Jerskin Fendrix on grief, memory and growing up in the sticks

Jerskin Fendrix emerged from south London’s idiosyncratic Windmill scene before being tapped by director Yorgos Lanthimos to compose the scores for Poor Things and the recently released Bugonia. His second album, Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire, is a similarly strange and evocative meditation on memory and grief.

“We’d get home to blood up the walls and half a rabbit still trying to scurry around.”

Sat in a coffee house in east London, Jerskin Fendrix is recounting the enthusiastic, if imprecise, hunting skills of his childhood cat. “He only had three legs but he tried  his goddamn best,” recalls the 30-year-old composer, born Joscelin Dent-Pooley, with a mixture of pride and amusement that gently undermines my cowardly winces.

Raised on a former farm in rural Shropshire, Fendrix got a handle on the concept of mortality earlier than most. “In the countryside, you get to see the cycle of animals being born and dying, be that livestock or family pets or wild animals. It’s this little microcosm of the world.” A classically trained pianist and violinist, his understanding deepened in his teenage years while playing the organ at funerals – a regular occurrence, thanks to the elderly population of the surrounding villages.

Still, nothing could have prepared him for the three-year period that began in 2020. Bookended by the release of his acclaimed solo debut Winterreise and his Oscar-nominated score for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Fendrix was soaring professionally. And yet these career highs were shadowed by grief, following a series of unexpected bereavements that began when a close friend died by suicide and culminated in the abrupt loss of his father.  

These seismic events form the creative foundation of Fendrix’s wildly original second album, the refreshingly platitude-free Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire. “A lot of songs about death can be a bit Hallmark-y,” Fendrix remarks. “Or a bit like, ‘This person was a hundred percent great, and I’m a hundred percent sad.’ And in some environments, that’s a very fair position to take. But my instinct is that grief is very complicated emotionally, and I really wanted to be as honest as I could be.”

Certainly, there’s never been an elegy quite like Sk2 before. An uncanny stream of consciousness delivered in rumbling tones over staggering drums, lurching bass and haunting choral harmonies, it climaxes with Fendrix proclaiming in a quasi-laugh, “You live! You live! You live! And I don’t.” Initially inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, the minimalism of King Lear sees Fendrix’s cavernous baritone adding surreal gravitas to non-sequiturs like, “Fuck, I’m buzzing, I’ve been drinking so much White Claw/ Who will call to say you died?” Then there’s Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle, a brass-powered, hip-hop/jazz hybrid featuring Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson – his old friend from the scene based around Brixton venue, The Windmill. In it, the protagonist declares, somewhat ominously, “I sleep in my friend’s blood/ It is a beautiful evening.”

Not only do Fendrix’s bizarre lyrical tangents help him swerve what he witheringly describes as “dripping, poetic, pastoral shit”, they accurately capture the essence of a pre-smartphone adolescence, when bored teenagers entertained each other by developing their own shared lexicon. For, as much as Once Upon a Time…  in Shropshire is an exploration of loss, it’s also a love letter to Fendrix’s upbringing. 

Driven by synthesised vocal arpeggios and genteel, Vaughan Williams-inspired strings, the swooning chamber-pop of album opener Beth’s Farm evokes the innocence of endless summer nights spent among friends. “It’s a real place that belongs to my friend’s mum,” Fendrix says of the song’s inspiration. “It’s this rare breed farm in the middle of Wales, where they conserve unusual species of livestock. It felt like a good image, because a deathless farm in outrageously bucolic surroundings is about as close to heaven as I can imagine.”

As the album progresses, that initial innocence is gradually corrupted, expressed through stylistic experimentation ranging from the cacophonous post-rock dynamics of Sk1 to arresting vocal turns on Together Again and The Universe. Eschewing the processing and pitch-shifting that characterised the maximalist, hyperpop-adjacent Winterreise, Fendrix manually contorts his voice from a guttural growl to a reedy falsetto, elongating words like stretched elastic at times and squeezing fistfuls of syllables together at others.

“It was all about exploring how I could use my voice in a dumb way for storytelling,” he explains. “I think it’s very important to sound as embarrassing as possible, because it’s hard to tell the truth if everything sounds too pretty. And because I’m willing to do literally anything necessary to achieve the right artistic effect, when it comes to art I get to be a real fucking idiot.”

Throughout, Fendrix fleshes out characters via snippets of conversations, vivid scenic snapshots and literary references employed as shorthand. “I wanted to be very specific about places and people and events, so songs were detailed enough that they were evocative while also being recognisable to anyone who grew up in a remote, non-urban setting.” He laughs, “I would be a bit sad if only 20 people from Shropshire could understand what the fuck I was talking about, so it’s been a kind of telekinesis, trying to get the balance right.”

Fendrix credits his growing interest in characterisation and narrative to his work with Lanthimos, which to date also includes 2024’s Kinds of Kindness and 2025’s Bugonia. “Songwriting is super biographical, but with film scores it’s an exercise in empathy. You have to think about these characters who are often very different to you, and try to work out what they might be thinking or feeling or going through. Ultimately, your job is to furnish the film with emotion.”

Similarly, Fendrix cites Lanthimos’ trusting commissioning approach as instrumental in helping him relinquish some of the control-freak tendencies that shaped Winterreise. Indeed, such is Lanthimos’ confidence in Fendrix that he progressively supplies less and less information with each brief.

“[For Bugonia] I wasn’t even allowed to read the script,” Fendrix smiles. “I got given three words to base an entire score off, so I wrote this very angsty, intense score featuring a 90-piece orchestra.” Returning the favour, Fendrix commissioned Lanthimos to direct the video for Beth’s Farm without ever seeing a treatment. The resulting short is a fantastical exploration of sacrifice, ritual and rebirth, starring Emma Stone opposite Fendrix.

At the opposite end of the record to Beth’s Farm is Last Night in Shropshire, a comparatively unadorned piano ballad written in Fendrix’s family home on the instrument he first learned to play piano on. Arriving after a suite of songs dense with formal left-hand turns and literary allusions to the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, it’s tough not be moved by the heartfelt simplicity of lines like, “This is my piano, this is my violin/ where piece by piece my heart was built.” 

The album ends with a joyous iPhone recording of Fendrix and his friends, half-cut on New Year’s Eve, singing a silly made-up song about dubstep in place of Auld Lang Syne. It’s a tender reminder of a more innocent time, but also a symbol of community and hope – something Fendrix continues to hold on to in spite of the past few years.

“I still feel extraordinarily attached to Shropshire,” he says. “It’s a very numinous place. Like, the sky there is just different. At times, I can feel quite overwhelmed thinking about it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever move back, but it really has a weight and an importance and a great sense of magic for me. It’s where my heart’s buried.”