The first track on Jockstrap’s Wicked City EP, “Robert” is an experimental electronic track featuring a verse from Stepa J. Groggs of Injury Reserve, who Jockstrap opened for in their UK tour. Taylor Skye, producer for Jockstrap, also produced the Injury Reserve single “Rock n Roll.”
The song is named after American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Lead singer Georgia Ellery says that she was moved to write a poem about the late photographer after reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, becoming “obsessed” with Mapplethorpe’s blurring of the sublime and the sexual, and growing fascinated by his Manhattan. “I mean, ‘70s New York is just something else, isn’t it?” she says on a Zoom call from her parents’ home in Cornwall while a chicken risotto cooks downstairs. “It’s like, if you want to go to one place in one point in time, it’s where you’d go.”