Inside Jim-E Stack’s Big Year Producing For Lorde and Bon Iver

During a recent gym visit, Jim-E Stack heard “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” start to play, and it walloped him in the middle of his workout session.

“I was like, ‘Agh.’ It really makes me emotional,” he says of the remix to Charli xcx’s brat standout, which he co-wrote. That reaction was nothing new for him: When Charli and Lorde performed it together at Coachella in April, he nearly cried.

When the remix arrived in June 2024, Stack and Lorde were halfway through creating the latter’s own album, Virgin. “How open and honest and personal [Lorde] is on that verse — that’s something we were channeling the whole time in the album,” he says of her fourth full-length. “So when she got to share some of that, it was like, ‘Holy s–t. We are onto something.’ It was reaffirming.”

Virgin, which Stack co-wrote and co-produced in its entirety alongside Lorde, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 following its June release. The album was heralded as Lorde’s most personal project to date, with the singer examining and untangling gender roles, body image issues and her sexuality. As for Stack, the album bumped him into a new stratosphere as a studio guru — one who had racked up credits with HAIM, Empress Of and Kacy Hill, but never a pop star of Lorde’s acclaim.

Stack, 33, has played the long game throughout his career, since landing his first major credit in 2017 on HAIM’s “Want You Back.” Along with his work on Virgin, his breakthrough this year is top-lined by another personal triumph: co-producing Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable with the band’s frontman, Justin Vernon.

“I remember when Justin and I first worked [together], we were messing around for i, i, his [2019] fourth album, and I was totally bummed to not contribute to that,” Stack recalls. “But I remember a friend telling me, ‘I bet more will come of that than you can even imagine right now.’ And he was totally right.” In a full-circle moment, Stack invited Danielle Haim to join his sessions with Vernon, resulting in her two features on Sable, Fable, “I’ll Be There” and “If Only I Could Wait.”

His other credits this year — with artists including Dominic Fike, Aminé and Dijon — are also representative of the yearslong friendships he formed after moving to Los Angeles in 2016. And now, he finds himself among a crop of fellow creatives, including Dijon and Mk.gee, all of whom are allowing jagged production elements to bleed into their pop music — and cut into the mainstream. “I think there is this new guard right now,” Stack says. “There are times when people, myself included, feel like nothing cool is coming out, and this is not one of those times.”

Born James Stack in San Francisco, he expressed an interest in music from a young age. In high school, he formed a jazz band with his best friends, and at New Orleans’ Loyola University, he surrounded himself with other aspiring musicians. In 2012, he moved to Brooklyn and released his first EP as an artist himself but found the city to be isolating both creatively and personally. After four years, he relocated back to the West Coast, this time landing in Los Angeles — and into a budding community of artists, songwriters and producers.

One of them was Dan Nigro, the future Grammy Award-winning collaborator of Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. “He was the first person I worked with in L.A.,” Stack recalls. “He was always doing his thing and staying true to that, and that led to some of the most impactful music of our time being made. He’s shown me that if you commit to yourself, commit to who you naturally are, you’re going to get to those places.”

That approach helped inspire Stacks’ own breakout second album, 2020’s self-released Ephemera, which he says “is randomly, for so many people I work with, my calling card.” The experimental pop album features Bon Iver, Dijon, Empress Of and others and helped establish Stack as a collaborator who not only has great taste but is unafraid to redefine popular music.

It’s exactly what drew Lorde to Stack when she reached out to him in 2022 while rehearsing for her Solar Power tour. “We met, talked for a while and really got along,” Stack says. “The things we were into and our visions of music, it was clear we could do something special together… A big green flag for me with her was that she was just willing to take risks.” It wasn’t until over a year later that they started working on what would become Lorde’s fourth album.

Virgin “does have this very raw, jagged sound, and the edges aren’t super sanded… and I credit [Lorde] so much for advocating for it,” he says. “I think there were times I felt like, ‘We’re working on this big pop album. Is this insane we’re not cleaning everything up?’ ”

Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable — which debuted atop multiple Billboard charts including Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums, Top Alternative Albums and Americana/Folk Albums — was recorded in a similar fashion. A favorite memory of Stack’s from those sessions is when he “haphazardly” banged out the drums for “Day One” in about five minutes — replacing the more “tasteful” versions he had worked on far longer.

Both Lorde and Bon Iver have received Grammy nods for album of the year in the past, and with Virgin and Sable, Fable as potential contenders this year, Stack may wind up on the shortlist for producer of the year, non-classical. “Of course there’s some fantasy about that… I would be lying if I said I didn’t want any accolade,” he says. Still, he feels he’s at a point of reflection as a transformative year winds down. “I’ve definitely needed a bit of a beat after everything that’s come out to get back in the studio on my own and discover new tools, put myself in some weird zones,” he says.

And while he “definitely” wants to make another solo album, he’d never cancel a session for it — causing any potential headway to often be put on pause. He’d never pass up time with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, for example, with whom Stack has worked on “a fair amount” over the past year. Stack has also been working with rising pop artist Dora Jar, whom he says “has such a distinct voice in her writing and guitar playing.”

And if there’s one element Stack hopes his discography can be identified by, it’s that kind of human touch — especially today, he says. “In this age where we have all the technology we could ever want and with [artificial intelligence], you can make perfect stuff,” he says. “How do we humanize things? Well, you don’t actually craft it to make it human. You just be you and hit ‘record.’ “

This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.