The rising singer-songwriter is rapidly becoming one of pop's most exciting and enigmatic talents.

A roadie rolls a large suitcase through a crowd of people, from the rear of a small London club and onto a stage. The audience of about 150 fans — one of them very famous, more on that later — is befuddled. 

“Is she in there?” some of them murmur as the luggage passes by, its contents wiggling inside. 

Explore See latest videos, charts and news Billie Eilish dora jar See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

Once on stage, the spray-painted bag slowly unzips and out tumbles Dora Jar, the budding singer-songwriter headlining the gig.  She is excited, she is ready, she is … covered in potting soil. 

Related Make Way For Ravyn Lenae 03/16/2022

As Jar recounts this tale, of her first-ever public performance — only this past September — many questions come to mind, most of them beginning with “why?” Why stuff yourself in a suitcase?

On Zoom from a studio in London, Jar’s eyes widen as she stares into the camera, considering the question. “I don’t know,” she answers, appearing to mean it. 

And why also fill the suitcase with soil? Was it a metaphor, like you were emerging from the earth? 

She takes another beat, thinks.

“No … yes … I don’t know!” she laughs. “Really, it was just an idea I had, and I had to do it. I was wearing a yellow hat, which I guess sort of resembled flower vibes. And there was soil on my hat, too. And when I would kick around for the first song, soil was just falling off in these dusty clouds and that’s sort of what I was imagining. So yeah.”

Welcome to the wonderfully whimsical world of Dora Jar, an idiosyncratic, experimental and captivating new alt-pop artist earning high praise from huge stars. The 24-year-old California singer-songwriter just finished a stint opening arenas for Billie Eilish, who’s hooked on the newcomer’s pinballing melodies —  a tangle of folk-rock, bedroom pop, grunge and trip-hop. Her singular sound has also scored co-signs from Charli XCX, Grimes , Moses Sumney and more. 

“Dora is unlike any creature on this earth,” says acclaimed pop artist Remi Wolf, for whom Jar (born Dora Jarkowski) opened a few shows late last year. “She really knows herself, and it shines through in her performance and her art.”

Even Elton John is on team Dora. On his radio show last month, Sir Elton played her trippy ‘90s-tinged tune “Scab Song,” one of several highlights off her beaming new EP, Comfortably in Pain, released March 4. 

However, the singer-songwriter’s biggest celebrity fan has to be Eilish, who attended that wild London show and witnessed Jar spill from the suitcase in all her unkempt glory. 

“Dora my angel, you make me cry every time,” Eilish posted to her Instagram story, over a video of Jar performing her delicate dirge “Garden.”   

Eilish had reached out to Jar after hearing her debut EP, May 2021’s arresting Digital Meadow.  The new artist, who to that point enjoyed only a modest-by-comparison online following, couldn’t believe her DMs. “It was so shocking and wild,” she says. “I had sent probably hundreds of DMs to [Eilish] before, because I’d loved her for a long time. And then a couple days after my EP came out, there were like seven new messages from Billie Eilish… I thought it was a fan account.”

Eilish was so taken by Jar, in fact, that she asked her to open some shows on the monstrous Happier Than Ever arena tour, which kicked off in February, filling several dates left vacant after Willow pulled out due to “production limitations.”  

“ Billie and her team were excited to offer her to join,” says Sara Bollwinkel, Senior Vice President at Wasserman Music, Jar’s booking agency. “It’s always so wonderful when the stars align and we are able to connect these dots.”

Jar joined the tour’s first U.S. leg last month for seven dates, including two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden — more than 15,000 fans per show, far beyond any gig she’d experienced. “It was extremely surreal,” she says. 

So how does an artist with so little stage experience handle such massive venues? Jar’s answer: Elves. 

“Five years ago, I had a strange thought during a meditation where I felt my cells tingling, my body was kind of tingling and felt really open,” she elaborates. “And the tingling sort of translated in my mind as the sound of a large crowd cheering and that large crowd in my brain was elves, and those elves were my cells. Then I was like, ‘Oh, I’m made of elves and so is everybody else.’”

However unlikely, the mantra appears to have worked. When seen at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. on Feb. 22, Jar was magnetic on Eilish’s diamond-shaped stage, winning over the audience with her slinking, politely manic persona.  

“She’s this captivating, unearthly and strange being that exudes and commands energy on and off stage unlike anything we’ve experienced,” say Kirk Harding and Hilary Sullivan, managers of Los Angeles-based Bad Habit management, where Jar is currently signed. “During her London show last fall, Billie whispered, ‘She’s a fairy’ – and that’s honestly getting very easy to believe.”  

Jar was raised in a rather unconventional household: Her mother was a Broadway actor, her father a Polish and Russian translator. When Jar was small, the family moved from New York City to Northern California to better accommodate her older sister, Lueza, who had cerebral palsy. 

