Check the release dates, and the shape of Trains, Planes & Airports becomes clear. “Better Than You” came out as a single in 2020. “Prove Who”, with Reuben Alexander, followed in 2021, and was still being remixed into UK garage versions as late as 2023. Jenny JAM has been releasing music since at least 2019. What arrives on 9 October as her debut album is, in substantial part, six years of singles gathered into one place, with newer material filling the gaps.
That is not a scandal. Plenty of independent artists build an album this way, and nobody is obliged to throw out good work because it came out earlier. Still, it does explain the record’s defining characteristic: it does not sound like one thing. The press framing calls this a blend of soul, pop, jazz and classic rock. In practice, it is a reggae-inflected track, a disco track, a soul ballad, a rock-leaning kiss-off and several things in between, and they sit next to each other the way songs from different years do. The title is honest by accident. These are songs from different departures.
Jenny JAM, born in London, now based in Los Angeles, came up through British musical theatre and still works as an actor and film producer under her legal name, Jennifer Moxham. She produced the gangster film Bermondsey Tales, where “Prove Who” also ended up as a sync. She has sung at the top of One World Trade Center for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, at Dubai Fashion Week and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “
Prove Who” was cut on Frank Sinatra‘s microphone at Capitol Records and later appeared on a billboard in Times Square. The album was recorded across Los Angeles, Delaware and Birmingham with Herb Middleton, who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Al Green, alongside Ikuma Matsuda and 5:00 am.
That is a lot of biography, and the publicity leans on it heavily, which is a mistake, because the strongest argument for this record is much simpler. She can really sing. The tone is warm and unforced at low volume and genuinely powerful at the top, and she has the theatre performer’s instinct for where a line should land. On the ballads, she resists the temptation to oversing, which is rarer than it should be in this lane.
The two best songs are the two most specific. “Toy Proof” has been widely described as a song about caring for her mother during leukaemia treatment, and that is when it was written, but it is not what it is about. By her own account, it concerns the person who walked out while she was doing that caring. Knowing the difference matters, because the song is not grief. It is the colder recognition that somebody was never who you thought, delivered without self-pity, and the arrangement stays warm underneath her while she works it out.
“Better Than You”, the older single about surviving abuse and taking her power back, is the more direct of the two and reached number 33 on the US Mediabase chart. Both songs work because the writing is exact.
Elsewhere, the specificity thins out. “Friend Zoned”, written on a Hampstead rooftop during Glastonbury weekend, is light and likeable and a touch slight. “Disco Ain’t Dead” does what the title promises competently. “Good Vibes” and “Free Bird” trade in general uplift rather than anything particular, and they suffer by comparison with the songs around them. “Drag You Down” closes the record with more bite, but by then the album has moved through so many modes that the final gesture carries little weight.
There is also a philosophical problem. Jenny JAM has said that no matter how dark the story, there is always a positive twist, and that rising above is the point. As a way to live, fine. As an editorial rule applied to every track on an album, it flattens things. A couple of these songs reach their resolution before they have properly earned it, and the strongest material here is strong precisely because it sits in the discomfort a while longer. “Toy Proof” does not rush to forgive anybody.
What you are left with is a collection rather than an album, with four or five songs that justify themselves completely and several that are pleasant and unremarkable. If this had been ten songs written in one stretch, with the same voice and the same willingness to be unsparing that “Toy Proof” and “Better Than You” show, it would be a considerably better record. As it stands, it is an introduction, six years in the making, to a singer worth hearing.