Briston Maroney has never shied away from the surreal. He titled his 2023 sophomore album Ultrapure, a word he made up to try to articulate the feeling of transcendence that can accompany moments of intense beauty or pain. That record retained the grungy roots of its predecessor, 2021’s Sunflower, while spreading out a bit sonically, making space for some of Maroney’s weirder musical impulses to shine through. On his third full-length, JIMMY, Maroney realises a fuller artistic vision by reconciling his folkier roots with his more psychedelic inclinations, making for an engaging, often surprising listen. Narratively, the record digs into his split adolescence: After his parents divorced when he was a teenager, he spent half of his time in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his father and half in Florida with his mother, seeming to inhabit two different characters in the process. JIMMY, named for an eclectic Floridian neighbour, is an attempt at integration, as evinced by the trippy cover art, which finds Maroney’s face literally split down the middle. The record opens with its title track, a noisy and plaintive intro that sounds like the inside of a perpetually buzzing brain. “Tomatoes” pairs a tight pop melody with fuzzed-out guitar and a strange, playful little breakdown about picking out a plot at a graveyard. “Real Good Swimmer” is urgent and hallucinatory in its invocations of rivers and seas, while “Sunsetter” takes similarly natural imagery and dips into existential anxiety. Maroney closes the project with “Be Yourself”, an impassioned garage-rocker whose title also serves as the album’s thesis statement.