Jupe Jupe Photo credit: Ed Sozinho
Today, Seattle-based darkwave band Jupe Jupe release their new single “Down With The Setting Sun.” The track appears on the band’s forthcoming album King of Sorrows, out February 27 via No-Count Records.
Says the band, “‘Down With The Setting Sun’ is an aggressive take on a familiar relational trope: people need people, yet people use people. We bump against one another in so many beautiful and painful ways. Nothing gold can stay, and even the stories the victors tell may not bring them comfort in the night.”
Eleven stochastic hits from snare and synth set “Down With The Setting Sun” in motion. One guitar and bass weave continuously through the verses atop tribal drums, while a second guitar and layered synths push the momentum forward, driving the vocal deeper into its darkening narrative. Long hinted at in their work, Jupe Jupe reveal a darker edge to their influences here, drawing a clear line back to Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen.
The sun sets in the west, and with it the daylight fades. It’s often at night when the mind is most free to wander through the past. Yet the close of day, no matter how powerful the metaphor, doesn’t always close the book on where we’ve been or where we’re going.
Jupe Jupe craft a cinematic blend of melodic post-punk and darkwave atmospherics, where brooding synths and angular guitars collide with crooning baritone vocals and pulse-driven rhythms. Their songs explore the human condition in an age of dissonance, searching for connection and harmony amid modern anxieties. The result is a seductive, shadow-lit soundscape that moves the body as much as it haunts the memory.
The Seattle quartet’s albums, Invaders, Reduction in Drag, Crooked Kisses, Lonely Creatures, Nightfall, and Midnight Waits for No One, span a wide range of styles, blending synthpop, post-punk, new wave, ’70s glam, and ghostly Americana into a neo-noir cocktail. While the sonic textures shift from record to record, Jupe Jupe have always carried a persistent undercurrent of angst, reflecting a shared sense that something about the path we’re on isn’t quite right. Leaning fully into that feeling, King of Sorrows was born.
King of Sorrows, Jupe Jupe’s latest full-length album, is an urgent collection of eight post-punk songs, darker, more focused, more angular, and more direct. The album exists in a sonic firmament shaped by The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. Vintage analog synths, low-bit samplers, and grainy Mellotrons are balanced by tribal drums, driving bass, biting guitars, and mournful saxophone, all anchored by the emotive lyrics and rich croon of a baritone voice.
Jupe Jupe are veterans of the Seattle and Austin music scenes: My Young (vocals, synths), Bryan Manzo (guitar, bass, saxophone), Patrick Partington (guitar), and Jarrod Arbini (drums, percussion). On King of Sorrows, the band reunites with longtime collaborators Evan Foster and Matt Bayles. Foster, of The Boss Martians, Dirty Sidewalks, and The Sonics, engineered the recordings at No-Count Studios in Seattle, while Bayles (Minus the Bear; producer for Botch, Mastodon, Nox Novacula, Murder City Devils, and Isis) mixed the album at Red Room in Seattle.
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