In pro wrestling, larger-than-life characters act out good-versus-evil storylines in a heightened atmosphere. For Kate Meizner, the vocalist, guitarist, and principal songwriter for the Brooklyn sludge-pop band Jobber, the spectacle of the squared circle doubles as a way for her to process what she calls “mundane and very serious struggles under capitalism.”
“It doesn’t let you wallow, but it still captures a crude version of reality,” she continues. “It’s a way to laugh so you don’t scream.”
Jobber’s debut full-length, Jobber to the Stars, captures that moment between a horrified yelp and a gut-busting guffaw in 11 twisty songs that cover their candied-center hooks in sweat and blood and muck, like the live-wire opener “Raw Is War” and the distortion-shrouded postcard from the edge “Pillman’s Got A Gun.” It’s power pop that busts itself open to reveal gnarly, messy bits lurking within.
The album’s title plays on the band’s name—a wrestling term that refers to a person who “does the job,” or loses, in a match—and Meizner’s own journey over the record’s two-plus-year genesis. “In pro wrestling, a ‘jobber to the stars’ is a performer who always loses to big names, but not to total unknowns,” she says. “They’re good enough to make the stars look great, but never the ones pushed to the top themselves.”
Meizner turned the idea into a dual metaphor. Songs like the choppy “HHH” and the sunlit “Clothesline From Hell” interrogate how adulthood can result in burnout and angst over the idea of “winning” at life. “There is dignity in being a ‘jobber,’” she says. “There’s pride in simply surviving in a world that feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. One can find real meaningful purposeful connection in the margins, without striving to be the star.”
It's also about how Meizner, disillusioned with New York after nearly a decade and a half living there (as she laments in “Raw Is War,” “Like every street’s a deleted scene/ In the night machine hydraulics drone,”), contemplated moving to Los Angeles while writing the album. “You can read Jobber to the Stars in a very literal sense, like, ‘Jobber is headed to Hollywood, to be with the stars,’” she says.
Meizner and her bandmates—drummer-vocalist Michael Falcone, guitarist-keyboardist Michael Julius, and bassist Miles Toth—recorded Jobber to the Stars with Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr, Body/Head, Editrix) at Sonelab in Easthampton, Massachusetts and with Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma, Hotline TNT, Squirrel Flower) at Studio G in Brooklyn.
These sessions allowed the band to be in the studio together for the first time, although it resulted in Jobber to the Stars’ creation being a lengthy process. “We were all squeezing in recording sessions between life stuff and full-time jobs, so the album took forever to record. I used so much vacation time,” says Meizner. “Recording sessions were super spread out and it took an insanely long time—two and a half years!—to make the album from start to finish.”
After releasing their debut EP Hell in a Cell in 2022, Jobber played shows around New York, in the Northeast, and in Austin while working on their first full-length project and managing their individual lives away from the band. Jobber to the Stars grapples with a lot of big ideas—the perils of institutional power, the way labor is exploited, being swallowed by a bad relationship—but at its core is what Meizner calls “the tension between wanting to escape and realizing you can’t escape yourself.”
The two title tracks (“Jobber to the Stars, Pt. I” and “Pt. II”) face this reality head-on. The languorous, moody first half finds Meizner wondering if self-help podcasts (“avoiding pesticides, and no blue screens at night”) or consumerist hedonism (“Answering my call/ I’ve been touched by an angel in a shopping mall”) will be a balm for her existential ennui before deciding that she wants out “to feel alive, or to remember who I am.” Its haze-covered companion piece dreams of driving down the PCH with San Pedro punk legends Minutemen blaring before reaching what Meizner calls a “bittersweet clarity.”
“Even if you reach ‘the stars,’” she says, “you might still feel like the jobber—stuck in the undercard of your own life.”
Pro wrestling, an art form that combines physical violence and heart-pounding emotionalism in a way that made the storied grappler Bryan Danielson once call it “combat theatre,” is rife with metaphors like the one that anchors Jobber to the Stars. Jobber’s blend of irresistible pop hooks and chaotic riffing resembles the best wrestling matches—hard-hitting and beautiful, death-defying and balletic—and on Jobber to the Stars, they have, as commentators thrilled by those five-star classics say, “left it all in the ring.”
Photo Credit: Natalie Piserchio
Bio: Maura Johnston
