Jesse Rutherford has spent more than a decade living two musical lives at once. One is public, monochrome, and instantly recognizable: the frontman of The Neighbourhood, the band whose black-and-white visual discipline helped make "Sweater Weather" an eleven-week Billboard Alternative Songs No. 1 that TikTok somehow made bigger nearly a decade later. The other life is quieter, stranger, and deliberately its opposite in every way Rutherford can manage.
A Mixtape Before the Band Existed
The solo catalog actually predates the band's formation. In 2011, the same year The Neighbourhood came together, Rutherford self-produced and released Truth Hurts, Truth Heals, a sprawling 17-track mixtape that few outside his earliest fans have heard. It set a pattern that would repeat for the next thirteen years: while the band built an empire on austerity, Rutherford kept a separate, looser project running underneath it, one where he could say things the band's aesthetic didn't leave room for.
Ampersand, GarageBand, and the Photo Book
That separate project got its formal debut on November 10, 2017, when Rutherford released &, pronounced "Ampersand," through Columbia Records. The eleven-track album arrived with a 144-page photo book shot by Jessie English, exploring androgynous, gender-fluid styling in a way the band's iconography never touched. Two years later came GARAGEB&, a scrappier 12-track record built largely inside the GarageBand iOS app, which closed out his Columbia years without ever trying to out-scale the debut.
Where the band trades in monochrome minimalism, the solo project has always been coded in color.
Rainbow, Atlantic, and the Jesse® Rebrand
The solo thread went quiet for a few years before resurfacing in March 2023 with a new label home at Atlantic Records, timed to the singles "Joker" and "Rainbow." That August brought the &ONE mixtape, and then, on September 20, 2024, the biggest identity shift of Rutherford's career: Wanted?, a 12-track album introducing a new stage name entirely, Jesse®, complete with a registered trademark symbol stamped into the branding itself.
Rutherford has been explicit about the logic behind the color-forward identity that runs through this era. "We try and connect songs to seasons," he told Office Magazine. "I feel like I have to just say rainbow because it has to be the opposite of rainbow because The Neighbourhood has always done the black and white thing. But I don't know. I really do like yellow."
I feel like I have to just say rainbow because it has to be the opposite of rainbow because The Neighbourhood has always done the black and white thing.Jesse Rutherford, Office Magazine
The Business Side
Rutherford isn't only building a parallel discography, he's built parallel infrastructure to support it. In 2020 he co-founded Therapy Records, a publishing joint venture with Warner Chappell, alongside producer Danny Parra. It's a detail that reframes the solo project as something closer to a second career than a vanity outlet, one where Rutherford operates on the ownership side of songwriting as much as the performing side.
When Real Life Wrote the Songs
The most publicly scrutinized chapter of Rutherford's recent life, his relationship with Billie Eilish between 2022 and 2023, fed directly into the solo catalog rather than the band's. "POV," from &ONE, is widely read by outlets including Elite Daily and Uproxx as addressing the relationship and the age-gap commentary that followed it into public view. "Turn Heel," from the same mixtape, names her outright: "I just got a text from Billie Eilish." It's the kind of direct, diaristic songwriting the black-and-white band persona rarely allows, and it underscores why Rutherford keeps the two projects separate in the first place.
A Brief Overlap
One documented thread connects Rutherford to Los Angeles singer-songwriter Christian Gates. Aris, the artist and model who stars in Gates's "Dangerous State of Mind" video from mid-July 2022, was briefly in a relationship with Rutherford around the time of that shoot, in the narrow window between his split from Devon Lee Carlson and the start of his relationship with Eilish that October. It's a footnote rather than a throughline, but it's a real one.
Still Running Parallel
None of Rutherford's solo streaming numbers approach the scale of The Neighbourhood's catalog, and that gap is the point rather than a problem. The band's monochrome discipline built a career; the rainbow built a release valve. Thirteen years after a teenager first self-produced a 17-track mixtape nobody was watching for, Jesse® is still the place Jesse Rutherford goes to say the things the black and white won't let him.