Dora Jar

For as long as she can remember, Dora Jar has been battling the existential. Growing up with creative parents and a special-needs sibling in suburban Northern California, she felt especially attuned to the ways her life stuck out. “Why is anything the way it is?” she remembers asking herself. In 2022, that question returned in full force when her still-burgeoning music career suddenly blew up after Billie Eilish asked her to open on her arena tour. “There was big imposter syndrome. It was a mix of being really grateful and also feeling like I don’t deserve this at all,” she says. “I felt like [I was] skipping a lot of steps. Now, I feel like I’m coming back and starting over.” This starting over arrives in the form of her long-awaited debut album, No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire, but also a head-first plunge back into the existential waters by posing the question: “Who am I?” It’s the query that opens the richly whimsical, dark pop fantasia, a lyric she poofs into being like a smoke cloud exhaled from the wise caterpillar of Wonderland. Over the course of 13 songs, she arrives no closer to one singular answer. But what she does illuminate is her penchant as an artist to delightfully slip beyond boxes, defying the music industry’s need for easy comprehension. “It might be the contrarian in me, in light of everyone identifying themselves and others, but I never want to stick to one sound or identity,” she says. “I like to shape-shift.” It’s a philosophy that shaped the album quite literally as it was recorded over the course of the last two years in a smattering of places: Poland, Alaska, California, and Mississippi (as Dora was in town building a “mud cob hut”). The list of collaborators also runs the gamut with Ralph Castelli (glaive), Henry Kwapis (Dominic Fike, Dijon), George Daniel (The 1975, Charli XCX), and Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Clairo) credited as producers.