While noise-rap-electro group Jane Remover screamed and pleaded during a 90-minute marathon at the Fonda on Thursday night, a very young couple dressed like something out of a conservative nightmare (ambiguous gender, purple hair, facial piercings) tapped me on the shoulder. They politely asked if I could take a little care of the newly purchased vinyl while they bustled through the crowd. Of course, this guy forced them.
Anyone who laments that L.A. crowds don't dance should head to one of the final sets of Jane Remover's three-night stand at the Fonda this weekend. He had the most genuinely raucous pit I've ever seen in 2026, even wilder for how sweet and earnest he was. After a Coachella set with high expectations, this Live Exhibit tour affirmed that the subculture Jane Remover built may or may not have broader pop potential, but it's becoming big enough to count toward stardom in today's fractured music world.
Jane Remover is an erudite trans producer and singer-songwriter with influences in rave, shoegaze, trap, and more. They've developed a fierce elaboration of the hyperpop of predecessors like Sophie, who similarly packaged so many good ideas into songs that they became a talisman for fans, a tonic for reinvention (Charli XCX's new opener, Underscores, is another traveling companion).
The music itself sounds like a reverse engineering of the moment in the 2000s when the metalcore kids discovered EDM. Only now it's Discord's disaffected youth who are ramping up hardstyle techno, auto-tuned girlypop ballads and rage-rap to a point of explosive fusion. “Census Designated,” Jane’s bold and dramatic LP set to debut in 2023, deemed them a force beyond the underground. But they soon eclipsed it with 2025's “Revengeseekerz,” a deliriously overheated mix of romantic longing, internet reckoning, and virtuosic production prowess.
Backed only by a DJ (Dazedgxd, who opened the set) and a retina-scorching light rig in front, Jane acknowledged Thursday that the stakes were much higher. They joked that they'd played El Rey like three times before this tour, and judging by the crowd's unbridled passions, the Fonda will probably be the smallest venue they'll play in a while. “It’s so cold up here,” Jane sang in “Turn Up or Die.” “I can't go to hell, but I can leave you.”
The feelings that drive the music are ultra-modern: self-aware, vicious and desperately vulnerable. The hilariously racy “Angels in Camo” (home of the most hit line of all time: “Jesus never had enough of a b–stranger”) concluded with a bloody plea that “I can’t let you g-win.” Jane wields that word like the flaming sword on the “Revengeseekerz” album cover, with all the casual lust of Future but also the anger of a reclaimed insult.
In “Professional Vengeance,” they grappled with the strange attractions of celebrity and intimacy, where no one really knows anyone, but desire still runs its courses; “Experimental Skin” found them longing for and fighting God, nihilism, technology and addiction all at the same time.
The tension in these tracks is the binding agent for Jane's fanbase: the music is full of contradictions and incompatibilities that blend together and make you feel like you're young right now. Aside from a quick affirmation that fans of all identities and backgrounds will always be welcome at their shows, they let the violent, contortionist music speak for itself about the way queer fans feel about life under siege in the United States.
If the set was too long for the limited stage setting, it was because Jane simply had so much music to let out: that caliber of emotion to release, so much desire to acknowledge. The set seemed to close with “In the Dark,” an aching ballad from his side project Venturing, which clearly declared “I still dream of us” through a haze of effects. But instead, they revved it up again to close out one last cathartic explosion, sending their faithful out onto Hollywood Boulevard, sweaty, dirty, and fundamentally familiar.
