Jessie Smith

Jessie Smith

Jessie Smith is a storyteller, illustrator, and poet from London. Born and raised on a wide variety of music, Jessie is a collector of sound and makes the effort to dip her toes in every genre imaginable. However, if she had to pick her favourites they will always revolve around post-punk, blues, classic rock, and folk. At a gig you can find Jessie happily (although at times unsuccessfully) fighting for her life in the mosh pit, and then afterwards in the smoking area where she is likely to absent-mindedly pocket your favourite lighter.

Deadletter Unleashes ‘Binge’

After building a reputation as paragons of the live performance, Deadletter soars even higher with ‘Binge,’ a biting incantation on intoxication. In a world of nicotine patches, ‘don’t talk to me before my morning coffee,’ and Klarna payment plans for your new shoes – frontman Zac Lawrence preaches at a world which demands everything immediately all the time. Instant porn, instant music, instant dating, and instant celebrity content have made us all shallow and impatient, and it’s hard to tell if ‘Binge’ is a call to arms against our current evolution or a sardonic ‘so what?’ ‘Binge’ brings us a collage of post-punk, funk, and new wave.

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Looking Back: ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours’ and the Power of Poly Styrene

It is a hot summer’s day in Central London and my friend Millie and I are jumping up and down screeching along to “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” by X-Ray Spex. Their flat above the Charing Cross Road holds some punk memorabilia that belonged to their late mother, with the face of Johnny Rotten staring down at us from a high-up corner as we mosh in the living room. The song came to me as a godsend, at a point where I briefly lived with Millie at the end of 2016, a year of my life that was fuelled by sex and anger. When I first heard Poly

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Why We Love: Wunderhorse

Are you a child of the Windmill Brixton? All of us babyfaced, barely legal and sneaking tins into gigs before screaming along to ‘Social Experiment’ by the Dead Pretties like some still-pimpled pheromonal cult. We’ve all seemingly grown up in the past five years, and the Dead Pretties frontman himself, Jacob Slater, is no exception.  There has been a slow tease of singles, beginning with ‘Teal,’ which holds some of the flavour that you’ll find familiar from those wild nights in 2017; it’s there in its hyperactivity, as well the balance of a gentle croon against that snarl from the back of the throat. Fans of old

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Prioritise Pleasure: Self Esteem’s Story of a New Girl Power

“Girl Power”: The immortal slogan of the Spice Girls and title of the 1996 album by Shampoo. However, its origin supposedly comes from a zine published by the US punk chicks of Bikini Kill in 1991. In The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, it is written that ‘they articulated an agenda for young women in and outside of music.’ 30 years later, and we are presented with Prioritise Pleasure, the highly-anticipated new album from Self Esteem.  It is a manifesto for the modern girl, a cornucopia of style punctuated by battle cries, all while celebrating strength and vulnerability. Throughout 2021 there has been a steady

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Looking Back: More News From Nowhere – Nick Cave’s Homeric Ballad to his Many Muses

Nick Cave is a literary magpie, and even in appearance he reflects that of the spry ominous bird – all pale and dressed in black. His lyricism shows more than an understanding of the written word, but a playfulness that allows him to creatively bend the rules of telling a story. To me, no song in his archive reflects this better than ‘More News From Nowhere’ (from the legendary 2008 album ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’) which blurs the line between melody and epic poetry.  Nick Cave takes Homer’s Odyssey and plucks out the pieces of its imagery that sparkle most for him, most notably ‘I saw Miss Polly

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