The Fool

Here’s an incomplete cast of characters that populate The Fool, Young Jesus’ provocative seventh album: a pair of washed-up outlaws, an elderly man entirely reliant on his children, a doctor who gets caught creeping on his patient’s social media, and, on “MOTY,” a menagerie of garden variety misogynists, hypocrites, and insecure momma’s boys fronting as alpha males. Oh, and the person who gets lost in their memories of being abused as a child and comes to, decades later, standing over a dog they’ve just beaten.

Yet, the most unnerving characters are the ones John Rossiter allows us to believe are himself—artists who’ve witnessed the life-saving powers of art firsthand and seen it curdle into condescension, delusions of grandeur, and revulsion towards the people most like him. While Rossiter hasn’t confirmed whether any of The Fool is autobiographical, it’s an unsparing, indelible product of a man who had to question every one of his artistic motivations before making the most vital album of his life.

Rossiter’s interrogative approach—to pop music, to literature, gender norms, to the social contract, to truth itself—serves as the connective tissue throughout Young Jesus’ fascinating discography, which has earned legitimate comparisons to the Hold Steady, Talk Talk, and Albert Ayler. But there’s also the one remnant of Rossiter’s formative era as a hard-drinking Midwestern garage rocker: the impulse to blow everything up on the verge of a conventional success. After 2015’s Grow/Decompose brought Young Jesus’ initial phase as Chicagoland barstool bards to a wider audience, Rossiter moved to Los Angeles and did what transplants do: experimented with spirituality, got into free jazz, and started book clubs. A trilogy of exploratory albums followed, each one tantalizingly close to a masterpiece. But due to burnout—or just the sense that Young Jesus’ incarnation as a post-rock jam band had become its own kind of formula—Rossiter disbanded the group and released the stripped-down Shepherd Head; like all Young Jesus albums, it felt transitional, but this was the first time that Rossiter lacked conviction in his direction.

The Fool does not have that problem. The opening duo of “Brenda & Diane” and “Two Brothers” brings Young Jesus back to their roots—gleaming acoustic strums and brassy synth washes, a gruff guy singing imperiously of the downtrodden trying to protect their dignity, the sort of things that gets called “heartland rock” in 2024; surely someone as studious as Rossiter recognizes the evocative nature of their respective titles. Whereas most of Young Jesus’ work on Saddle Creek trafficked in dialectics, arcane philosophical tracts, and 15-minute jam sessions, The Fool gets right to the point, with Rossiter putting his trust in direct statements—“True love is a little bit like hell,” the goddamn American Dream, concepts dismissed as cliche until time and experience reveals their enduring truth. Towards the end of “Two Brothers,” Rossiter meets a humble gardener who works the Earth to get closer to God, which would’ve been too pat of a literary device had Rossiter not temporarily quit music to study permaculture.

Even as The Fool shapeshifts into meditative jazz-pop, torch song, and frisky folk-rock, there isn’t a second of passive listening to be had; Rossiter and his new cast of collaborators confront and engage the listener as if their undivided attention essential to keeping the unorthodox mix from collapsing on itself. He might not be the most technically proficient singer, but Rossiter’s fearless—no tonal or emotional register is out of his range. To accurately express the decade's worth of thwarted desires packed in the chorus of “Rabbit,” you don’t hit the notes, they need to be smashed to bits. On “Sunrise,” Rossiter plays the role of a singer who believes they communicate directly with God, but not so far gone they lose their sense of humor—“Don’t think I take it light/Yeah I bought some new pants!” In the rare times when Rossiter takes on a more subdued tone, the mix is riddled with found sound, bursts of noise, and curious harmonies that all hit like a sudden burst of cortisol from the shame of pressing an accidental “like” or experiencing the first pangs of a vulnerability hangover.

“Rich” is that very feeling extended to about six minutes. The narrator is the product of ill-gotten gains that have produced lawyers, schizophrenics, bankers, anorexics, active and sober addicts, completed suicides and four others that “tried, but we didn’t get far.” And now, an artist who sees far too many white guys just like him, overcompensating for their privilege and competing for “the purest of all.” Calling out the hypocrisy of indie rock trust funders isn’t brave on its own, but “Rich” calls into question why and if these conversations are even worth having—does generational wealth create generational trauma? Why is it assumed to preclude the ability to make great art? Is the glorification of poverty a subtle form of condescension? “And the worst of it all is that art saved my life,” Rossiter intones during the final verse, where his voice eventually undergoes an Irishman-style de-aging to bring them back to the time they bought their first guitar and deviated from the path of McKinsey internships, law school, feckless philanthropy, and everything else that makes the rich a different kind of miserable than everyone else.

The thorniest question posed by The Fool is why I’d expect, or even want “Rich” or “Dancer” to be explicitly about Rossiter. Even if that would require him owning some embarrassing truths, it would actually work to Young Jesus’ benefit, placing The Fool in a lineage of indie rock lifers making a mid-career transition to full disclosure and achieving new heights of respect and acclaim. But this is yet another impulse that Rossiter has challenged—“Wanted to write about the bad men that I’ve known,” he moans during “Am I the Only One,” before he questions whether this would be just another way to reinforce his own self-image.

Too often, “therapeutic” and “confessional” music is viewed as praiseworthy by default, where the unburdening of one’s own flaws is an end unto itself rather than a means of shedding ego and shame to foster connection. When the recurring character of Eloise sees a ping from her Instagram page, she doesn’t screenshot it to shame her doctor; she thinks of her father and her brother and the loneliness that moves them to scroll through a stranger’s pictures. “MOTY” (i.e., “Man of the Year”) starts cynically, in judgment of Great Men, and ends with Rossiter finding strength in the presence of the good men in his immediate circle.

Perhaps the most daring song Young Jesus wrote during this process could’ve offered a more tidy first-person narrative had it made the final tracklist. “Another album in the books,” Rossiter sings on the B-side to “Brenda & Diane,” acknowledging up front how this one might be received differently than his previous six—“to Mom and Dad: I know it hurts.” It’s called “Hollywood Ending,” a title that bears more weight given Rossiter’s experience writing for television. Instead, we got The Fool, an album that offers its emotional reckoning as a messy and necessary new beginning for Young Jesus.

Young Jesus: The Fool

$27 at Rough Trade