Second-guessing the sound of a No Joy album before it comes out isn’t always easy. For one, the band-turned-solo project’s evolution borders on arcane. Exercising their rough magic, No Joy have pivoted from scuzzy Montreal shoegazers, to glam rock enthusiasts, to spidery dream-poppers. By 2020’s Motherhood, they weren’t even a band. If there seems a logical next step for No Joy’s gyroscopic sound, just know it probably isn’t the one that frontwoman and sole permanent member Jasamine White-Gluz is going to take.
On their fifth album, No Joy reach into the shoegaze landfill and stumble across fierce, cybernetic treasure. With IDM/maximalist/face-melting augur Fire-Toolz (aka Angel Marcloid) in tow, the two strike a medium between futuristic music and the shoegaze of the past. For an album with enough electronics to kill a horse, the coalition results in a sound that’s surprisingly natural – bristling, reactive and uncannily emotive. Bugland sputters into place on ‘Garbage Dream House’ with some Aphex-adjacent mania, before the emergence of a frostbitten synth and a tectonic drumbeat. Owing to the time White-Gluz spent in rural Quebec for the album’s writing and recording process, the track almost gives the image of a robotised Rite of Spring: synth pads waking from sublunary slumbers, lichen-cloaked vocals collecting firewood, menacing guitar lines bubbling under a lake.
Fire Toolz’ production operates with a precision so granular it borders on machine sentience. At times, it feels as if Marcloid has somehow found a way to give her DAW a nervous system. This, combined with White-Gluz’ organic melodic impulses, makes for a pop album that is both strikingly deft and consciously playful. On tracks like ‘Save the Lobsters’ and ‘I hate that I forget what you look like’, the totemic, artful pop of Kate Bush, Angel Olsen and Björk glints through the forest as a modular synth-drawn dawn chorus sounds against forceful string pads.
‘Jelly Meadow Bright’, the album’s closer, sees the meeting of both of these impulses. Hammered dulcimers, steeped in delay, are slowly stripped back by Fire-Toolz, as if she’d been trying to hack into the album for its entire runtime and only just succeeded in doing so. All the while, White-Gluz begins to sound like Korn frontman Jonathan Davis. Marcloid tinkers with her synths again, stumbling across natural grooves, patterns and arpeggios that ebb and flow like dark forest waterways. Somewhere, someone’s playing a saxophone, and there’s something that sounds like a fruit machine at the fringes of the mix. Bugland is music best enjoyed with a healthy whack of Adderall.
Unlike their shoegaze forebears, White-Gluz and Marcloid aren’t retreating from dreary English market towns or labyrinthine American suburbs and freeways. Neither are they, like many of their shoegaze contemporaries, looking to gild the nostalgic lily. Instead, the duo revel in the inventive, infinite beauty of a world increasingly suspended between digital and corporeal spaces: AI and other technology, but also the radical and transportive relationship between electronic and natural sounds. Even a century from now, I imagine there’ll probably be some iteration of No Joy, quietly modding their way into whatever blissed-out music the future may hold.
