Add Jennifer Vanilla to your ’80s alien-pop playlist

As Jennifer Vanilla, ex-Ava Luna singer Kye Grant can be a million things at once. They’ve described their extraterrestrial alter ego as “a noun, a verb, and an adjective all at once”; “an all-purpose, multi-use substance”; and an “entrepreneurial fantasy vessel and avatar-cultivation experiment LARPed into reality.” Glancing at these descriptors in 2023 inspires an automatic eye roll at post-post-modernism gone mad, but Vanilla’s music justifies the nebulous phraseology surrounding it.

The project’s unlikely origin story may not ameliorate the skepticism inspired by Grant’s lofty labels, but it does provide some depth to the persona: As the story goes, Vanilla is a “sexless humanoid alien” with a “quintessentially ’80s name (the decade of [Grant’s] birth)” who “opened a portal to the eastern coast of the United States” and used a “magical braid” to entangle Grant’s essence with their own.

The Jennifer Vanilla experiment has always used the ’80s as its control group. 2017’s This Is Jennifer, the listening public’s patchwork introduction to the phenomenon, was reflexively self-conscious of its debt to the decade, resulting in a flavorful but soupy meta-pastiche. Castle In the Sky, Vanilla’s debut studio LP, still owes its tongue-in-cheek technicolor sheen to the false consumerist fantasies of the Reagan/Bush era, but the character’s scope is expanded here. Co-written and -produced by Grant and Brian Abelson, dropped in August, and deluxe-ified on December 1, the album is a confident defense of an apparently shaky concept. Its three new tracks — remixes by Jerry Paper, musclecars, and Love Injection — are further proof of Vanilla’s present-day staying power.

De facto opener “Take Me For a Ride” (following the aqueous intro “Jennifer Calling”) draws heavily on the mid-’70s sci-fi adventures of Kraftwerk. And later track “Cool Loneliness” jumps forward in time to the turn of the millennium, pulling from the sleepier end of the trip-hop spectrum (think Zero 7) and the sumptuous, sneakily off-center R&B of Macy Gray. It appears that sometime between Vanilla’s landing on earth and the now, Grant has helped them cultivate an appreciation for the ancestors and descendants of their defining cultural moment.

Still, an entity as temporally grounded as Vanilla can’t resist some direct allusions to its home decade. Mid-album cut “Humility’s Disease” and the original record’s closing, titular track take cues from no wave’s more dance-floor friendly sector (Bush Tetras, Lizzy Mercier Descloux), mining its most uncanny sounds for songs that leave a metallic taste on the tongue. Elsewhere, early standout “Jennifer Pastoral” and centerpiece “Body Music” pay homage to house pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Alan King in a way that’s clearly loving but too flighty to feel derivative.

“Dancing is an expression of emotion / Often a kind of aspiration / Toward complete physical wellbeing and fulfillment,” Vanilla says early on in the latter track, adopting an ebullient speaking voice that conveys tonality without actually containing it. Really, Grant’s elastic vocal instrument is the selling point of the Vanillaverse, a subtly sarcastic tour guide through a shining city of creature comforts.

With enough curated cheeriness and kitschy synth work, any artist worth their salt can emulate an ’80s sound. But Castles In the Sky takes on the much trickier task of blending the era’s capitalist excesses with its radical elements — art that arose as a response to the brutal injustices of austerity and imperialism masked as American exceptionalism — and projecting the whole mess onto our current technocratic dystopia. Jennifer Vanilla’s dimension of origin is an eternal ’80s, one in which the decade’s false promises are suspended in midair like floating castles. But Grant’s critical eye complicates the premise, letting the weight of the future seep ever so slightly into their avatar’s perpetual daydream.