Job Market So Bad It Got Me Chasing My Dreams
When discovering a new artist in the information age, it can be hard not to be at least a little parasocial. I started listening to the band Horse Jumper of Love in late summer of last year, and the trio’s angular shifts between chimey slowcore and high-gain maximalist art-rock were the bedrock of my Autumn listening. HJOL, as they are often abbreviated, have been active since 2013, and their debut album remains one of the most successful cult records in its slacker-shoegaze niche.
Naturally then, their popularity has spawned plenty of live videos and interviews, a highlight reel of which auto-played the background of my dark November evenings as I found myself more and more curious about the lives obscured behind walls of distortion and abstract poetry. I was surprised to piece together that despite significant indie acclaim, frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos is open about the fact that Horse Jumper as a business has not been profitable enough to self-sustain without an unrealistically aggressive touring schedule. Its members work part-time jobs and make ends meet through shift and security work amongst other odd jobs. Anyone with even a headline-grazing interest in the state of the modern music industry might not be surprised to learn this. Stories about the ever-inflating costs of touring for independent musicians, and the lack of serious streaming royalties are well reported, despite how hard it can be to extrapolate this out to our personal faves and often cited influential indie darlings.
In 1956, as a recent graduate under a less late-stage capitalism, you could spend a tender half-decade working and buy a starter home with your childhood sweetheart. Maybe in a few years you’d raise a family, and upgrade to a modest three-bedroom house. By the early 70’s, you might have children of your own making psychedelic rock in the garage of your middle-class domicile. Seventy years later, and to many graduates the prospect of ever owning anything, let alone a living space large enough to make anything other than true bedroom pop, seems near impossible. Many are forced to dream smaller. The job market in 2026 is so competitive that often even the most “unskilled” positions are overwhelmed by applicants whose industries have been ravaged by automation and unsteady economic growth.
So why is it that even when being in a band as beloved as HJOL is precarious, does it sometimes feel like we are surrounded by a golden age of young creativity? For one, the shrinking long-term purchasing power of the average person has dovetailed with a cheapening of powerful recording technology. If you have a laptop or an iPhone, which are both becoming more essential to daily life than ever, and maybe a single borrowed cheap condenser microphone, you likely own music technology more powerful than the most forward-thinking fifties studio head. This unique abundance, along with some of the highest rates of youth unemployment in decades, results in a lot of creatives having access to the time and technology to make whatever they want, and very little reason not to.
Last summer, inspired by how much new music we had time to catch up on after finishing our degrees, me and a handful of friends took a trip to an Airbnb in rural Wales and spent a week writing and recording music. I know for a fact that even though what we were doing had essentially no chance of financially or professionally impacting our futures, it’s one of the most meaningful and memorable things we’ve done since entering the adult world. Many of us have still not found long-term jobs- it is hard to quickly manifest anything for a young person’s future.
Despite how obscured everything beyond tomorrow can be, as a young person participating in the Bristol city music scene, I don’t find nearly as much nihilism as you might expect in real life. The evaporating middle class and job market, the climate catastrophe…it’s all absurd. And there is an outpouring of great work, because to a young person, living a “normal” life feels so aspirationally unlikely; why not spend your time dreaming? Doing the beautiful labour of making something great on your own terms.
HJOL’s most recent album opens with the gutting Snow Angel, which asks,
"Would you pull me a feather from your pillow? I want to dream like you."
Written by Ruth Wire
