Um, Jennifer? Takes On the City

It’s not a surprise that Elijah Scarpati and Fig Regan want to meet for our interview at Joe Junior, an old-school lunch counter in Manhattan that’s been serving STEAKS & CHOPS • SEAFOOD, as the sign puts it, since at least the 1970s. Its formica booths and wood paneling are featured prominently in the video for “Girl Class,” the 2023 single that first propelled their band, Um, Jennifer?, to NYC cult status, and its YouTube credits thank the joint for the “best burgers and waffles known to man.” So on a mild Tuesday in April, when I roll up to the table where Eli is reading a copy of the iconic queer novelist Dennis Cooper’s Closer, he encourages me to get the burger and grins a thousand watts, expressing the charisma I’ve come to admire in his band’s live performances. He orders himself a large glass of orange juice—he’s the sole man booked to go-go dance at a lesbian bar later that night, and doesn’t want a heavy meal to impede his moves. 

He’s also on a first-name basis with the cooks behind the fryer, one indicator of Um, Jennifer?’s fundamental charm: The scrappy, poppy indie-punk duo feels quintessentially old-school New York, juiced with the kind of ingenious energy that fuels an entire nostalgia industry around the City’s halcyon artist days, dropping self-directed videos that feel ripped from late-20th-century Manhattan Cable Access for clever songs about love, break-ups, transness, existential confusion, and a fickle poltergeist named Jennifer who forms the basis of their band’s mythology. The crux of Um, Jennifer?’s old-school appeal, though, is not their own nostalgia. “My mom grew up in Brooklyn,” Eli tells me, “And she's like, ‘I love watching your music videos because they feel like ’80s New York, but without all the violence. She's like, ‘I have a lot of fond memories from then except that it was so traumatic.’” Um, Jennifer?’s songs and topics are both urgently contemporary and timeless; their classic NYCness comes from the city looming large in their lyrics, and that they have a punchy energy teeming with funny invention. 

On Um Comma Jennifer Question Mark, the duo’s debut album, their exuberance underscores their vocal interplay, with Eli delivering pop melodies and guitar-hero solos and Fig slamming cool distorted riffs and even cooler punk vox. The clearest example of their collaborative songwriting is on “Old Grimes,” where Fig’s minor-key ennui (“Had a dream about disaster/Carved into the plaster/Too much Ari Aster”) is interrupted by Eli’s bright major-key chorus (“I’m toeing a hard line/Singing would you be mine/Listening to old Grimes”). On paper, it’s two different songs duking it out, which shouldn’t work, but the way they weave their parts together makes sense—an inventive way to capture internal chaos. And by the end, they’ve united as one and Fig has come around to Eli’s chorus with her own acerbicism: “I’m growing my beard again/softened by the estrogen/Gotta make my bed again/Overdose on vitamins.” Their outro harmonies are Beatles-esque and a little over the top; Eli says that writing them needed to be “so ridiculous… like salt, fat, acid, heat.” 

It’s here where I mention that, before Eli and I ordered our Joe Junior dinners, Fig called and said she wasn’t going to make it—her day job at a woodworking shop had exhausted her—so she video-chats me a week later (from the woodworking shop, after work, where I watch her clock out). She’s wearing headphones and slabs of wood are arranged on a shelf behind her; a coworker in a sweatshirt walks by as she explains her Ari Aster lyric. “There was a point in my life, kind of pre-transition, where I had watched Hereditary so many times to the point where it wasn't healthy. It was very much a symptom of not being in touch with my emotions,” she says. “That's kind of what that line speaks to—only feeling in touch with my emotions at the most extreme. The verse is kind of free, floaty, but also kind of describing that I only felt like a person when I was feeling extreme emotion, because it was kind of proof that I was alive. I watched Hereditary 17 times.”

I’m kinda beside myself when Fig tells me this—Hereditary is freaking intense!—but I can relate to the sentiment, and her frankness embodies one reason I love Um, Jennifer?’s music so much. They capture these messy, gloopy, complicated emotions with a heightened level of humor and camp, conveyed via succinct guitar-pop melodies that stick in your head for days—the album is 25 minutes of scrappy perfection. On “Delancey,” Eli laments a failed relationship with melancholy aplomb over a kinetic riff, imagining that he sees his former paramour’s face in those of strangers. “Thought I saw you sittin’/on a bench in Tompkins/When I saw your silhouette it really made me wanna choke.” And on “Keep It Tight,” Fig caterwauls about depressing sexual encounters on chunky riffs that compel one to bark along: “I’ll fuck your boyfriend and I’ll fuck your dad/Then fuck myself because you’re making me sad!” 

The crux of Eli and Fig’s own mythology is that they met at a party in Brooklyn when Eli had a crush on Fig’s friend, but there were tons of hangs between that and starting a band. Eli was a jazz-trained multi-instrumentalist playing in another band called Moon Kissed; Fig was a working actor who’d played trumpet throughout her young life. As they developed their musical and friendship connection, they conjured “Jennifer” from Fig’s demo for “Girl Class,” and she became a symbol of where they both were in their respective transitions. “From my perspective, I first saw Jennifer as a projection, this woman that someone might aspire to be, someone that is your best friend, something that is everything that you're not,” says Eli. “We make women into monsters and gods. So it’s a way of doing that consciously—of saying, we’re making this woman a figure, and she's larger than life, and she's mean, and she hates me, and she's such a bitch, and she's my mom, and I love her—that whole entire subconscious mess. It takes that thing that we do to women that can be really mean, and just let it be a little bit lighter and like, breathe some humor into it.”

Um Comma Jennifer Question Mark is a video album, too, with that humor and complexity translating to clips Eli directed for each song. Their most recent, for the mid-tempo agita jam “So Sick,” depicts the duo at the Lower East Side dive bar Home Sweet Home, reveling in a messy night out: dancing, fighting, making out, ending up on the floor, while they sing in unison about being fed up with it all. It’s funny and tragic and spirited and most of all it’s pure, the duo’s inherent sweetness pulsing through their grit—they’ve got the essence of what makes NYC great, and they’re the kind of band the city, in its absolute best iteration, deserves.