Parents who, like me, hear sounds from their distant youth now celebrated by their kids might well wonder if the same labels apply. Case in point: what does “New Wave” mean anymore? Unsure if younger generations even know the genre, I asked myself that question recently as I spoke to the founders of Above Jupiter, a young band in every sense of the word. Instead of breaking out my retro categories, I asked them what they would call the choppy, stomping, synth-tinged, and hook-filled music they made — so reminiscent of sounds that captivated me in the 1980s. Graham Burks III, the group’s singer and drummer, didn’t miss a beat. “We’ve been calling it art pop.”
To clarify, he added, “We’re trying to make popular enjoyable music that doesn’t really fit into a category. It’s our own art. Other artists that used that label have been like, DEVO and David Bowie — artists that are hard to fit into a specific genre.”
Those two acts are perfect reference points for the fundamentals of their sound, as are influences they list on their website like Talking Heads, Beck, and Gorillaz. The end result is a beat-driven soundscape with equal parts slashing guitar, skronky synth, and cool singing that lives in a kind of timeless pop utopia. And it’s not only timeless, it’s literally ageless. One would never guess that these musicians are all between 14 and 16 years old.
Photo by Justin Fox Burks
Their debut single was celebrated last December in Chris McCoy’s Music Video Monday column for the Memphis Flyer.
“‘Details’ is a super catchy rock song about ‘going off the rails’ if you don’t have the basics nailed now, which these kids definitely do,” McCoy wrote, noting that the group’s bassist and co-founder Noah Hand directed the video, being “a recent Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival alum who learned to animate at Cloud901.”
“I do film,” Hand told me, “and the video was all directed and written by me. I’m really glad how that turned out. It’s all my vision.”
The band, which also includes Zariya Scullark on guitar and Desmond Coppin on keys, was started by Burks and Hand. “We were in fourth grade or fifth grade when we put together our first project, which was going to be a duo called the Breeze,” Burks noted. “That didn’t end up working out, but around that time we recorded four songs as demos. And as time went on we got our two other band members and the songs have just evolved into what they are now.”
As it turns out, all four of the musical wunderkinder attend the Stax Music Academy, but that’s been peripheral to the band’s formation. As Burks explained, “We all happen to attend Stax Academy but I wouldn’t say that the band was formed through Stax Academy. I mean, I’ve been playing with Desmond since I was four, and we were in our first band together. So really, it’s just a coincidence that we all ended up at Stax and I think it’s just because that’s a really amazing music program.”
Photo by Justin Fox Burks
Hand added, “I feel like the music of Stax and all that stuff that we play over there correlates with our music and affects us. The way we evolved was through that music. And I’m very glad that we have that outlet, because it helps us learn the basics.”
That may be overly modest, as the group certainly leveled up from “basic” a while ago. Burks’ father, Graham Burks II, is also a celebrated musician around town, with a solo career of his own and a studio in his back house. He told me that “their listener base outside of Memphis and around the world has grown with each new release. They’ve had over 16,000 listeners around the world stream their music over 36,000 times.”
Certainly there’s some serious training and talent behind the group’s home-recorded tracks. Exhibit A was their debut EP, Demo, released this January. Given the polished final product, and the futuristic shimmer of tracks like “Meteor Beach” and “Midnight Sun,” that release’s title is somewhat ironic.
“The title track, ‘Demo,’ is something that we would show aspiring members of the band when we were trying to recruit them,” the younger Burks told me. “‘Demo’ was always the working title of that piece, because it’s a demo of what we’re trying to go for. We were running with that title for long enough that it just kind of stuck. And I feel like it was a pretty interesting choice to make the title track of the EP an instrumental song. That means we can go in more directions with the EP instead of being locked into the style of a title track. Not everything has to be the same.”
That EP was ultimately incorporated into the band’s self-titled full-length album, released this May. The shimmering, glossy-yet-surreal pop is even more evident in the newer collection, including as it does such tracks as the single “Lizard Freeway,” which asks the musical question, “Would you trust a lizard with a steering wheel?”
Meanwhile, album opener “Falling Archipelago” goes way beyond the rush of the highway and opts instead for full-on world-building. As a synth wash opens like dawn through the forest, synthetic bird chirps herald the airy strum of folk-rock guitar. That’s just before the drums crescendo and propel the whole thing back into high velocity — the band has created a world, only to promptly launch into orbit around it.
There are plenty more sonic surprises on the full-length release as well, ranging from the funk-rock of “Paranoid on Purpose” to the swinging “Skeleton Jazz Band.” As drummer Burks himself quipped, “Not everything has to be the same.” With that sentiment as a mission statement, expect a lot more not-the-same music from these young folks in the future.