Jar was very protective of Lueza, she says. “We had our own language together and a way of communicating that I felt that people struggled to understand,” she says.  

When she was in middle school, Lueza’s health worsened, eventually leading to the older sister’s death in 2011. Jar says of that time: “I just didn’t do school. It was kind of like school, hospital, home. I didn’t do homework, I played guitar.”

The singer-songwriter soldiered on, attending a music school in California before dropping out and moving to her father’s native Poland to live with family. “I just didn’t feel like doing school, I felt like playing a character that I just wasn’t,” she says. “Also I did too many ‘shrooms and had a lot of things to process. My sister had passed away and I hadn’t talked about her for four years and that was definitely a psychic weight.”

While in Poland in 2018, Jar, then 20, began to upload snippets of home-recorded songs on Instagram, one of which caught the attention of a producer, Felix Joseph in London, who suggested they collaborate. She flew out for a few sessions. 

“Dora hadn’t been in a studio before and I would never have known,” says Joseph, who’s also worked with Griff, Burna Boy and Jorja Smith. “Her mic technique and her willingness to experiment and play was like someone who’d been doing this thing for years.” 

Jar soon relocated to London and began to focus on her career in earnest, eventually signing with Bad Habit and expanding her list of producers, all of whom couldn’t get enough of her raw talent and vision. “Her ability to express the most common emotions of the human experience with the most fantastical and mystical words and scenarios is something that I firmly believe is unmatched in music right now,” says producer John DeBold (Katy Perry, HAIM), who worked on Comfortably in Pain. 

Ralph Castelli, another producer who assisted on both of Jar’s EPs, is more blunt: “[Jar] is fearless; she is always down to do the weirdest s–t.”

How weird, exactly? Discussing her influences, Jar cites the late Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim and hip-hop luminaries Outkast; ATLiens (1996) was the first CD she bought with her allowance money. Unprompted, she spits a Big Boi verse from the title track – “Cause I’m cooler than a polar bear’s toenails…” – calling it “mind-blowing.”

“Suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, songs don’t have to be serious and sappy and love songs,’” she says. “They can be saying words that you would never expect.” 

Cut to “Polly,” her infectious twang-and-skitter jam and most-streamed track on Spotify (1.6 million plays), with its oddball hook: “Fratica-patica-automatica/ I won’t slow down, I don’t slow down.”

“That s–t had me sheeshin’ on the floor!” gushes Jared Solomon (a.k.a. Solomonophonic), another well-traveled producer (HAIM, Remi Wolf, Jawny), who worked on “Polly” and sings her praises.  “Dora isn’t a bulls–t act you find on Spotify every other day,” he promises. “This is a real musician, songwriter, and storyteller that is not here for games.”

While she notes her affinity for “unexpected melodies,” Jar’s most avant-garde moments are found in her accompanying visuals, like the “Polly” music video : a low-fi, Sesame Street- nodding fever dream, where Jar plays both an oversized Elmo and a trash-covered Oscar the Grouch, whose garbage can eventually takes flight — why wouldn’t it? 

For “Lagoon,” a stand-out track on Comfortably in Pain that sounds like Mitski crooning over Elton John piano pumps, Jar adopts the perspective of a lonely mermaid, sexualizing the tune with lines like: “I wanna be medically examined by you.” She cites Disney’s The Little Mermaid as inspiration, noting “my sister and I would watch it for a month straight.”

The new EP bounds in all sorts of directions, no two tracks sounding alike: The punchier “Tiger Face” is reminiscent of Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel,” while “Scab Song” has all the backward-glancing jangle of Lorde’s Solar Power (with more memorable melodies). 

Speaking on the wistful irony of Comfortably in Pain ’s moniker, Jar says: “I have all these comforts in my life. And a lot of us do, we have homes, hopefully if we’re lucky, and beds and friends and communities, but a lot of times we can feel lonely and disconnected and that’s just part of the human experience. So while we may have everyday comforts, we can be in a lot of agony anyway.” 

Next up for the rising artist is another headlining show in London on March 17, before she returns to the U.S. in early April, to open more shows for Eilish. More music is coming, too: “I’m just sitting on a lot of songs that I’m sort of connecting the dots as I go. But for now we’re just going to let these last couple projects ride.” 

And as she builds her fan base, Jar urges listeners to follow her lead, exploring the strangest corners of their own psyches. 

“I just hope people feel curious to their own emotions and playful,” she says. “Even with the darkness, I hope they feel inspired and liberated.”

Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox

A daily briefing on what matters in the music industry

Send us a tip using our anonymous form.

A daily briefing on what matters in the music industry

Send us a tip using our anonymous form.

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2022 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.