All in a Jobber’s Day’s Work: Booked to Lose, Built to Last
- Josh Kitchen
- Aug 18
- 11 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / August 18, 2025
In 2023, Stereogum released their 40 Best New Bands of 2023 list. Looking back now as we head into the final stretch of 2025, it’s fascinating to see where many of those acts have gone. Agriculture, Feeble Little Horse, and The Tubs have become reliable indie and alt mainstays. Sexyy Red and a breakout called Chappell Roan have rocketed into full-blown stardom.
But one band that caught my eye—and absolutely floored me when I dove into their latest EP—was a New York four-piece called Jobber. Their promise? Sweeping guitars, lush vocals, and pro-wrestling as a thematic backbone. I pressed play on their new single “Summerslam” (starting strong with the WWE references), and immediately got five minutes of pure rock-and-roll perfection: heavy, in-your-face drumming, blistering riffs, and a pounding ’90s-style grunge groove.
Frontwoman Kate Meizner’s vocals are sweet as candy but cut with grit, delivering lyrics that are both creative and poignant—using the spectacle of wrestling to contextualize the pain of living and the dignity of an honest day’s work, and how those two things often go hand in hand.
Fast forward to August 2025, and Jobber are finally releasing their debut full-length LP, Jobber to the Stars. The album places “Summerslam” at its rightful center, surrounded by ten more tracks of shimmering, power-pop-leaning guitar rock, Cars-inspired synth touches, and Meizner’s confident, slacker-cadence delivery that would make Shirley Manson proud. Add in enough pro-wrestling nods and song titles to make any die-hard fan grin—and enough sheer riffage to melt the brains of casual listeners—and what you get is 47 minutes of working-class angst wrapped in soaring, hook-heavy rock.
Jobber to the Stars is an insanely strong debut. Meizner is on vocals and gutar, with Michael Falcone on drums, Michael Julius on guitar and keys, Miles Toth on bass, and it was recorded with Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr, Body/Head, Editrix.) Jobber's full-length arrives with confidence and gusto, ready to take you on in the squared circle. I caught up with Meizner to talk about the lengthy process of making the record, what it really means to be a “jobber,” and chllenged her to contextualize the 2025 New York City mayoral race as a pro-wrestling match.
Your debut full-length album, comes out this month - Jobber to the Stars. It's been a long time coming, you’ve been kind of working on it for almost three years, right?
Yeah, we’ve been working on it since May of 2022, which is before the [Hell in a Cell] EP even came out. So at this point, it's over three years. Wow. So I knew it was going to take me forever, because I learned from recording the first EP that the recording process, the writing process — it doesn’t end before I get into the studio. There’s always things with arrangement and writing that come to the surface that I really need to think about or reconsider when I’m in the studio. So it’s not like we just book the time, record the stuff, and like we’re done, then we start mixing. It’s almost like there is this development process once we get into the studio where I record everything that’s on the demo, in addition to any ideas I’ve come up with between when I demoed and got into the studio.
And then the other dimension is that I work an office job. Hate using the word "career," because it sounds so boring, but I sort of have a career outside of music that I’ve been doing for the better part of a decade. I went to grad school for it. I work fully nine-to-five. I actually feel very lucky that I somewhat enjoy my job. So there’s always the tension between going and recording and working on music, and doing this job that piques my curiosity and keeps me busy. That throws a wrench into our recording process. Then there’s the money consideration — accommodations, renting cars, taking time off work. I always say I wouldn’t wish scheduling band practice or recording in your 30s on my worst enemy. That’s why it took so long.
In a way, that feels similar to what you’re doing with pro-wrestling as a guiding theme: you're balancing the nine-to-five with the chance to step into a different world and create art. The same way - wrestling has always struck me as almost theatrical—like a play, with masks, personas, and larger-than-life performances. Where did that come from - the wrestling influence?
I was reading Jeff Tweedy’s book, How to Write One Song, and in past projects, I’ve always had a very difficult time writing about myself or my life, or finding any sort of focus within music. There’s so much I want to do musically, and I’m into so many kinds of music, that all of my past projects lacked a thread tying things together — a focus in terms of the lyrics, tone, and genre. There are a bunch of different tactics. One of them was to write as if you were a wrestler or playing a character, or living in a fictional world. That really helped me unlock myself. Writing lyrics is particularly difficult for me.
