You may know Sean Neumann either from his guitar playing in the Midwest emo collective Ratboys or from his work profiling Bill Nye for Rolling Stone—but in addition to these commitments, he puts out solo music under the moniker Jupiter Styles. Following the debut record he put out just over a year ago, Neumann has revealed the next chapter in the Jupiter Styles saga, Ultra St. Opera, which is set to be released October 25.
As breezy as its power-pop riffs suggest it could be, Ultra is an album weighed down with grief—particularly feelings attached to aging and growing apart from loved ones, and even the death of friends. Inspired by an incident when Neumann reached out to a friend via text only to learn later that that friend had passed away, the record is as lyrically uncertain as its melodies are infectious, blending the blissful pop of Young Guv with the lo-fi charm of Radiator Hospital.
“Two thousand fucking friends now / Ain’t a one wanna hear from me,” Neumann sings on lead single “Haunted,” a particularly distressed—yet jaunty—track, which sees the songwriter dealing with blips of amnesia on a daily basis. “Sometimes small mishaps like forgetting someone’s name or losing track of what I’m working on can make me feel like I’m possessed by something that’s stripping away my life from the inside out,” he explains. “It can be absolutely terrifying to always question who you really are, what you’re capable of, and what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.”
Yet there’s always a silver lining: “Every once in a while there’s an eye in the middle of the storm—you know, something that says, ‘Fuck it. This is how it is.’—where you can find a calmness in accepting who you are and how you are, even with all the deflating loneliness or never-ending worry flying by around you.”
Ultra St. Opera is out October 25 on Rat King Records. You can pre-order it here.
