Jutes, born Jordan Lutes on March 28, 1991, is a Canadian singer, songwriter and producer who grew up on a farm in Kars, Ontario, cut his teeth in Toronto's independent hip-hop scene, signed and then amicably exited a Capitol Records pop-punk deal, and rebuilt himself as an independent alt-rock artist before landing his 2024 breakthrough single "Sleepyhead." He is now signed to Position Music, remains an in-demand outside songwriter with credits for Demi Lovato, Illenium and iann dior, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, and Arizona Zervas, and is married to Demi Lovato as of May 2025.
Jutes was born Jordan Lutes and raised not in Ottawa proper, as his own Wikipedia and Apple Music bios shorthand it, but on what SOCAN Magazine describes as a 300-acre farm in the small community of Kars, Ontario, roughly 44 kilometers south of the capital. A separate interview places the property closer to 100 acres, describing his childhood as spent "among the solitude of a super-small town and in the company of a bevy of animals," listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers, OutKast and Ludacris on repeat. Jutes has been candid about how isolating that upbringing felt: "I always felt like a black sheep. Growing up, I just wanted to be in the city, and in the mix," he told SOCAN Magazine.
His stage name has no hidden meaning. It is a mispronunciation of his own nickname, "J Lutes," that stuck, as he explained to Melodic Magazine. Musically, his formative influences skew toward the alternative rock and nu-metal of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Nirvana, Deftones, Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins are the names he returns to most often, a palette that eventually resurfaced fully in his mid-2020s sound after years spent in hip-hop and pop-punk lanes. As of his November 2025 single "It Takes Two," People magazine reported his age as 34, consistent with the March 1991 birth date.
Jutes originally enrolled in the film program at Humber College in Toronto, intending a path through filmmaking rather than music. He lost interest almost immediately, spending dorm-room hours recording what he has called "joke raps" over a webcam microphone in GarageBand. "I was skipping all my classes just to write these stupid songs. I made the songs as a joke, 'cause I didn't have the confidence to say, 'I'm going to be a rapper now,'" he told SOCAN Magazine. He eventually dropped out entirely, walking out of an exam five minutes after sitting down: "I left my exams five minutes after showing up and didn't even fill anything out... I just kind of had that blind faith of like, 'This just feels right in my heart, so I'm going to give up everything else for it,'" he told Melodic Magazine.
He moved into downtown Toronto, worked a day job, and built a lo-fi hip-hop and R&B foundation using free beats found online, since he had no access to musicians or producers at the time, according to Ones to Watch. His early single "Cocaine Cinderella" (2016), recorded on his couch with his first real microphone, generated meaningful traction and established the raw, emotion-forward vocal delivery that has stayed a constant through every genre shift since. He played "any gig he could get his hands on in Toronto" through this period, per Melodic Magazine.
The move to Los Angeles followed, with Jutes initially couch-surfing at a friend's place while working odd jobs and writing constantly. "I was performing before I went to L.A., [but] the performing kind of stopped when I got to L.A. I was just writing songs nonstop," he told Melodic Magazine. Within his first year in Los Angeles he signed a small distribution deal, a stepping stone toward the major-label deal that followed in early 2020.
Jutes signed to Capitol Records in early 2020 as a hip-hop and R&B artist, releasing the EPs Overrated and A Really Bad Dream. Inside the label he began pushing for a stylistic pivot toward pop-punk, telling collaborators, "I wanted to make pop-punk music... We can still have hip-hop drums, but I want to make pop-punk." The compromise produced a hybrid of trap beats and guitar hooks on singles like "When You're Around" and "Backseat (Kiss Me)."
The Capitol run ended in 2021, amid budget cuts tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jutes has described the exit as amicable and, in retrospect, freeing: "I left because due to Covid mad budgets got cut, and I guess they didn't want to hold me and not give me the support I needed, which is so blessed of them to do... I had been wishing I could be indie again for a while just because I love being totally in charge of my own career, so it worked out quite nicely," he told People. Independent again, he launched a "song a week" project through 2021, later compiled into the mixtape Careful What You Wish For.
