Brooklyn’s Jerk Turns Toward the Light on New Single ‘alarmed’

The Brooklyn project Jerk has never sounded interested in staying in one lane. Built as the brainchild of composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Joni Kinney, the act is now five albums and several EPs deep into an eclectic career that treats genre less like a map and more like a mood.

Across Jerk’s catalogue, you can hear the fingerprints of J Dilla and Madlib in the beat-making instincts — that loose-limbed swing, that head-nod logic — while the music’s brighter edges borrow from the uplift of Patrice Rushen and Earth, Wind & Fire. Threaded through it all is a contemporary, electronic-tinged jazz fusion spirit reminiscent of artists like Louis Cole, Knower, and Roller Trio: virtuosic without being clinical, playful without losing depth.

Jerk returns with ‘alarmed’, the final single lifted from the forthcoming EP ‘as day breaks’, due for release on Friday 15 May via DeepMatter Records. The project forms the second part of a two-EP narrative cycle, following 2025’s ‘as night falls’, and together, the pair will mark a milestone for the project: Jerk’s first vinyl pressing, arriving as a limited-run double EP.

Where as night falls leaned into the darker corners of human nature — a late-night blend of midnight funk and nu-jazz shaded with electronics — as day breaks turns its face toward something lighter. Not naïve brightness, but the kind that arrives after you’ve been through the long hours and still choose to step forward.

“This joint album project is the essence of Jerk,” Kinney shares. “Neither day nor night, but something more ethereal.”

That line lands like a thesis statement. Because what Jerk does best is live in the in-between: the liminal space where groove meets improvisation. Created with long-time friend, collaborator, and drummer Martin Wade, as day breaks continues to build on the momentum Jerk has been gathering across tastemaker platforms and radio. The project follows support from outlets like Stereofox and Somewhere Soul, alongside DJs including Huey Morgan on BBC 6 Music, Tony Minvielle and John Osborne on Jazz FM, Papaoul and Tom Ravenscroft on Rinse FM, and more. It’s the kind of spread that makes sense for music that refuses to be boxed in — equally at home with jazz heads, beat scene devotees, and late-night radio listeners who like their grooves with a little left-field edge.

On as day breaks, Jerk and Wade soundtrack a journey through daylight hours with uplifting, soulful instrumentals — coloured by jazz fusion, house grooves, and breakbeats — and decorated with small, vivid details: birdsong, and the ambient textures of New York City itself. It’s music that feels lived-in, like it’s walking beside you rather than performing at you. Following the swaggering, funk-laced lead single ‘steppinout’ and the contemplative, cyclical roll of ‘wait’, the final single ‘alarmed’ veers back into jazz-funk territory but with a narrative purpose. It’s a track that captures the opening moments of the day: that soft, bopping first breath of awareness before reality fully arrives.

A gentle intro gradually opens into an improvisation-led, off-kilter B-section that spotlights Kinney’s abilities as a saxophonist, not as a flashy detour, but as a human one. The song doesn’t just move; it thinks. “The track is made up of two distinct sections,” Kinney explains, “with an A section meant to evoke those first moments of consciousness, as well as a B section meant to evoke the baggage we all carry day to day.”