Hooked on Jian Ross

From viral TikTok covers to her debut EP, the Vancouver artist explains why Runt is exactly who she was, and still is.

By Cam Delisle

Photos by Lia Hansen

Published on March 9, 2026

When I pitch Jian Ross the idea for our RANGE editorial – a high-fashion spin on the ruggedly masculine pastime of fishing – she gives me a quick heads-up: she’s a vegetarian. “As long as I don’t have to hold any raw fish, I’m down,” she says.

Ross is all for a concept, and she brings the same blend of ferocity and unexpected grace that animates her music to Buntzen Lake at 8:00am on a Sunday. Her debut EP Runt garnered praise for her innate ability to be simultaneously inward-looking and explosive, turning her own emotional truths into guitar melodies that shimmer like sunlit water and lyrics that hit like splashes in a still lake. Jian is down for whatever, yes – but she’s also here to elevate whatever.

Jian talks about Runt with a mix of honesty and deadpan humour. “I’ve always been someone who feels everything a little too deeply,” she says. High school was intense – being an “undercover-gay stoner teacher’s pet” meant that every feeling was amplified. “A lot of emotions start to fester. I think Runt is the result of that. It’s like fermented feelings. It’s a probiotic, it’s good for you!” The EP captures that tension between embarrassment and clarity, between the self-loathing of adolescence and the boldness of confronting it. Listening to her describe it, it’s obvious these tracks were never meant to be small or muffled; they exist exactly as she intended.

Songwriting, Jian says, is less a choice than a necessity. “I can’t help but do it,” she admits. Turning bedlam into music is how she navigates the world: something painful or traumatic becomes something separate, something she can reflect on, and, most importantly, something she can share. Her earliest offerings were direct and confessional, but lately, she’s exploring subtlety. “I want to create a dialogue for collective vulnerability rather than just telling people about my personal experiences,” she explains. Even when someone else reads a song differently than she initially intended, that becomes part of its life.

Jian’s relationship with her audience has always been tricky. Most of her following came from the Covid-era TikTok surge, which was exciting and paralyzing at the same time. “I wish I could say it makes me more confident, but truthfully it makes me really scared,” she admits. Lately, she’s turned her attention to the listeners who stay, finding that a smaller audience makes it easier to trust her own instincts.

Collaboration, too, reframed the stakes. Before her first live show in 2024, she worked alone in her room. “My heart has always wanted to be more rock-forward, but I didn’t have the capacity to do it by myself,” she says. Her bandmates – fellow musicians cherry pick and Eden – have been there since the outset, giving her early, insular demos the heft and voltage they once lacked but now wear easily. “It’s such a gift to share raw and intimate music with friends and build on it collectively.”

Before Runt, Jian spent years posting covers online, trying on different sounds as she edged toward something that felt like her own. “Like most teenagers, I was trying to figure myself and my style out for so long,” she says. Early on, she gravitated toward what drew clicks. It offered a kind of cover, but it never quite fit.

Releasing her own music felt riskier. She didn’t want to put something out unless it felt fully inhabited, and finding her bandmates gave form to that aspiration. “Once we started working on the songs together and I met people in the scene who were willing to record and produce for us, everything just clicked.”

Even now, Jian looks at Runt as a map of where she’s been – and a reminder of how she got here. The EP captures a teenager learning how to feel, how to write, and how to exist. There’s embarrassment in the memory, but there’s also bravery: calling out toxic relationships, leaning into her hyper-emotional side, and finding the courage to share it all.

In a way, listening to Runt is like casting a line into a lake that she knows she’s still learning to navigate – sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it splashes violently, but even when the water churns, her hand stays steady on the reel. “I was a runt when I wrote it, and that’s how it should be.”