An unflinching portrait of love and loss, Jacob Read’s long-awaited second full-length is a moving testament to finding light amidst the darkness.

Jacob Read has never been in a rush. Since releasing his first song, ‘Shadowshow’, on Bandcamp in 2010, the South East London artist has spent over a decade refining the deliberately mysterious lo-fi sound of Jerkcurb. His 2019 debut album ‘Air Con Eden’ represented the years spent exploring variations of the same tuning and technique, establishing him as a meticulous craftsman embedded in the SE scene.

Five years on, Jerkcurb’s second album ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’ has arrived as something different. Initially intended to be an ambitious departure inspired by Old Hollywood grandeur and mid-century composers such as Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell, the album changed course when Read lost his father in 2022. Moving back into his childhood bedroom - which had become his late father’s room - Read abandoned his conceptual vision in favour of a collection that was more immediate and honest. He gravitated toward synthesisers and laptop production, discovering an intimacy in technology that he’d never felt before, and that allowed him to trace a journey from elaborate noir-inspired character studies to raw, direct expressions of grief - some recorded entirely from his bed.

We caught up with Read - the self-described “Snail Man”, a testament to his painstaking creative process - to discuss the long road to completing this deeply personal work, the spontaneity of bringing in collaborators after years of isolation, and how an album shaped by loss can ultimately encapsulate joy.

It’s been five years since your debut album, ‘Air Con Eden’. With the release of ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’, how do you feel that you’ve changed as an artist since then? What made now feel like the right time to put out a new project? I’ve survived an abundance of setbacks, losses and failures. I’m more nihilistic now and more world weary, which has changed my approach to the project, ultimately making me more positive and grateful about why I’m doing it. As I’ve got older, I don’t feel like I’m riding on the coattails of any wave, scene or trend. It’s more of a survival mechanism, a way of expressing through art and music, which is the only real thing I’m capable of doing.

I’ve been writing this album since about 2019, so I was never waiting around to find the right time. It just takes me a while. Almost every decision, from midi choir arrangements, to the hand painted fonts in the inner sleeve, was made by me. They call me the Snail Man. Others call this mental illness. But it took a while to make this record to a standard I was happy with, whilst simultaneously grieving, being broke, and living in London. I am incredibly proud of this body of work, and really grateful to everyone who helped and supported me through it.

Your original vision for ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’ was to go big with a full band, inspired by the grandiosity of Old Hollywood soundtracks and 20th Century composers. What initially made you want to deviate in this way from the different sound you established with ‘Air Con Eden’? I was already feeling quite defined by my past, specifically the guitar playing on ‘Air Con Eden’. That album was the accumulation of ten years of variations on the same tuning and technique; my first song was released on bandcamp in 2009, and ‘Air Con Eden’ didn’t drift too far sonically from the initial conception of what the project was.

This time, I wanted to replace the tremolo guitar - which is integral to Jerkcurb - with other instruments such as cello, which utilised a similar pitch-bending technique. High drama. I was very interested in mid century composers like Lou Harrison, Walter Schumann and Henry Cowell. I had quite a clear direction for the album… before it all changed and I did the opposite.

That vision changed after your father’s passing, with the songs taking a more direct approach as opposed to being ambiguous. Why was it important for you to be able to communicate your grief in such an open way? The vision I had before was too conceptual, pretentious, character driven. After he passed, the world I was living in shrank, and I needed to make music that suited my new pace of life. I cut a lot of things out during that period: people, jobs, ambitions, expectations. It takes a cataclysmic event to realise how much of life is made out of distractions. Naturally, I gravitated towards synthesizers, software and laptop production, things you could get physically very close to. It was the most direct way to convey my state of mind. A song like ‘Loss Dub’, for example, was recorded entirely without leaving my bed.

“As I’ve got older, I don’t feel like I’m riding on the coattails of any wave, scene or trend. It’s more of a survival mechanism, a way of expressing through art and music, which is the only real thing I’m capable of doing.”

**You made the decision to move into your father’s room - formerly your childhood bedroom - to exist with your grief as closely as possible. How did inhabiting that space shape the songs that arose from that period? ** When I first moved back, I wanted to shelve all ambitions to make an album. But the desire to make music crept up on me, more naturally and quicker than anticipated, and with a much clearer intention - to make sense of loss. Interestingly, ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’ was a song from the earlier, “Hollywood noir” vision of the album; a character-driven song about someone who goes fishing on a lake at night to seek out something below the surface, something that is missing from his life, a secret or a mystery.

‘Hungry’ and ‘Loss Dub’ I wrote a month or two after my father passed away, with a very clear and direct, very different approach to songwriting. I kept thinking of this Phil Elverum lyric: “When real death enters the house all poetry is dumb”. It was important for me to write in this way. Initially, I wasn’t sure if the new songs fitted in the same body of work as the older ones, but it ultimately became obvious that it was all part of the same process or journey that I went through, and thus the album is an equal mixture of both.

