Um, Jennifer? Takes On the City
The punk-informed guitar-pop duo embodies old-school NYC—and confronts life’s complexities—on their scrappy debut album.
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 NYC-ness comes from the city looming large in their lyrics, and that they have a punchy energy teeming with funny invention.
