Just Keep Calling Me Baby

No Joy “Four”

In retrospect Jasamine White-Gluz’s discography as No Joy is like this reverse “anxiety of influence” arc in which she resists emulating the things she grew up loving to the point that it was limiting her creativity, and she fully becomes herself when she gives herself permission to embrace the largely uncool late 90s/early 00s music that shaped her taste. Motherhood, her new record as No Joy, boldly integrates elements of nü-metal, the commercial end of trip-hop, and quasi-futuristic pre-millennial production trends you’d recognize from albums like No Doubt’s Return of Saturn, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and Madonna’s Ray of Light into her established romantic shoegaze aesthetic. She sounds truly free on this record, like someone who is unafraid to let you see who they are. This starts in formal terms but carries through to the emotional content of it – even when lyrics are hazy and the sound gets abstract, there’s an open-hearted vulnerability on display that’s poignant and relatable.

“Four” strings together all the stylistic extremes of Motherhood into one remarkably coherent piece of music. It’s basically a suite – an atmospheric shoegaze section flowing into a groovy trip-hop section flowing into a thrashing nü-metal finale – and a lot of the reason it works so well is that at least from White-Gluz’s perspective this is a fully intuitive progression. The trip-hop section is the main draw here. It’s very confident in its funk despite this previously never being an element of the No Joy sound, and I love the way the juxtaposition of White-Gluz’s voice singing “just keep calling me baby,” a pitched-down masculine voice, and a baby giggle that’s clearly in homage to the famous baby sample in Aaliyah “Are You That Somebody” suggest a lot of ideas about female sexuality and motherhood without explicating anything. It’s more of a Rorschach blot, or the song deliberately posing a leading question.

Buy it from Bandcamp.