Jenny Palacios Talks “Ruin Your Life,” Crunchy Pop and Building Each Song Its Own World

There’s a very specific kind of tension at the center of Jenny Palacios’ “Ruin Your Life.” It’s the feeling of being somewhere you’re supposed to be having fun while your mind is somewhere else entirely.

The Toronto-based Peruvian-Vietnamese artist initially approached the song with a much lighter idea in mind. It was supposed to be tongue in cheek, almost mischievous, built around the fantasy of disrupting someone else’s perfectly put-together life. But somewhere in the writing process, the song started revealing something more personal.

“I’ll try to have a plan to keep things light and like a dedicated story or something and I’ll just end up vomiting how I really feel at whatever time,” Jenny says. “It seeps out.”

That shift is what makes “Ruin Your Life” work. The title still sounds reckless. The production still wants to be turned up loud. But underneath it is someone painfully aware of their own thoughts and increasingly desperate to get out of them for a second.

Crunchy Pop, On Purpose

Before “Ruin Your Life” even existed, Jenny and collaborator Kyle already knew what kind of session they wanted.

“We were like set on making a ‘crunchy pop’ song,” she says.

Their reference playlist, appropriately called vibe checker, pulled from Good Charlotte, Nine Inch Nails, Millionaires and The Veronicas. It’s an eclectic mix, but it makes sense once you hear the finished song. “Ruin Your Life” has the immediacy of pop, but there’s grit underneath it. The guitars push forward, the drums give it full-band weight, and nothing feels overly cleaned up.

Jenny had wanted to explore that kind of energy for a while.

“If anything it felt like a challenge to make it work like band-style,” she says. “And it’s mainly the drums that do it.”

The guitars were always part of the plan, but the drum choice ultimately kept the song from slipping fully into an electronic direction. Even now, that possibility still hangs around. Jenny says someone recently asked her to upload the stems, so electronic remixes could eventually happen.

That flexibility feels very Jenny Palacios.

Ask her to define exactly what genre she makes and she’ll be the first to admit it gets complicated.

“I’m never sure how to explain my sound,” she says. “I think I just hear the songs I love in songs I write which jumbles me up cause they come from so many genres.”

Later, she jokes that she might be getting a little too comfortable ignoring those boundaries.

“I am feeling the repercussions of not sticking to a lane and having to say like, ‘oh yeah it’s like indie-pop-alt-rock-pop with an asterisk.’”

Honestly, the asterisk suits her.

The Visual Comes Early

Jenny’s music has never really stopped at the song itself.

With a background in graphic design and art direction, she’s deeply involved in building the visual language around each release, often before the track is even finished.

“I enjoy picturing the setting of a song as it’s being written and I feel like it can help finish it,” she says.

For “Ruin Your Life,” part of that visual inspiration came from Rihanna’s “We Found Love” video, directed by Melina Matsoukas. Jenny was especially drawn to the way the video stacks quick, emotionally charged images together and still manages to tell a story without everything needing to happen in order.

“There’s something about the crazy wild time supercut video that is loaded with storytelling without even having to be sequential sometimes,” she says.

It’s that feeling of documenting a night while you’re still inside it. Glitter, movement, overstimulation, something a little glamorous and a little wrecked.

The approach also fits the way Jenny thinks about individual releases.

Rather than waiting for an album cycle to give everything one overarching aesthetic, she started treating singles as opportunities to build completely distinct worlds.

“At first I just never thought I’d have the time or money to write a full album,” she says. “Pretty soon into it I just actually started to get stoked on singles, and like why not.”

An album will happen eventually. For now, she’s enjoying the freedom.

Tiny Choices Make the Song

Jenny also keeps much of that process close to home, frequently collaborating with friends across music and visuals.

For her, the appeal isn’t necessarily about making the most experimental choice in the room. It’s about the small suggestion that shifts something just enough to make the whole song feel different.

“It’s never some wildly experimental chord progression that gets me the most excited in the studio,” she says. “It’s usually a small suggestion, something slightly outside of what I’d normally think to do, that makes me go, ‘huh, yeah that’s sick we should just do that.’”

Being involved in so many parts of the process means constantly making those decisions.

“Being so close to everything just gets me so much exposure to making all these tiny choices all the time,” Jenny says. “I love it.”

That DIY instinct is part of what connects “Ruin Your Life” to earlier releases like “Back of My Hand,” “IYKYK,” and “Who Couldn't Love You,” even when the songs occupy different sonic spaces.

Built to Be Yelled Back

From the beginning, “Ruin Your Life” was also meant to live outside the headphones.

“Ruin Your Life was like the energy song from the jump,” Jenny says. “It was all meant to be shouted out loud and cathartic.”

That makes sense for an artist who has already experienced what it feels like to bring her music into a live environment, including a past performance at Vans Warped Tour.

And if she could drop this song into any festival setting now?

“I think it’d be so in its element.”

The bridge might be the most Jenny Palacios part of the entire track, at least according to Jenny herself.

“The bridge yelling part rhyming!” she says. “I really didn’t want it to haha, but something happens to my brain, maybe for others too, when I set out to not rhyme I’m suddenly Dr. Seuss.”

Sometimes the most unmistakably personal choice is the one you were actively trying not to make.

Letting “Ruin Your Life” Live

Jenny’s relationship with songwriting has changed over time.

She says her earlier work often functioned almost like a public diary. The songs are still personal now, but she’s become more interested in sitting with an idea, pulling from experience and shaping it into something rather than simply documenting exactly what happened.

“I think I used to really treat songwriting as like my own little public diary,” she says. “It’s still really personal, but sitting with ideas of songs and pulling from experiences to write them was always something I wanted to do.”

“Ruin Your Life” feels like a good example of that evolution.

It begins as one story, accidentally reveals another, then turns the whole thing into something you can yell over loud guitars.

And Jenny isn’t finished with it yet.

“I’m excited ‘Ruin Your Life’ is finally out and I can live in it,” she says. “I just storyboarded some videos, there’s loads I still want to do with it.”

For an artist who likes giving every release its own world, “Ruin Your Life” sounds like one Jenny Palacios plans on staying inside for a little while longer.

Stream‍ ‍“Ruin Your Life” ‍ ‍by Jenny Palacios now.

Photography: Jenny Palacios