jnr. Is Still Figuring It Out and That’s Exactly Where He Wants To Be

Photographs by Sara Regan

There’s a quiet defiance running through jnr.’s debut EP i’ve been looking for you my whole life. (released March 18). Even in its most tender moments, something deeper is being questioned, and we’re taken along the journey as it is understood (almost). What began as a project to create a collection of love songs written abroad in his partner’s home country of France, slowly transformed into something a little different… a documented journey where jnr. is coming to terms with his identity and the uneasy process of learning how to belong.

For jnr., the last year and a half have marked a turning point. The self-produced artist, who has collaborated with Sydney’s alt-pop circuit like Hevenshe and RAGEFLOWER, arrives at this debut with something more compelling, honesty in the change that occurred throughout the making of the EP and his journey as an artist. Framed as a love letter to both his partner and himself, but it reads less like a conclusion and more like an open-ended conversation.

“I feel like a big thing about this EP is that there are a lot of questions all over the project but not really any answers,” he says. “Which is where I sit currently.”

The opening track ‘Darling,’ sets the tone with a current of doubt as jnr. doesn’t quite allow himself to settle into happiness without interrogation. “The main thing with me whenever I’m writing a love song is that I can’t always see pure happiness,” he explains. The track captures the tension between emotional instinct and learned doubt. Even in its most affectionate moments, jnr. is negotiating with himself.

Originally, jnr. planned on creating the majority of the project during his two-week writing residency in France (aka where his partner is from) to create the perfect love letter that he had in mind. But distance has a way of distorting perspective.

“I was so far away from anything connected to myself and my culture, especially writing my first EP didn’t feel like the best way to represent me,” he says.

The turning point came on the final day of that residency, when ‘I guess it’s fine.’ was pretty much fully written in the first sitting. Listening to the track, you can understand the years of suppressed tension around identity and belonging being vented through the lyrics. 

“It’s a big factor of my life,” he says. “I’ve never felt like I’ve fit in due to my culture… which trained me to think that ‘this (Australia) isn’t home.’”

From here, the EP wasn’t just about romantic love. It was a lot more about sitting with his  “relationship to my own culture and the reasons I didn’t want to face my own identity”. And from this change, he was able to come to terms with the evolving definition of home. How it’s not tied to a country, nor narrowed down to a particular answer by the end of the record.

“For me right now, home is just wherever my friends and family and loved ones are,” he says. 

jnr. mirrors that emotional uncertainty in ‘for less/nothing more’ as an immersive, two-part track that combines ambient field recordings into alt-pop sounds. As I asked jnr. about the making of the track, he revealed that he suddenly came to the realisation that he “was never going to be in this place again”. With this he took the initiative with a “little pencil microphone and limited equipment” and placed it into “a watering can where I recorded crickets that were singing certain notes, so I left it out there and came back to it and made chords out of it. That's how I took the space I was in and turned it into a song”. With the other side of the track though, we enter the alt-pop sound which leans into the UK Garage and Jerome Blazé’s ‘Living Room’ and shows the strong climax → breaking point which also inspired him to try a similar technique.

The track closes with a spoken-word recording from his partner Zoe’s parents, reflecting on her childhood and the person she would become. It’s an intimate and loving reminder that love exists within a generational context, not just the present moment.

“I love spoken word,” he adds. “Sometimes it’s better to speak something instead of sing it.”

Tracks like ‘as you are’ push the EP further into emotional duality. Written as both a reflection on his partner and himself, it captures the experience of watching someone you love struggle with the same internal battles you’re facing. “I was trying to find a way to combine both concepts,” he says. “A song about being at war with myself and coming to understand someone who is also at war with themselves.”

It pairs with ‘But I won’t settle.’ as a kind of sibling track. This being more introspective, and ‘as you are’ shifting perspectives between voices. Together, they underline a central idea: that intimacy often reveals as much about yourself as it does about the other person.

The final track (or should I say lullaby) ‘everything’ offers the closest thing to comfort on the EP. Written early in the process, it carries a quiet reassurance, both to himself and the listener, that amidst all the uncertainty, everything is okay.

“I wanted to write a lullaby as something that could be passed down generationally.”

jnr. noted that “this song feels like paper,” revealing that it was the first track where he wrote lyrics by hand instead of typing them. Which led us into discussing jnr. 's approach to new projects like this EP which unusually revealed that he made the decision to name every track before writing the songs. Rather acting as a conceptual framework that guided the early stages, even as the meaning of those titles (which were originally love letters for his partner) shifted over time.

“I thought it would be a cooler idea than just going into a studio and saying ‘I’m going to write an EP using these titles,’” he says. “It felt like a really beautiful concept… and then it evolved into something else (just as beautiful) entirely.” 

i’ve been looking for you my whole life. perfectly demonstratesthe unexpected change and evolvement of both the project and of jnr. 

With a debut EP comes a debut headline show at Buddy’s Bar in Newtown. jnr. recalls how the energy was strong enough to the point that the floor was a little loose and shaking.” Leaving jnr. Just wanting to do more shows now and get into the rhythm of playing live.”

As the project had been a quite a long process, I was curious to know what’s next for jnr. in which he shared that he had “been writing a lot” but this time without set track titles and he is finding it “so freeing to do the exact opposite of what I was doing in the last process,” he says. “Now I’m just writing without a planned direction.”

If this EP is anything to go by, then we’ve learnt how openness might be where jnr. thrives most. Not in having the answers but in documenting the process of searching for them.

If that’s something you’re keen to know more about (how could you not) then make sure you check out jnr. and i’ve been looking for you my whole life.here!