Clever chameleons The Creepy Jingles return with new album Against All Opps
The Creepy Jingles. // photo by Gailen Gillespie
The Creepy Jingles’ Against All Opps is out digitally on Friday, August 28 and you can pre-order the vinyl release from Enigmatic Brunch Records. They play miniBar on Friday, August 28 with Hotel Leo and Terri Quinn & the Coyotes. Details on that show here.
On Friday, August 28, Kansas City rock band the Creepy Jingles puts out its second release of the year. Following on the heels of May’s Washed Up comes the new EP, Against All Opps. While both albums are very much rooted in the jangly power pop garage which has been the band’s hallmark since their 2019 self-titled debut, the new EP marks a new direction for the band.
If you’ve caught the Creepy Jingles live over the past few months, you’ve likely noticed a greater emphasis on keys from frontwoman Jocelyn Nixon, and it shines through over the course of Against All Opps‘ six songs. For those who’ve been fans of the band over the course of its history, this should come as no surprise, but coming after Washed Up, the new songs might seem as though they’re from a different band entirely.
And, honestly, it kind of is.
“The songs for Washed Up, I started working on ’em I think at the end of 2022,” explains Jocelyn Nixon one afternoon, noting that, when guitarist Wills Van Dorn joined the band in early 2023, she wanted to have a full set of new songs in order to debut them during the band’s set at that year’s Manor Fest.
“I wanted to play a new set at Manor Fest, and then we’ll record that album,” Nixon continues. “We hit that goal. It was the first time I’d really worked under a deadline set for myself ’cause normally it’s just working however I wanna work when I wanna work. I hit the deadline. We worked really well.”
The Jingles got to Manor Fest, and then went into the studio with Paul Malinowski at Massive Sounds in Shawnee, recording four songs, which ended up becoming the singles of Washed Up: “Love Like You,” “Repeat After Me,” “When Things Go Wrong,” and “Bow Down,” the last of which didn’t get released until this year.
In retrospect, releasing “When Things Go Wrong” as the first single in February of 2024 might now seem like a harbinger of things to come.
“We had to wait a few months because we didn’t have enough money to go back in the studio and finish the record,” admits Nixon. “I couldn’t even afford to get them mastered or finish those up, and they were just sitting in the can.”
Then Van Dorn and drummer Nick Robertson left the band, which then made it difficult for Nixon to play shows to make money to then put out the record, placing the frontwoman into what she describes as “this pickle situation.”
“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” she says. “’I really like these songs. I’m proud of this record.’”
When Nixon began working with friend and fellow musician Josh Thomas of RxGhost and the Eradicats at his home studio on potential solo songs, it distracted her from feeling helpless and sitting around. It was performing those songs for a solo show at The Brick, where Major Matt Mason was also playing, that revitalized the Jingles.
“Brian Hurtgen, who is on drums for us now, was playing for Major Matt,” Nixon explains. “We got on really well. I loved his drumming style. He liked my songwriting. Said, ‘Hey, can you come in?’ He came in. After that, I said, “Do you know, do you have any guitarists?’”
He did. They tried out a few. Finally settled on “good fit” Joseph Peaks, and as Nixon also wanted to add in some cool keyboard stuff–“a little bit of Montreal, a little Nintendo-y, a little bit of ‘Strawberry Fields,’ all that kind of shit that I love”–they brought in Gailen Gillespie to do the keyboards, alongside longtime Jingle Andrew Woody on bass.
Nixon had those songs comprising Against All Opps ready to go, so they went in, started learning them, then went in and recorded them. Thanks to the support and resources behind her, Nixon was also able to finish mastering Washed Up, with an eye towards what she describes as “Let’s put this out and hopefully have a little bit of heat off it to do the thing that we wanna do.”
Nixon says that Against All Opps is really the thing that she’s standing behind now.
“This is the thing that I’ve been looking forward to,” Nixon says. “This thing that’s–you wanna get in step as close as you can with your audience, breathing in step with your audience, and I hated having to hold onto those songs for two years.”
It’s been a whirlwind of a couple of years, admits Nixon, but as hard as Washed Up was to finish, Against All Opps came very quickly and easily, and she feels blessed that she’s able to be back on stage, playing her songs with a band.
Listening to the new EP, the thing which will strike longtime Creepy Jingles fans the most is that this is the most relaxed Nixon has ever sounded on a recording. Not in a loose or sloppy way, however. It just sounds like she’s comfortable in herself, and Nixon readily agrees.
