French electronic duo , brothers Carl and Renaud, have been stirring up a scene with feverishly energetic live shows and viral social content. In six years they’ve dropped plenty of big singles and one EP in 2023, but debut album ‘NOTHING’S FAKE’ is the first time they’ve fleshed out a fully cohesive body of material.
The album took two years to make, and the pair know it matters. “We do realise that it is a big thing,” says Carl, speaking ahead of the band’s London album release party. “We are happy to have finished a real project, something that is the most well-finished thing we have ever done. Track 2 must be coherent with track 11, it’s a craft.”
“It makes sense for us,” reflects Renaud on the timing, something that took time to build to. “I like every song that we put on the album, it’s not something that comes from a place of needing to add things to sell it. We took the time to do it properly.”
Jersey seem to do everything “properly”, throwing themselves into the details. They’ve taken on all sorts of creative paths to bring out the joy of the band, manifesting plenty of online success naturally thanks to the absurdity and surrealism of their ideas. The attention-grabbing side of Jersey is as effortless as it is unavoidable, with a man raving with a lamp in an intimate apartment performance is perhaps the standout so far.
For this duo, the quality of the songs and the ability to capture attention are equally important. “You do need both now unless you are a nepo baby. Unfortunately, we are not,” Carl laughs. “I don’t know, if we didn’t have this social media, whether we would be here right now. We are not Parisian born-and-raised so it is a great way to meet people who are working there.”
Tonight’s final album release party, following sets in NYC and Paris, is at London’s Avalon Café, an unsuspecting and unpretentious backroom in a rogue area of South East London that quickly comes alive with a hundred or so fans who secured free but exclusive tickets to what will likely be the last chance to see the Jersey brothers perform from within a crowd as their shows grow in scale and capacity.
Renaud has found these foreign crowds particularly gracious: “We are really inspired by English and US music since we were kids… these are two cities that we like, where the crowds are good, and where we feel welcome.”
“We did our first world tour after a video of one of those intimate parties in Paris,” Carl explains. “With the new project, we will be on stage; for the first 3 years, we have been playing from the middle of the crowd. For the next shows, we are currently working on something big for on-stage – a whole new set-up. It is cool to end the in-the-crowd era in this way. We never did this in London before. London was our first sell-out show away from France, it is a nice place for us to return to.”
Those here to see it are fervent: fans are spotted in 2024 tour merch, avidly discussing previous shows and the music videos the band have released since. One man describes finding other Jersey fans like “spotting a unicorn in the wild” – but that is indisputably becoming less true as the cult grows.
provides an impressively high-energy set as support, but when walk across the room things step up a notch. Launching straight into LP opener ‘Walk, Choose, Wait, Think’, the hyperactive setlist darts between unreleased material, old hits and a few massive covers – most notably Phoenix’s ‘1901’, which has the entire room jumping along and generating a huge amount of heat.
Fans hear unreleased previews of many tracks a week before the official release, and ‘NOTHING’S FAKE’ gives us a whole lot more of Jersey to digest: ‘Fake Or True’ and ‘Breathe’ deliver genuine earworm melodies, with ‘Fake Or True’ an instant standout, while ‘Fool For You’ and ‘Nobody Can Know’ are high-energy dancefloor hits.
Watching Carl and Renaud bring some of these tracks to life is a thrill, the pair flitting between synth pads and keys, leaning over fans to emphasise a chorus hit or trigger a sample. It’s a stark contrast to their online presence, where faces are distorted, pedals disintegrate into cake and you never quite know where the illusion begins or ends.
One grounding in reality might be their influences, worn on their sleeves – or often their chests, in bootleg and customised merch. This live set includes samples from Skrillex and MGMT as well as Phoenix, not a bad list of influences to claim.
Growing up in France certainly gave the duo a lot of inspiration, with Justice and Daft Punk obvious cultural touchpoints for the brothers. “Justice maybe more so because of our age,” Renaud thinks, “but definitely SebastiAn and the whole Ed Banger team. It was a dream to meet them. We met Pedro” – Pedro Winter, that is, founder of Ed Banger Records – “and ½ of Justice and it was a childhood dream come true.”
Justice’s spectacular 2024 album ‘Hyperdrama’ fuses metal and punk sensibilities with hardcore dance, a combination of sounds which Jersey appreciate. They have always been rock fans too, remixing old favourites like Pixies and admiring current favourites Wet Leg and Fat Dog.
It is The Prodigy, though, who seem to have lit a spark in Renaud’s early days: “It was like 15 years ago, obviously The Prodigy were just the best thing to see on-stage even from afar. I went to a festival and the energy they gave to the crowd and received in return was crazy. I was jumping from midnight to 2am.”
Jersey mix hyperpop, garage, house and just about everything else adjacent to electronic dance. Adding to that sonic fingerprint are vocal distortions that use AI, a tool that has shaped their process in parts and their presentation and identity far more.
“I created avatars with an AI model like 3 years ago, even then you could upload something and train it,” Carl recalls. “It was fun to create this alter ego version of us. It is something that Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, other artists that we’ve liked do different ways. It is not covering up our identities but doing the exact opposite, in a way. It is putting our faces everywhere; sometimes we replace every face with us.”
Hearing an artist talk this transparently about using AI as far back as 2023 is notable given the controversy around its exponential boom in 2026.
Carl is firm on one point: “We don’t use it in the same way of these new apps,” referring to the newer generative tools. “The question is interesting in terms of art, is it art or not, I can see both sides of the opinion. But we are not interested in using it in that way.”
“Our job is to make music,” Renaud says. “To erase that? It would not be welcome. The process is the fun. We make music for the process and to experiment with these tools using AI sometimes, but not generative. We prefer to create glitches with AI – creating new vocal patterns, putting them into our work and surprising ourselves with the files we can export.”
“Our main goal with music is to play it live,” Carl continues. “If we generate an album, how could we even play it? That doesn’t align with us at all.”
Striking a balance between the innovative technology and the process is key, and ‘U&I’, arguably the most euphoric track on ‘NOTHING’S FAKE’, is one example. It takes a vocal from an artist Jersey met in LA, mixes it with an AI model and throws on some of the brothers’ real vocals too. “It’s not a clear, classic pop sound – not the most distorted either, but it has some texture,” Renaud admits.
Prompting people to ask questions is something they aspire to, deliberately pushing technology to distort humanity in uncanny ways. But in terms of always knowing the answers, does this really matter?
Carl doesn’t think so. “If you only have 15 seconds in a reel or TikTok, you can make people believe anything. People will question if it’s fake or not, and this question is already becoming outdated. The main question should be about the emotions you have… We are making fun of people who ask these questions. It’s like asking an artist, is it art to paint on a canvas? Or to produce an album?”
The Jersey perspective is that how you feel defines what is art to you, regardless of the tools behind it. By the end of the London set, after hearing a lot of the album for the first time, the room is clearly filled with glee, and that is what lasts: a record performed live in every respect, full of experimentation and exuberant in its expression. Carl sums it up: “We like to play with it. We like live music, we like a crowd – to have people question the things around them is fun.”
That’s half the fun of Jersey, and what they’re capitalising on with their debut record, ‘NOTHING’S FAKE’. In our modern world, can you really trust what you see? Or should you just acknowledge how it makes you feel? If one thing is certain, it’s that walking away after hearing Jersey will leave a grin on your face long after the lights go down or the record stops spinning.
‘Nothing’s Fake’ will be released on October 15th.