Painful Enlightenment

The veteran Chicago footwork producer tests the genre’s stylistic limits on a bracing, sometimes harrowing album that documents her struggles with depression.

Chicago house veteran Jana Rush made her full-length debut with 2017's Pariah, a confounding album filled with contorted, bass-heavy rhythms and samples pushed past the breaking point.

Footwork innovator Jana Rush returns with Painful Enlightenment, a discomfiting, weirdly sexy, groundbreaking triumph of a record

Jana Rush's new album addresses mental health issues and exists gingerly on footwork's outer edges, suggesting the genre without quite hardening into it.

The Chicago producer finds new emotional depths to the footwork genre, confronting depression and overwork in stunningly original music