“Before the Jingles started, I had taken two and a half, three years off from the stage,” reflects Nixon. “I was very nervous to be my true self on stage.”
Since our first interview with Nixon in 2019, a lot has changed, she says.
“I feel like a lot more confident in myself,” Nixon admits–not to say that this hasn’t been a very struggle bus of a year for the musician. She’s had a lot of personal setbacks in the sense that she had to move from Kansas due to the state requiring that driver’s licenses reflect the gender assigned at birth, making her life as a trans woman perilous. “I had to quit a $60,000 job because I didn’t wanna drive back and forth into Kansas and I’m still unemployed right now.”
Because of that, Nixon has been focusing on controlling what she can control and, even with all the outside noise, she says she’s really become very centered in herself.
“Which has taken 40-something years to feel that comfortable in myself,” says Nixon. “But I don’t feel I’m in competition with myself. I wanna continue to get better in myself, but there’s a whole lot more confidence and I am more relaxed.”
With that confidence and lack of masking comes songs like Againust All Opps‘ first single, “You Don’t Trend,” a very delightful track which is the lyrical encapsulation of the wordplay song titles on the Jingles’ older records. It’s very much like playing with language and Gen Alpha slang, while also being mildly clap back-ish.
“Yeah, it is,” says Nixon of that assessment. “It’s like, ‘Listen, you think I’m not cool because I’m in my 40s, and I’m gonna let you know that you don’t get cool.’”
The songwriter wanted to poke fun at how serious some people take themselves, while also coming from a place of wanting to have different surgeries and feel whole in her body. Nixon also says she sees people online that are so desperate to be performative that they’re willing to bend over backward and change themselves to a degree where they lose themselves and then become part of the problem.
“I never wanted to be that,” she says. “I always wanted to make sure that my brain is the thing that is guiding this ship and to make fun of myself and that it doesn’t matter the packaging. It’s making fun of the packaging and the commercialism of the music industry and only wanting to highlight 20-year-olds.”
“Throw Me In Some Rice” is the encapsulation of everything Nixon and I have talked about over the course of our chat. It’s a very good metaphor for “I need some time to get back to where I’m functional,” and Nixon says that it’s of a piece with past songs such as “Circadian Rhythm Guitar” from the Jingles’ debut.
“To me, it’s almost like the same thing,” says Nixon of the track. “But it seems to have some more years behind it and a little bit more silliness behind it versus being so in the moment of it.”
The Creepy Jingles. // photo by Gailen Gillespie
Listening to Against All Opps, you’ll come away with a sense of timelessness. Thanks to the keys, it does have that of Montreal feel which Nixon mentioned earlier, but really, it could be from the ’60s. It could be from the ’70s. It could be from now, and those keys make it really, really dancey. While there’s always been a connection with Nixon’s lyrics and the band’s music as a sort of connection between the head and the heart, now it’s the head and the heart and the hips.
“[Take Me at My] Wordplay has a darker tone and it’s a little bit more rock and roll, and it’s a little bit more psych in the sense that it’s genre-hopping and it’s kinda all over the place,” says Nixon of the changing tones. “And then Washed Up seemed to be, to me, one of the more adult records that I’ve ever made. It felt like a true ‘coming into yourself’ adult record.”
For this one, though, Nixon says she wanted to have fun, and so thought about what the things were that make for a good Creepy Jingles show.
“We wanna make people dance,” Nixon exclaims. “I wanna write great pop songs. And I started to get into less rock and roll and more into, ‘I wanna write the catchiest songs that I can write so people can dance and sing these words, and then six months, a year down the line go, ‘What the hell have I been singing?’”
Where all of this was coming from is that, ultimately, Nixon wants the Creepy Jingles to make great catchy music, but with a lot of substance and intelligence behind the lyrics.
“I wanna do both,” Nixon explains. “Obviously, I think everybody sets out to make something that would be accepted commercially and critically, but I wanted to write something that appealed to my nature of writing catchy music, but also trying to do it in an intelligent way that other people hopefully aren’t doing. I feel like we’ve created a sound that’s uniquely me.”
The Creepy Jingles’ Against All Opps is out digitally on Friday, August 28 and you can pre-order the vinyl release from Enigmatic Brunch Records. They play miniBar on Friday, August 28 with Hotel Leo and Terri Quinn & the Coyotes. Details on that show here.