The songs came out of solo writing sessions taking place in the middle of the night. What was it about this particular time that allowed your ideas to come to the surface? This relates more to the writing of the early songs; I lived with five people in Catford, so the dead of night was the only time I couldn’t escape myself.

After producing and engineering most of the album yourself during solo sessions at Arcus Studios, what inspired you to bring in collaborators? What perspectives did they offer that changed the shape of the work? It is worth emphasising here how integral other people have been to this project, in terms of validation and also improvement. My partner Bella read through lyrics and helped me edit certain lines. Lara and Gray helped workshop beautiful harmonies. Henry played fretless bass over a lot of the tracks. George and Elliott replaced sterile drum loops with actual feeling. Right at the very end, Emma came in and replaced midi cello tracks with the real thing. Al played some synth. Tom and I drank a bottle of wine one night and he turned the bottle into a slide guitar; that was the final thing that was recorded for ‘Larchmont’, and it makes the song.

There is undeniable spontaneity that can be harder to capture when you’re on your own. Working with others at the end was possibly the most exciting part of the whole process, because it felt like it was coming alive. And everyone who played on the album is a close friend of mine - I’d been working alone, grieving, in various rooms for years, driving myself insane.

“There’s a certain fear that comes with ignorance — the feeling that you do not know enough, and therefore are doing something wrong. I think, actually, creativity is the opposite; it’s the freedom of exploring the unknown, without expectations and making mistakes.”

Synthesisers played an important part in the album’s making, specifically the immediacy that you recognised in them. What did they allow you to express that felt essential within ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’? Honestly, I’d never cared for synthesizers before. I loved the sound of them, but I relied heavily on synths being the obsession of other people. There’s a certain fear that comes with ignorance - the feeling that you do not know enough, and therefore are doing something wrong. I think, actually, creativity is the opposite; it’s the freedom of exploring the unknown, without expectations and making mistakes. That was ultimately why they were so integral - it felt like opening up a can of worms I’d never known was in the cupboard. Those worms fed me for weeks. Pretty much all of my favourite things I’ve created have been accidents.

From a stylistic point of view, the synths reminded me of my childhood: of the trance, techno, trip hop and IDM CDs that my dad played when I was a kid. LFO, Massive Attack, Underworld, Orbital, Black Dog etc. But also of being in school, with that sense of technological optimism. I got forensically obsessed with Eric Persing, the man who pioneered sample based synthesis in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He layered low res recordings of things like a pin dropping and a voice, turned them into samples, and created some of the most popular synthesiser presets. These are the utopian tones of my childhood - of ‘90s infomercials, and early video games. It reminds me of a time when technology was forward thinking, when dialing up the internet was like going on an archaeological expedition of the world. Retro futurism, in some capacity, has always been there with my approach to making art. I don’t know why, perhaps I’m just a deeply nostalgic person.

You played songs from the album live in 2023, including while supporting King Krule on a US tour - the response to which you’ve described as “heartening”. What was it like sharing such personal material with live audiences for the first time, and did their response teach you anything about what you’d created? One half of my family are American, and I hadn’t seen any of them since my dad had passed away the previous summer. I’m an only child, and my cousin Miki is like a brother to me. When Archy [King Krule] asked me to do the tour, it felt like the most beautiful thing I could do with my life at that exact moment. Miki took time off work and became my tour manager for almost a month. We drove around in a rented car going from state to state and listening to the music of our childhood. A lot of my family were in the audience, across Boston, New York etc.

King Krule’s audience has always been very supportive of my music. The guys in his band are also family to me, since we’ve all grown up together. The shows were terrifying; there were times I felt like I couldn’t do it, jumping out of my state of hibernation to play alone in front of thousands of people every night. But I’m so glad I did. Everybody was supportive. The whole thing feels like a blissful mirage.

**You painted the album cover at your father’s studio in Camberwell, and it was your first time using oil paint as a medium. What was that experience like, and how does the dreamlike, noir-influenced imagery connect to the songs? ** My dad was an oil painter, the best I knew. I inherited all of his paints and canvases. I felt a solemn sense of connection and importance when I got the keys to the studio… although I do think he would have really disliked the paintings I made! I can only seem to paint very flatly, like I have a fear of my own brushstrokes. Years of cartooning and graphic illustration has formed my style of painting. But I find beauty in ugliness, and I try to embrace it.

Now that ‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’ is out in the world, what are you hoping that listeners take away from spending time with it? I would like for people to not think of it as depressing, and for them to not be put off by any of its themes. It’s ultimately a joyous experience. While making it, I learnt a lot about what I value most in life, and in creativity; and, whilst it was a difficult process, I also had a lot of fun. I hope that shows. I am very proud of the album and I can’t wait to do more in the future.

**‘Night Fishing On A Calm Lake’ is out now via Handsome Dad Records. **

**Jerkcurb will embark on a headline tour of the UK in February 2026; find out more here. **

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