Los Angeles, California’s J MAU & THE KISS OFF emerge from what they lovingly call their “beloved hellhole” with their debut single “Poison,” out March 25. Founded in 2025 by Justin “J Mau” Maurer, longtime punk lifer and founder of Clorox Girls, Suspect Parts, L.A. Drugz, and Maniac, the project finds Maurer turning toward something darker and dustier without losing the bite that’s always defined him. “Poison” is a cinematic honky tonk murder ballad filtered through decades of West Coast punk history. It’s the first glimpse of a songwriter who’s always followed the feeling, even when it led somewhere uncomfortable.
Maurer’s story isn’t mythology. It’s messy and real. A CODA raised between Los Angeles and Bainbridge Island by a single Deaf mother, American Sign Language was his first language. Punk became his second. After surviving a turbulent childhood and helping put his abusive father in jail as a teenager, Maurer found autonomy in the underground. By fifteen he was booking shows and touring. By twenty he was releasing records and circling the globe with Clorox Girls. Along the way he built a parallel career as one of the country’s most respected ASL interpreters, working alongside prominent political figures like Michelle Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden, stage interpreting for punk legends like Alice Bag and The Avengers, interpreting Deaf actor Troy Kotsur’s historic 2022 Academy Award acceptance speech, and appearing with Kotsur on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His life has always moved between worlds.
After stints living in Madrid, London, and Baja California, and in the wake of a divorce that leveled him, Maurer found himself flat on his back in an East Hollywood apartment, cowboy boots still on, old country records spinning. Hank Williams. Buck Owens. Merle Haggard. Gram Parsons. Kris Kristofferson. Townes Van Zandt. He finally understood it. “Real country music is poetry,” Maurer says. “It’s about failure, heartbreak, and the tragic human condition. Music to laugh and cry and live and die by.” That rock-bottom clarity led him to write “Poison.”
Recorded at Savannah Studios in Boyle Heights with Ignacio “Iggy” Gonzalez and backed by Patrick “Butterworth” Vasquez and Kevin “Quake” Milner, the track moves like a slow-burning reckoning. Acoustic strum, restrained rhythm, and a haunted vocal that feels equal parts confession and warning. From his window in Pico Union, Maurer could hear children playing at the elementary school across the street. Listening to old country compilations full of doomed protagonists, he imagined himself as a man on the run whose days were numbered, watching that schoolyard and knowing he might never see it again. That’s where the line came from: “When will you see the children play / You never will again.” The refrain doesn’t comfort you. It circles back like a hard truth you can’t shake: “It’s got a way / That poison’s got a way / It’s got a say / It’s got the final say.”
The single arrives with an 8mm-shot video co-directed by Maurer’s former MANIAC bandmate Zache Davis and Marta Ribate Gracia-Davis. Grainy, sun-bleached, and edited with a careful hand, it plays like a spaghetti western fever dream, a corrido where the protagonist must confront how he’ll be remembered before the end comes calling. The artwork, designed by longtime collaborator Matthew “Snake” Davis, leans into vintage flash tattoo skulls and silent-film menace.
J MAU & THE KISS OFF Online
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