NO JOY
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No Joy's relentless sonic permutations are evidence of frontperson and principal songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz's insatiable desire to grow. The Montréal-based project began a decade ago as e-mail-
traded riffs; subsequent albums showcased a penchant for delay-saturated jangle, industrial distortion, and sludgey drones over disco beats.
The doomily dreamy duo No Joy began in November 2009 and soon established themselves at the forefront of the shoegaze revival. They formed when guitarist/vocalist Jasamine White-Gluz was living in Los Angeles and guitarist/vocalist Laura Lloyd was living in Montreal. The pair wrote songs as long-distance collaborators until White-Gluzmoved to Montreal and they could play shows together.The band's moody, interlocking guitars and ethereal vocals allowed them to fit on bills with bands as diverse as Wavves, Harvey Milk, and Besnard Lakes. Meanwhile, Best Coast's label Mexican Summer signed No Joy and issued their self-titled 7", which was produced by Miracle Fortress' Graham Van Pelt in 2010. The band expanded to a four-piece and enlisted the Raveonettes' Sune Rose Wagner to mix their full-length album, Ghost Blonde (2010). In 2012, a stopgap EP entitled Negaverse was released while the band worked again with Wagner on the follow-up to their debut. Ultimately, however, the band was unsatisfied with the results and shelved the sessions, opting instead to work with producer Jorge Elbrecht on what would become their sophomore release, Wait to Pleasure (2013).
For third album More Faithful (2015), the band members split their recording time between studios in Brooklyn and Costa Rica. Working again with Elbrecht behind the desk, No Joy dove headlong into their most intricate and reaching ideas thus far, incorporating expanded instrumentation and advanced studio trickery into their established shoegaze sound. They released two EPs (Drool Sucker and Creep) in 2016, then spent large chunks of 2017 touring. The next No Joy release was a collaboration with Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3and Spectrum fame. White-Gluz and Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) began a correspondence in 2015 when the No Joy singer was looking to do something different musically. The two traded songs back and forth, eventually choosing four that White-Gluz had written with a full band treatment in mind. Kember reshaped them into something more electronic and guitar-free, and the No Joy/Sonic Boom EP was issued in March of 2018 by Joyful Noise.
2020 saw the release of Motherhood, a fearlessly creative, beat-heavy new record that spiked the band's dream pop with trip-hop, nu-metal, and other ’90s signifiers. In 2021 the Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven revisited four songs from Motherhood, rescoring them for an ensemble based on voice, cello, harp, and horn. The EP crafted a unique meditation on childhood, memory and loss of innocence, drawing influences from classical music and other experiments in rock-orchestra crossover. Most recently, 2023 rewarded fans with a re-issue of acclaimed Wait To Pleasure.
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