The turn that reshaped both his sound and his personal life came through his writing and production partner Keith "Ten4" Sorrells, who brought Jutes into a songwriting session for Demi Lovato's 2022 pop-punk comeback album HOLY FVCK. Working alongside producer Oak Felder, Jutes co-wrote "Substance," "Happy Ending" and "City of Angels" for the record. The session reignited his enthusiasm for guitar-driven music and directly sparked his own reinvention across 2023's Ladybug and 2024's Sleepyhead, according to SOCAN Magazine. It also marked the beginning of his relationship with Lovato, first confirmed by People in August 2022, with a source describing it as "a really happy and healthy relationship." The two spent that Halloween dressed as "a zombie bride and groom" and Christmas Eve together at Disneyland.
Ladybug, released May 19, 2023, was Jutes's first full-length album, an 11-track, 28-minute record leaning into grunge influence and released via Luvsick. The couple made their red-carpet debut together at Clive Davis's pre-Grammy Gala on February 4, 2023. On December 16, 2023, Jutes proposed with a bespoke pear-shaped diamond solitaire from Material Good; Lovato posted, "I'm still speechless... last night was the best night of my life and I can't believe I get to marry the love of my life @jutesmusic." Jutes later detailed the proposal on The Viall Files, describing a rehearsed guitar performance he staged despite, by his own account, not really being a guitarist: "I definitely almost broke down crying a few times... I wanted to catch her off guard."
Jutes has been explicit that his rise did not hinge on a single viral moment. "It's just been insane to watch something grow in real time at the rate that it's growing without a viral song or a hit song or anything like that," he told Melodic Magazine. What momentum he did have built gradually, aided by a widely circulated one-take acoustic performance of "Vertigo" that changed public perception of him as a live performer.
The real commercial breakthrough arrived with Sleepyhead, released August 1, 2024, and expanded that December. The title track became Jutes's first Billboard and Mediabase-charting song, debuting at No. 33 on the Alternative Airplay chart before peaking at No. 24 Alternative and No. 13 Hard Rock. He described the sound he had landed on to Ones to Watch: "Definitely a lot darker. It's very emotional. Kind of just like a blend of all the alternative rock and nu-metal stuff that I grew up on in the late 90s, early 2000s. So very nostalgic. But I would say just cinematic, dark, heavy, emotional."
The following year brought "Red Velvet," a January 24, 2025 collaboration with Ari Abdul, co-written with Ella Boh and produced by Keith "Ten4" Sorrells and Alex Niceforo. Jutes later appeared on Ella Boh's own curated "The Songwriters" Apple Music playlist alongside her other collaborators, a marker of his standing within the same alt-pop songwriting circuit that produced Ari Abdul's own breakout, "Babydoll."
In May 2025, Jutes signed a global recording deal with Position Music, the Los Angeles-based independent company president and CEO Tyler Bacon has described as blurring the lines between record label, music publisher, and management firm. The announcement highlighted Position's outsized publishing footprint, including a No. 7 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100 publishing chart for Q3 2024, and confirmed "Left on Dilworth," released May 21, 2025, as the first single under the new deal. His subsequent studio releases, the expanded Dilworth (December 2025) and the announced Chin Up, Beautiful (August 2026), are both issued under exclusive license to Position Music.
In 2026, alongside the "Disassociate" single and video, Jutes extended his agreement with Position into a new worldwide publishing deal and label extension, described in trade coverage as enabling him to keep developing "his distinctive blend of alternative rock grit and emotionally charged songwriting while collaborating closely with the Position team." A September 2025 Billboard piece on internal changes at Position, including the promotion of Mark Chipello to President, confirmed Jutes remains a headline name on the label's roster alongside artists such as Hunter Metts, Kyle Welshly and RobinAugust.
The industry recognized the run in early 2026, when Jutes received a Juno Award nomination for Breakthrough Artist or Group of the Year at the 2026 JUNO Awards, Canada's national music awards, alongside Cameron Whitcomb, Jade LeMac, MICO, Noeline Hofmann, Saya Gray, Sofia Camara, Goldie Boutilier, Sacha and yung kai. Whitcomb ultimately won the category.
