Paper Jam's 'This And That' Is a Twenty-Minute Masterpiece of Jangle
The Sonic Breakdown
Paper Jam were started by Natalia De la Cruz and Natalie Winkler, and the lineup on record runs Winkler on vocals and guitar, Cecilia Case-Hernandez on bass and vocals, Mason Blair on guitar, De la Cruz on keys and Taylor Rivers on drums. Rivers and Blair recorded and mixed the whole thing themselves between December 2024 and January 2025 in Watauga, Texas; Fred Thomas mastered it. K Records and Perennial have now co-released it as a ten-song LP, catalogue KLP330/PRNL77, and K’s own notes place the band “seeped in texas tradition by way of dunedin, glasgow, and olympia” — which is both a joke and an accurate map.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Case-Hernandez plays bass like a second rhythm guitar, melodic and slightly ahead, and the self-recorded mix keeps it close rather than deep. On “Ojos de Luneta” it is the thing carrying the tune.
The Spatial Dynamics: Fred Thomas’s mastering is the quiet hero here — a home recording that reads as deliberate rather than thin. Percussion sits up front and unapologetic: shakers, tambourine, cymbals used as punctuation.
Standout Performance
Natalie Winkler, who delivers “Polka Dot Girl” in seventy-eight seconds and “Tattle Tale” in eighty-eight without ever sounding rushed. Brevity as a vocal style is harder than it looks.
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Post-Trash’s Patrick Daul called it “a collection of pop hooks armored with the right amount of grit,” adding that “the way these songs are presented is both tactile and crisp.”
🌈 K Records, who know a thing or two, singled out the chord changes and the girl-group flourishes as “just right” and confessed to loving “the shakers and the cymbal dings.”
🌈 Not one song on it reaches three minutes. None of them needs to.