Add Jennifer Vanilla to your ’80s alien-pop playlist

thefader.com:

As Jennifer Vanilla, ex-Ava Luna singer Kye Grant can be a million things at once. They’ve described their extraterrestrial alter ego as “a noun, a verb, and an adjective all at once”; “an all-purpose, multi-use substance”; and an “entrepreneurial fantasy vessel and avatar-cultivation experiment LARPed into reality.” Glancing at these descriptors in 2023 inspires an automatic eye roll at post-post-modernism gone mad, but Vanilla’s music justifies the nebulous phraseology surrounding it.

The project’s unlikely origin story may not ameliorate the skepticism inspired by Grant’s lofty labels, but it does provide some depth to the persona: As the story goes, Vanilla is a “sexless humanoid alien” with a “quintessentially ’80s name (the decade of [Grant’s] birth)” who “opened a portal to the eastern coast of the United States” and used a “magical braid” to entangle Grant’s essence with their own.

The Jennifer Vanilla experiment has always used the ’80s as its control group. 2017’s This Is Jennifer, the listening public’s patchwork introduction to the phenomenon, was reflexively self-conscious of its debt to the decade, resulting in a flavorful but soupy meta-pastiche.

Castle In the Sky, Vanilla’s debut studio LP, still owes its tongue-in-cheek technicolor sheen to the false consumerist fantasies of the Reagan/Bush era, but the character’s scope is expanded here.