Having an exemplary debut LP is one thing. Reinventing a medium is another. If you’ve done it once before, what else can you do but experiment? Electronic duo Jockstrap has again proven, for the second year in a row, that experimentation in popular and electronic music remains possible. How, then, might you accomplish this? Get even weirder. Get wild. Embrace the new.

“I<3UQTINVU” (pronounced I Love You Cutie, I Envy You) offers a glimpse into the future of not only dance music, but what pop music should be: exciting. Some of the duo’s production may prove out-there at first, but this type of abrasiveness feels necessary if you want to push the boundaries of popular music. Why not build on what’s been already done?

To begin, it is worth speaking about the pre-dissected original album, “I Love You Jennifer B”, which I consider one of the greatest debut LPs of the decade, having witnessed their tour for “Jennifer B” nearly a year ago to this day. Critics seem to agree, the record having not only received near universal critical acclaim (rated by The Quietus as the best record of 2022), but received a nomination for a Mercury Prize, a major award in the United Kingdom. On reflection, “Jennifer B” remains eclectic, dark, glitchy and intimate, a soundscape so radical, so melancholic it becomes difficult to describe. If the record already contrasted English country estates and Spanish vacations with ambiguous non-places in tracks such as “Concrete Over Water,” overlapping sincere dance overtones with romantic tragedy, what else can you do with those scenes and soundscapes?

“I<3UQTINVU” presents an entirely different vision, and reworks the whole album seemingly from scratch. The opening track, “Sexy,” somehow manages to amalgamate the entire original album. Featuring London house producer babymorocco prominently, producer Taylor Skye mangles orchestral arrangements into a club-ready epic, at once swaggering, tongue-in-cheek and overdramatic. babymorocco affirms in the midst of pumping bass: “You gotta listen to my new EP”!  It’s dramatic, chopped and detuned, yet you can’t help but dance along from the first minute, to the inbetween of lyricism and modern anarchy.

Here, the London-based duo of vocalist and violinist Georgia Ellery and Skye (the latter credited individually for all their remixes) shine, their creativity conjuring genres never imagined before. “All roads lead to London” conjures a dark entrance into “the city” remixing “Concrete over Water,” now naming the original track’s city to be the ever-distorted finance capital. Even with this revelation, you can’t help but enjoy the descent in its cathedral-like synthesizers. London might be hell at times, but you miss its contours and jagged parts.  You may even want to be there.

“Good Girl” is the first highlight and second single of the record, transforming the intimate “Jennifer B” track into a club anthem. It’s impossible not to agree that “everything is good” by the end of it. “I Touch” and “I Feel” both take the quiet acoustics of “Glasgow” and “Angst” on the original album respectively, yet move with them in two separate ways. Ellery’s vocal work on “I Touch” sounds at times like Joni Mitchell, yet remains compounded by electronic fractures, further complicating the tragedy. “I Feel” takes the lyricism of “Angst,” yet recontextualizes its anxieties of the human body. “Pain Is Real,” reworking “Debra,” is extremely brief, yet proves Taylor Skye as a producer to keep an eye on, as he integrates tones both familiar to Jockstrap listeners and mainstream dance and electronic that you may not have ever noticed.

If there is one debatable misstep, it is the first single off the record, “Red Eye.” Featuring Atlanta-based hyperpop artist Ian Starr, “Red Eye” remains so distorted, compressed and noisy that the thematics of the album, its inbetweens of modernity and sexuality, become difficult to comprehend, even lyrically. Admittedly, I am not familiar with the extremes of hyperpop, but from Starr’s feature, at the very least, I get a clear idea of what could become the exciting future of music. If the genre is as maximalist and raw that Skye and Starr show us in a little over a minute, it is a certainly fascinating injunction regarding the state of modern pop. 

Moving on from this utter maximalism, Skye makes an interesting decision in “I Noticed You,” invoking the house music of the early 2000s by reworking an acoustic ballad into a sleek and meandering dance hit you would hope appears at every club. Yet I am continually entranced by the closer track of the album “Sexy 2.” Moving away from the intensive electronic production of the entire album (and the opening track “Sexy”), “Sexy 2” is incredibly sincere, beautiful, entirely acoustic and an affirmation of love. It also happens to be the only (mostly) original song on the album. The lyric “I’m feeling sexy tonight / I’ve fallen for a girl, I just met her on the floor / Tequila soda, that’s my order / Gonna ask her, girl, is that your boyfriend on the dance floor?” is at once sweet and complicated, as both an affirmation of queer romance and a question. What can we say about love in pop music? What can we say about love in our most private moments? What can we say if we can’t speak?

Regardless what you might think of electronic music, “I<3UQTINVU” remains incredibly complicated. If you are familiar with “I Love You Jennifer B,” this record will be extra special; “for the fans,” as one may suggest. You will be amazed when you pair the original to how different the new sounds are. Yet for those who are not familiar with this powerhouse duo, it may be something else entirely.

We may recognize an intricately produced electronic song in the fleeting moments in the clubs, yet we dance away. We hear an acoustic interlude, and we might understand a look on the dance floor we’ve all had once in our lives. Much more than a simple “remix” record, “I<3UQTINVU” remains wholly committed to experimentation, eclecticism and unshackled creativity. It pushes forward what we might think of as the boundaries of music, but also, how we might talk to people, as Ellery suggests in closing out “Sexy 2,” “gotta go, gotta think about that.” The duo don’t give us the cleanest answer, but they sure as hell give us a way to dance closer to it.