On November 8, 2024, French band JIRO released Elevate Spirit, their very first EP, which is already establishing itself as a benchmark on the metal scene.
With its blend of raw energy and progressive sophistication, this opus deftly navigates between gentleness and intensity, clear vocals and screams. Through this album, JIRO delivers a message of hope: an exploration of life's defeats and fears, offering listeners an opportunity to recognize themselves, to reassure themselves, and to feel less alone. This contrast between sonic power and emotional depth is a paradox often found in metal, but one that JIRO master brilliantly.
Elevate Spirit marks a turning point for the band: this is their first project with their official line-up, after having worked on other tracks with a different singer. The chemistry between the current members is clearly evident on this EP (which is available on all platforms).
Rather than tell you more about it, we'd rather let Florian, Jonathan and Romain - JIRO's guitarists and singer - tell you about it themselves in the interview below.
To conclude, we invite you to come and discover JIRO live at the Charitable Metal Fest, on December 21 at Le Petit Bain, alongside Solar Eruption and Dropdead Chaos. An evening not to be missed - and we hope to see many of you there!
INTERVIEW
So, where does the name Jiro?
F - Well, there are several answers to that question. The first is that we wanted a name that would be easy to remember in a few letters, that would be unifying, that would be understood by everyone. And JIRO is easy to remember and easy to say. But in fact, the little story is that the group is a year and a half old, but in fact, with Jonathan, Benjamin and Thomas, we've been playing together for a very long time. And we used to rehearse in Le Blanc-Ménil, Rue du Général Giraud, in the 93. So it says G-I-R-A-U-D. And it's a place we were really attached to. We used to play in the drummer's garage. Then the house was sold. And out of nostalgia, we thought, well... It was Jonathan who came up with the idea of saying, “Look, we spent all our teenage years playing together in that garage. Why not call this new project Jiro?” and we thought it was funny, so we kept the idea.
How would you define yourself to someone who has never listened to your music?
R - That's a good question.
J - There are so many possibilities, but I think we're really a stamped metal band with big metalcore influences and a particular affection for riffing, so looking for influences from Lamb of God, the very raw side of guitar riffing. With a very modern side influenced by the whole English and Australian scene too, so While She Sleeps, Parkway Drive, Polaris, are big influences for us. So the riffing is very raw and the writing and arrangements very modern.
Do you have a word to define your Elevate Spirit EP?
R - Introspection.
J - It's hard to choose a word. But if I had to pick just one, that would be it.
A - Introspection, whether it's emotional... mental, sensory, really there's a bit of a global aspect to it. And depending on how the songs evolve from the first to the fifth, there's really this aspect of understanding yourself, understanding others and trying to reflect a bit of yourself.
And what is the message of this EP?
A - To sum up the message, because it's a very broad one, it's really about what we've experienced personally or with other people. What we've been through, what we're going through right now, what we'll go through later. There's really this aspect of how you can work on yourself. Whether it's about shocks or traumas we might have had before, about things we find hard to deal with, about things we find hard to get through sometimes. And this set-up tells a bit of all that at once with all the songs, to finally de-diabolize certain things a bit, and succeed in unblocking things for certain people. Maybe it will speak to them when they read the text, when they listen to the song, and there's really this aspect that comes out a lot because I wanted to do it, I needed to do it. And in the band, talking to the other guys too, we realized that I wasn't the only one who wanted to do it. And in the end, it came naturally. We wanted to end up with this strong message, in fact.
J - There's a phrase I like, which I think defines the EP quite well, and that's “taking a step back”. Taking a step back from the things that happen to us, from our place in society, from the emotions we may feel. It's about taking a step back and looking at things from a different angle.
And why did you choose Last to Remain to introduce this new EP, this new era?
