No Joy - Motherhood (2020)

No Joy - Motherhood

When No Joy’s debut Ghost Blonde came out in 2010, the band was instantly championed as a welcome addition to the nu-gaze movement. On that album, No Joy was able to manage the tricky balancing act of treating their wailing guitars to the point that they came out hushed and ethereal. While charming, the band never chose to rest on their laurels, slowly altering their delivery with each release; pushing aside the lo-fi, DIY aesthetic of their earlier records and overtime embracing a crisp, expensive DIY precision.

No Joy has changed a lot over the last decade with Montreal native Jasamine White-Gluz remaining the one constant. Now, five years after their last outing, the group is set to release Motherhood; a dense and extremely diverse take on what was their established sound. While the band’s catalog has remained soothing and uniformly indebted to the shoegaze of the ’90s, Motherhood presents an almost complete rejection of everything that came before.

Whether or not the listener likes, let alone has heard of No Joy is completely irrelevant at this point, the left turn White-Gluz makes here brings all parties into uncharted waters. While preparing Motherhood over the last few years, she has pushed the sounds of the group in her recording and writing, crafting new songs as diverse as growling metal, acid –house and dream pop. But somehow every frayed hair pulls together at the end, with each song distinctly dissimilar from each other but honing the same production and personality that marks the album as a whole.

Like the heart of any shoegaze album, Motherhood is defined by its sonic palette, whether it be “Dream Rats” or “Primal Curse” White-Gluz has constantly surrounded her angelic vocals with as much guitar distortion or building cacophony as she can. Where previous No Joy albums built their beautiful ambiance out of emphasized noise, Motherhood uses noise to repel its underlying beauty. One of the most eclectic releases of the year, it’s also far and away the best No Joy album to date.

~8.5

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