JANIE DANGER AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Words & Photos by Ellen Arden

Two of the sweetest black cats – Pip and Toyota – will meet you at the door of Janie Danger’s Candler Park apartment before she does. The apartment around them is akin to a cabinet of curiosities: a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster, shelves of neatly stacked cassette tapes, a stereo setup that’s clearly used and not just for display, a gaming station tucked into the corner, and a tableau of little sculptures and tiny works of art fill much of the available empty space. As we set up for our interview, Pip and Toyota curiously wind around our ankles, then settle in for the interview as if they’ve sat through many discussions before this one.

Today Frequency ATL is sitting down with Janie Danger — the Atlanta artist behind the project of the same name, backed by her bandmates Caro Shepard, Zera West, and Sawyer Flanagan — to talk about band identity, the philosophy behind hypnagogic powerviolence and transcendental hyperpunk, and the making of her new record: Crisis Acting set to arrive on September 11th.

MORE THAN A SOLO PROJECT

Janie Danger started off as a solo project in 2021, but since then the project quietly evolved into a full band with Caro Shepard on bass, Zera West on lead guitar, and Sawyer Flanagan on drums. What began as one person’s bedroom recordings turned into four people who, by Janie’s account, are now closer than they’ve ever been. “The core lineup is me, Caro, Zera, and Sawyer — we are all best friends,” she says. “Even though it is my baby, my solo project — I write all the songs — this last album was incredibly collaborative, and I consider us more of a band. Janie Danger, the band, the show — I love them.”

On the name itself: “I go by Janie in real life, and there was a while where I considered telling people to just call me Jane, but everyone called me Janie because that’s how they knew me. As a trans person, you kind of know when a name doesn’t work for you, and Janie always worked for me. There was a point where I thought about having a separation there, but I realized as I went on that the Janie on stage and the Janie off stage are the same person. I just have more people looking at me when I’m on stage — I get more of an excuse to perform, be myself, be that kind of bombastic person.”

A VISCERAL GENRE : HYPNAGOGIC POWER VIOLENCE, TRANSCENDENTAL HYPERPUNK

Janie Danger can be found filed somewhere under the intersection of hypnagogic powerviolence and transcendental hyperpunk — labels that sound impossibly specific until you hear her explain them. Hypnagogia describes the hazy threshold between sleep and wakefulness, while powerviolence evokes the polar opposite feeling – wide awake, extreme, abrasive, and physically immediate. Hyperpunk borrows its logic from hyperpop’s collision of past and future, while the “transcendental” part traces back to Liturgy and frontwoman Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s ideas around transcendental black metal. Put all of these elements together, and the terminology begins to function less like traditional genre classification and more like a map of what Danger wants their music to accomplish.

“It’s been hard for me to find an elevator pitch,” she says. “When people ask what music I play, I generally just say rock music, because it’s a very wide umbrella. Naming things the kind of shit that sounds cool, but also it means nothing, and yet it means something. I think the hyperpunk term came from when hyperpop was blowing up, and hyperpop is this deep-fried amalgamation of early 2000s pop and futuristic auto-tune, deep-fried, fucked-up stuff. It’s a little future and past coinciding together.”

Danger isn’t necessarily trying to invent increasingly granular subgenres as much as she is attempting to find language for two opposing sensations. On one end is the physical immediacy she associates with punk and powerviolence — speed, volume, screams, music you feel almost involuntarily. On the other is the dreamlike quality she hears in artists like John Maus, Molly Nilsson, Beach House, Animal Collective, Panda Bear, and Cindy Lee; music that ultimately feels familiar without necessarily belonging to a recognizable time or place.

“It sounds like it’s from a genre that never existed, or an era of rock that never existed,” Danger explains. “My goal is to bridge the most extreme, visceral thing — because punk music is visceral, you just feel it — with hypnagogic music, which isn’t visceral, but you feel it. It’s emotional, it’s pillowy, it reminds you of things, it’s evocative.

That range of emotion runs through much of the band’s recent catalog.

On 2024’s East Atlanta Sober, the song “I Don’t Want to Die in a Mass Shooting” emerged in the aftermath of the 2022 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, where a gunman killed five people and injured 19 others. The attack carried particular weight because of what Club Q represented. For more than two decades, the LGBTQ+ nightclub had served as a gathering place and safe haven for Colorado Springs’ queer community — the kind of space where people came not only for nightlife, but to find community and a sense of belonging.

“The Colorado gay bar shooting had happened,” Danger says, “and I remember being at Mary’s that week, and I was just imagining the awful things that could happen. It was the first time I really felt in my gut this unease, like I’m not safe. I just wanted to be as blunt as possible — I don’t want to die in a mass shooting.” To Danger, the song captured the fear of suddenly recognizing that a space which was meant to feel safe might not be. Danger considers the track “Pure Black Tendency” as the album’s answer to that feeling of fear and a shift toward defiance.

“Pure Black Tendency is the no — I’m not gonna let this fear push me around anymore. We can fight back against this.”

Danger recorded East Atlanta Sober largely on her own. “I recorded it all in my room,” she says. “I basically just had my laptop here, my mic, my guitar, and my interface.”

