Jerm’s Best Day Loses (And Then Finds) His Voice on Latest EP

Written by Niall Mirza

There’s nothing like five hundred custom-made cassette tapes sprawled across the room of a Billboard Hot 100 breakthrough writer as he prepares to mail them out to fans, and cover shipping, completely free. Jerm’s Best Day, who rose to popularity under the name Sarcastic Sounds, spanning Lofi, Hip Hop, and Folk across his solo work and collaborations with the likes of Powfu, Lil Wayne, and David Kushner, had no idea if anyone would even want to take them. Within days, all five hundred found a home with eager fans awaiting the then-unreleased project, while Jerm’s Best Day (Jeremy) quickly realised he needed to find something more scalable for next time…

A mainstay in the 2020s-era TikTok algorithm, Jeremy was already successful: label-mates with Beyoncé at Columbia Records, and a genre-hopping writer and producer. But success and creative ownership weren’t the same thing: “My amount of success has outpaced my artistic accomplishments in my mind”, he reflects. On the back of his second project as Jerm’s Best Day, titled just when I found my voice I lost it, that gap between success and self-expression starts to narrow. In doing so, it trades polished internet-era minimalism for something far more tactile: open-tuned guitars and a crackle only achieved by recording through cassette tape, soft folk textures against throat-shredding catharsis. In true Jeremy fashion, though, he still refuses to pin his work down: “Vocally and musically it’s very Midwest emo inspired,” he says, “but the lyrics are more subtle and less tongue-in-cheek”. The result is an EP that fuels the nostalgic Midwest emo sentiments of all-time greats like American Football and newcomers like Arm’s Length, without bending to the genre’s rules. Chasing a sound also inspired by indie-folk bands Daughter and Pinegrove, Jerm’s Best Day carves his own path where the lines between genres overlap.

The same grit was reflected in the origins of Lofi-led Sarcastic Sounds, or even earlier under the moniker Sarcastic Asshole, despite taking a wildly different shape. While working through high school, Jeremy started out flipping beats into Lofi tracks, which is where he first encountered Midwest emo. Later, under Columbia Records, his artistic craft was formulated through Jeremy’s trademark pitched-up vocals and features with artists like Maisie Peters and Claire Rosinkranz. “When I was doing that early Lofi stuff, I was insecure and unwilling to stand behind myself as a singer. I felt like I had fallen into singing more than anything,” Jeremy looked back, “It's a very vulnerable thing to do, and I was not in a place to be vulnerable”.

After stepping back from the ‘artist project’ of it all for two years, focusing instead on writing and producing for others, he stumbled upon ‘The Yard Has Aged’, the first Jerm’s Best Day song, on a whim. Feeling drawn to the music, with no audience or outside expectations, he sent his vocals into strained screams: “That was the first time I’d really loved how my voice sounded”. The style became a sort of emotional permission for Jeremy, built on years of hidden tendencies finally surfacing. It allowed for a sonic evolution that felt like purpose, demanding a separate artist project: “Even when I was doing some of that Sarcastic Sounds stuff, my tendency is to lean super fucking emo. I tried to repress that a lot because that wasn’t the space I was in, and it’s been very cathartic to lean all the way into it.”

That same immediacy extends into the way the songs are physically built. Now well into his second EP, the sound feels less like whim and more like destiny. With the majority of the project in FACGCE open tuning, it’s almost impossible for its songs to hit pop-triad voicing. According to Jeremy, though, this limitation makes Midwest emo sound “fucking awesome every single time”. As a renowned writer and producer, and an artist once-notorious for his collaborative prowess, this tactile, somewhat playful approach sees a great remove. While the project breaks further into the vulnerable, roomy DIY-folk sound that he produces for other artists, this time Jeremy takes the lead on writing, recording, and producing, only calling on friends like Jonah Kagen and Sody to fill in the gaps.

Alone, his process is split between recording and writing simultaneously, trying to capture intimate moments before they escape. Lyrics, too, arrive as fragments. Emotional debris waiting to be dusted off, hidden away in none other than Jeremy’s Notes app. As a producer, the project’s instrumentals lead the feeling, drawing the right words out. One such lyric, tucked away, sneaked into pivotal track ‘hell of a year’, and became the thesis statement for the song and arguably the entire project: “I think I deserve love / but if I can’t have love then I’ll take peace / and if I can’t have that I’ll just take anything but this / I’d give anything to just be free”. 

The emotional landscape of the EP sits within guilt, decay, memory, and the passage of time, with lyrics ranging from abstract to hyper-specific between the three songs. The ironic title of the project itself, just when I found my voice I lost it, riffs on Jerm’s Best Day’s deeply personal vocal journey, which led to a six-month period of vocal rest after blowing his voice out screaming “did I sell you out?”, the guilt-ridden hook of opening track ‘Sylvia Plath’. When asked how his voice is progressing now, Jeremy grins and says, “I’m gonna get a steroid shot in my fucking vocal cords next week”. The techniques behind fry screams, especially ones that sound as raw and strained as they do on this EP, can be incredibly taxing. Professionals have warned that the strain of screaming may never be fully sustainable on Jeremy’s vocal health, especially if touring enters the equation. Still, he speaks less like someone backing away from the project and more like someone trying to figure out how to carry it forward without losing the voice he worked so hard to find.

But the project’s defiant grit doesn’t end here. Jerm’s Best Day can be described aptly as an artist navigating his belief in his own work. The gripping promotional tactic, with cassettes scaled from 100 copies to 500 between his first and second EPs, shows how far Jeremy is truly willing to go for his art, with fans responding with a matched eagerness. From the free cassettes to the analogue vocal-led sound, Jerm’s Best Day is rediscovering the excitement of building something from scratch. But this time, it’s more than the high school kid sending off a Lofi beat into the digital ether, or the up-and-coming artist launching a song up through the machinery of major-label pressure. “I basically just want the Jerm’s Best Day stuff to get to the point where it has a fair shot,” Jeremy explains. After years of success in a completely different world, he’s finally creating the music he spent that whole time chasing. “There’s lots of demos from the peak of Sarcastic Sounds where I’m trying to do that acoustic-leaning stuff but I just wasn’t able to do it. It’s a lot harder to do and way more time-consuming than making beats, to be honest”.

just when I found my voice, I lost it finally feels less concerned with chasing scale and more with providing a public space for Jeremy’s honest instincts to exist, however loudly, for as long as his voice will let him. After all, the end-goal here isn’t to be a “fucking Midwest emo pop star or anything like that”. In truth, it's something far beyond anyone’s understanding. Mir