As you’ve likely gleaned from the album title, June Jones wants to unabashedly embrace the power of pop with her third solo record. The Melbourne-based artist, whose second album, Leafcutter, garnered coverage in outlets like MTV and NME, attempts to channel her folk and art-punk roots into danceable radio hits with Pop Music for Normal Women. With her expert ear for catchy refrains and solid songwriting abilities, Jones’s latest album is packed full of earworms that are as fun, and silly, as they are emotionally devastating.
“When I was younger, I listened to pop music all the time, then as a teenager, I felt like pop music wasn’t for me. That cringy Catcher in the Rye feeling of, ‘I’m not like everybody,’” Jones told Xtra. As she grew older, she began to embrace pop music again, listening to albums like Sia’s 1000 Forms of Fear and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion on repeat. But despite her excitement about pop music, especially as Sophie showed what could be done with the genre, the music Jones was creating wasn’t wholly aligning with pop.
“I used to unashamedly make songs with an average length of six minutes, but that wasn’t the music I was listening to as much,” Jones says. She wanted to see whether she could fit her mode of rich song-writing into a pop form “without compromising the lyrical content.”The result is Pop Music for Normal Women.
Robust lyrical content is quite definitively at the centre of the album, with Jones’s voice functioning both as storytelling device and instrument—her voice croons and vibrates, yells and sighs, is layered and echoed and played back in distorted, effects-heavy forms. With some notable exceptions, most of the songs on the album are backed up by generally subdued, minimal production, letting the vocals and lyrics drive the music. Jones’s voice, held aloft by synths and drums, crafts an atmosphere of longing and sadness, but the ’80s vibe and pop sensibility makes the album almost annoyingly catchy and frequently danceable. It’s also very gay, and one can imagine many a queer crying or smiling along to this album as they brood in their bedroom during a lonely eve.
Loneliness and craving connection are common themes on the album; indeed, it is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. On “My Crew,” a song featuring subtle production punctuated sparsely with punchy synths, Jones sighs that “it gets weird sometimes, I, myself and me.” On “Extrovert,” a slow, luxuriously languid song featuring reverb-heavy, bedroom-poppy guitar, Jones recruits Alice Skye to join her singing about social exhaustion and dissatisfaction.
“I was predisposed to be more okay with being at home all the time during the pandemic because that’s what I did a lot as a teenager,” Jones says. “But there is a lot of stuff on the album about missing friends and wanting to rebuild social connection.” When asked whether it ever feels uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing to put her vulnerability out into the world, she vehemently disagrees. “I feel a sense of relief when I’m honest, rather than trying to fake something. The things that make me cringe aren’t honesty and vulnerability, it’s the inverse. I cringe more about the idea of a lyric that feels generic, rather than something more raw.”
“Hoodie Girl” is, production-wise, a much brighter song than the rest of the album, with cheeky, twanging synths, rushing electronics and snappy snares—there’s even a happy burst of distorted, noise-poppy guitar. But the song features some of the most miserable lyrics of the album, as Jones speaks about dysphoria and negative self-image. “I want to be the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, and if I can’t be her then I’ll settle for being happy,” Jones sings, talking about retreating into a hoodie because of anxieties around dressing in vulnerably feminine ways.
Despite all this sadness and yearning, the album is also fun—and funny. From the title of the record, to songs like “Gamer” and “Motorcycle,” Pop Music for Normal Women is heavily influenced by a particular kind of cheeky, ironic internet culture that many young LGBTQ2S+ people will be familiar with. In fact, Jones admits that being extremely online is a part of her songwriting process. “A lot of my songs start out as tweets. I’ve been on Twitter for 10 years and I feel like it’s been a really good way of practising concise writing. I make a tweet and then think, ‘That should be a chorus, I’m going to build a song around that.’”
