Jesse Sykes

The Arc of Jesse Sykes

The pivots — what forced Jesse Sykes to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Barsuk Run

   After Hominy dropped their lone 1998 self-titled record and collapsed, Sykes formed The Sweet Hereafter with Wandscher, violist Anne Marie Ruljancich, bassist Bill Herzog, and drummer Kevin Warner. Tucker Martine stepped behind the board to track Reckless Burning in 2002 and Oh, My Girl in 2004 for Barsuk Records. The records were heavy, slow-paced alt-country laced with weeping strings and bruised electric guitar lines. Eric Eagle stepped in behind the kit for 2007's Like, Love, Lust and the Open Halls of the Soul, dialing in a thicker, room-filling rhythmic pulse that leaned toward Martin Feveyear's expanded production palette.

2. 02

   The Heavy Psych Shift

   A sudden left turn came when Greg Anderson pulled Sykes into the studio to write lyrics and sing on Sunn O))) and Boris's collaborative 2006 monolithic beast Altar. That metal crossover rewrote the script for The Sweet Hereafter, pushing them to ditch Martine and self-produce 2011's Marble Son alongside engineer Mell Dettmer. Issued on their own Station Grey imprint via Thirty Tigers, the record blew out their delicate acoustic picking with wall-of-sound psychedelic distortion and expansive seven-minute song structures. Wandscher's guitar went completely feral, abandoning standard Americana picking for heavy drone and jagged fuzz.

3. 03

   The Third Mind and Southern Lord Rebirth

   Sykes spent the late 2010s lending her raw vocal grit to Dave Alvin's psych-rock project The Third Mind, appearing across their 2020 self-titled debut, 2023's Third Mind 2, and 2025's Right Now!. That detour sharpened her road instincts before regrouping with Wandscher to revive The Sweet Hereafter after a fourteen-year studio gap. Working with producer Robb Davidson, they released Forever, I've Been Being Born in 2025 on Southern Lord and Ideologic Organ. Stripping the presentation down to just Sykes and Wandscher for festival dates like Roadburn 2026, the performance stripped away the polite trappings of folk to reveal bare-wire, haunted menace.

Influences

• Townes Van Zandt — Sykes has openly cited his bleak, unvarnished Texas folk songwriting as a direct narrative foundation for her own work. You hear that fatalist Appalachian sorrow carved all over the chord progressions on Reckless Burning. No punchlines, just stark lyrical reckonings.
• Sandy Denny — Denny's run with Fairport Convention created the blueprint for dragging ancient traditional folk vocal weight through electric rock setups. Sykes lifts that exact phrasing discipline, using deliberate vibrato against crushing electric distortion on Oh, My Girl. She doesn't imitate the English lilt, but she takes the same cold authority to the microphone.
• Neil Young — His ragged Ditch Trilogy records set the ground rules for how Sykes and Wandscher build guitar friction in the studio. On Marble Son, the rhythm section lumbers while Wandscher's amplifier fights for its life in full Crazy Horse feedback territory. The arrangements breathe through grit rather than polish.
• Patti Smith — Sykes channels Smith's incantatory, poetry-first delivery rather than traditional verse-chorus pop mechanics. The sprawling vocal build on the Sunn O))) and Boris collaboration track 'The Sinking Belle' uses Smith's method of ritualistic, trance-like spoken dynamics. It sounds like an exorcism in slow motion.
• Leonard Cohen — His sparse, barroom European acoustic records defined the art of leaving dead space inside the mix. You hear it immediately on Like, Love, Lust and the Open Halls of the Soul, where Sykes hangs back behind the beat and lets the silence do the emotional heavy lifting. It treats quietness as a weapon.