Photography press courtesy of The Real Jobs
Yes, self-optimization is having its moment, if you can call it that. The internet is full of instructions on how to become a better version of yourself. Be healthier. Want less. Achieve more. Fix your sleep. Fix your habits. Be yourself — just preferably a slightly more successful, attractive and emotionally balanced version of it.
Somewhere inside this endless machinery of improvement sits Becoming A Baddie, the new EP by Norwegian four-piece The Real Jobs. And thankfully, they are not particularly interested in fixing anything.
Instead, the six-track release crawls straight into the strange space between wanting to get your life together and watching your brain turn that very idea against you. There are nights of becoming someone else, questionable doses, tanning butter, the pursuit of being “TV handsome” and all those tiny absurdities that start making perfect sense once you have spent too much time online. At least, that’s how The Real Jobs describe it themselves.
The Real Jobs call themselves an “evil boyband”, which gives you a fairly good idea of the universe we are entering. Drummer and producer Eirik Marinius Sandvik, synth player and producer Jonas Vedaa Særsten, vocalist and lyricist Bryn Bowen and guitarist William Jensen Mangerøy make music that feels restless by design. Synths twitch, guitars smear across the edges and moments of almost-pop pleasure appear before something underneath starts slipping out of place. For those who like their sound a little rough around the edges, slightly cinematic and never too clean.
There is something physical about it. Not polished chaos for the sake of looking cool, but music that seems permanently caught between keeping itself together and giving in to the mess. That tension runs through Becoming A Baddie. One moment feels almost bright, another dissolves into a hazier wall of sound, while the whole thing carries the odd humour of people who know that modern life has become slightly ridiculous but have decided to participate anyway.
