The Cork artist turns poetry, anger and the invisible weight people carry into a collision of alt-R&B, soul, jazz and spoken word.
There is something immediately likeable about an artist who can move from discussing societal pressure, mental health and sexual violence to wanting to “frolic away from smelly men.”
Welcome to the world of Jena, a Cork artist whose music sits somewhere between alt-R&B, soul, jazz and spoken word, although trying to contain what she does within a tidy genre description rather misses the point.
Before there were songs, there were poems.
Jena had spent years writing poetry privately before deciding in 2020 that those words needed somewhere else to go. Music became the next step, and the writing that had previously existed in silence began finding its way into songs.
That origin remains audible in her work. There is a distinctly writerly quality to how Jena approaches music, with the words carrying as much weight as the production around them. For her, music is a place to examine what happens inside people’s heads when the outside world becomes unbearable.
“I create music on the basis that people who have to carry these invisible burdens don’t have to feel it alone,” she explains.
Those burdens can be intensely personal, but Jena isn’t particularly interested in separating the personal from the political.
Mental health, suicide, women’s experiences, violence and the pressures people absorb from the societies around them all enter the work. Then, occasionally, she would simply like to escape the whole bloody lot of it and go outside.
Fair enough.
‘Sick’ Came From Being Completely Fed Up
Her recent single “sick” emerged from anger.
Jena describes writing it as war and political upheaval dominated the news, while stories concerning Jeffrey Epstein, women’s civil liberties and violence across the world left her increasingly frustrated by what she was witnessing both online and off.
Eventually, she had enough.
Rather than carefully constructing a political statement, Jena allowed that frustration to come out almost in real time. She estimates that around 80 per cent of “sick” was freestyled, with only 20 per cent formally written.
That is interesting for an artist who began with poetry.
The poet who once spent years privately constructing words is now also willing to abandon the page and trust whatever arrives at the microphone.
There is urgency in that method. Sometimes anger becomes less interesting when it has been polished to death. Jena isn’t attempting to provide listeners with a manifesto or tell them precisely what conclusions to reach.
“I hope she makes you feel something,” she says of the track.
That’s a considerably more interesting ambition.
Making Something From What We Don’t Talk About
There is another project beginning to take shape behind the scenes, and it could take Jena’s work beyond recorded music.
She is currently developing a new song and project alongside plans for an event for women in Ireland who have experienced sexual violence. It is still developing, and Jena isn’t giving everything away yet, but the idea feels consistent with the reason she started making music in the first place.
Her songs aren’t concerned only with what happens to people.
They’re interested in what people are forced to carry afterwards.
Sexual violence is one of those subjects society has become considerably better at publicly condemning while remaining far less comfortable dealing with the complicated reality experienced by the people who survive it.
Creating spaces in which women can speak, listen, make art or simply recognise their own experience in somebody else’s is a different proposition from turning trauma into a slogan.
For Jena, music appears to offer precisely that kind of space.
From Poetry Written in Silence to Something Much Louder
There is an appealing lack of polish to the way Jena describes herself.
Not the music itself, but the machinery artists are increasingly expected to build around it.
The perfectly sanitised biography. The approved talking points. The relentlessly aspirational social feeds. The requirement to transform yourself into a marketable proposition before anyone has even listened to the record.
Jena instead talks about invisible burdens, political rage, poetry, nature, women’s experiences and escaping smelly men.
Good.
Irish music has never suffered from having too many artists with something genuine to say. What began as poetry written privately has become music intended to reach other people carrying things nobody else can see. And if “sick” is any indication of where Jena is heading next, she doesn’t appear particularly interested in making herself smaller, quieter or more comfortable for anyone else’s benefit.
Stay tuned, as the woman herself would say, ye ledgebags.
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