Jutes is ready to crank it up.
When Revolver catches up with the mononymed L.A.-based artist, he’s talking from home in his “Shroom Room,” a vibrant and vibey hideaway with silvery-shimmery curtains and a multi-colored tapestry of mauves and ceruleans overhead.
As soon as he wraps the call, though, Jutes will be hitting the mic to rehearse songs off his new Dilworth album for an upcoming tour. The LP vaults from sensual alt-metal (“Parasite”) to distorted-but-pop-forward ballads (“The End”) to uproarious rap-rocking (“One of Us”). His kaleidoscopic vocal range includes brood-heavy crooning, monstrous screams and passionately moaned passages. And in his downtime, he keeps the playlist just as eclectic.
“I’m one of those people that really does just keep running back to old Deftones and Smashing Pumpkins albums,” he says. “I listen to a lot of stuff that I grew up on, all the time… [but] I really like Thornhill. The new Turnstile is very cool, very vibey. I was bumping the Clipse album.
“I listen to a lot of music, but then I also try to turn my brain off,” he adds. “I try to meditate every day. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Let me do this 10-minute drive to the chiropractor in silence,’ just to look at stuff and not [need] this dopamine rush everywhere I go, whether it’s looking at my phone or listening to music. So, yeah, I listen to stuff… but I also live under a rock at the same time.”
On the off-chance you’ve been living under a rock yourself, Jutes has spent the past couple of years making a glorious name for himself with his thrill ride of pop, alt-rock and nu-metal, first surging into the collective consciousness through last year’s Sleepyhead album. This year, Dilworth singles like his “Red Velvet” collab with Brooklyn singer Ari Abdul have clocked more than four million views and counting. Though he’s a rising presence and quickly becoming a cultural force, it took time for Jutes’ true self to surface.
The Canadian musician was raised in a rural town just outside of Ottawa, Ontario, thousands of miles away from the flash of L.A. “I grew up on a farm, basically,” he explains. “We didn’t grow crops or anything like that, but we had horses, and llamas, pigs, goats, chickens. A couple emus.”
Despite the isolation, Jutes grew up loving music and basketball — he hooped on a dirt road that had a 2×4 with a net bolted to it. He also had aspirations to become a rapper early on in his musical career, and eventually moved to Toronto — the country’s biggest metropolis — to work on his bars. His dreams only got bigger, which is what led to him making the trip to California.
Josh Flores
While in L.A., he started crashing on people’s couches and working on music with anyone he could. Eventually, this is how he collaborated with pop star Demi Lovato — even more important than the artistic connection, the two fell in love. They’re now married.
Jutes’ journey from his small town to the City of Angels is chronicled across Dilworth — its de facto title track, “Left on Dilworth” is a shout-out to his old neighborhood, plus a paean to the ambition that got him where he is today (“When the black sheep leaves the nest, there’s no coming back/I found the cure to happiness and now my bags are packed”). The wide-scope album also alludes to overcoming one’s demons, succumbing to your carnal desires, and contemplating mortality. To give us Dilworth, he had to get away from Dilworth.
“You had to turn left on Dilworth to get to my place, but also, my innocence was left on Dilworth,” he explains. “When I left Dilworth, the world got a lot bigger — a lot of darker influences, a lot of partying, a lot of depression, [and] a lot of finding my way on my own in a big city, and leaving everything that I knew behind.”
Speaking with Revolver, Jutes reflects on growing his art while going darker and heavier than ever, self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism, and what it’s like to bounce song ideas off of the love of his life.
There’s been an evolution to your sound — from the rap-styled Really Bad Dream era of a few years back, into Sleepyhead, and now into Dilworth. What can you tell us about finding the heaviness within that sound, which you’ve increasingly been leaning towards?
Jutes I think it goes hand-in-hand with me removing myself from what I think is cool and popular. I think a lot of my [old] music doesn’t feel that authentic. I mean… some of the stuff I’m talking about in that old music before Sleepyhead is so wild. Like, talking about having all this money? [I was] just doing what I saw other people doing, and seeing what worked. I was trying to fit into something.
Sleepyhead happened after I made a full album that I ended up scrapping, which was meant to appease radio. I was trying to make radio music when I just needed to make something niche for myself. Like, it doesn’t have to be something popular. It doesn’t have to be a hit. The chorus doesn’t have to be catchy. I just wanted to make something that I liked, [so] I started leaning heavier, and I was OK with it not doing well. I just needed to express myself. That’s when I made Sleepyhead, and that’s what changed everything for me. It ended up being on the radio, which is the most ironic part of it.
