
Meet Your Marsupial

Marsupial Lion is the pet project of singer-soundmaker Travis Jonathan.
The majestic megafauna known as the marsupial lion can lay claim to being one of the most ferocious creatures ever to stalk the planet. But the name’s component parts—”marsupial” and “lion”—represent virtually opposite archetypes, from the cuddly koala to the king of the jungle.
This unconventional coupling lies at the core of Marsupial Lion’s sound: soaring guitar fuzz with smooth soundscape synths, new wave punch with neo-psychedelic texture, bubblegum retro-pop with searing lyricism. And for a guy who grew up in a tiny rural town in New Hampshire—the “live free or die” state—he has an awful lot to say about technology.
Juvenilia has landed 🦘🦁
Juvenilia is Marsupial Lion’s self-described “debut retrospective”. An almost entirely DIY effort, it culminates a 10-year collaboration between singer-soundmaker Travis Jonathan and his co-writer, synth wizard, and near-lifelong friend, Parker Tichko.
The word “juvenilia” refers to the art of an artist’s youth, and the album accordingly peers backward to capture the twentysomething lives of its creators. The listener retraces their steps through bedrooms and basements in New Hampshire, Providence, Las Vegas, Boston, and Los Angeles in which the record was written and recorded. Themes of love, hope, aging, and madness play out in familiar pop format, albeit shot through with Marsupial Lion’s idiosyncratic blend of fuzz and slickness.
But the album’s focus is not constrained to glossy nostalgia. Juvenilia is a record about technology; more precisely, it is a record about living under digital algorithms dictated by surveillance capitalism and BUMMER (Behavior of Users Modified, Made into an Empire for Rent).
Juvenilia posits that perhaps humanity is being willfully remade within the grinding gears of these algorithms. Perhaps humanity can no longer be said to be the artist, having become the artwork itself. A new juvenilia emerges—the juvenilia of algorithms—and within it unfolds our human experience.
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