Separate from his own artist project, Jutes has built a substantial outside songwriting career. Beyond his three HOLY FVCK credits for Demi Lovato, his highest-streaming outside placement is "First Time" with Illenium and iann dior, which has generated more than 86 million streams according to Spotify for Artists. He also holds a writing credit on TOMORROW X TOGETHER's "Growing Pain" (23 million-plus streams) and Arizona Zervas's "2 AM" (20.5 million-plus streams). As of 2024 he was also an active writing collaborator with Charlotte Sands on unreleased material. Spotify for Artists credits him with 76 songs written across his own catalog and outside collaborations combined.
Jutes's live business scaled quickly once Sleepyhead broke through. His 2024 to 2025 Sleepyhead Tour ran three legs, and he recapped its trajectory on social media: "we started in the smallest rooms we could find and by the end of the tour we had to triple the size of the venues and yall still sold them out. idk how this is real life but it's all I've ever wanted."
His May 2026 European run spanned Glasgow, Manchester's Gorilla, Birmingham, Tilburg, Cologne's Club Volta, Hamburg's Fabrik, Berlin's Hole44, Warsaw, Vienna's Arena Wien, Lyon and Paris, with London's KOKO upgraded three times over. He announced the changes directly to fans: "we upgraded Hamburg again, London for the 3rd time (we're in KOKO now), and also upgraded Paris. we could not get an upgrade for Cologne so I added a second show in a bigger venue!" The run included dates alongside Ally Nicholas across several European stops, a genuine touring pairing between the two Position-adjacent alt acts. A North American headline tour is set to launch in August 2026 in support of Chin Up, Beautiful, culminating at Aftershock Festival on October 4.
Jutes's visual identity is explicitly rockstar-coded. SOCAN Magazine describes him via "his shaggy, vermillion-dyed hair to his multitude of tattoos," calling him "the image of a rockstar." His tattoo collection is a recurring personal touchpoint in interviews, including a mother tribute tattoo on his thigh applied during a tour stop with Demi Lovato present: "So my boyfriend was on tour with me, visiting, and we had a tattoo artist there and he wanted to get a tattoo of a song title of mine called, 'Forever For Me'... he was like, 'I want you to do it,'" Lovato has recounted.
His brand has moved through three identifiable phases: a Toronto-era lo-fi hip-hop and trap aesthetic through 2019; a Capitol-era hybrid pop-punk and trap look tied to Overrated and A Really Bad Dream in 2020; and his current, most fully realized dark, cinematic, nu-metal-inflected alt-rock persona. Music videos have leaned increasingly on high-concept metaphor, most notably the "It Takes Two" video, directed by Tommy Kelly and produced by Social Cinema, which stages Jutes performing on the edge of a building as a literal dramatization of romantic desperation. Frequent visual collaborators across 2023 to 2026 include directors Jake Doforno, Tommy Kelly and B.K. Barone.
His formal red-carpet style trends toward classic tailoring: a black suit and white button-down for the 2023 Clive Davis pre-Grammy Gala, a Saint Laurent suit with David Yurman and Spinelli Kilcollin jewelry for his own May 2025 wedding, and a black pinstripe suit for the January 2026 pre-Grammy Gala.
Jutes married Demi Lovato in a California ceremony reported by outlets on May 26, 2025 (the precise ceremony date has not been independently specified). Lovato wore two custom Vivienne Westwood gowns, and Goo Goo Dolls frontman Johnny Rzeznik performed an acoustic rendition of "Iris" at the ceremony, a song the couple has since treated as their wedding anthem. On April 24, 2026, Jutes joined Lovato on stage at Madison Square Garden during her It's Not That Deep tour for their first live duet, singing "Iris" together. The couple marked their first wedding anniversary on May 25, 2026, with Lovato writing on Instagram: "1 year married to the one i love the most, my best friend and my favorite human... this has been the best year of my life."
