FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Jaguar Jonze - BUNNY MODE
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AN artist I have…
PHOTO CREDIT: She Is Aphrodite/Nettwerk Records
enormous respect for, Jaguar Jonze is the alias of Deena Lynch. The Brisbane songwriter is someone that everyone should know about. I want to revisit her 2022 album, BUNNY MODE. It is an album of trauma, catharsis, openness and this blend of thrills and fury. Recently, Jonze spoke with Rolling Stone Australia about a sensational live music project and concept that she performed at the Sydney Opera House. Boundary-pushing and utterly extraordinary, it signalled her as one of the most powerful and exceptional artists in the world! There are other great features relating to Vivid LIVE. This is what Rolling Strone Australia wrote:
“Of all the shows at this year’s Vivid LIVE, few sound as thrillingly thoughtful or physically visceral as Jaguar Jonze’s performance.
The Art of Broken Pieces is described as a “fusion of music, film shibari rope art and contemporary performance,” and will act as the artist’s “defiant reclamation of her body and artistic voice.”
“Moving between the dangerous and the beautiful, Jonze looks at the intersection of life and art, blending storytelling, her known elevation of provocative visuals, and intimate songs performed live for the very first time,” the event description reads.
There’s a lot involved in The Art of Broken Pieces, put simply. And yet Jonze – aka Deena Lynch – had minimal time to prepare for it.
“We’ve only had two months to develop it,” she tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ one nervous week before the one-off performance. “It’s been just months but everyone on the team keeps saying how this is a show that should take years! We’re being really ambitious with this show and it’s felt like a full-time job for the last two months.”
The monumental effort – the “blood, sweat and tears,” as Jonze puts it – will all be worth it in the end, because there are myriad special components involved in her endeavour.
For the Taiwanese-Australian artist, who came to this country as a young child, performing at Sydney Opera House will be a landmark occasion.
“It’s really emotional for me because it does really feel like a lifetime moment,” she says. “I had this map as a child where you had all these iconic destinations around Australia. I’m now going to have played two that I was obsessed with – I got to play at Wave Rock in WA and then the other is, of course, Sydney Opera House. It does feel absolutely surreal”.
PHOTO CREDIT: SOH/Therese Hall
I hope that Jaguar Jonze comes to the U.K. and performs at some point, as there is a lot of love for her over here – and many venues that she could play and stun. BUNNY MODE was among my favourite albums of last year. I am not sure, like here and in Canada, there is a national music prize celebrating the best Australian albums of the year. BUNNY MODE should walk away with it! Australia is producing some of the most interesting and captivating music of the moment – in spite of listeners in Australia not really listening to homegrown artists. In any case, BUNNY MODE gained nothing but praise and respect. It is an album that everyone needs to hear and understand. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for one of the most important albums in recent times. PopMatters spoke with Jaguar Jonze ahead of the release of BUNNY MODE. We get some background and biography about this amazing artist:
“Persevering despite facing personal and professional obstacles, Lynch has been forthright about the perilous trip she has taken. Born in Yokohama, Japan, on 12 January 1992, she was raised by her single mother, who is Taiwanese, and moved to Australia (her father’s homeland) while approaching the age of seven.
Since then, Lynch has lived primarily in Brisbane, where she currently resides and also has spent time in Melbourne, Sydney, and Orange County. In elementary school, the youngster met Brisbane’s Joseph Fallon, who would later re-enter the picture as her guitarist, leading the way for the musical late bloomer.
Lynch’s education background included studying engineering at the University of Melbourne and business at Bond University. “I fell into writing music and playing guitar late in life, and it wasn’t really something I had in mind,” Lynch admits. “I was walking home one day from university and passed a garage sale, saw a guitar, and decided to buy it. I had just lost a close friend of mine and struggled a lot with the grief, and the guitar and songwriting became my catharsis. They weren’t great songs, but it was an important part of my life where I finally found a way to express myself and found passion in that. … At first, I just wanted the music to be a part of my life, and over time I wanted it to be my whole life.”
