The Mess Is In You

No Joy “Hellhole”

I feel like a lot of the artists who’ve made shoegaze music in the past decade and a half have set a very low bar for themselves. It’s a style where you can get by on very little, and artists who legitimately pushed the genre forward, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow in the mid-00s, were mostly shrugged off in favor of far less interesting and imaginative bands. No Joy have evolved into both the best shoegaze act of their era, and also something a bit beyond those parameters. (Of course, they also get underrated and unrecognized by the culture industry.) Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd have staked out an interesting musical space for themselves – increasingly bold vocal harmonies crashing into shifting planes of abrasive rhythm guitar and ambient noise. A song like “Hellhole” manages to sound fragile and brutal at the same time, and the way they contrast these elements suggests that those extremes aren’t as opposite as they might seem.

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