The world has changed a lot since Holly Rankin dropped Sugar Mountain, her first album as Jack River, in June of 2018.
That effort condensed some 27 years of living into 13 tight and impassioned cuts of escapist dream-pop, through which she dissected, reckoned with and — ultimately — allowed herself to heal from some of the darkest traumas imaginable. Given how much of Holly’s blood, sweat and tears went into the record, fans were justified in asking: how the hell could she possibly one-up herself on LP2?
What followed feels insane to reflect on — like an apocalyptic popcorn flick so cheesy that it would have been absolutely decimated on Rotten Tomatoes. We saw the harrowing peak and catastrophic end of the Trump presidency, reams of our own political unrest under former PM Scott Morrison, the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, and then like a maraschino cherry soaked in battery acid topping a dog shit sundae, a goddamn pandemic. It’s no surprise that when she started writing it, Holly thought her second album would shape up to be “a full-on protest album”.
Raging Against The Machine With Jack River
The spark that lit the fuse was ‘We Are The Youth’, an incendiary call-to-arms she wrote after performing at a School Strike 4 Climate rally in 2019. Released in September of 2021, she dedicated it to “the billions of young people driving urgent political and social change”, who, as she described, “want to find the destiny of humanity and the planet for the rest of time”.
“I wanted to keep heading down the path I started on with that song,” Holly tells Junkee, “and make more literal commentary on what was going on. The album used to have a different name and I had a completely different vision for it, but as I started making it, I realised that I needed to escape that — my life was full of enough of those typical protest feelings and emotions. And I can wish all I want for the songs to come out a certain way, but at the end of the day, I have to kind of take my hands off the wheel and let the songs write themselves.”
Exhausted by the political stressors she’d been so ardently engaged in, Holly started reframing her vision for album two with the same lens she had for Sugar Mountain — one of whimsy and colour, galvanising her to embrace absurdity. This led her to sow the seeds for what would eventually blossom into Endless Summer, a kaleidoscopic acid trip of transgressive pop music about the slow death of our planet being expedited by climate change denialists. “I definitely have a bit of a warped way of dealing with things,” Holly concedes with a chuckle.
In adding to the sonic palette she painted with on Sugar Mountain, Holly looked to the psych-pop greats of the 1960s and ‘70s, “when there was a lot of political mayhem and societal upheaval” that mirrors much of what we’re up against now. It made sense then that she’d revisit the concept of escapism, since “there was a lot of consciously escapist music coming out of that time”. She cites The Beach Boys and The Beatles as two prime examples: “These artists were making social commentary, but they were making magical music at the same time.” See 1971’s Surf’s Up album for the former and ‘Blackbird’, ‘Revolution’ and ‘Taxman’ for the latter.
Escaping From The Machine
Holly is best known in the public eye as Jack River, the dream-pop heartthrob, but she’s just as passionate about — and active in — the fight for social justice and political reform. Across the election campaign of 2021-22, she devoted much of her energy to helping push the Liberal Party out of power, mobilising as many people as she could to secure a future for her generation and those to come. During the 2022 federal election, she worked as part of the Campaign Management team for Independent ACT Senator David Pocock, as well as a Comms/Culture Advisor to Climate 200.
It was “really intense and important” work, she asserts, and quite understandably, she found it draining. “I found songwriting to be like an exhaust pipe,” she says. “It was a place to go and escape from all of that stuff — but also take those very real, literal feelings of anxiety and all that political brain activity and do something illustrative of that in a completely different way. [Songwriting] was how I could express what I was feeling emotionally, and infuse those more universal feelings into it.” In more recent times, she worked on the Music Australia policy, serving as ARIA’s Govt and Industry liaison.
Holly has always used music for therapy. It all circles back to this concept of escapism, which she leans on in her songwriting, not so much as a crutch, but as a tool; a vehicle. In the Sugar Mountain era, she reflects, she “drastically used music as a form of escapism” — that’s precisely what made it the transcendent listening experience it was. She took it beyond the music itself, too, noting that “not only was the songwriting therapy but the album campaign itself, and the whole artistry behind that”.
“It was a way for me to feel things really directly through the songs,” she says, “but then go on to have these incredible conversations with strangers about the stuff I was feeling and the stuff they were feeling as well. And I feel the same about [Endless Summer] now. I feel like we all need a lot of therapy right now.”