I decided not to box myself into one genre, but instead scope the project around something I felt had a lot of meat on the bone and that I thought about constantly, which is professional wrestling. Because wrestling has storylines, conflicts, masks, interpersonal drama. It’s rooted in this very dramatic structure. That and I started watching wrestling a lot in 2015 when a good friend worked at WWE and my partner at the time was a huge fan. We would watch every pay-per-view, and we sort of started to talk about it like reality TV — picking it apart, psychoanalyzing it.
I started seeing parallels between wrestling and real life.
It felt like a broad but narrow enough scope to tether myself to so I didn’t lose focus. It provided a framework for the sound too. I knew it was going to be loud guitar music, but reflecting different eras of wrestling and music. That’s how it started. It was a songwriting exercise to get my shit together.
That’s why I think the lyrics are so fun and interesting. You’re singing about things like how a job sucks, or relationships, or how the world sucks, and you can find all of that in pro wrestling. It’s like a movie: a hero’s journey, obstacles, villains. You gotta hit it with a giant folding chair.
Exactly. I’ve never been great at expressing myself in writing. I’m much more of a verbal person. But this gave me a foundation to stay rooted in, to make oblique references rather than pouring my heart out, which feels uncomfortable to me. Maybe that’s something I need to work on.
I think people who sit with the record will understand your heart. The record is so warm, and like a wrestling show, it’s pretty savage in its delivery, but there’s real feeling there too. For people who don’t know pro-wrestling, can you talk about what a "jobber" is and why that was an important band name for you?
I actually came up with the band name before I had written any songs. Jobber is just a sick band name. I have a bank of band names in the Notes app on my phone, and I wrote this down one day. When I was relearning professional wrestling in my 20s, I read the term and it really stuck out to me — both the tragedy and the dignity of it. A jobber is a wrestler who is called in to do the job, to lose, to make other wrestlers — the John Cenas of the world — look good. And I thought that was a fascinating analogy -
especially at a point in my life where I was working a bunch of underpaid jobs, essentially just working to make other people rich. I was doing the job, just like a jobber.
I connected the dots and thought more about what it means to be a jobber, especially in the wrestling sense. It’s a really poignant concept. Most of the world are workers making others look successful, just trying to get by. There’s solidarity in that term. I don’t view it as derogatory. There are so many jobbers I greatly appreciate. Some of the silliest, weirdest, most fascinating storylines were jobbers I hoped would get their break. Some of my favorite wrestlers — the goofy, clowny concepts — those were jobbers. I have a deep appreciation for it, and there’s solidarity in it.
I feel like people can probably relate to that — to being a jobber. And just because you are a jobber doesn’t mean you don’t want to be the hero. It’s the aspiration, and part of the journey. It’s the everyman.
Totally. And sometimes you don’t even want to be the person at the top. The complication, sadness, greed, or abandonment of morals that often comes with mass success or fame — not everybody wants that. Some people just want to do the thing they like, get paid, and make a living off of it.
I want to talk about the singles. “Nightmare” is so sick. I’ve loved “Summerslam” for like two years since it came out and hit me like a truck. Tell me about some of the musical influences, Jobber’s music would be perfect in a 90s horror movie. What were you pulling from?
I was listening to a lot of Helmet at the time that I wrote this song. Helmet is one of my favorite bands. The bass tones are incredible. A lot of their songs are incredibly bass-driven, and I know Paige Hamilton is not just the guitar singer of a hard rock band, he’s also a really accomplished, cerebral jazz musician. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in their music if you close listen.
I always like to use the fish analogy. With Helmet, it’s like you’re drawing a fish. You start with the outline and it just sounds like a hard rock band. Then you start drawing the scales, and you start seeing the light reflecting off the scales. There’s so much more underneath. I wanted to write a song like that — that on the surface is a hard rock song, but there’s a lot going on underneath. A lot of weird textures. I started writing "Summerslam" on bass, which unlocked something new for me. I haven’t done it since for some reason, but it was wonderful.
And it opens with that sick bass line.
Yeah. And it took a long time to write. I actually wrote that song in 2021. I was starting a new job, and I didn’t have much to do for the first few months besides read documents. Instead, I had my guitar set up in between every meeting, and I was agonizing over every part of this song. Melody, guitar parts, chords. It felt like a magnum opus. It was so extra, but I kept going with it. I had so much time to loop things, play them over and over, until I found something sticky. It probably took me a few months to write and refine.
It pays off. That’s one of those songs where every part is strong enough to be its own hook. But together it explodes. If I wanted to play someone one song to explain Jobber, it’d be that one. Songs like “Nightmare” and “Pillman’s Got a Gun” feel like they flow from it too.
