'I Just Became A Shell Of Myself': The Path To Montaigne's Second Album

Three years on from the release of her ARIA-winning debut Glorious Heights, 24-year-old art-pop wunderkind, Montaigne, aka Jess Cerro, has returned with Complex. 

After working only with Tony Buchen on her first album, Complex sees Cerro collaborating with a stack of new producers, as well as Buchen, including TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek and Papa Vs Pretty’s Thomas Rawle. Their influence has allowed Cerro to explore different facets of her sound, all on one record.

That’s not to say the record sounds disjointed. Her collaborators helped push Montaigne's theatrical-pop further than it’s gone before. 

“I think my voice is stronger,” Cerro says, describing how Complex has evolved from Glorious Heights. “I think my songwriting is stronger. I think the melodies are probably as strong – I still think that the melodies in Glorious Heights are pretty good. 

“I think the production's a little clearer, a little more lucid and a little more confident in this one. I think Glorious Heights is confident, but this one has virtuosity that matches that level of confidence. It's like earned confidence.” 

Going into the process, Cerro had no preconceptions about what the album would be, from the way it would sound to the subjects she would delve into. But the nature of an album, she notes, tends to reveal itself naturally over time.

“I don't think that is something anyone can ever really plan. I think when you do set a plan everything goes haywire anyway. I had zero plans and I felt bad that I didn't have a plan or that like I couldn't achieve the lofty dreams I had for making music.”

Cerro also recognises that part of her felt pressure to make something that people would like. 

“As I learned a bit more about myself and about the tendencies I have to people-please, I was like, 'You know what, this is my thing.' If I'm happy with this, then I'm happy with all of it, and that's kind of where I'm at now.”

“I was looking straight into the void basically to figure out how to fix that or how to get through it as well, when I also felt really alone."

The story of the album is intertwined with Cerro’s own path to understanding herself and overcoming the effects of burnout, a process aided by therapy and other actions of self-care.

“I just became a shell of myself,” Cerro says, noting that, as an athlete – Cerro was a semi-professional soccer player before she decided to pursue a career in music – she suddenly couldn’t exercise at all. 

“I was looking straight into the void basically to figure out how to fix that or how to get through it as well, when I also felt really alone. You know, not entirely, I have some amazing friends on board and family, but I felt very isolated within myself.”

These struggles became the fodder for her songs, the singer describing her songwriting MO as distilling “the stuff in my life that happened and I’m emotional about”.  

“I was coming to this critical awareness of all the ways in which I was neurotic and flawed,” Cerro begins. “I'd reached the awareness, but I couldn't figure out how to re-engineer my brain, which is like one of the hardest possible things we can be tasked with for ourselves. 

“I was constantly drawn to people who were emotionally unavailable, and was dealing with like a few hairy relationships, you know, romantic or otherwise.

”There was that people-pleasing thing of never feeling like I am enough, and that I need to be funner or smarter or better at music or make a certain kind of music to be successful or whatever.” 

But Cerro doesn’t see music as the thing that helps her overcome difficulties. Instead, she describes songwriting as “a notch on the belt of health”. 

“I go to therapy regularly, I meditate, I do journaling, I practise mindfulness and all that stuff. I talk to my friends constantly about all of my issues and all of their issues. I'm very well read on self-help, I'm all over it.

“I think writing songs is totally a really good and effective tool, but on its own, I think it's nowhere near as effective. It's not a problem solver,” she concludes.

The project of self-improvement, of growth, is an ongoing one for Cerro. She’s grateful to have the time and resources to be able to meaningfully engage with her inner world. The alternative is an “unhealthy dose of nihilism”. 

“Being on the other side of the scale, for me, that sort of threatens to annihilate all the good work I do. It's just like a very unhealthy dose of nihilism, where occasionally I will come to this point in my life where I'm just like, 'But it's all pointless.' I'm doing all this quote-unquote, 'good work' to quote-unquote 'make myself a better person', but at the end of the day, what's the fucking point? 

“Sometimes I literally go into a depressive spiral and I'm like, 'Wow, everything's meaningless...' It's like someone hits a red button in my brain, then my brain's like, 'There's no point in you writing music, there's no point in you doing this job, there's no point in you doing anything, why do you keep doing it?'

“I'm good at reining that in though [and] checking myself before I wreck myself basically. And my friends are also really supportive and awesome.” 

Cerro’s great strength is in the power of her voice – she uses it to express yearning, or to reach out and connect with a listener. Her hyper-articulate lyrics, ruminating on sadness, self-doubt, and desire, are set to crunching pop beats, a style she describes as “pop survival”. 

As individuals, Cerro says, in the face of a looming sense of nihilism, we have to imbue our lives with meaning – to find something to live for. 

“For me, it's joy and all those like buoyant human emotions and awe and sublimeness and stuff – that's the shit I live for,” Cerro says. “I think there is a very sweet spot of sublime in the juxtaposition between dark and light. 

“Putting something you can dance to and that feels really energised and really spirited to [lyrics that are] quite low, I guess, to me is like survival [laughs]. That's it – how do you survive if you don't seek out the things that make you want to do that?”