Jakob Nowell releases a new anthem of insouciance dubbed ‘2 Hours Ago’ from his solo project Jakobs Castle – set to release its galvanizing debut album ‘Enter: The Castle’ on April 12th via Epitaph Records.
The hyperpop-adjacent song echoes nostalgia for the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude of 90s punk rock, but filtered through Nowell’s casual, irreverent musicality. “What I think is cool about punk rock music wasn’t just the sounds, it was the ideal, the realness. And there’s nothing more real than kids making insane-sounding music in their bedrooms nowadays,” Nowell explains. “I wanted to capture that spirit, that DIYness, and mold it into a song that has genuine heart behind it.” On the surface, the song’s lyrics offer a lesson in the art of being unbothered – written about a drunken girlfriend that just couldn’t get her act together. But digging deeper, he lowers the drawbridge into the mind of an intelligent, wildly interesting songwriter.
Created with producer and co-collaborator Jon Joseph (Børns, Caroline Rose), Nowell describes each song on ‘Enter: The Castle’ like an experiment. He’s not chasing trends or trying to make music that fits into a mold. His songs are a weird amalgamation of his favorite, often contrary, things – like transforming Japanese instruments into guitar-sounding upstrokes or turning a melody from a weird piece of emo-rap reverb. “The goal of the project is infiltration. I want to infiltrate different scenes and make very weird music that is also palatable,” he said.