JBL Emerging Interview: Croixx on going viral in high school & making an EP in a week

Continuing a rapid rise as an alternative phenomenon, 18-year-old artist, vocalist, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Croixx has unveiled his debut EP, How I’m feeling now. In this Emerging Headliner interview powered by JBL, Croixx explains how – while still in high school – he went viral and created his six-track EP in a single week.

A high school graduate as of this year, Croixx is celebrating the end of an era, he shares, speaking to Headliner from L.A., where he calls home. Originally from Henderson, Nevada – he recalls that life in the desert felt like being stuck in a loop.

“It was not my speed, really,” he explains of his hometown. “I wanted to be somewhere where something new was happening every day. There, you have to find things to do, and in California, there's lots of different things to try every day.”

Not to mention its thriving music scene. “That wasn't necessarily the reason at first, but then everything just fell into place when I came down here,” he says of the move to L.A.. “I was able to let my creativity fully go.”

Croixx’s real name is Jake Vanderpool. The inspiration for his artist moniker? An American brand of sparkling water. “I definitely was inspired by the sparkling drink, LaCroix," he says with a grin. “I could not figure out a name for so long, and it was killing me! I hated every name I was thinking of. I just looked at one of those cans, and I was just like, ‘Screw it. That's the name!’ I was very unsure about it for a while, and then people started to tell me that it was cool,” he shrugs.

Experiencing intense loneliness at school, Croixx found a sense of solace and acceptance in songs by Machine Gun Kelly, Post Malone, Dominic Fike, Sueco, and The Kid LAROI. “I really like studying their music,” he says of being drawn to music made for outsiders. “That might be why I was drawn so much to their music,” he considers. “It helped me get through some of those feelings. I feel like it was something that had to happen in order to get the best product out of my music. It was just part of the process.”

Indeed, Croixx makes music people can lean on when things get dark, and can sing along to as things get better. “A lot of my tough times were self-inflicted,” he confesses with a laugh, “and was me making things more dramatic in my head than they actually are. But you can still get to a new place with your music.”

At 14 years old, instinct pushed him to spit over a YouTube beat, and he dove into writing, recording, and playing guitar. “That's when I started recording vocals and stuff,” he says, adding that he’s self taught via YouTube videos. “I realised that you have to scroll through a million YouTube beats in order to find something that you might like. I just wanted to learn how to just make what I like immediately.”

As soon as he got home from school, Croixx would freestyle his words over his own D.I.Y. production rather than writing lyrics down – a method that he still employs to this day. “It's the most natural thing,” he explains of his technique. “It's easier for me to freestyle stuff than to sit down and write a song. I probably would say I do that about 85% of the time now. It's the reason why I got awful grades! I would make music rather than do my schoolwork, but somehow I graduated,” he laughs. “I went through the motions at school and then got home, and then really got to work.”

Maintaining a steady flow of uploads, his following snowballed and paved the way for Losing Me to catch fire in 2023. It lit up TikTok, inspiring singer-songwriter David Kushner to comment, while Croixx received hundreds of thousands of views.

“I was getting ready for school one morning and I saw [the video’s response and Kushner’s comment] and I freaked out,” he recalls. “I smiled the rest of the day. That song in particular, even though it may not have been the biggest song, it definitely did give me motivation and showed me, ‘Yo, you might actually be able to do this’.”

He kicked off 2024 with In Your Arms and Can You Love Me? – the latter of which garnered more than 2 million streams. “I did not think that one was gonna be big,” he admits. “I had the little snippet of it and I put it on my Instagram story – everybody was like, ‘Finish this one!’. I put it on TikTok, and it just went insane. I would just be in class in third period, I’d post a video, and by the time I got home, it had half a million views.

Croixx’s debut EP, How I’m feeling now was created with producer Shy Kid over the course of a single week in Malibu. “Honestly, it was one of the best weeks of my life,” he enthuses. “I do like to work fast. I like to start a song one day, and by the time I'm leaving the producer's house, I like to be able to listen to a full song in the car on the way home. I feel like it's my best work when that happens.

“It was super fun,” he adds. “Shy Kid is amazing. I was like, ‘Dude, we gotta make an EP in a week’, and he was like, ‘Okay!’ – so we just did it. It was so natural; nothing felt forced. How I’m feeling now was a turning point for how I approach making music,” he points out. “It made me realise that it is okay to evolve and try new sounds. This EP is a gateway for all the music yet to come.”

He reveals that with this EP, he purposefully set out to make something that sounded different to his previous work. “The music I was making was something I was just really into at the time,” he says of his earlier material. “My music taste is always changing. I listen to every sort of music, and I’m not really into the kind of stuff I was making before. So I definitely was like, ‘Let's put something out that's not what I've been doing, and hopefully people like it!’”.

Balancing dreamy alternative beat-craft with larger-than-life pop hooks, the EP laces kinetic soundscapes with hyper-personal storytelling, mirroring life’s ups, downs, and everything in between. The project’s title track – How I’m feeling now – revolves around a pulsating bassline, organic percussion and hazy guitar. The refrain culminates with a confession, ‘I just want to hear the sound of your voice in my head, things that I never said, reflecting how I’m feeling now’.

“It kind of described where I was at that point,” he says of the song’s inspiration. “Lots of crazy things were happening. I was graduating and I just signed a record deal. The EP describes how I was feeling at that moment.”

Croixx’s favourite track on the EP is One Day At A Time. “I actually made that in my room,” he shares. “It was originally just a guitar demo, and I loved it. It's pretty deep when you really listen to it. What happens with a lot of my music is I'll work quickly and freestyle stuff, and I don't put the pieces together on what I just said. I'll listen to it back and I'll be like, ‘Wow, that kind of made sense’. That was definitely one of them.”

When he performs his songs live, Croixx shares he is using a JBL EON ONE Compact Portable PA with Professional-Grade Mixer, which is small enough to carry in one hand, but its sound is big enough to fill a room.

"It's great,” he nods. “I didn't know how small it was, but I was happy about that! I was like, ‘Man, this thing's small, but super loud!’ It definitely can help with taking it to do shows, and it can also help with singing karaoke in your room, because I've definitely tried that. My neighbours probably hate me,” he laughs. “It's super easy to take anywhere you want, and it doesn't have a bunch of parts. You can go take that thing to the park and just go set it up and play. I'm looking forward to using it more,” he smiles.