Jane Remover: Beauty Sleep keeps waking itself up

Beauty Sleep is a pop song with a hand around its own throat. Jane Remover wrote, produced, mixed and performed the whole of it, and it never picks between its two moods: a vocal softened nearly shy, and drums that land like weather.

Remover retired the Dltzk name in 2022. Since then: Frailty, Census Designated, Revengeseekerz, the Heart EP, and side projects Leroy and Venturing that let them work other muscles. Beauty Sleep is their first proper single in a while, announced September 21 and out September 23 on deadAir.

The Brendon Burton video puts them in a laboratory tube as a glamorous alien, then breaks them out, onto a motorcycle, to the beach, and the song earns the frame.

Three minutes and forty-two seconds, most of them spent warping. Synths bend in disorienting directions, cymbals crash in a crush, and a four-on-the-floor kick holds the floor while everything above it argues. Then the hook arrives and it is straightforwardly pretty. That is the trick: hyperpop with electroclash in its teeth, and the sweetness rewards sitting through the noise.

It is for anyone who has followed Remover through the genre shifts, and for anyone who likes pop mixed loud and slightly wrong. Earlier this year brought the SoundCloud tracks Headbanger and Conversion 2, and the Live Exhibit tour runs to October 7.

What fails is the middle, where effects stack faster than the melody can answer and the track briefly turns into a folder of good ideas. The warping is the point, and it still costs the song a clean second listen.

A strong four: loud, pretty, restless, and gone in under four minutes.

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