella Smoker who could be the cutest and most morbid person we know, if you actually listen to her lyrics, they’re dark as fuck. In terms of collabs, Alex would say he looks for a passion for human expression, perhaps a little existentialism and playfulness in the studio, but don’t hold me to that!
What were your particular musical inspirations or just things you were inspired by in general while composing this album? How long did composition take?
We were influenced by a lot of old Trip Hop albums, listened to a lot of Portishead and DJ Shadow in particular, and then there’s always some specific influences floating around. When we made AUX, we were going through old Gorillaz, and when we made U we wanted to make a song like Magnetic Man. The thing that influenced the album most of all is the film Lost In Translation and the feeling of being lost in a foreign place literally and metaphorically.
What does it mean for you to experiment electronically? Oftentimes a single starts or ends with these fantastic electronic distortions, going into the genre of noise. Towards the end of Dualism, I thought I heard fluid being swirled in glass bottles, which I interpreted as alcohol being drunk. How do you experiment and go beyond what the ear is accustomed to hearing, electronically?
Songs are like portals into another world, or time and place, so we like to have fun with the sound design. Anything that can immerse someone even more into their own imagination. Anything that can highlight transitional states from one world, or song or album to another. Anything that sounds weird or beautiful. Anything that sounds like the warping of reality.
I think Alex told Wonderland a couple of years ago that as he got into electronic music and raves, he disliked any music with a vocal element, and in your albums, sometimes a single will just be sounds without words. What made you add this element to almost all your albums – even the upcoming Post Romance track?
Yeah, I guess we were both part of an era post the indie band mania where it felt for a while that guitar music had died. Through our grief both me and Alex separately got really into producing electronic music in our bedrooms and making beats, just to feel something. I think it took about 5 mins before we couldn’t help ourselves and had guitars in our hands again, but in that time we both grew a love for producing and music that doesn’t feature vocals. There’ll always be a place in our hearts for that, and we’ll always enjoy a good album instrumental. Sometimes you don’t want the lyrics of a song to tell you what you’re meant to be thinking, and you want to make your own interpretation. I think that’s why I love the Cocteau Twins so much because I can’t understand a word they’re saying.
It's interesting how you have almost built another world in visuals, with animation, pixelated early 2000s cam footage and also documented your personal life into your music. You’ve also mentioned before that film inspires you more than music, so what was your fascination with this visual format?
I guess we naturally build our visual world as an extension of our sonic world, which to us is a huge mixture of different influences from different mediums. We never really stick to one style or sound, and are always experimenting and having fun, so yeah, one day we might be using a doctored 1990s camcorder and guitar pedals, and the next we might be going super high-fi and playing with electronica and digital plug-ins. Our personal lives naturally seep into everything we do, as the band is highly entangled with our intimate reality.
An intriguing detail is your use of pixelation in the video, and interesting formats in your music where it seems like a radio is about to start, or a pause in Koora which seems like a glitch but is actually not. What's your take on adding these glitches to your music and visuals?
Our main philosophy is finding beauty within chaos. Most of what we do is serendipitous and we wouldn’t change that. I think there’s so much magic in being willing to make mistakes and being childlike with your creative approach, and it leaves you with pockets of art that you would never have been able to plan. The art becomes itself, and rather than you leading it, it leads you. There’s a lyric in the last song on the album SOS that goes, “Lean into entropy, let it go, let it be", and it’s all part of the same ethos. Try stuff out and find beauty in the mistakes or glitches that happen along the way, otherwise what is being alive really?
There are also mediaeval imagery influences and art history references, particularly like in Caroline. Is that something both of you are interested in?
The medieval imagery really came through from when we moved into the basement of a church in Bristol the year we wrote Hyper Romance, and we, through osmosis I believe, became completely obsessed with gothic imagery and storytelling. We called our home studio The Crypt and the whole album is steeped in this weird religious, magical, gothic witchy vibe. it’s nothing we have studied officially but just speaks to us both naturally as people who are drawn to escapism.
What is the atmosphere of Post Heaven? Although the feeling of conflicted love and disappointment in life is present here too, there's a sense of progression in terms of time. We've often seen your songs as told by characters like in your first EP where it was very obvious. At what stage of life are the two characters in this EP?
The emotional atmosphere of Post Heaven is somewhere between the afters and the first summer after a breakup. It’s about reflection and all the stages of an intense life-changing event. Truly, heaven is a state of being, perhaps love itself. and post heaven, life exists beyond what you once thought was everything.
Also, considering both of you broke up before starting work on this album, what was your process of collaborating with each other throughout this?
Making music together was the only time when anything felt normal.
For Post Romance you had one verse each, I think? What's your process of writing lyrics, and composing music for it?
We have never had a set songwriting process that works every time. Every album brings different circumstances and challenges. Hyper Romance was written a lot individually and then we came together to finish ideas, as we lived and created in the same house. Post Heaven was written mostly in the room together as we would come in separately to the studio every day. We usually leave lyrics to whoever is singing them, as they are so personal.
Has the spiritual aspect in your worldbuilding, that began with masks and journeys into forests in your videos, remained, or has it transformed into a different aspect?
Yes 100%. It’s constantly evolving of course, but that mysticism will always be a part of who me and Alex are. I think we might be the opposite of cynics: we are very earnest, and we like life, love and value experience and the magic and weirdness of being here. We find life difficult and strange, but we try to find the beauty in that. I guess you could call it being spiritual, but not in the traditional sense. I’d describe it more as a psychedelic existence.
You're about to perform in LA with Fontaines DC. What's the process of working with them been like, and what are you most looking forward to?
Carlos followed us on Instagram last year and we sent him our album before it was out, thinking nothing would come of it. But he said he loved it and had played it to the rest of the boys when he was on tour in Asia. The rest is history! He’s such a sound guy and we’re mainly just excited to play our new songs and to get to see the Fontaines show over 20 times! We also miss America, despite everything going on there, so it will be nice to be back playing in the US again.
