Jupe Jupe: The Kings of Sorrows Have Arrived

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Music has an immensely powerful way of transforming us. In an instant, you are transported deep into the heart of the city late at night, beckoning a forbidden rendezvous with a lover. Or, like a noir film, you are a spy caught between the mission and the woman you desire, unsure of whom to trust—not even the shadows. Or, perhaps, the music simply reflects loneliness, melancholy, or something in between.

These are some of the emotions you experience when listening to Jupe Jupe. Their sound harkens back to the 1980s and the stiff collar romantics, the frilly wanderers connecting fabric to being, and the introverted creatives wrapped in a nuance of minimalist black. Their music is not just a timestamp, but a prospective look over the art of sound, vision, and the story.

With a new album, King of Sorrows further dives into the darkness and finds lost parallels to youth, passion, and a gritty drive not fully experienced before with their now expansive discography.

Burning from the Inside

“I got to bring in some of my youthful anger into this new album,” said vocalist My Young. “There’s still some of the Duran Duran and Depeche Mode influence. I spent time listening to a bunch of old Industrial and the darker side of Bauhaus, Siouxsie, and The Cure. It inspired me to look at what else I could explore from an artistic side. It was fun to dive into that side of me because it’s been largely ignored for so many years.

“With the new album, we got to pull in some of the more obscure influences like Legendary Pink Dots or Front 242, that early mid-’80s stuff. It’s been fun pulling from the darker stuff and bringing that into the pop songs that obviously define us as we mix it all in.”

What carves the path for King of Sorrows is the writing that went into it. Jupe Jupe have morphed their process from writing the storyline first and then wrapping the music around it to writing the music first and then layering over songwriting. For this album, it is about the emotion and keeping both at the forefront.

“This time around, we asked what the vibe is that we like, what do we want to sound like, and what would we like to perform,” said guitarist Bryan Manzo. “And so in that, it’s like you get kind of a lyric and sound a little bit together more at the same time because they start to reveal themselves a little bit as the pieces start to build.”

For the band, the sound and the story all came together very effortlessly. What the album presents is a bite-ier post-punk style. It’s a nice dynamic for them to nestle into the Darkwave scene of Seattle. But that wasn’t always the case.

An Evolution of Emotion

Young and Manzo’s story started over 2,000 miles away as they originally called Austin their home, performing together in a spaced-out prog band. As their hearts grew fonder of new directions, they left Austin for Seattle. Inspired by their love of New Wave and indie pop, they formed Pleasure Craft with guitarist Patrick Partington. It was one of the few bands in the Northwest experimenting with this sound.

“It was an even more bold decision when we started Pleasure Craft because this was still a rock town,” said Young. “It was not like New York or Los Angeles or any of the other music cities that were really into this kind of music. We were lucky to find a community of shoegaze and indie rock bands that liked what we were doing enough to where we could put on shows with those kinds of bands. It was not a scene where we could easily put on a Darkwave night or a New Wave night like it is now.”

When the band transitioned to Jupe Jupe, they put themselves in a unique position surrounded by bands that lived in a lo-fi world exasperated by a grunge scene that formulated as a reaction to the 1980s. In essence, Jupe Jupe brought the scene full circle while focusing on progressing the band into timeless art. People took notice and through albums like Invaders, Crooked Kisses, and Midnight Waits for No One, they have inspired a younger audience to take note and prove to themselves that they do not simply exist as nostalgic art.

With Midnight Waits for No One, the group used the album as a platform of reflection during the pandemic. But we got some hints of what was to come with the edgier “Horrorshow” and “As The Body Will.” On King of Sorrows, it’s about pushing through turbulence.

“If you go progressively from some of the stuff we’ve done in the past, it’s pretty harmonically dense,” said Manzo. “A lot of stuff is happening a lot of the time that replicated our lives. Now in 2026, so far has proven to be even more than you can imagine, where the pandemic did strip things down in a way that gets in your head. I think it left us a little bit of freedom and permission to do less. Not less in terms of the dedication to writing or wanting to craft something that we felt was at a quality level, but to do less intentionally inside the song.”

“It was a little more introspective on the parts,” continued Arbini. “For me, I deliberately looked at how I approached the music. On a couple of songs, we actually started with drumbeats and recorded them as the foundation for the song. It was about building off of that. I tried to integrate some things outside of my comfort zone. We started listening more to how to support the songs and evolve the material.”

Intentional Progression

Though the album was written over a year ago, King of Sorrows as a whole feels very synchronicitous of the times. It leads to the intention of being aware of the society around you and building parallels to individual relationships. These are the things that reach out to the listener and latch on through a shared experience.

It comes from the ephemeral longing of the song “Haunting” that burns with a fire forged into a jagged knife. It appears in the dead of night through dim fluorescents on “Nothing Left To Come.” And it builds through angular guitars slicing through the atmosphere on “Cane.” Through all of this, Young vocals guide us into the abyss.

“We’ve all been in different bands before and different combinations of all of us,” said Young. “There’s so many life events that I can pinpoint to certain times of Jupe Jupe. We just want to push it further and see where the process takes us.”