I love that you said that, because that’s also how I think of "Summerslam." There are a few Jobber songs that feel like the central pillars: “Summerslam,” “Hell in a Cell,” and the first track on the new record -“Raw Is War."
The "Pillman's Got a Gun" video is great.
That was such a fun video to make. I’m obsessed with The Replacements, who have been my favorite band for the past few years. When you’re a band making music videos on a small label, I try to think of simple but impactful concepts. I had the idea to do a riff on their “Bastards of Young” video. In that one, the camera is fixed on a speaker playing the song, slowly zooming out to reveal more of the room. It’s so silly and low-budget.
Originally I wanted “Pillman’s Got a Gun” to be more elaborate — a “We Are the World”-style tribute to Brian Pillman with people impersonating wrestlers. But it was too much for our budget and timeline. So I scoped it down and riffed on the Replacements video: a slow zoom on a shrine we built for Brian Pillman, one of my favorite wrestlers.
My friend Brittany [Reeber] helped flesh out the concept. She thought about the practical side — bringing in a production designer, proper cinematography, particular lenses. She also convinced me to be in the video. We came up with the idea of me entering the frame, taking Pillman’s sunglasses, and becoming “possessed” by him to play the solo.
We brought in production designer Jayne Clark to build the shrine from objects I’d collected, plus more. My friend Adam [Kolodny] did cinematography and crushed it. It was my first time with a full film crew. Most of our videos have just been handheld.
I think wrestling fans are going to love that Brian Pillman tribute. Modern wrestling feels so cheap sometimes. Logan Paul, The Rizzler…
It is weird. It feels like the “influencerization” of wrestling. Some gimmicks are unique, but the best ones are when the wrestler’s real personality is just turned up to 11. Brian Danielson was like that. Sami Zayn too. With Brian Pillman, there was real authenticity to the “loose cannon” persona. People didn’t know if it was real or fake. WWE tried to recreate it with Dean Ambrose, but it feels more contrived now. Wrestling’s been sanitized — sometimes for good reasons — but it’s harder for wild icons like Pillman to exist today.
I want to wrap things up with sort of a left turn. You’re a New York band, and New York has a big mayoral race coming up that's becoming a national story. Can you explain the NYC mayoral race in wrestling terms?
This is the hardest thing, but okay. Zohran [Mamdani] is the guy who’s not afraid to say the thing. That moment in the mayoral debate with Andrew Cuomo where he just unleashed — that felt like CM Punk’s legendary “pipe bomb” promo. So to me, Zohran is punk: the outsider, the underdog, the one who’s saying what the fans already feel. Radical to some, but really just humane — valuing people, community, your neighbors. And I heard he's a wrestling fan.
Eric Adams, on the other hand, is like the corporatized empty suit. He’s the character the promotion desperately wants you to cheer for, but there’s nothing there. He’s bland, propped up by management, with a lot of other people pulling the strings. In wrestling terms, he’s the guy creative keeps pushing to the top even though the crowd isn’t buying it — like when WWE tried to force Roman Reigns into being “the guy” long before the audience was ready.
Andrew Cuomo is the mega-heel. He’s Triple H in his most corporate, power-hungry form: a villain with real conviction and charisma, someone you actually believe when they cut a promo, even though what they’re saying is terrible. He’s ruthless, calculating, and in control of the machinery. He’s not an empty suit like Adams — he’s a heel who knows how to wield power.
And then there’s Curtis Sliwa. He’s the late-match run-in, the bizarre gimmick nobody really asked for. He shows up in his little red beret like it’s his costume, tries to insert himself into the main event, and the crowd gives him absolutely no pop. But then you realize he’s such a total weirdo outside the ring that people become fascinated by him almost in spite of themselves. He’s the kind of mid-card comedy act who gains notoriety not because of booking, but because he’s just a freak show in real life.
So if you picture it as a match: Zohran comes in with all the momentum, the crowd behind him, CM Punk-style fire. Adams is the bland corporate face they’re desperate to put over. Cuomo’s the big boss heel looming over everything. And then Sliwa stumbles in at the end like a late-90s gimmick wrestler, hoping for a reaction but mostly confusing everyone.
God that's beautiful. I think Zohran’s going to win.
I hope so. Hopefully it’s not like Summerslam, night one — punk wins, and then a corporate heel swoops the title away.
Jobber to the Stars is out on Friday, August 22. Pre-order it on vinyl here and check out the singles below, and follow Jobber here!
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