The new album – Crisis Acting – began in much the same way. Every song still starts as a demo, usually with little more than Danger and whatever tools are within reach. “It always starts with a demo, with a stock Logic drummer,” she says. “There’s one they have named — I like Kyle. Kyle is dope.”

But from there, the process has become increasingly collaborative. Caro joined Danger nearly every Monday for the better part of a year, working out of Danger’s music room while the record gradually took shape. The pair would play Balatro until, “Caro would be like, ‘I have an idea,’ and I’d just give her the keys to the recording and let her lay stuff down,” Danger says. “Sometimes I’d say, ‘It’s great, change this.’ Sometimes, ‘Perfect.’ Sometimes, ‘I don’t really like it.’ But she played all the bass, laid down a lot of guitar parts, and a lot of keys. It would not have come together the way it is without her.”

Sawyer’s drums came next. “We brought it to Sawyer’s house and recorded drums with him. He’s a fucking beast. I can just let him cook, and he just pops off.” Zera contributed to a handful of tracks, while two songs, including “Somebody Has to Do It,” were recorded live as a full band before Danger went back in to shape them further. Once the pieces were in place, the record went to Stu’s Room for its final mix and mastering was completed by Danger.

THE AMBIENT ANXIETY OF TODAY

Crisis Acting is a love letter exchange between existential dread and the absurdity of everyday life, riddled with the anxiety we all feel but are quick to dismiss as something we are unable to change. The unease raging through many of the songs on the record is immediately introduced by the record’s title – Crisis Acting – while also serving as a play on the crisis actor conspiracy theory. Crisis actors are people supposedly hired to pose as victims or witnesses after mass shootings and other tragedies. Danger turns the phrase toward something much broader and elaborates on the concept.

“It’s about how I feel like everyone is existing in a crisis all of the time,” she says. “We are living at probably the end of the world, if not by political exchanges, by everyone stripping everything for parts. Everyone has this ambient anxiety that something is wrong, that someone has to do something, but you also have to be like, ‘Would you like still or sparkling water?’ It’s genuinely ridiculous to me, and that’s where the term [sic] comes from, because I feel like we’re all existing in a crisis.”

If there is one song that pulls those ideas – and much of Danger’s creative philosophy – together, it’s “Staircase Wit,” the album’s sixth track and the song she says she’s proudest of. Appropriately, it began with something she thought she’d already done. Its title comes from the French expression l’esprit de l’escalier — literally “staircase wit” — for that maddening experience of thinking of the perfect response only after the moment has passed. “You’re walking away,” Danger says, “and you’re like, fuck, I just thought of the funniest thing to say.”

“I had this beautiful melody, and then I realized it was an almost identical chord progression to three other songs I’d already written,” she says. Rather than abandon it, Danger turned the repetition into the subject itself: “It keeps coming back to me, that same chord progression, it isn’t through with me.” The song became, as she describes it, a billet-doux to an idea, particularly the strange feeling that sometimes an idea isn’t something an artist creates so much as something that keeps returning to them.

The track’s bridge drops into something quieter and more dreamlike, incorporating a sample of David Lynch discussing the agony of losing a good idea. Then moments later it mutates again and settles into something much more kinetic and dance-driven via a remix by Orlando DJ KAiJUBRiDE. “It was the hardest song for all of us to record,” Danger says, describing an ascending tempo that moves from 80 to 160 BPM over an extended stretch — a decision she jokes made Sawyer want to kill her. “When I listen back to it, it’s probably the proudest I am of a song.”

ATLANTA : BREAKING CONTAINMENT

For all the anxiety running through the record, Danger’s relationship with the city around her has lately been moving in the opposite direction. She’s found herself paying closer attention to Atlanta’s local scene and rediscovering some of the excitement that brought her into it in the first place.

“It makes me feel like a kid again,” she says of going to local shows rather than saving her attention for touring acts. “Now I get to see so many local shows — I’m excited about it again.”

Atlanta, in her view, can be a difficult place for bands to break through.

“I think it’s great, but I think it’s tough. Atlanta is very insular, and kind of fractured,” she says. “Things just don’t break containment from Atlanta that often – you’ve got your Deerhunter and Omni, but they’re the exception and not the rule. I think Balkans could have been one of the biggest fucking bands, especially in that indie scene. I feel like Atlanta bands are always a little bit underrated.”

At the same time, she hears something distinctly Atlanta running through artists who otherwise sound nothing alike.

“That being said, there is an Atlanta sound that you can trace through the different eras of the city. My friend Nico and Big Yellow — one of my favorite Atlanta bands — they called it “freakcore” a few years ago. I see a lot of creative parallels between bands like Assembly, Baums, and Big Yellow,” she says. “I honestly feel the same about Detroit, too — Detroit and Atlanta are two places where there is just something there. I think there’s a lack of fear to conform. Everyone’s kind of doing their own thing, but that weirdly is what makes it holistic.”

You can catch Janie Danger with Major live at Criminal Records on September 10th.

Crisis Acting arrives on all streaming platforms September 11th, the same day Janie Danger takes the stage at Mainline Music Fest at Star Community Bar alongside MUELAS, Shepherds, Safety Switch, Glittering Insects, and Grebe.

“We’re just gonna play our favorite songs to play, the ones we have as tight as possible,” she says. “It’s gonna be a night of fun violence.”