Initially using just her first name professionally, Deena was 20 in 2012 when she released the first of two independent albums — Lone Wolf. In February 2015, Black Cat followed, with Fallon on electric guitar and organ while Lynch sang and played acoustic guitar, keyboards, and organ.
“The guitar gives me the most joy to play, and I still write many songs on the acoustic guitar that I built myself,” Lynch notes. “I still don’t quite know how to play the guitar, I don’t know chord names or scales, but I always found the guitar to be so freeing because I can go with what sounds good and what sound I want to make on it.”
Of course, by then she was relying heavily on Fallon’s instrumental contributions. “Joseph Fallon has been on my right side on stage since I started writing music, playing shows, and making mistakes, ha ha. … He is an amazing classical guitarist, and I assumed it was all the same thing. It turns out it really isn’t, but luckily, Joseph is an incredible electrical guitarist, too,” reveals Lynch, whose family of musicians — and “biggest supporters” — also includes Aidan Hogg (bass/co-producer/synths) and Jacob Mann (drums).
Lynch broke loose as Jaguar Jonze in 2018, though the story goes she was initially called “Panther” by her friends. (See below in the bonus “Take 5” segment for more on Jaguar’s origin story.) That year, her first single as Jaguar Jonze — “You Got Left Behind” — was written and released, catching the attention of Nettwerk when “it miraculously got New Music Fridays AU/NZ and USA,” Lynch proclaims.
“Their Australian rep [who works for an independent marketing firm] believed in me, my hustle, and the project and put it across to [Nettwerk CEO, chairman, and co-founder] Terry McBride, who called me with so much passion and determination that I couldn’t go past it,” she continues. “Everything I do, I do with so much commitment and passion, and that’s what I wanted from anyone I brought onto the team. I made them wait a long time as I was so scared to sign my baby over, but they were true to their word.
“They respect and support my artistry and have even been so generous throughout the advocacy. Their support has allowed me to grow so much as an artist and as a person. I have grown up having to hustle, survive and be independent; it’s been a lonely process. Nettwerk has shown me that everyone deserves trust and a team, and just like with music — collaboration is how we go further. I love my team and am blessed to have some amazing, determined minds on it.”
Two EPs — 2020’s Diamonds & Liquid Gold and 2021’s Antihero — were released by Nettwerk as Jaguar Jonze and her other personas continued to develop. “Deadalive”, the lead single from Antihero she co-wrote with Hogg, was called “propulsive and thrilling” by PopMatters when the song made the “PM Picks Playlist” on 30 September 2020.
Stripping away Jaguar’s animal instincts toward music, Lynch was making her mark in other areas, too. Honored for her advocacy with the triple j Done Good Award and the Australian Independent Record Award for Outstanding Achievement, Lynch also was among Vogue‘s “21 Australian Women Who Defined 2021″. She collaborated with Christian Louboutin to create a concept film for their AW20 collection in 2020 and made a valiant effort that year to become Australia’s entrant for Eurovision’s international songwriting competition.
Even while moving forward and being applauded for her work as a feminist, activist, and performance artist seeking change in the Australian music industry and taking charge in Australia’s #MeToo movement, Lynch struggled to get BUNNY MODE off the ground. For one thing, COVID-19 landed Lynch in the hospital for 40 days when the global pandemic struck in March 2020”.
PHOTO CREDIT: ABC Arts: Britt Spring
On an album that sends out a comprehensive and emphatic middle finger to abusers and oppressors – to slightly paraphrase what The Guardian wrote about BUNNY MODE -, the listener is moved and stunned. There is this strength and defiance that comes from the songs that makes the heart leap and the blood run. So many emotions run through BUNNY MODE. NME interviewed Jaguar Jonze about her sensational 2022 album. Just over a year old now, I am still listening to it a lot and being affected and moved every time I pass through it. Your heart goes out to someone who has had to deal with so much. There is no doubt that Jaguar Jonze’s music and words are helping and giving voice to other survivors of abuse and sexual assault:
“A turning point came when she unearthed ‘Not Yours’, a song she’d written in 2019 to “take the weight off my shoulders about what I’ve been through as a sexual assault survivor”. Writing it was a “cathartic process”, she says, but the state of her confidence back then meant she “was never going to let it see the light of day”. But when Lynch dusted off the original project file, she got goosebumps. “I saw how far ahead I’d moved from being that person – how I had grown and healed so much – and I forgot what it felt like to be where I used to be.”
