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Music

Jana Hunter of Lower Dens Atones and Emerges on New LP 'Escape from Evil'

The Baltimore quartet have just released the finest record of their career—an LP which sees singer Jana Hunter dealing with death and ditching drugs before turning the magnifying glass on herself.

These days, when Jana Hunter takes the stage with Lower Dens, she moves to the front. When she gets dressed, she wears a suit, and when she sings, she gets heavy, spilling out her personal experiences with death, drugs, and recklessness. Her hair is shorn short to the scalp, her emotions are similarly close to the surface. It wasn't always this way. On the band's first two albums, Hunter found it easier to hide behind a guitar, wearing rock ‘n' roll's classic t-shirt-and-whatever combo, while masking intimate details with broad lyrical strokes. But with Lower Dens' third LP, Escape from Evil, out this week via Ribbon Music, she's pushing her personality to the forefront, and while the quartet’s swirling, indie-synth-pop still takes center stage, now Hunter is ready to be vulnerable as much as she's ready to entertain.

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"When you do that, you're giving a lot more of the audience," Hunter says, calling me from her car. "You're not making them work so hard to figure out who you are. I think that means more to people. I know when I go to a show, and someone really puts themselves out there as a front person, I get the impression of kind of knowing them." Lower Dens are a quite a different band compared with the quartet who emerged from Baltimore back in 2010. For one, they lost their guitarist Will Adams on this record—he opted for family time over the itinerant band life—with Walker Teret stepping up to the plate. For another, the synths they incorporated due to writing on the road circa 2012’s Nootropics remain. The songs themselves are more concise, more plushly high def. A prevailing sense of melancholy lingers, but with Hunter on co-production duties, alongside Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Beach House, Future Islands) and producer of the moment Ariel Reichstadt (Vampire Weekend, Haim), Escape from Evil is more instantly pop.

Nevertheless even as Hunter's melodies flirt with uplifting cadences, these still stand in stark contrast to the Hunter’s confessional lyrics. The album's first track immediately deals with her dark relationship with drugs. "Sucker's Shangri-La" is an exhausted, end-of-the-night slow dance to addiction, with the singer’s warm tones recalling Beach House’s Victoria Legrand over an orchestra of 80s synths. Hunter compares her troubled liaison with drugs to that of a romantic split: “You wonder if you'll ever be able to get them out of your head."

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Substances also fuel the reckless lifestyle she sings about on the album's catchiest track, "To Die In LA." The song, in all its reverbed glory, is an ode to people who don't care if they live or die. Thing is, Hunter has been that person. "It's a little ridiculous to live that way," she said. "But I'm drawn to people like that, who are really reckless and really restless and put themselves and other people at risk, and you can't trust them with anything and they'll always flake out on you, but despite all that, you love them and you keep going back to them."

In living this way Hunter realizes there have been people she's mistreated along the way, which is exactly why the album is titled Escape from Evil—taken from the book of the same name by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. His conclusion? That people are mostly evil. Hunter finds herself preoccupied with this concept, and explains it to me, "People live to ensure they have a legacy and this is why we work so hard to prove ourselves our whole lives. In the process of doing that—especially if we're power hungry or we're in desperate situations—we do things that fuck other people over."

Free from drugs, Hunter has a new perspective: she wants to say sorry and she’s trying to keep the people she doesn't want to lose. "There are things that I want to do and there are people that I want to stay in my life, and I know that if I want those things, I can't act like a crazy person," she said.

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On “I Am the Earth,” she places herself at center of the universe, she sings about trying to apologize to someone, but letting her ego get in the way, and because of that, she distances herself from them. She also exposes what she fears in herself: selfishness. Unlike other songs, which are edited to protect others' privacy (and her own), “I Am the Earth” didn’t undergo many revisions. "They're like unprocessed emotion," she explains of her songs. "The obstinate, selfishness in 'I Am The Earth' is completely inconsiderate of other people.

"What I was trying to do was open myself up to not judge [my songs] and trust that these are the things that needed to be expressed and they didn't need to be any more technical or any more processed or any more developed than they were," she says. "These were honest, real emotions."

Dealing with death is another topic Hunter tackled on Escape… She was in the midst of processing the loss of three people in a short period of time: the son of a friend, a man she worked with, and a friend's aunt. "Your Heart Still Beating" sifts through that grief: "All of my fears / Coming to life / All of my time / Wanting you near / At my side," she sings over a motorik beat and shimmering guitars. She's shared her music with one of the families, but finds that there's no easy way to explain herself when it comes to losing life. "I was really feeling for those people, and you're in that situation where you can't even begin to describe how you're feeling because it's all-consuming."

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"Your Heart Still Beating" attempts to communicate these feelings. After all, music is one of the most sincere ways of connecting when you don't know what else to say. The other way, Hunter asserts, is through religion. She doesn't consider herself a spiritual person, but understands that religion stands as a basic construct for human community. When her devoutly Christian mother says she prays for her, Hunter gets it. "I went to church when I was a kid and it felt like I was part of something. Even though I don't feel that anymore, even though I don't want to study the bible or anything, I do wish that I had something like that in my life. For me—and I think for a lot of people—music is the closest thing we get to that. It's not about worship but it's all about community."

And that's why Jana is most excited about her live show: Community. We'll all be in it together, except she'll be the one in the suit.

Lower Dens Tour Dates:

05-08 Arden, DE - Gild Hall

05-09 Pittsburgh, PA - Carnegie Museum of Art

06-11 Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg (Northside)

06-12 Philadelphia, PA - Voyeur

06-13 Washington, DC - Rock & Roll Hotel

06-15 Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle

06-16 Ferndale, MI - The Loving Touch

06-17 Toronto, ON - Legendary Horseshoe Tavern (NXNE)

06-19 Montreal, QC - Bar Le Ritz PDB

06-20 Cambridge, MA - The Sinclair

06-21 Providence, RI - Columbus Theatre

07-17 Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop

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07-21 Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry

07-24 Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios

07-25 Vancouver, BC – Electric Owl

07-28 Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge

07-29 Denver, CO – Larimer Lounge

08-04 Atlanta, GA – The Earl

08-05 Chapel Hill, NC – King’s Barcade

Escape from Evil is out now.

Follow Emilee Lindner on Twitter.