Sobriety and mental health form the emotional throughline of nearly every long-form Jutes interview. He first publicly marked 100 days sober in July 2022 via X, framing the milestone around anxiety management: "Learning to cope with my anxiety properly was something i was always too scared to try... if ur dealing with shit rn that feels never ending just know nothing lasts forever." In later interviews he has been more direct about the substance use that preceded that milestone: "So much drinking. The drugs stuff stopped before I got to LA, thank God," he said on the Lipps Service podcast, connecting his most emotionally raw songwriting to a period of "being really inauthentic with my music" and feeling "numb."
He has credited Lovato directly with helping sustain his sobriety: "It's very, very helpful having the support of Demi... Sadly I'm like, I don't know if I would have stuck with it if it wasn't for her, in the beginning," he told People, describing a routine built around "waking up early and feeding my dogs and meditating and having coffee and doing wholesome stuff and feeling good and going to the gym." He frames sobriety as ongoing rather than resolved: "There's still times where I'll be out and I'm like, 'This would be better if I wasn't sober'... it doesn't ever go away."
Songwriting itself functions as therapy for Jutes: "I really live to write songs... It's my therapy, and it's how I first started being honest about my emotions and mental health, so my connection to it is very deep-rooted," he has said, describing a habit of keeping over 300 unfinished demos on his phone at any given time. He and Lovato share a home with three dogs, and both have spoken about the relationship's easy, playful rhythm. Lovato has described their day-to-day as "snuggles in the mornings, random slow dances, leaving parties early to go get taco bell together, nights staying up way too late laughing our asses off til we cry, doing goofy shit trying to out-weird each other." Jutes has echoed the sentiment, calling married life "awesome" and noting continued growth: "We thought that when we got married that we couldn't love each other any more than we do. And we are somehow so much closer now than even when we got married."
| Year | Release | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | "Free" | Single | Debut independent single |
| 2016 | "Cocaine Cinderella" | Single | Early viral traction; couch-recorded |
| 2020 | Overrated | EP | First Capitol Records EP, 7 tracks |
| 2020 | A Really Bad Dream | EP | Capitol Records; pop-punk pivot cuts |
| 2021 | Careful What You Wish For | Mixtape | First independent project post-Capitol |
| 2022 | Hot Trash | EP | Alt-rock pivot; anchored by "Hollywood Hillbilly" |
| 2023 | Ladybug | Album | 11 tracks; released via Luvsick; grunge-inspired |
| 2023 | "Born To Lose" | Single | Standalone single |
| 2024 | Sleepyhead | Album | Breakthrough LP; title track hit #24 Alternative, #13 Hard Rock |
| 2025 | "Red Velvet" (feat. Ari Abdul) | Single | Co-written with Ella Boh |
| 2025 | "House of Cards" | Single/EP | Two-track release |
| 2025 | Dilworth | EP | Named after the street he grew up on |
| 2025 | "The End" | EP | Follow-on release |
| 2025 | Dilworth (expanded) | Album | 15 songs; exclusive license to Position Music |
| 2025 | "It Takes Two" | Single | Peaked #24 Alt Airplay; performed on Jimmy Fallon |
| 2026 | "Disassociate" | Single | Accompanied Position Music deal extension |
| 2026 | "Icarus" | Single | — |
| 2026 | "Mannequin" / "Goodnight (Interlude) <3" | Double single | Preview tracks for Chin Up, Beautiful |
| 2026 | "White Butterflies" | Single | — |
| 2026 | Chin Up, Beautiful | Album | Announced; 13 songs; exclusive license to Position Music |
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1991 | Born Jordan Lutes, raised on a farm in Kars, Ontario |
| 2015–2019 | Independent hip-hop and trap releases in Toronto |
| 2020 | Signs to Capitol Records; releases Overrated and A Really Bad Dream |
| 2021 | Amicably exits Capitol Records; begins independent "song a week" project |
| 2022 | Invited into a Demi Lovato HOLY FVCK writing session; co-writes three album tracks |