Lynch has since turned the rough acoustic demo into a sizzling, swaggering ballad that twines a dirty blues-rock twang with swelling strings. She declares: “This body’s mine and not for you to feel and touch / Pretend you’re blind but I know that you’re not / You can never right your wrongs / Hope you change before you’re gone.”
‘Not Yours’ was the spark that gave way to an eruption of hard-earned confidence, fury and authenticity – all fully displayed on Jaguar Jonze’s debut album, ‘Bunny Mode’. Out today (June 3), the record – which she made with her band, Aidan Hogg (co-producer/synths/bass), Joseph Fallon (guitar/string arrangements) and Jacob Mann (drums) – is named for the coping mechanism Lynch developed to navigate the triggers for her complex PTSD. In the face of physical, psychological or emotional threats, Lynch would become still and quiet, mimicking the way a wild rabbit will play dead in the presence of a predator: “I would freeze, I would play dead, and I would just wait for the threats to wash over me.”
There are two sides to ‘Bunny Mode’, Lynch says: “This album is a way for me to say ‘thank you’ to my bunny mode,” she says, “for allowing me to survive up until this point… but also saying, ‘I don’t need you anymore.’ The biggest [step I’ve taken in my] healing journey has been to give myself permission to express the feelings and have the conversations that I was so scared to have with myself, and would repress and deny.”
Once she embraced the power of opening up to herself, Lynch channelled the energy she’d spent repressing into connecting with like-minded folks walking down the same paths she was. “That’s how we’re hardwired as humans,” she says, “by connection and community. That’s my favourite thing about music: I get to have this honest dialogue with myself, but I also have this give-and-take relationship with the people who resonate with my music.”
‘Punchline’ is a notable example of the ‘give’ in this exchange: fellow Brisbane artist Charlotte Marnee said she “instantly resonated” with the song’s perspective on “the fetishisation and stereotypes [about Asian women] enhanced by Australian and western media”. ‘Little Fires’ on the other hand, is a direct result of Lynch being galvanised by the solidarity shown by her community. The song, she says, is “a reminder about where we’ve come from, what we are fighting for, and what we can achieve when we work together”.
But this is not the part of the Jaguar Jonze story where Lynch rides off into the sunset, her mission accomplished and journey having come to its happy ending. She’s at an impasse between her art and her activism for women of colour and abuse survivors in Australian music – thankful for the praise she’s received for the latter, but frustrated that it often comes at the expense of her deserved recognition as an artist.
“My career has been completely taken over by the advocacy,” she admits with a sigh. “I want this album to say, ‘I am so passionate about my advocacy, but also, let me slap you in the face with my artistry.’ This is a landmark moment for me. It’s an album [of stories] that are extremely personal for me, and will always be emotional – but I want people to see that I have many stories to tell, and this album is just a taste of the breadth of genres and sounds and attitudes that I’m capable of”.
I want to come to The Guardian’s four-star review of the staggering BUNNY MODE. They echo a lot of what was said in other reviews: it is impossible not to be affected by Jaguar Jonze’s albums. It is an album that is still under my skin and inside my head; such is its incredible power and potency:
“I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling,” Jaguar Jonze sings on her debut album, her voice barely a whisper.
Then, moments later with the volume turned right up: “You could’ve destroyed me, but then I got loud.”
