Jane’s Party Go “Surfing on a Sinewave” (premiere)

It’s hard to put a label on Jane’s Party. They’re often referred to as a band of Toronto-based rockers, and that’s fair enough. There is an unbridled passion that pervades much of their work, and it can sometimes feel a lot like the sort-of pluckiness that Alice Cooper slammed Mumford & Sons for not bringing to the table. Albeit, there’s something more to it than that—a kind of experimental bone to pick with those who are keen to define everything by a strict, genre-classified box in an age of innovation. Something that instead opts to bend these standards into a conceptual space.

Even by its name alone, Jane’s Party’s “Surfing on a Sinewave” gives mixed signals as something that altogether conveys warm, natural landscapes and an icier world of electronic precision. There’s elements of rock thrown into this vibrant composition to be certain, but jazzy undertones permeate through the work from the get-go, as do dashes of pristine electropop. The end result might just be classified as an experiment gone right, especially with the help of BADBADNOTGOOD’s Leland Whitty.

Jane’s Party’s Tom Ionescu tells PopMatters, “With all four of us growing up musically as jazz school students, we’ve always played and listened to instrumental music yet we had somehow never recorded an instrumental song. We thought it was time to see what that might sound like. The concept was to record it in a traditional way – a single day in a studio with all four of us jamming together in a single room – to capture a live vibe. We thought who better to inspire us and guide us through the process than Leland Whitty of BADBADNOTGOOD, whose production work in the studio and during mixing was an incredible learning experience.”

“Surfing on a Sinewave” is featured on Jane’s Party’s upcoming album, Casual Island. It is set to be released sometime later this year.