In April 2023, Wallice found herself on stages in arenas full of strangers. The Los Angeles songwriter was on the other side of the world, playing shows to 10,000 or more people who had, in many cases, been standing in line for days to see their favorite band, The 1975. Wallice was the opener, playing the biggest shows of her life to crowds that mostly didn’t know her name. It was a thrill, of course, but there was dejection to it, too, to staring out at front rows of blank faces, struggling with the sleeplessness of a few days spent in line.
So Wallice did what songwriters do: She turned the uncanny experience into “The Opener,” the six-minute gambit of her first LP, The Jester. As the track moves from tender ballad to defiant rocker, she considers all the bad things she might say about her own art — a Radiohead rip-off, too innocent, too determined — and moves forward, anyway. “Gonna get what I deserve/I’m still the opener,” she roars in the final seconds, balancing future hopes with present conditions across a razor wire of howling guitars.
This push and pull between expectation and actuality animate much of The Jester, Wallice’s ultra-dynamic and charged 14-song debut. Though Wallice has been writing songs since she was a preteen playing cello and releasing them for almost as long, her career took shape during the last four years, when a series of singles and EPs suggested her as a new chronicler of early adulthood’s struggles and delights.
Written while living with her mom and working in the eyelash extension business, that music — Wallice, 26, says now — was about coming of age. Now with a place of her own and a decade-long relationship, Wallice is making music that reckons with age and reality, that learns to find joy and meaning not in the life you wanted but in the life you have. As it pivots from soft acoustic waltzes to fluorescent electronic bounces, from warped piano drifts to unabashed rock anthems, The Jester holds fast to that thread: gratitude for what you’ve got and hope for what might yet come.
A year before those shows across the globe, Wallice returned from her first substantial tour with similar questions about her path forward. Having first found widespread attention online, she struggled with the novel notion of putting on a show each night, of performing for a crowd no matter what else was happening. On April 1, 2022, during their first writing session together, she told Ethan Gruska & her longtime collaborator Marinelli about those feelings; together, they stumbled upon the concept of “The Jester,” or about sometimes having to mask what’s inside for the sake of entertainment.
They hatched the first half of “Heaven Has to Happen,” a confession about suffering from imposter syndrome even while you’re living your dream. “How many more jokes can I make before the wool gets pulled out from over my eyes?” Wallice sings just before a brief, mid-song outburst of distorted bass. For the better part of two years, that’s where Wallice and Gruska left the track.
