Jr Jr

JR JR fuses folk and electronic sounds into light indie pop ideal for festivals, staying attentive to dancefloor energy while upholding strong songcraft and channeling the vocal blends of 1960s pop. Launched under the playfully irreverent name Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., the group issued its first full-length, It's a Corporate World, in 2011 before adopting the abbreviated JR JR moniker for its third Warner Bros. album, JR JR, in 2015.

Detroit served as the meeting point for Joshua Epstein, formerly of The Silent Years, and Daniel Zott when the pair formed in 2009. From a basement workspace they crafted early material that balanced maturity and hooks, surfacing in 2010 as the Horse Power EP on Quite Scientific under the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. banner. A follow-up, My Love Is Easy: Remixes, Pt. 1, arrived soon after, and the same year the duo supplied a remix of Moby’s “Wait for Me.” The resulting attention secured a Warner Bros. contract, which surfaced first with the Record Store Day-exclusive EP We Almost Lost Detroit in April 2011. Its a Corporate World appeared on the label that June and registered one week at number 17 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums chart. Patterns, an EP, preceded the second album, The Speed of Things, later in 2013; that release climbed to number 12 on the same chart.

Although Dale Earnhardt, Jr. had granted permission for the original name, Epstein and Zott shortened it to JR JR in 2015 to eliminate persistent mix-ups with the driver. Their initial album under the new identity, the third Warner Bros. release titled JR JR, reached stores that September and featured the single “Gone,” which peaked just outside the Top Ten of Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart in 2016.

Following their exit from Warner, the duo established Love is EZ Records and issued the fourth album, Invocations/Conversations, through Secretly Distribution in 2019. The double album combined one disc of material written in Detroit during 2016 alongside touring bandmembers with another disc assembled primarily by Epstein and Zott.