Although his roots lie in the experimental pop circles that spawned Black Midi and Jockstrap, and although his own solo releases pursue a comparably adventurous sound, Jerskin Fendrix has gained widest recognition for his singular instrumental scores. Before earning an Oscar nomination for his first feature-film effort—the music for 2023’s Poor Things—he had already composed for the theater, written and produced for fellow artists, and issued the 2020 album Winterreise.
Born Joscelin Dent-Pooley in 1995, Fendrix spent his childhood in England’s West Midlands, where he trained on classical piano and violin. By 2018 he had become part of the artist community orbiting the Brixton venue The Windmill, joining Black Midi for the track “Ice Cream” and supplying a deliberately abrasive score for a Victoria and Albert Museum staging of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.
In April 2020 he unveiled his debut solo album, Winterreise, whose tracks veered without warning between hyperpop bursts and acoustic chamber-music textures. Over the following two years he co-wrote songs for Gia Ford and Spector while co-producing GFOTY’s 2021 album Femmedorm. Work on the soundtrack for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things began in 2021, drawn directly from the screenplay and production sketches; the resulting score reached U.S. theaters and Milan Records on December 8, 2023. Its lean, distorted textures mirrored the film’s fascination with the grotesque and the childlike, earning Fendrix an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score in 2024.