J - Actually, it was part of the overall context of the EP in terms of release strategy. We wanted to have a first single, then a second, then the EP. And in the things we wanted to gradually introduce to the public, knowing that it's necessarily the public who discover us, since we're a young band. We really identify it as our first project; there was a first EP but it's no longer available, because it was made with a former singer, with compositions that we don't play anymore. We really reshaped our artistic direction, so we consider it our first EP. And we thought Last to Remain was really a track that showed the full range of what we can do. But now we've just released a second single that's much more accessible, more mainstream. But in Last To Remain, there was really the whole range of what we can do. There's a riff, there's clean vocals, there's saturated vocals, there's a clean passage, there's a breakdown, there's a solo... It really had all the ingredients of what we like to do, what we know how to do, what we can do. And we thought it was a good way of getting started before proposing other versions of our music.
What was your favorite song to record in the studio?
F - I recorded almost all the guitars on the EP. It wasn't easy. I'd have to say that Last To Remain was the one I had the most trouble recording, not technically, but more in the sense of getting my head around the production and how I was going to do it. I had to find the sounds, etc., because I produced the sounds myself. Because I produced all the sounds on the album. After that, I'd say the easiest to record was, I think, Enmity Spreads.
J - Which was your favorite to record? The one you had the most fun with?
F - The one I had the most fun recording? Actually, all of them! I'd say The Dread I Felt, though, but all of them.
J - I'd say that the one I preferred to record was the only one I recorded. [laughs] Actually, I didn't interfere with the recording of the guitars because Flo knows how to do it very well and there wasn't necessarily any point in me doing it. Still, it's always better to have one person record all the guitar parts. But I did record Kairos, which is the last song on the EP, and it's a song I wrote a long time ago, so it made sense to record it to keep a certain groove that was important to me when I wrote it, and that I wanted to keep in the song a few years later.
R - As a singer, it's true that there was Kairos vocally speaking. There are a lot of things, and it was a pleasure to record it in the studio because there are a lot of things, it tells a lot of stories, but it was a pleasure and a need for me, and it was also a challenge because it wasn't easy at all to record. And the first one, Will I See You There? required both pleasure and... not suffering, that's a big word, but it was both hard and pleasant to do it.
Your sound strikes a balance between this groove and the brutality of metal. How do you manage to balance the two in the studio?
J - I think the balance comes before the studio, actually. The studio is where we materialize the artistic work we've done upstream. I don't think you could say that we do what we do to get what we get. It's really the fruit of a lot of hard work, a lot of reflection, a lot of back and forth, and a lot of composing, which in the end has had several lives because we just couldn't find the groove we wanted to bring out in our song. I think that in our music, we have a definition of groove which is a little bit our own and which defines us and which, I think, will continue to evolve. As we said at the start of this interview, we're looking for something very raw, very effective, like Lamb of God, where there's really very little artifice. It's all about the choice of notes, the rhythmic choices made directly on the instrument, which we try to put into perspective with a more modern approach, with sounds that go beyond those of the instrument. And I think all this is really work that's done pre-prod, in fact. What we realized in the production of this EP was that the pre-prod work already had to be of the highest quality for it to sound right. But we already knew that magic wasn't going to happen in the studio, that it had to be there when we were composing and recording the pre-prod, and that if it wasn't there, a priori, the studio wasn't going to work any magic. It had to be there from the start, so I think it was mostly upstream that it happened.
And earlier you spoke of introspection in relation to the album. You touch on some pretty important themes, nostalgia, anger... all things emotional, in the end. Was it an outlet for you?
A - I think there will be different answers for different people, basically. I know that for me personally, yes, it's a kind of outlet. After that, it's also how I compose, it's also how I work. I really look for things that speak to me personally or that I perceive, that I feel, etc., whether in terms of emotions, lyrics, anything verbal or non-verbal. And quickly, it's something I want to put down on paper and write down. But yes, there's a real introspective side to it. I needed to do it because there were quite a few things, many years before, even a few years before writing this EP, where, precisely, there was a need to put things down on paper. And that led to what's here today. So I'm both happy and almost relieved, in the sense of “here I am, I've put this down, it's almost not mine any more, now everyone can read it, listen to it and make up their own imaginations in their heads or their own feelings about what they hear”.
