Header image by Hector Rivera /Words by Willa Rudolph
Earlier this summer I received an email with the subject, “willa ……. r u jim rat???” What does this mean? I thought…My interest was piqued, and I opened the email, which read:
“people have said good: ‘there is the one time that I can hear and also he sounded good and she was so cool and i love you and also they made a cool website where you can find out more about jimrat and also she was so cool and i love you and also music that I saw them live and she was jim rat is a thing that jim rat really means a lot to me. when I think of jim rat I ask myself the question of why I think of jim rat too. But to come up with it all, jim rat and she played guitar and also music’
people have said bad: ‘jimrat If you would have been cool jimrat about it and maybe jimrat had more of a reason to be relaxed about it. That same night, you said that big venues will take the money situation jimrat in a condescending way and you talk to the public. Anyone can reach out to you personally is more than appropriate. | could have DM’d the jimrat house jimrat show- from what I’m told- jimrat you’re responsible for the money even if the artist cancels the jimrat show right before going on. This is jimrat true, but it’s fucked up. Just because they do it doesn’t make it okay for you to do it. Wouldn’t you jimrat be upset if you paid money to see an artist perform and they didn’t get that. That’s like buying jimrat food, the chef to cook’ what would you say? whoisjimrat.github.io“ ]
I clicked the website link and only then realized Jimrat is a band. And a really interesting band, at that. This began my conversation with Sam Dvorin from Jimrat.
Jimrat is Josie Arthur (rhythm guitar), E. Benavides (bass), Emma DeLaRosa (lead guitar and synth), Tim Ro (drums), and Sam Dvorin (lead vox/everyone also sings too, though). Having met through the Boston DIY scene around 2020, schoolmates turned into roommates turned into bandmates turned into Jimrat, as well as various other projects (corporeal, video days, the diver) with members trading instruments and roles. Jimrat has existed since 2021, but the current lineup is new in 2024.
Today, the 5-piece is releasing a dual single, “neck,” to follow their most recent dual single “i hate shoegaze.” They may be from Boston, but they’re coming to NYC in November–here’s my advice: go see them when they come to NYC! (show dates below). Both sludgy rock songs feature ~10-minute long IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) continuations as second parts to each single, respectively titled, “again” and “give in.”
Sam tells The Deli, “To me, both ‘i hate shoegaze’ and ‘neck’ are very ‘GUITAR,’ very ‘ROCK,’ like to the point of parody. So, I felt that there needed to be something after each of them that was completely out of left field. Also I really love weird long electronic tracks, so I wanted to have something like that in the discog. The record we are gonna be making in November will feature our guitarist Emma doing a lot of noise guitar and feedback guitar so we wanted an ‘intro’ to Jimrat doing non-rock songs. Especially the track that comes after ‘neck’: those sort of sounds are very inspired by Emma’s playing, and we are trying to incorporate it into the album more and more.”
Watch a snippet of Emma doing her thing here.
The IDM tracks were created in collaboration with producer fern_shy. They made the tracks by “taking stems from an ambient set Jimrat did and then turning them into full songs by adding drums in as we saw fit,” Sam explains. “The track that goes with ‘i hate shoegaze’ (‘give in‘) has a lot more drums, the one that goes with ‘neck’ is a lot more ambient and out there. Both of them are pretty long and the combination of 5-6 snippets that we had made together.”
Creating for the sake of creation, experimentation, and exploring the possibilities of music and sound all seem to be pillars of Jimrat’s creative process.
…‘neck,’ which is about wanting someone, is a continuation of ‘i hate shoegaze,’ which is about how you can still mess it up even if you really like someone “(by being in a shoegaze band),” Sam adds. The two tracks are two sides of the same coin. “Things can be done right, but it’s done wrong by chance. ‘neck’ is a lot more explicit, while ‘i hate shoegaze’ is very ironic. The only lyric is just “of all the people i’ve seen around the world, you’re my favorite, your my favorite girl”. ‘neck’ goes into more detail.”
Fern, who has modeled for Jimrat in some shoots (an appears on the cover of their self-titled debut EP) is “just a crazy artist.” They met through the Boston DIY scene, playing some shows together, where Fern had done some performance art with Jimrat on stage. “We did a show where he wrapped the entire band in yarn as we played. That show was pretty bad, lol… He does a lot of sound design, so I sent him synths and drones, and then he sent me back short snippets that I then stitched together, added transitions, more guitars, and some vocals. Also, in some of the tracks, I used stems from the first EP.”
Jimrat essentially brings their shoegazey, noise rock into a digital sphere and translates it into a computerized landscape of fantastical sound and nonsensical noise, where the sound continues on and on for quite a long time, shifting and changing like the terrain would on a very long walk.
“There is a part in ‘give in’ where the ending of ‘all u do is’ (from the first EP) is played. But yeah, Fern’s main thing is making beats for rappers, and he is probably gonna be one of the biggest names in a year or so. It was a really good working progress- we just kept sending each other stuff until we had like 24 minutes of music. Currently, we are working on new music very similar to Drain Gang meets ARCA meets Yves Tumor. Also he will be in a music video. He’s essentially in the band now, lol.”
“neck” is out today, October 4th!
UPCOMING SHOW DATES
October 12 – Over Yonder in Philadelphia
October 30 – Rockwell in Boston
November 9 – Trash Bridge in NYC
November 17 – Trans Pecos in NYC
Jimrat by Hector Rivera