Distance doesn’t always heart grow fonder, but you can count on it to summon the muse. Just ask No Joy: before they signed with Mexican Summer or shared stages with Best Coast and Deafheaven, Jasamine White-Gluz, and Laura Lloyd were just two friends on opposite sides of the country (Los Angeles and Montreal, respectively), swapping musical ideas over email. The long-distance musical partnership became official in 2009, when White-Gluz reunited with Lloyd in L.A. Despite closing the geographical distance between them, their sound remained unsettled and unpredictable–honeyed hooks bookended by whooshing static, gauzy fretwork that quickly deteriorates into a Sonic Youth-like roar, even the occasional foray into demented dream-pop.
From a sonic standpoint, White-Gluz and Lloyd have made their desire to escape genre tags—“shoegaze revival,” “noise-pop,” or “indie rock”—from the jump. Regardless of a band’s intentions, most listeners (and critics) are wont to regard full-length albums as aesthetic lines drawn in in the sand. Perhaps that’s why No Joy’s skipping the album cycle brouhaha all together for their latest project: Drool Sucker, the first entry in a trilogy of stylistically distinct EPs ostensibly intended (at least partially) as a refutation of these imposed boundaries.
Like the LP that precedes it, Drool Sucker sees White-Gluz and Lloyd raking their silvery melodies over jagged coals of distortion with purpose and restraint, melting down the 4/4 tempos into a feedback-driven delirium. But where More Faithful swaddles listeners in the din, Drool Sucker represents an effort to suffocate them; on the punishing opener “A Thorn in Garland’s Side,” a stampeding drum fill gives way to caterwauling punk verses which threaten to buckle under the guitars’ leaden heft. “XO (Adam’s Getting Married)” develops their tightly-packed harmonies as a dynamic focal point soon overtaken by the lumbering, doom-y coda.
Viewed in terms of My Bloody Valentine, whose balancing act between ethereal and acrid informs most of No Joy’s output up to this point, the EP stands as the Isn’t Anything to the previous album’s Loveless*:* a woozy, raucous effort that tempers their pop with caustic flourishes. Appropriately for their self-defining (or rather, self-redefining) aims, the duo end with a “Theme Song”—and while its swooning grunge doesn’t sound drastically different from what listeners have come to expect, the track belies No Joy’s confidence, as well as their broader determination to transcend genre pigeon-holing as their heroes did. They’re off to a good start.
