ira glass know that novelty is a dead end. “The half-life of a musical trend is getting shorter and shorter,” said drummer Landon Kerouac in a recent interview. “There aren’t real scenes, just friend groups,” added Lise Ivanova, ira glass’ frontwoman. The Chicago post-hardcore band holds fast to these truths, uninterested in snobbishness or modish songwriting; they’re technically a four-piece, but they have a rotating cast of collaborators that they bring on stage and in the studio to assist in their expansive noise rock. joy is no knocking nation, their blistering second EP, clarifies that their goal isn’t subversion or invention, but collective study as they blaze through post-hardcore’s past half century in a dense 19 minutes.
Jill Roth’s saxophone is crucial to ira glass’ sound. Their playing veers between droning textures and the roughly jazzy, as on “fritz all over you,” when a loping melody wafts like smoke amid gentle post-Slint guitar chords. Roth dishes out skronkier wails on “fd&c red 40,” the group’s foremost dance-punk track. It begins with the sort of fractured funk groove that courses through no-wave classics, then channels ’90s screamo before landing on an extended free-improv jam with spoken word. The members connect various pockets of DIY punk—from James Chance and Brainbombs to Ebullition Records and sasscore—with ease and flair.
It’s this flexibility that makes ira glass so thrilling. “new guy (big softie)” has howled screams and free-jazz saxophone, but ends with guitar harmonics ringing out in relative quietude. A lot of the cohesion comes down to Ivanova’s delivery, which nimbly switches between angsty, plainspoken recitations and the kind of shrill yelling found in classic skramz. She sounds tortured in at least three different ways across “that’s it/that? that’s all you can say?,” a track swirling with uneasy tension. These constant transitions mean that the final wordless passage—more than a minute of unspooling noise, complete with puttering drum beat—sounds like the craggy remains of the band’s volcanic chaos.
Even the most straightforward songs on joy is no knocking nation feel like they’re evolving. “it’s a whole ‘who shot john’ story” is brooding post-rock, striving for the epic drama of post-reunion Swans; the screams and sax carry the song into headbanging catharsis. Despite the record’s referential nature, its atmosphere is more austere than ’90s emocore, more rigid than the Chicago art rock they’re in the lineage of, but also scrappier than modern bands like Prostitute and Sprain. They occupy a fertile middle ground that makes their music sound loose and volatile, but also calculated and severe. A track like “fritz all over you” briskly shifts from hardcore riffage to hushed lullaby; the transition is so slick that ira glass’ songcraft, even this early in their career, is easy to overlook.
