Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and musician Remy Jean is the creative mastermind behind the rising indie project Sister Gemini. Much like countless other musicians, she came into music as a byproduct of teenage discomfort: After being shunned by the cheerleaders at her high school, the Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based artist found herself taking up guitar and hanging out with the outsiders and weirdos in the music room. “At first I was, like, ‘Oh my god, really? I’m going to hang out with these people?’ And then I was, like, ‘Wait, these people are me,'” Remy Jean fondly recalls.
Embracing some of her genuine interests for the first time in her life, the Bay Area native began gigging in a Misfits over band and dreamt of a move to Southern California. Upon graduation, Remy Jean relocated to Los Angeles, where she harnesses the energy and encouragement of a circle of talented peers — and where she started her solo recording project Sister Gemini.
She describes Sister Gemini’s sound as “Heavy music for people who like soft music and vice versa.” Thematically, her lyrics grapple with the concept of forgiving yourself — and of coming terms with the reality that although you may sometimes hurt others, it doesn’t necessarily make you a terrible person. Frequently, the material focus on making mistakes, and as a narrator, she isn’t afraid to paint herself as a malevolent character — whether wittingly or unwittingly. “You’re always the villain in someone’s narrative,” she says.
As a self-described open book, Remy Jean’s work is anchored in the sort of unvarnished honesty of an older sister or older friend, giving the listener advice based on the embarrassing yet survivable missteps they’ve managed to navigate.
The Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first single of year, and third Sister Gemini single ever “One Room Apartment” is a 120 Minutes era MTV alt rock-like anthem featuring fuzzy and crunchy distortion pedaled power chords, rousingly anthemic hooks and chorus paired with Remy Jean’s saccharine sweet melody within a classic grunge-inspired song structure. The result is a song that sounds as though it could hav been
Initially conceived as a whispery acoustic demo, the grunge pop anthem “is about attempting to rely on external comforts to pull you up when you’re in a funk,” Remy Jean explains. “I start by calling my friends but when they aren’t available, I turn to casual sex to try to numb the loneliness. I wrote this song during the pandemic, when the world really did feel as small as my apartment at times. It’s a pretty vulnerable song for how upbeat it sounds, I love that contrast.”
She adds, “It took me a while to find my groove, in terms of who I wanted to work with and who actually understood the sound that I was going for.” Ultimately, she wound up working with Sam Plecker, because he had an intrinsic understanding of Remy Jean’s vision for the project. Along with Plecker, who also contributed bass, as well as engineering duties, the Bay Area native recruited Babehoven‘s and Runnner’s Ellington Peet (percussion) and Yunus Iyriboz (guitar) to flesh out the original demo.
Directed by Director Mia Gualtieri, the accompanying video for “One Room Apartment” captures the boredom, desperation and unease of pandemic related lockdowns, in which some people slowly lost their shit.
