Jamie Irrepressible’s creative guise The Irrepressibles returns with fourth album ‘Yo Homo!’. A punk-rock indie-rock and often symphonic new sound world. Known for his highly emotionally charged works this album is no exception – yet the emotion here is sexy, dancy, witty, and occasionally queer-political. ‘Yo Homo!’ will be released through Of Naked Design records on the 27th September 2024 and can be pre-saved HERE.
The Irrepressibles is the creative guise of composer, vocalist, and producer Jamie Irrepressible. Jamie Irrepressible has never, for a second, shied away from making sexuality the storyboard of his vision, from ‘Two Men In Love’ to ‘The Most Beautiful Boy’. But his new album, simply and boldly titled ‘Yo Homo!’, is the most direct, and the most sexual, Irrepressibles record yet; a thrilling, celebratory, uninhibited, and steamy rush of lust and love, honesty and community.
Says Jamie, “I wanted to make a record specifically for the queer community, to create a safe space where people feel they are being expressed. To contribute something to that soundtrack of our lives, both in the music and the videos”.
“With my earlier songs, like ‘In This Shirt’, I focussed on beauty, to inspire a sense of connection and compassion to homosexual love with the work, in the wider world, but this is very much about expressing the homosexual experience. I believe it’s important that music should be authentic. ”
Composed and produced by Jamie, ‘Yo Homo!’ is equally the most sinewy and visceral Irrepressibles record yet, the first to embrace the energy and of Jamie’s indie-rock roots. It’s a unique, spacious and slow burning blend, infused and alchemised with the exquisite melody and beauty of preceding Jamie Irrepressible’s records, including the gilding presence of strings. ‘Yo Homo!’ unfurls 11 tracks both lavish and taut, crowned by Jamie’s gorgeously deep voice, tough and swooning, naturally vibrato and capable of falsetto flight.
Immediate proof is offered by the new single, which doubles as the album’s finale – ‘Ecstasy Homosexual’, a song of palpably erotic power (“He’s leading me up to a feeling that’s so sublime”) with slow, epic brushstrokes of guitar and drums, building to a symphonic crescendo, and finally a few seconds of calm. The video, directed by Berlin-based queer couple Container Love, shows footage of the original Gay Lib movement of the early ‘70s bookending carnal scenes of four young men who are reaping the freedoms earned by their pioneering ancestors.
What Jamie describes as “a new era” of Irrepressibles was launched in early 2024 with the single – and ‘Yo Homo!’ album intro – ‘Will You?’ with its music video of a sensual pas de deux between real-life lovers, directed by Will Kennedy. Gorgeously heavy and serpentine, driven by bassy dynamics and blood-quickening imagery – “Will you take me home… like a handsome strapping cowboy / like a dirty f*cking animal” – “’Will You’ is about an encounter: the homosexual allure, the intensity of desire,” says Jamie. “The fear is in the strings… the sexual tension in the drums… and the drive in the bass and distorted guitars. It’s a track that lifts from intensity to abandon.”
Two more singles – both on ‘Yo Homo!’ – followed. First, the title track, ‘Yo Homo’ a quiet-to-loud and slow-to-fast dynamic like a Queens Of The Queer Age in the tale of a child taught to be, “wrong,” bursting forth, free at last to be who he always was, and its matching video of costumed renegades directed by queer activist and drag performer Joseph Wilson (a still from which provides ‘Yo Homo!’s album).
Next up was ‘Be Wild’, a lighter version of Irrepressibles heaviness starting with a levitating baritone guitar riff, and another multicast video depicting an impressionist and erogenous slice of queer nightlife, like some East London version of a Jean Genet mise-en-scène, directed by queer artist, activist and drag performer Joseph Wilson.
Future singles (all with accompanying videos) are ‘In The Rhythm’, the album’s longest song at over seven undulating minutes with Jamie’s crunching riff, and ‘Destination’, which feels exactly as a cruisy nightclub looks, all sweat and glances and bodies, with Jamie’s breathy vocal and bass pulse leading to a sublime orchestrated coda. “Destination is about isolation due to being introverted and these times of fleeting sexual encounters and the longing for a destination for one’s love,” says Jamie (“Will you come and give my love a destination? / Oh Mr these days love don’t seem so clever / maybe it won’t last forever” ).
Completing ‘Yo Homo!’ are ‘Raise My Soul’, inspired by Jamie’s first time in a gay bar, aged 18, which rocks hard but adds a tranquil gospel coda; ‘So!’, where sawing strings drive a riff as mighty as Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’; the dramatic highs and lows of a relationship explored in the delicate pizzicato strings of ‘Two Hearts’; the intense dynamic of ‘Connection’ highlights, “all the things we do to impress and obfuscate from what we deeply want from each other – emotional and intellectual connection”; and the album’s sole instrumental, the becalmed, Morricone-esque ‘The Desert’.
‘Yo Homo!’ doesn’t sound like punk rock, but its roots are fed by the punk bands that Jamie formed in his teens – “and didn’t the original meaning of the word ‘punk’ mean ‘gay?” he says. “Why not make a punk record that realigns that? To push the envelope and challenge.” The album’s roots are there too in the grunge records on teenage Jamie’s turntable, and in his falling for the late Jeff Buckley, whose twist on rock assimilated everything from Led Zeppelin to French chanson. Other influences on ‘Yo Homo!’ are spiritual more than musical. Jamie hears, “the swagger of Manchester” especially in ‘Be Wild’ and, “the industrial buildings that connect to New York architecture. I was thinking of [poet] Allen Ginsberg and that initial queer liberation.” Lou Reed’s album ‘Transformer’, especially the brazen (for its time) imagery of ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, Iggy’s Stooges, and Peaches all somehow figure in ‘Yo Homo!’ in its musical muscle, daring dialogue and godlike guitar.
To celebrate the album, The Irrepressibles hit the road in late September, which includes a performance at The Old Market in Hove on 15th October, where they will present songs exclusively from this new era of Jamie’s work; the set will in no way be retrospective. With a line up of drums and percussion, electric guitars, piano, electric bass, and violin, viola, cello, double bass with backing and lead vocals expect a standing show to move your body to. The official line up of musicians will be announced in September.
The Irrepressibles tour dates:
29/09/2024 – Manchester, Gorilla (Homobloc show)
03/10/2024 – Bristol The Fleece
05/10/24 – Leeds, The Wardrobe
06/10/24 – London 100 Club
08/10/24 – The Black Box, Belfast
09/10/24 – Edinburgh Mash House
10/10/24 – Birmingham Hare & Hounds
11/10/24 – Oxford, upstairs O2
15/10/24 – Brighton The Old Market
17/10/24 – Berlin, Germany – Gretchen Club
19 /10/24 – Tblisi, Georgia – Mono Hall
Tickets for all dates can be located HERE and tickets for The Old Market concert can also be purchased HERE.
www.linktr.ee/theirrepressibles
