Inside Jim-E Stack’s Big Year Producing For Lorde and Bon Iver

During a caller gym visit, Jim-E Stack heard “Girl, truthful confusing featuring lorde” commencement to play, and it walloped him successful the mediate of his workout session.

“I was like, ‘Agh.’ It truly makes maine emotional,” helium says of the remix to Charli xcx’s brat standout, which helium co-wrote. That absorption was thing caller for him: When Charli and Lorde performed it unneurotic astatine Coachella successful April, helium astir cried.

When the remix arrived successful June 2024, Stack and Lorde were halfway done creating the latter’s ain album, Virgin. “How unfastened and honorable and idiosyncratic [Lorde] is connected that verse — that’s thing we were channeling the full clip successful the album,” helium says of her 4th full-length. “So erstwhile she got to stock immoderate of that, it was like, ‘Holy s–t. We are onto something.’ It was reaffirming.”

Virgin, which Stack co-wrote and co-produced successful its entirety alongside Lorde, debuted astatine No. 2 connected the Billboard 200 pursuing its June release. The medium was heralded arsenic Lorde’s astir idiosyncratic task to date, with the vocalist examining and untangling sex roles, assemblage representation issues and her sexuality. As for Stack, the medium bumped him into a caller stratosphere arsenic a workplace guru — 1 who had racked up credits with HAIM, Empress Of and Kacy Hill, but ne'er a popular prima of Lorde’s acclaim.

Stack, 33, has played the agelong crippled passim his career, since landing his archetypal large recognition successful 2017 connected HAIM’s “Want You Back.” Along with his enactment connected Virgin, his breakthrough this twelvemonth is top-lined by different idiosyncratic triumph: co-producing Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable with the band’s frontman, Justin Vernon.

“I retrieve erstwhile Justin and I archetypal worked [together], we were messing astir for i, i, his [2019] 4th album, and I was wholly bummed to not lend to that,” Stack recalls. “But I retrieve a person telling me, ‘I stake much volition travel of that than you tin adjacent ideate close now.’ And helium was wholly right.” In a full-circle moment, Stack invited Danielle Haim to articulation his sessions with Vernon, resulting successful her 2 features connected Sable, Fable, “I’ll Be There” and “If Only I Could Wait.”

His different credits this twelvemonth — with artists including Dominic Fike, Aminé and Dijon — are besides typical of the yearslong friendships helium formed aft moving to Los Angeles successful 2016. And now, helium finds himself among a harvest of chap creatives, including Dijon and Mk.gee, each of whom are allowing jagged accumulation elements to bleed into their popular euphony — and chopped into the mainstream. “I deliberation determination is this caller defender close now,” Stack says. “There are times erstwhile people, myself included, consciousness similar thing chill is coming out, and this is not 1 of those times.”

Born James Stack successful San Francisco, helium expressed an involvement successful euphony from a young age. In precocious school, helium formed a jazz set with his champion friends, and astatine New Orleans’ Loyola University, helium surrounded himself with different aspiring musicians. In 2012, helium moved to Brooklyn and released his archetypal EP arsenic an creator himself but recovered the metropolis to beryllium isolating some creatively and personally. After 4 years, helium relocated backmost to the West Coast, this clip landing successful Los Angeles — and into a budding assemblage of artists, songwriters and producers.

One of them wa...