| Aug 2022 | Relationship with Demi Lovato confirmed by People |
| Feb 2023 | Red-carpet debut with Lovato at Clive Davis pre-Grammy Gala |
| May 2023 | Releases debut album Ladybug |
| Dec 2023 | Proposes to Demi Lovato |
| Aug 2024 | Releases Sleepyhead; title track becomes first Billboard-charting single |
| May 2025 | Signs global recording deal with Position Music |
| May 2025 | Marries Demi Lovato; Johnny Rzeznik performs "Iris" at the ceremony |
| Jun 2025 | Releases Dilworth EP |
| Dec 2025 | Releases expanded 15-track Dilworth; makes television debut on Jimmy Fallon |
| Jan 2026 | Receives Juno Award nomination for Breakthrough Artist or Group of the Year |
| Apr 2026 | Joins Lovato on stage at Madison Square Garden for their first live duet |
| May 2026 | European headline tour; first wedding anniversary |
| Aug 2026 | Chin Up, Beautiful announced/released; North American tour launches |
Jutes is the stage name of Jordan Lutes, born March 28, 1991. The name comes from a mispronunciation of his own nickname, "J Lutes," that stuck, as he explained to Melodic Magazine. Claims circulating that his legal name is different are not supported by any primary source.
No. Jutes is married to Demi Lovato as of May 2025. Kelsea Ballerini's documented relationship history centers on Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes; there is no verified connection between Ballerini and Jutes.
On a farm in Kars, Ontario, a small community roughly 44 kilometers south of Ottawa, though shorthand bios often simplify his hometown to "Ottawa."
Through a songwriting session for Lovato's 2022 album HOLY FVCK, arranged by his collaborator Keith "Ten4" Sorrells. Jutes co-wrote three songs on the album, and the working relationship developed into a romantic one, confirmed publicly in August 2022.
"Sleepyhead," released August 1, 2024, became his first Billboard and Mediabase-charting single, peaking at No. 24 on the Alternative chart and No. 13 on Hard Rock.
He released "Red Velvet" featuring Ari Abdul in January 2025, co-written with Ella Boh, and has since appeared on Ella Boh's own curated songwriter playlist.
He has spoken publicly about sobriety since at least mid-2022, describing it as an ongoing practice rather than a solved problem, and has credited Demi Lovato with helping him sustain it.
The street Jutes grew up on. It was first released as a seven-track EP in June 2025, then expanded to a 15-track project in December 2025 under license to Position Music.
As of early 2026, Jutes has approximately 1.58 million monthly listeners on Spotify, per the platform's own listing and third-party trackers. His cumulative streaming footprint exceeds 200.8 million total Spotify streams across 59 tracks where he appears as lead or featured artist, according to Kworb tracking data, with roughly 425,000 daily streams at time of measurement. Industry signing announcements have cited "85 million global streams" as of mid-2025, a figure that should be read as a directional snapshot rather than part of one consistent running total. Specific Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube follower counts were not independently verifiable at the time of this profile.
| Metric | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Spotify monthly listeners | ≈1.58 million | Early 2026 |
| Cumulative Spotify streams | 200.8 million+ | Early 2026 |
| "Sleepyhead" Alternative Airplay peak | No. 24 | 2024 |
| "Sleepyhead" Hard Rock peak | No. 13 | 2024 |
| "It Takes Two" Alternative Airplay peak | No. 24 | 2025 |
| Credited songs written (own + outside) | 76 | Per Spotify for Artists |
Jutes's story runs parallel to several other artists profiled on The Ring: his "Red Velvet" collaborator Ari Abdul and her songwriting partner Ella Boh sit within the same alt-pop songwriting circuit that also touches Position Music's broader roster, while his 2026 European touring partner Ally Nicholas represents another artist navigating the independent-to-label pipeline that shaped Jutes's own career. Readers interested in the Capitol-to-independent arc many alt and pop-adjacent artists share may also find useful context in profiles of other Position Music and DIY-rooted acts across the wiki.