Though the Danish multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter J. Ludvig III is known by many as a virtuosic jazz drummer, he also has more than a few emo skeletons in his closet. He spent part of his youth listening to and playing the kind of mall emo that Americans heard ringing out of Hot Topic in the 2000s. On his new project, EMOTAN, Ludvig III’s emo skeletons have been dusted off, reappraised, and repurposed. As it turns out, emo is actually pretty cool! 

Ludvig III’s new record is a synthesis of the many musical points in the artist’s life. Influences are culled from rap, jazz, and the kind of guitar music that some might deem “cringeworthy,” but, upon further inspection, provides the kind of timeless emotional catharsis that has been a hallmark of good rock and roll for decades. Taken together on the album, Ludvig III’s influences are deployed as a tool to tell a larger story—both musical and personal. We sent over a few questions to the artist.

I read that you listened to a lot of, for lack of better words, mall emo during your teenage years. Your new record is called EMOTAN. What is your relationship with emo music, and how did it inform this new album?

J. Ludvig III: I used to listen to it a lot when I was a teenager, back when I called myself Emotan, he he. I posted drum solos on YouTube, you’ll find them if you search Emotan666, I think. However, the music I listened to back then, I cringed over pretty hard for many years. But within the last couple of years I noticed a tingling, newfound love for that music. It has a juvenile energy that was refreshing and that I found useful in the music I was working on, I guess, because it felt very me, and because I love contrasting “cool,” complex ideas with ironically cliche, forbidden, overly conventional ideas. Trying to implement traces of emo into my new album felt surprisingly natural, I guess, because it helped me reconnect with my past self. So in a way I became Emotan again, and that's why I decided to honor Emotan on this album. He was bullied in school, lonely, and found most of his joy in drumming alone to no music and playing World of Warcraft while listening to Paramore, Escape The Fate, Hoobastank, and the like. 

What other music inspired you during the making of EMOTAN?

The album was made over a really long time, so it's been through a lot of iterations. The guitar anthems definitely come from my love for Mike Dean and Kanye productions. I also spend more time at the club than I have in other parts of my life, so there's definitely been some inspiration from club music. The D'agostino-like synths on “Angels Needs Saving” definitely also feel a little forbidden to me, shoutout Zack Christ for working with me on that. When I play that song for my friends, they are always completely shocked because the synth anthem is such a statement, and I guess not what people expect from me, and if there's something I love, it is to not live up to people's expectations of what music they think you should do. I feel like it's hard to pin a genre to what inspired the album, I know I wanted the album to hurt as much as possible. So whatever extremely yearnful and mournful music I would come across would have an impact on me, and I usually like it best when there's room for some irony and quirkiness that makes it feel less pretentious, and leaves it a little open and open to interpretation.

Could you talk about some of the subject matter that underpins the record?

When I put out my first album in 2021, I really wasn't interested in making a new album straight away, but then heartbreak and a band breakup made its way into my life, on the same night in fact. I had just started a masters degree at that time too, and when I think back on that time I was a ghost, and I had just started touring again, so I wasn't in a good place. I didn't know how else to process my grief and hurt over what had happened in other ways than being in the studio. I managed to find solace in writing songs, it was my form of therapy, but it also reached a point where I had started to romanticize my own sadness and when I reached that point I knew I had to finish the album, otherwise I'd never make it out. 

On EMOTAN, how did you conceptualize the balance between live drums and programmed drums?

I try not to shy away from the fact that I'm a drummer and always try to generate beats from an organic standpoint, something that is played on an instrument. I like making a groove on acoustic drums, recording it, converting it to MIDI, and finding interesting ways to use the acoustic drums as an effect or texture, adding vibes to sampled kicks and snares that were generated from the recording. That's what I did on the first part of “AGAIN.” The acoustic drums are a phone recording of me practicing a subdivision of quintuplets in a rehearsal space when I was doing my undergrad in Aarhus. I would have never programmed such a beat, because its imperfections and unstable time feel is where the magic lies. 

There’s a really nice double kick moment on “AGAIN.” Did you have much experience with metal drumming before playing that? 

I think you can find Emotan playing double pedal on YouTube somewhere, but I only recently acquired a double pedal and started practicing again. I find it really useful and would like to be good at it, but it's so hard that I would have to put in more time, so actually that double kick moment, I'm playing kick and floor tom, it’s me doing my best pretending to be a metal drummer, ha ha. I love watching double pedal tutorials. For some reason people that play metal are not only extremely sweet usually, but also extremely technical. I love their ambition, it's deeply inspiring. 

Are you a fan of Drain Gang? As a jazz musician, what do you take from the music they make? 

I love Drain Gang. I've returned to Ecco2k’s Boiler Room DJ set many times. It's so beautiful, I love how it's not what anyone had expected, and that it pissed some people off, too, ha ha. I think it's genius. I spend time just scrolling through people's reactions and comments, my favorite is, “Ecco2k mosh pits looking like a Renaissance painting.” I appreciate when people do things their own way and don't adjust their creative output to trends, that's always when I'm the most interested. I don't know if it comes from my love of improvisation—I spend a lot of time playing free improvisation, and when you do that, when you just do what comes natural to you, without intentions, and don't make musical choices out of the search of validation, thats always when the best moments happen, that’s when I really feel something.

I’m always curious about Scandinavian candy. Do you have any favorites?

There’s an Icelandic candy called ÞRISTUR that is liquorice covered in chocolate. It's harder to come by in Denmark, but my friend Sara who used to live in Iceland would always bring them home for me. I love her for that.