This defiance is at the heart of Bunny Mode, an 11-track juggernaut that is cutting in its specificity. Its title refers to a survival tactic that the artist employed as a survivor of childhood abuse: a freeze response to any safety threats, like a frightened rabbit. The record is a middle finger to oppressors and abusers, as the artist – real name Deena Lynch – breaks free of their chokehold, rising anew.
The Brisbane musician, who released two EPs under the Jaguar Jonze moniker in 2020 and 2021, leans into an esoteric sound across Bunny Mode, fortified by the unbridled anger in her lyrics. Sonically and thematically, the record bears similarities to Halsey’s 2021 album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power – both take cues from industrial music, building unapologetically feminist narratives and rebuttals upon glorious walls of sound. Despite the experimentation and boundary-pushing, it’s all still underpinned by pop and a knack for melody, as on the passionate slow-builder Little Fires, which Lynch performed as part of Eurovision’s Australian decider in February.
While there’s much to like musically – Bunny Mode moves away from the loopy spaghetti western sounds of Lynch’s early work to experiment with darker, heavier sounds, and the singer’s vocal chops are, as always, impressive – the album’s real power is in the lyrical details. It’s another piece of the activism puzzle for Lynch, who has spent much of the last two years on the forefront of fighting for change as a leader in the Australian #MeToo movement, shining a light on misbehaviour in the music industry. It also explores the more personal process of healing and recovery following trauma.
These many facets are visible through different threads of the album: on one of the more downbeat tracks, Drawing Lines, Lynch sings silkily of the importance of setting boundaries. The fury is more evident on tracks such as Who Died and Made You King, all angular guitars and punchy electropop beats, as Lynch spits, almost mockingly: “You’re sick and a victim of your own disease.” It’s thrilling to hear the tables turned on the powers that be in this way – a reclamation of space, a bold statement of self-sovereignty.
The highlight is Punchline, which turns a sharp eye on to tokenism and racism within the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion to Camp Cope’s The Opener, the Taiwanese Australian artist regurgitates box-ticking sentiments from corporate bigwigs to reveal their hollowness: “We love culture but make sure it’s to our very liking / Make it milky, make it plain and not too spicy.” Over wailing guitars and layered vocals, Lynch makes herself in her own image, rejecting the condescension of the white-centric industry that still sees artists of colour as an exotic other.
Lynch’s cohesive world-building across the album makes for a compelling, absorbing and often intimate listening experience. Her many creative personas – musically as Jaguar Jonze, visually as Spectator Jonze and photographically as Dusky Jonze – swirl through the record, but she emerges as a singularity: a woman who has, despite everything, survived.
After all the noise and the rage, the fire and the passion, it’s barely a whisper, again, that ends the record. The instrumentals cut out for Lynch’s controlled vocals to deliver their final, stinging words to the patriarchy and all that enable it: “It’s always been a man-made monster only a woman can destroy”.
I will end with this emphatic and impassioned review and feature. I cannot emphasis enough how important and inspiring the album it is. A deeply personal album, it is also one that will provide this strength and hope to those who can relate to Jaguar Jonze’s words. Such a potent and utterly unforgettable listen, this is an album that really needs to get more radio play around the world:
“Despite its title, there’s nothing timid about BUNNY MODE. Jaguar Jonze’s debut album is a bold listen that’s equally playful and punky, lacing dark subject matter with a comical edge into a rousing blend of industrial crunch and addictive pop hooks.
‘TRIGGER HAPPY’ takes aim at the toxic practise of love bombing and shoots back with a palette of twangy guitars and glitchy flourishes. ‘LOUD’ – fittingly – is an ode to standing up and speaking out, splicing in clips of Lynch’s many media appearances over the past 18 months.
‘I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling,’ she purrs before roaring in the chorus: ‘I’m gonna be more resilient, I’m gonna be proud/You could’ve destroyed me, but then I got loud.’
On ‘PUNCHLINE’, the Taiwanese-Australian artist skewers music industry tokenism towards women of colour, their appearance exploited and stereotyped for a predominantly white audience.