For a lot of the time that I’ve been in L.A., heavy music — rock music — wasn’t dominating the charts like it used to. It started to have this moment, and then it dipped, and now it’s back.
For so long, I was like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” I was signed to Capitol Records for a bit, and even they were like, “All your production should be trap, and then in your live show you have guitars and a drummer.” Nobody wanted rock music, and so I was listening to that, as opposed to just doing what I wanted to do.
The second I started leaning into the heavier stuff — going back to [what I liked] when I was a kid — everything changed for me.
What kind of stuff were you listening to as a kid?
So, my dad was a drummer, and he raised me on rock music. I was into rock before I ever got into hip-hop. It was a lot of Eighties rock. Like, we would listen to Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses. And I grew up in the Nineties, so obviously there was Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and a lot of that grungy sound. That definitely appealed to me more than the glam.
I ended up getting into the Chili Peppers, and I loved Third Eye Blind, but then I ended up getting into hip-hop because I started playing basketball and wanted to be in the NBA.
I was late to Deftones. My college roommate was obsessed with Deftones, and so he put me onto them. I was still into hip-hop, but I was like, “This has hip-hop elements — the grooves are hip-hop, but then we have this really heavy music.”
And in high school, I was also really into Disturbed and Three Days Grace. I explored all over the place, and now I feel like I mix all of it together, because there’s elements of my music that is for sure from the hip-hop days, but then there’s elements of Deftones [or RHCP vocalist] Anthony Kiedis.
Weirdly enough, a lot of people praise my singing these days, [but] I never was a singer growing up. I was inspired by Anthony Kiedis or [Third Eye Blind’s] Steven Jenkins — people that I feel had very unique voices. They weren’t insanely talented singers where it’s pitch perfect. It was a swagger in their voice, and in their cadence. So, I always aimed for that.
Reflecting on that, there are points on this record where your vocals shine with high-tenor gravitas, but you also bring a lot of swagger to “One of Us,” which is one of the more aggressive pieces on Dilworth. It’s an almost sassy performance…
Yeah, it’s kind of like Rage Against the Machine meets Limp Bizkit. It’s definitely more like a true nu-metal vibe where, again, I loved rapping. When I started making music, I was a rapper. Singing was not even on the radar. I wasn’t singing my hooks. I wasn’t singing anything. And I loved fast, intricate rapping.
On songs like “One of Us”… first of all, I feel like my show right now is very ethereal and very much vibe-based. It’s heavy, it’s emotional and it’s sexy, but it’s also vibey. So, I was like, “I do want something to mosh to, to wild out [and] just be unhinged.” So, one of us [in the studio] was like, “[We] should bring back the rapping shit.” To not use the rapping ever seemed like a shame, so [it] was me mixing those two things. Like, let’s do the big, soaring, classic chorus that everybody likes, and then let’s do some super in-your-face, ignorant, crazy verses.
This is a personal record, but as you’ve been promoting it on Instagram, you’ve brought out a jokey, self-deprecating tone to your posts — like writing about showing up to the Warped Tour to “trauma dump in front of thousands of people.” Have you always been the kind of person to be that vulnerable in public?
That took a long time for me. I never did therapy growing up, [but] definitely should have. In the Nineties, and in the small town that I lived in, it just wasn’t really a thing. [So,] it took me a long time to get there.
At first, when [my music] was on a very small scale, the people around me were like, “Oh, maybe this is how he actually feels?” But I’d be like, “It’s just the music. I’m just making songs.” But they were pretty dark, and they were [actually] about me going through stuff.
…It’s kind of like a muscle. Anything that you do enough times you start to get more comfortable with it. With the live show… you’re actually seeing people [in the crowd] that have the same issues, and seeing what it means to them. I want to help people, and I want to connect with people, so that takes the fear away from being that vulnerable.
I’ve always been self-deprecating. My humor is self-deprecation. I feel like a lot of people who struggle with depression use comedy, and try to make light of the really heavy stuff that they’re going through, which is another thing I’ve always done.
Josh Flores
This can be a pretty horny album, as well, with song like “SMUT” and “Parasite.” In your interview with us earlier in the year, you talked about loving a “gnarly sex jam.” What’s the drive behind embracing that sensuality?
I mean… I’m definitely a sexual person. I love emotional songs, and it always seems like my favorite music has that dark, heavy kind of sexual energy. I try to channel any emotion that I’m feeling strongly, and if it is sexual, I’m like, “Alright, let’s go all the way with it.” And if it’s emotional, I really spill my guts on the track.
It’s just fun to be gnarly sometimes.
