Jenn Champion

Jenn Champion, a founding member of Carissa's Wierd, produces refined and wistful synth pop under that name. Before adopting the project, she issued four guitar-driven lo-fi solo albums as S across the 2000s and early 2010s. Drawing on a spacious, synthesizer-focused palette in the vein of 1980s post-punk, she first appeared as Jenn Champion with the 2016 single "No One." The ensuing debut album Single Rider, released in 2018, folded in understated flourishes of sleek sophisti-pop and eccentric indie electronica.

After relocating from Tucson, Arizona to Seattle, Washington, Jenn Ghetto formed the deliberately misspelled Carissa's Wierd with Mat Brooke in 1995. Although the group's membership changed during its three albums issued from 1999 to 2002, key contributors included singer/songwriter Sera Cahoone and then-drummer Ben Bridwell, who subsequently launched Band of Horses alongside Brooke. Meanwhile, Ghetto delivered the solo album SADSTYLE as S in 2001. Carissa's Wierd formally dissolved in 2003, after which the S release Puking and Crying surfaced on Suicide Squeeze Records in 2004. The third LP, i'm not as good at it as you, followed in 2010 on Own Records, and she created a more fully realized final S album, Cool Choices, alongside a backing band and producer Chris Walla, issued by Hardly Art in 2014.

Ghetto retired the S alias and pivoted to a keyboard-led post-punk approach on the 2016 track "No One," credited as Jenn Champion. Remaining on Hardly Art, the follow-up No One EP contained remixes by the indie electronic artists Crater, USF, and Breakmaster Cylinder. Champion reinterpreted Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" in April 2018, then issued her first Champion album, Single Rider, that July on Hardly Art. Brian Fennell (Barcelona, SYML) served as producer.