ROOT FOR THE MONSTER
JANESAYS · Full-length album · 14 tracks · Out 9 October 2026 · Palalala Records
Every story has a hero, and the hero has a sword. Nobody ever roots for the monster.
I wrote this album from the other side of that story. The narrator knows exactly where she sits in it: third act, torchlight, somebody's father with a very good reason. She has watched them rehearse the face they make right before they say they had no choice. And in all that time, in every version, she has never once been the one anybody was rooting for.
Then somebody did.
Root for the Monster is fourteen songs about what happens after that. A counting rhyme you make up to get through the first year. A ring that taps on wood. A kiss that turns a skeleton back into a face. A small word that nobody says out loud. A woman who climbs out of the ground feet first, dances, loses her mind, learns Spanish, and finally stands on the outside of the door she started behind.
If you heard She Returns in October last month, you already know eight of these songs as club records. These are the originals: slower, closer, written to be heard in a room with the lights on. Same cello under everything. Same voice that never shouts. Listen to both and you'll hear the same song breathing in two different rooms. That's the whole point of the order.
The album opens with a knock from inside a coffin. It ends with the same knock, heard from outside.
For the single monsters, heroes and heroines building an identity nobody handed them: you are not alone. I'm rooting for you. I always was.
— JANE
Expected release: October 2, 2026