She adds of her perspective on escapism as an art form: “Music and songwriting, for me, have always been about creating other worlds to go and process things [in]. That’s just like my coping mechanism — I think I really needed escapism growing up. A bit of it might also come from growing up in a small town and feeling like a weirdo with everything I was interested in, whether it was music, politics, whatever… I’ve always felt like I can’t be my complete self in this Earthly reality — which sounds kind of wack, but I guess it’s what a lot of artists do. And then it becomes a career!”
Dismantling The Machine
Holly cringes in her seat when the topic shifts to her political activism: she’s long embraced her role as a champion for social justice, and especially on Endless Summer, it’s inseparable from her artistry. But she’s hesitant to brand herself an ‘activist’ by way of that specific label. “I think the word ‘activist’ can pit you against the system in some ways,” she argues, “or make you seem really leftist and stuff.
“I do feel weird about [being called an ‘activist’] because it’s like, it assumes ‘the system’ is ‘winning’ — or the government, or whatever other forces are against you — and I don’t see myself like that at all. I feel really engaged with all types of people, and I try to remain quite apolitical — even though that might sound contradictory. I just care about stuff and I love my community, and I love being engaged in it.”
To that end, Holly is unwilling to place herself anywhere on the political spectrum, at least insofar as it exists in its current left-to-right form. “I think our generation is more issue-based,” she offers. “It’s not so much that I’m excited for the death of the political spectrum, but I think we have the capacity — and the access to enough information — to be more issue-based when we react to and engage with political issues.”
Judging from what we know of her personal values, Holly certainly seems to veer further towards the left. She agrees with that conclusion, but she’s quick to note that she’d “rather treat each issue as it comes, and not just jump onto the bandwagon of a left or right or centre position” — at least not until she’s “analysed the issue and how everyone else is reacting to it”.
Regardless of how she’s viewed in black-and-white political terms, Holly is adamant she’ll never stop fighting for what she thinks is right. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to create my platform in the first place,” she says, pointing out that “the space that exists between politics, entertainment and culture is just so, so powerful”.
Never has that been truer for Holly than now, six months after she delivered her first child. Her daughter, Magnolia Blue (aka Maggie) was brought into the world at exactly 12:24pm on December 2, 2022. She’s changed Holly’s life for the better in more ways than she’s able to quantify — but as most new parents will be able to relate, her birth also came with pangs of existentialism.
“I was already scared about the future,” she admits, “but now with Maggie in my life… You know, she’s going to be 30 in the year 2050. If she has kids, they might live to see the year 2135. I feel like I’m holding the future in my arms every day, and I look at her and wonder what her life will be like… But then I think about how climate scientists say we have ten years or less to change the course of history forever. And that just feels like something out of a Marvel movie — it’s incomprehensible to me that this is real.”
Maggie’s birth, Holly says, has made her “drastically reprioritise what I want to do over these next few years — for my daughter’s sake, but also for everyone’s sake”.
Rebuilding The Machine
Holly found out she was pregnant right at the end of the recording process for Endless Summer, exactly one (1) day after she’d come up with the title (and no, she doesn’t have any beef with Miley Cyrus over her own new album being called Endless Summer Vacation — “We’re Sagittarian gals,” she says with an exaggerated flick of the wrist, “we’re just in sync like that”). The pregnancy thus didn’t influence the album itself, but Holly says it did shape her “post-studio understanding” of the album, and “the narrative I wanted to build around it”.
Fastidiously choosing her words, she adds: “I don’t know, I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, but I do feel like there’s a ‘force’ that brings everything together, and it [informs] narratives that I built around my records… Like, how I self-analyse what it is I was doing after I’ve finished doing it. And it’s all totally related to Maggie coming, and making the future, and how my whole entire life is suddenly so much more real to me. Everything is more vivid. I’m more time-curious and sensitive, and I have so many more intense feelings about what to do and the need to get my purpose out of me.
“We live in such an awesomely trippy world, and I am so grateful to be able to just, like, plunge myself into that again. Because I was living very fast and very distracted, and I definitely wasn’t stopping to look at how cool all those hotel lights were. And it’s so random, but it’s like, when you’re just travelling and going on planes and staying in hotels and stuff, you’re just doing that — you don’t stop to really look at the effort and the magic in everything.
“Like, bubbles? They’re floating rainbow balls! It’s really fun to see that again. And it’s really important for my creativity. Because yesterday I was thinking, ‘Should we get a bubble machine for Splendour In The Grass?’ And I wouldn’t have even thought about that unless I went to Rhyme Time at the library the other day, where there was a bubble machine!”
Jack River’s new album Endless Summer is out now.
Ellie Robinson (she/her) is a music and pop-culture writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s on Twitter as @ellierobins_etc and Instagram as @ellierobinsonwrites.