Powering the reckless ecstasy is a new level of emotional specificity. “#BOYLETMEKNOW” functions as both a morass of quivering sound and a sample-collage text. The ghosts of a generation of pop girls—Tinashe, Carly Rae Jepsen, Doja Cat, Kim Petras—team up to call out to a boy who won’t text Jane back. There’s a poignance to the way the music comes out as a tumble of atemporal yet strangely coherent stems, mirroring the way memory can work.
Elsewhere, on “GET UGLY,” Jane channels Zara Larsson for what feels like a sci-fi manifesto depicting music-making and performance as a body-bloodying struggle akin to mortal combat. “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this? Messy like this?” Larsson chants, her voice ripping apart in the smog of metal riffs and flesh-eating kicks. These tracks are basically Jane assembling a who’s-who of dream dinner guests and serving them a gourmet bomb. No one is spared: Waka Flocka Flame and Janet Jackson, SOPHIE and underscores, Pokemon and Donkey Kong and Counter:Strike characters all get blown up as Jane collapses the boundaries between regions and genres, mainstream and niche.
status update music trickled out in the form of loosies every few weeks, allowing listeners time to relish every cluttered detonation. Taken as a whole, the album’s polyrhythmic frenzy sometimes feels more numbing than electrifying. Compared to previous leroy releases, the tracks are longer (some reach nearly six minutes), more overproduced, and brasher; it’s not so much a dopamine IV drip but a full-on hydro cannon. By the fourth or fifth rawstyle freakout, the beats start to feel like an iron mallet whacking your brain. Jane could’ve lightened the load by pulling from leroy’s bag of tricks, like the completely unexpected genre switch-ups that decorated dariacore 3, or dariacore 2’s better ratio of goofy levity to ballistic drops. Instead, you have to wait patiently for the CPU-cooling piano and acoustic guitar comedown that hits two-thirds of the way through “CHASE THIS FEELING” or the glittery Willow cover on the closer.
Jane has described status update music as “my life as I lived it from may 2025 to may 2026,” a period that encompasses their Revengeseekerz tour—and the album’s exhilarated and exhausted feel probably reflects Jane’s long year of no-holds-barred mosh warfare. Indeed, some titles directly reference Jane’s near-fetishization of stage rage (“CROWDKILLING 101”) and tracks sputter with fan noise culled from sets and relevant samples: “I’m gonna need you guys to make out with the person that’s next to you,” goes a hyped-up Miley Cyrus at the start of the gale-force “LOVE.ANGEL.MUSIC.BABY.”
Last month at Coachella, Jane Remover “collaborated” with leroy for the first time with a piece of that song, taking the speakers to pound town with a doomsday “leroy remix” of their ♡ EP’s pillowtalky “Music Baby.” “KILL EACH OTHER!” Jane howled on the biggest stage of their career as kicks rained over the crowd and influencer types probably ducked for cover or got baptized. Between the flickering lights, on the edge of the stage, I thought for a second that I caught a ghost dancing giddily—the spirit of leroy finally escaping the screen.
