Unloved

Unloved merges the apparent purity of 1960s girl-group sounds with the sweep of vintage motion-picture soundtracks, spotlighting Jade Vincent’s incisive singing alongside the inventive arrangements of Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes. The group established its signature elegance on the 2016 album Guilty of Love, refined the approach through prize-winning contributions to the BBC’s sharply suspenseful series Killing Eve, and added vivid range and luster on the 2019 release Heartbreak. Further collaborators helped enlarge the ensemble’s enduring aura on the two-disc set The Pink Album in 2022 and on 2023’s Polychrome: The Pink Album Postlude, where the boundaries separating music’s eras grew increasingly fluid and dreamlike.

A native of Phoenix, Vincent relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. While performing in local jazz venues she encountered Ciancia, who had arrived from Colorado in 1991 to pursue musical studies and soon integrated himself into the city’s underground circles through the band Weapon of Choice. Their partnership began with the formation of the Jade Vincent Experiment, a ten-piece ensemble whose 1998 album Moy appeared shortly afterward, and continued with Vincent & Mr. Green, whose self-titled album came out on Ipecac Records in 2004. Throughout this period Ciancia established himself as a session keyboardist and film-and-television composer; in 2010 he and Everlast co-wrote and produced the Emmy-nominated theme for the TNT series Saving Grace, later contributing to The Hunger Games, Nashville, and True Detective alongside his mentor T-Bone Burnett. Vincent and Ciancia persisted with their own material, pairing her smoky delivery with arrangements that traversed jazz, electronic, hip-hop, and country idioms.

The project crystallized once acclaimed producer, composer, and DJ David Holmes joined after Ciancia supplied keyboard overdubs for the Haywire score. Their rapport led Ciancia to invite Holmes to perform as a DJ at the Rotary Room, a Los Feliz salon operated by Vincent and Ciancia where musicians gathered informally. The three began composing and recording as Unloved, with Ciancia and Holmes supplying tracks shaped by the Shangri-Las, Lee Hazlewood, and Ennio Morricone for Vincent to complete with atmospheric vignettes and vocals. Their initial undertaking supplied music for The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator, the 2012 web series created by director Edgar Wright for Microsoft. Unloved’s debut EP Guilty of Love surfaced in October 2015, followed by the full-length album of the same name in March 2016. Recorded at Vox Studios in Los Angeles, the record included appearances by Rotary Room associates Wayne Kramer and Jonathan Wilson. Also in 2016, Ciancia and Holmes received an Ivor Novello Award for Best TV Soundtrack for their work on the BBC America series London Spy.

In 2018 Unloved supplied both new material and selections from Guilty of Love to Killing Eve, the taut and sardonic BBC production chronicling the pursuit between an MI5 officer and an assassin. Holmes and Ciancia additionally scored the series and earned the 2019 BAFTA TV Craft Award for Original Music. Unloved resurfaced in February 2019 with the album Heartbreak, whose songs broadened the trio’s expressive range through touches of trip-hop, exotica, dark wit, and sincere emotion. Later that year Ciancia and Vincent joined Burnett on The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, a concept album addressing society’s increasing struggle to separate fact from invention. In 2020 the group issued the single “Strange Effect,” a collaboration with singer-songwriter Raven Violet that served as the theme for the 2021 Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers. Holmes and Ciancia meanwhile pursued separate assignments, the former scoring Ordinary Love and No Sudden Move while the latter composed for the Netflix series Made for Love. For September 2022’s The Pink Album, Ciancia, Holmes, and Vincent enlisted Violet, Jarvis Cocker, Jon Spencer, and Étienne Daho to create a double album exploring love in its many guises. The following month the reunited Black Science Orchestra, featuring Holmes’ longtime associate Ashley Beedle, partnered with Unloved on the EP Number in My Phone - Black Science Orchestra Remixes. Vincent, Ciancia, and Holmes reemerged in February 2023 with Polychrome: The Pink Album Postlude, a psychedelia- and Tropicalia-inflected collection drawn from The Pink Album sessions, along with a new version of the track “Far from Here” that had originally appeared on the Guilty of Love EP.