F - To pick up on that, the most important thing about the lyrics, even if Romain wrote them, is that you can relate to them. So it's true that we don't write lyrics about dragons or fantasy like you might find in certain types of metal. It's not really our cup of tea, even if we do listen to it, of course. I really like this style of music, which talks about fantastic things and so on. But it's true that it's important for us, so we really want to say what we feel, and at the same time offer people our way of life, so that they can identify with it too, because we're looking to get close to the public, quite simply. And it's important for us to develop this through our music.
J - Maybe just to conclude, it's true that when you make English-language music, especially metal, it's pretty easy to take a few shortcuts, to have very effective music, to put down a lyric that... it doesn't really matter what it's about, as long as the musicality is there, it's fine. I listen to a lot of bands where the lyrics don't necessarily transcend me. And I think that with Jiro, we've always wanted to go for something like that. I think we've always wanted to get a message across... In other words, not to betray who we are. I mean, we're suburbanites, we're kind of average guys, and we don't want to invent a life for ourselves. But the fact remains that we have - some of us more than others - experienced strange things that upset us, hard things, even traumatic things. And that's what we'd like to talk about: telling ourselves that we're normal people, completely normal, but that hasn't stopped us from having to face up to things in life that are sometimes extremely hard, and that are coming to the surface, in fact, today, and using that to move forward, to do good within ourselves and around us. So it's a message we want to be fairly positive, or at least we want to avoid being pessimistic and fatalistic.
And if your EP were the soundtrack to a film or video game, what kind of film or video would it be?
A - It depends on the songs. For my part, I'm way behind, I apologize to all the gamers out there, I just finished 2016's Doom, and Mike Gordon, the God, the ultimate God. We're not as much into musical doom as he does, which is extraordinary, but musically, maybe Kairos. But on a video game that's a bit more spatial, something that's in a bit of a space opera universe, that's something that would speak to me quite a lot, so after that it could be quite a lot of things, without wanting to get into the Star Citizen debate, but I love starting with a particular idea, but we'll talk about that later. Otherwise, in film maybe a little less, I don't know. I'll leave it to them.
F - Since we're talking a lot about introspection and relationships with others. I'd go for The Last Of Us. And right now I'm playing Silent Hill 2. It's a psychological thriller, and I really like that kind of thing, and it's true that it reminds me a lot of that. After that, in terms of a film, I confess, I don't have too many ideas for introspective stuff.
A - Yes, I'm going to come back to that. I was talking about space opera with Kairos. We'd had a bit of a chat about the theme John had in mind for this track, because he'd written the riffs and the guitar in relation to that. He had a Kairos theme, so I'll let him explain what “Kairos” really is. And in fact I talked about it and I said to him, listen, it's funny, but a few days ago I watched Interstellar for the umpteenth time, which is an incredible masterpiece, and I said to myself, this is amazing, because I finished the film and I had Kairos in my head. I said to myself, this is crazy, it's really stuck, and clearly, the text that's written on it and everything that revolves around it, revolves around Kairos. And so the Kairos theme tells us a little bit about the kind of vision that the main character of Interstellar has, the little girl who sees her father go off into space and doesn't see him again for a really long time. And there's a real sense of that in Kairos's lyrics. So yes, I'd say Interstellar.
F - Why have you spoiled it?
J - We can only hope that everyone has seen it.
F - It's been 10 years since it came out.
J - If you spoiled it, anyone who hasn't seen it is at fault. [laughs] I won't have a better suggestion... Much to the dismay of those watching, perhaps, but... All metalheads are gamers, I feel, except me.
R - Says the guy who just finished playing God of War.
J - Yeah, I got a PS4... But I'm not really into video games to be honest. But I'd say Interstellar too.
And finally, do you have a message for your fans?
J - What we can tell you is that the EP that's coming out, Elevate Spirit, makes us very proud. It's the start of a new adventure. We're just going to enjoy releasing it, and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves beforehand to make sure that everything went well and that we released it in good conditions. It's done, it's out now, we're savoring every moment, we've got concerts coming up right afterwards, so we're going to take the time to have a good time on stage with those who want to come and see us, and then there's bound to be a sequel, we're on it and we're not doing it out of compulsion, we're doing it because we love making music together and I think we've got a great future ahead of us. In any case, we're going to seize the opportunity and have a lot of fun doing it.
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