Weaving together silliness in equal parts with emotional vulnerability is a common combo throughout the album; it seems like this might be a good recipe for cheesiness, but somehow Jones keeps things from feeling tacky. This might be because the songs are self-aware without being self-deprecating; ironic while remaining honest. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, but she nails it.
“Gamer” is a perfect example of this. The song features rolling, shaking percussion matched with airy textures and a sky of distant robotic bleeps and bloops, like you’re stuck inside of an arcade game and someone’s rhythmically, tenderly, pushing buttons above. Though emotionally dense and ethereal, “Gamer” is also topped with silly flourishes alluding to video games—it references Mortal Kombat with a “finish her!” sound effect, and turns ’90s musician Beck into a gamer, the iconic refrain to “Loser” becoming “I’m a gamer, baby, so why don’t you kill me” in the chorus.
“I wrote ‘Gamer’ to work through the most challenging part of my identity, which is being a gamer,” jokes Jones. The song has the potential to come across as cringe-inducing, like Grimes’s “Player of Games,” another pop song about a gamer, but Jones avoids that song’s mistakes (like being clearly about Elon Musk) and manages to attain the right balance between vulnerability and irony.
Pop Music for Normal Women doesn’t have one, but two, songs that are explicitly about video games, in yet another win for the gamer community. “A big part of what I was doing while making the album was playing video games to relax. When Elden Ring came out, I played like 250 hours in three months,” says Jones. On the other gaming-themed track, “If Only,” Katie Dey sings alongside Jones, or rather floats somewhere above her; Dey’s vocals haunt the track, flying above and swooping in to loosely mirror Jones as she sings, adding layers to the atmosphere of nostalgia and yearning that wraps around the song. Using video games as a thematic vehicle to talk about difficult feelings, Jones’s lyrics are heartfelt, even when there’s a Final Fantasy reference: “I own fewer human-sized swords and I miss you more than ever.”
“Motorcycle,” featuring guest production by the maximalist pop producer Geryon, showcases Jones’s ability to be silly and vulnerable in one catchy hit. Supported by Geryon’s rushing, euphoric production, Jones’s voice spins out one of the most memorable lines on the album: “every day I wake up and wish I was a Kawasaki motorcycle/ every day I wake up and wish I was a lime-green machine.” It’s a moment that embodies everything that’s great about this album: the driving, engulfing synths, Jones’s rich vocals and lyrics that are completely absurd at first, before revealing the vulnerability at their core. If you immediately pictured Born This Way’s iconic original album cover when reading those lyrics, you’re not alone, but apparently that wasn’t intentional, as Jones was unfamiliar with it until she was wrapping up the album. “I had a moment where I was trying to figure out the artwork of the album, and I thought I would do me as a motorcycle. And my friend sent me Lady Gaga’s album cover and I realized I couldn’t do that,”she laughs.
“Goblin Mindset,” with its dangerous and sexy production, is one of the main highlights of the album. It’s a bass-heavy, driving and taunting track featuring bursts of layered, distorted sound in the chorus, giving the vocals a static effect. “Goblin mindset, got my dial set all the way up to 11, I need a little bit of hell inside of my heaven,” Jones sings during the chorus above the post-punk production. Layered vocals add to the thrilling, grungy texture, including distorted echoes of lyrics that are creepy and titillating. The intensity of the song is almost funny because of its subject matter, based off of a meme about “going goblin mode” that was popular earlier in the year on the internet, and apparently with Julia Fox. Like with “Gamer” or “Motorcycle,” it’s clear that Jones is having a bit of fun, but the fun is matched with an honesty that keeps the song from feeling like it’s just a “meme song”; it’s packed with genuine feeling that drives it underneath your skin.
On her third solo album, June Jones deftly mixes cheeky humour and emotional vulnerability within poppy songs that are fun, catchy and exciting. Regardless of your gender or state of normalcy, you’ll find something to enjoy in the Melbourne musician’s exploration of loneliness, gaming and pop.
Pop Music for Normal Women is out now.
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