Jack River is the alias of Holly Rankin who hails from Forster on the NSW Mid North Coast. Growing up in a coastal town, her unbreakable ties with her family and the environment are the cornerstones to Rankin’s musical inspiration. Her experiences to date, coupled with her talents as an outstanding producer (Holly features as a producer on each song from the EP), multi-instrumentalist and gifted songwriter and singer have all intertwined to form the artist she is today.
Rankin explains her excitement in joining the I OH YOU family: “I first showed Johann my songs as a friend and he pretty much immediately came back to me saying he loved them. Fast forward a couple of months and I am super, super thrilled to be joining the I OH YOU family. It’s pretty damn rare to find a team who really get the heart of what you are doing. The artists on I OH YOU are making the exact kind of music I love and need – it’s real, gritty, alive and electrifying – there is no other home for Jack River.”
Her music is diverse, almost genre-less, ranging from indie-rock, psychedelic electro, bubblegum pop and acoustic ballads and her voice chameleonic to mirror the eclectic mix. Rankin explains further, “From a songwriting perspective, I always want to make something completely original to that song. I don’t ever reference what I did in the last song; that would be really boring. In our world right now a lot of things are so homogenised and repetitive that we almost expect things to be repetitive.”
For some, this may not be their first encounter with the artist. Holly’s music had its first spin on Sydney community radio station FBi who picked up one of her very first tracks online back in 2010. A string of shows in Forster and Sydney was shortly followed by a move to the latter and the subsequent independent release of a debut EP in 2013. Flash forward a few years and with an EP full of new music almost ready to be revealed, 2016 is shaping up to be the break-out year for Jack River.
Johann Ponniah of I OH YOU reveals, “I first met Holly just over a year ago through a mutual friend, she’d just come back from a stint in NYC where she had been working on her music. I remember how her enthusiasm and passion for song writing made me immediately curious to hear her songs. A few days later she emailed me a private Soundcloud link to her demos and I became immediately hooked! Today I couldn’t be happier to officially welcome her to the I OH YOU family and am so excited to share her music with everyone in the future. We’re just getting started!”
Jack River’s ‘Talk Like That’ is out now through I OH YOU. Grab a copy HERE.