You also embrace a really disgusting groove in the “Parasite” breakdown. What’s the heaviest moment on Dilworth to you?
I think that the end of “Parasite” has to be the heaviest moment on the album.
I tend to sing over everything, even breakdowns. But this time I was like, “I’m just gonna scream.” Like, “Let’s just blow it out [and] make it a crazy moment.”
I played [“Parasite”] on the last tour I just did. It was unreleased at the time, so no one knew it, but people were just instinctively moshing. I wasn’t even really telling them to. It just invoked that energy in the room. So, mission accomplished with that!
I was [also] like, “I need to get out of the way and just let the breakdown be the breakdown.” Because I’m a solo artist, and I come from such a solo artist world, I’m insecure about letting a part be instrumental. But if I was in a band, that would be so normal. Like, it would be insane for me to sing over every single part!
Me and my producer are so close, we do everything together. It feels like we’re a band when we’re in the studio. So, I was like, “This is your time to shine, just go crazy and make it disgusting.”
You’ve worked with your wife, Demi, in the past. Did she contribute to Dilworth?
She’s definitely my muse. I write about her all the time — all the good stuff, and the sexy stuff… not the dark, sad stuff.
We didn’t write any songs together for Dilworth, but I was writing the other day and [got] stuck, [so I started] FaceTiming her. When I hit writer’s block, or if she hits writer’s block, we just talk it out and throw ideas at each other [to] see if anything sparks.
She’ll forever be my main inspiration in everything. I think love is the most universal inspiration for music — she’s always going to be woven through a lot of my music. [At least] when I’m not taking a trip down memory lane into my darker past, which I do because it feels therapeutic.
Does she have a favorite song on the record?
She loved “The End.”
What is the song about?
The song is about dying. I get scared to write about death so much, but it naturally happens… I’ve lost people close to me, and they’re on my mind sometimes when I’m in the studio.
I like to write songs that are kind of like… it could be a breakup song, it could be you saying goodbye to a vice, it could be [about] somebody that’s dying. Sometimes [with] a record, I will be like, “This is the inspiration for me… but let me make sure that I’m not so specific in my writing that it can only be about this one thing.” I like to be ambiguous.
I feel like a lot of stuff’s incredibly literal these days, with TikTok and the 15-second clip era. You’ve got be so to-the-point, but my favorite stuff is the ambiguous stuff.
How has maintaining your sobriety impacted the way you write or interpret music?
It’s so helpful. Before I was sober, I thought I had to be, like, completely broken… like, “I do a job that you can [only] do drunk, or under the influence of whatever.” So, I’d justify [substance abuse] like that. I thought that I had to be in pain all the time to write music that resonated with other people that are struggling.
And then when I got sober, my brain was so clear. I’m so focused now on what I need to do. I’m not escaping real life anymore, and I realized the memories are there. Like, I lived through all of that stuff, so I can write songs about the places that I’ve been.
…I will say, going out sucks now. [Laughs] A lot of people that get sober are like, “You can have just as much fun when you’re sober”, and I’m like, “Well… I don’t know about that.” Social anxiety is something that I struggle with, and playing the live shows definitely challenges that — especially doing the VIP meet-and-greets. It’s intense to be sober in these social situations with people you’re just meeting.
I don’t go out as much anymore, but my life… it’s not even comparable how much better it is now. I want to live long. I want to be healthy when I’m old. A lot of things matter to me now that didn’t matter to me when I was younger.
Such as?
Such as being healthy for my wife. Like, not destroying my body and then having her deal with that when I get older. I don’t want to put her through that. I want to enjoy my life with her for as long as I possibly can. I’m looking forward to being old and retired, just traveling and adventuring around doing little side quests. That stuff matters to me now. But when I was younger, it was like, “Who gives a shit what happens to me when I’m older? All that matters is right now. I’m a rock star.”
I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t want the last part of my life to be painful, or taken from me because of carelessness. [And] I’ve partied so many times… there’s not really that many new nights to have. Like, I’ve done it.
What are the biggest differences between the Sleepyhead era and what you’re doing now with Dilworth?
These two albums almost feel like a part one/part two, because it’s a sound that was born for me with Sleepyhead. I just wanted to expand on that, solidify that sound, and not bail on it and switch it up [immediately].
I’ve switched it up so many times in my career, [but] I feel like I’m finally home. So, I want to stay home for a bit.
Order Jutes’ Dilworth on limited-edition “blue galaxy marble” vinyl at Revolver’s shop, and livestream the record release show tomorrow (December 3rd) on Veeps.