‘We love culture but make sure it’s to our liking / Make it milky, make it plain and not too spicy,’ she sings over the cutting groove and chugging riffs. ‘Tell the press that you are something so exotic/Can’t remember if its east or west or in the tropics/Just make sure that it is underlined and made symbolic.”
She’s accompanied by an entourage of Asian women and non-binary folk in the visual, which like all of Jaguar Jonze’s music videos, was self-directed and edited. It’s another sign of an individual whose creativity can’t be contained by one medium, extending her art into the worlds of fashion, photography, and illustration.
BUNNY MODE will be many listeners’ first introduction to Jaguar Jonze, but it also demonstrates her growth as an artist.
Last year’s ANTIHERO EP already saw her moving forward from the spaghetti western twang of her 2020 EP, and her debut album builds further upon that sound by leaning into a more abrasive, pulse-quickening aesthetic without sacrificing her knack for melody and melodrama.
Even at its most vulnerable – such as the swooning ‘DRAWING LINES’ or the quieter builds that characterise ‘LOUD’ and ‘MAN MADE MONSTER’ – the album possesses an empowering feminist attitude, employing sonic invention to overcome deep-seated personal traumas.
Despite surviving terrible things, she never sounds like a victim. Whether at knockout volume or whispered like a threat, lines like ‘it’s always been a manmade monster only a woman can destroy’ demonstrate her skill for serving up stinging sentiments into rallying retorts against abusers, oppressors, and the structures that enable them.
BUNNY MODE’s title refers to an old coping mechanism Deena used to employ: going quiet and freezing up like a frightened rabbit in response to physical, psychological or emotional threats. It’s also a tactic she’s proudly outgrown.
“This album is a journey of saying goodbye to ‘going bunny mode'," she explains, a way of saying: "Thank you for saving me and allowing me to survive up until this point, but I don’t need you anymore."
As much as the fire of BUNNY MODE is fuelled by the advocacy that has defined so much of Jaguar Jonze’s airtime over the past few years, the album is also a sign-off to her past self.
Born in Japan, Deena moved to Australia at age six and spent years bouncing between homes while her mother awaited approval for citizenship. Her childhood was marked by physical and sexual abuse, and by her mid-20s, she had been diagnosed with complex PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
“It’s pretty well known that I came from a turbulent childhood, so everything I did was for survival, security, shelter, food, etc. Music was permission for me to live my life and express myself freely.”
Jaguar Jonze may have started as an alter-ego – a tagline on her Unearthed profile once read “Eastern cowgirl howling at the rising sun” – but Deena acknowledges that the lines between herself and her persona have increasingly blurred. And her music is all the stronger for it.
“With Jaguar Jonze, it’s the childhood I never had. It’s playful and I’m doe-eyed looking into the world excited about the experiences I get to have.”
“Yeah, it is a serious album and being wrapped up in the #metoo movement for the Australian music industry has taken over my life in the past few years. I wanted this album to be a safe space for people to seek refuge, especially for survivors who’ve been through what I’ve been through.”
“But I’m also ready to go, ‘This is the end of this chapter and I’m ready to start a new chapter and have some fun with my music!’ It was important for me with the debut album to do this for myself and everyone else.”
“I’m excited to see what’s going to come after this as well.”
Us too, Jaguar Jonze. Us too”.
I shall leave it there. Among the absolute best albums of 2022, Jaguar Jonze’s BUNNY MODE is a unique and sense-blowing experience that seems to be a turning point and pivotal moment for her. Although it might have taken a while to come about and be released to the world, the impact it has made is phenomenal! I wonder where she goes from here and what follows BUNNY MODE. She appeared on two songs with HARU NEMURI in April, ANGRY ANGRY and don’t call me queen…so we might get yet more new music soon. This catharsis you hear on BUNNY MODE might clear a path for Jaguar Jonze to embark on a new era and direction. Whatever she comes up with next, you just know that it is…
GOING to be absolutely essential listening!