Every band has an origin story, but Jawdropped's is more like an ultimatum. The accompanying notes to their debut album carry bassist Sean Edwards' account of the moment the four of them stopped pretending there was a plan B worth having. "We'd all beaten the dead horse of being in a local band," he says, "booking DIY tours and sleeping in punk houses. Narrowing in on 30 years old, shit ain't never worked, and you could either go work for Facebook or be a waiter - but we were like, 'Fuck it, let's do it.'"
Two years on, and "fuck it" is doing remarkably well. There's a deal with Transgressive, the label that, alongside many storied legends of modern alternative music, gave the world Rocket and Greg Freeman, both of whom Jawdropped have run around America with. There's a debut album, 'Secret To Spare', arriving on 18th September. There's a first UK tour already banked, and a new single, 'Cup', out nowish. For a band built from years of going not much of anywhere quickly across various projects, they're covering a suspicious amount of ground.
The speed of it all only looks sudden from the outside, though. This is a band where everybody has already made every mistake somewhere less visible. "We've only been a band for about two years," they point out, "but before that each of us had been playing around LA in various projects for the better part of a decade."
It explains the confidence of last year's 'Just Fantasy' EP, five songs of scuffed, sun-warmed guitar pop that turned heads far faster than anyone expected, the band included. "The response exceeded all our expectations," they admit. "When we started the band, we just wanted to make the songs we felt like making, and put them out. The biggest lesson we learned was to trust ourselves and to try to keep the outside noise out."
The album followed at once, some of it already written before the EP had even landed. The mission this time, they explain, was "to continue to develop the niche we had begun to carve out for ourselves on 'Just Fantasy', and learn how to write together as a band." It was recorded the stubborn way: self-produced and played live in a room. Assembled in spare days and weekends between tours and day jobs, it was then handed over to Alex Farrar, the mixer behind Wednesday and MJ Lenderman to finish. What survived is the thing most debuts accidentally manage to polish away in an attempt to be the big, shiny thing that convinces mum and dad that it is a proper job, after all. "I think the record has a certain looseness that feels very authentic to the way we play live," they say. "There's this slight push and pull at times that keeps things feeling real and not too fussed over."
"Have gratitude and enjoy the moment, because it definitely fluctuates"
Underneath the looseness sits a hard and fast rule, stated plainest in those album notes by Edwards: "If it doesn't work on an acoustic guitar with just Kyra and Roman singing, it doesn't work at all. We try to shed any pretension and mysteriousness in favour of to-the-point sincerity. So much shit is ironic right now, but we mean it."
What they mean it about, mostly, is other people. These are songs full of overheard conversations, bar-stool soap operas and friends of friends who nearly made it. "Inspiration is everywhere," the response comes, and what the people don't offer up, the city tops up. Los Angeles runs through 'Secret To Spare' the way it runs through everyone who moves there, all sunshine radiation and often something a little less jaunty underneath. The band know exactly which song holds their clearest picture of it. "It's probably 'Cup'," they say of the new single. "It touches on the way LA chews up and spits out so many of its brightest prospects. It's a theme we're really drawn to." They're inside that theme now, not above or outside it, surrounded by brilliant people at every altitude of the climb. "It's humbling for sure. We're surrounded by so many creative people enjoying varying degrees of success at all times. It's a reminder to have gratitude and enjoy the moment, because it definitely fluctuates!"
The secret about rising bands is that the idea of the partially realised dream arrives long before the money does, if it does at all. Has the reality matched what they imagined as kids? "Let's just say, economically, it's way harder, and a lot less glamorous. Sometimes it feels like trying to squeeze the last drop out of something that's already been wrung dry. But at the same time, it's incredibly exciting to get to experience these things we've been dreaming about since we were kids. Crossing off the proverbial 'bucket list'."
Britain got its first crossing-off in May: The Great Escape, the Brudenell, London's George Tavern, and a Dot To Dot date in Nottingham on Dork's own stage, where we can confirm the band-in-a-room thing checks out. They're back in the autumn too, with Sheffield, London, Southampton and Bristol dates wrapped around the album. Before any of that, there's the small matter of the best compliment anyone could pay this record, and it has nothing to do with charts, streaming stats or being the next anything. "That it feels uniquely our voice," they say. They should be expecting to feel very happy, very often.
Today, though, there is no tour van and no day job. They are, by their own account, at home in LA, "drinking water, watching TV, chilling". Rock and roll can wait until September; hydration cannot. They sign off with thanks, and a promise: "More soon…" We'll hold them to it.
Jawdropped's debut album 'Secret To Spare' is out 18th September.
