For those who identified with emo during its artistic (if not commercial) peak in the '90s, the most demoralizing development over the past decade is the term becoming synonymous with a performative, juvenile sadness that commodifies depression, often treats women as props, and is expressed in a voice that sounds like the worst version of your 8th grade inner monologue. And so it's understandable to be skeptical of an all-male band named Sorority Noise, often tagged as emo, making a song called “Art School Wannabe”. In it, Cameron Boucher sings in a nasal tone, pinpointing that post-pubescent sour spot where snark becomes an all-purpose defense mechanism against emotional disturbance. It bops along to a chipper shuffle that brings to mind, depending on your age and generosity, the Front Bottoms, mid-period Weezer, or Ben Folds Five. But it also contains the lyric upon which the entirety of Joy, Departed hinges—“Maybe I’m just scared to admit that I might not be as dark as I think/ Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be.”
On their 2014 debut Forgettable, Sorority Noise's pop-punk was so steeped in self-pity that the title felt like more of an epitaph than a punchline (“Nobody likes me/ That’s what I tell myself...I spent a lot of last year learning I don’t like me too”). As indicated by "Art School Wannabe", Joy, Departed is motivated, above all, by a drive to get over your own bullshit, and this has become an emergent and necessary theme for other bands in its realm. A similar mindset serves as the basis for the near entirety of Annabel’s recently released Having it All and was touched upon on by Modern Baseball's “Two Good Things” and You Blew It!’s “Better to Best”, both of whom contribute guest vocals on Joy, Departed. The Connecticut band also strains with ambition, and the most exciting thing about Sorority Noise and their ilk is that they’re courting a larger audience, reaching for something that seems to be out of their grasp. Both of these aspects can occasionally make Joy, Departed an uncomfortable listen, but they’re also the reason why it’s such a consistently engaging record.
Over the last year, Sorority Noise have learned to channel their energy towards their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, well-produced and also more vertiginous in all aspects. Boucher’s bedheaded vocals are contrasted against gorgeous, sighing strings on “Blissth” and “Fluorescent Black” and both build to soaring peaks that cruelly cut out, as if Sorority Noise temporarily forgot they were still an upstart emo band and were snapped back into reality out of their arena-rock dreams. “Your Soft Blood” has the gripping bombast of Bright Eyes or Cursive or Say Anything from 2002-2004, projects where an untrained, verbose speaker is pulled between caustic punk and ornate chamber pop, fighting against the perception that they haven’t earned such grandiosity.
They haven't completely overlooked what worked on Forgettable. The clean twee-punk center at the outset of “Corrigan” bravely holds as blaring fuzz guitars encroach in the chorus. During the verses of “Nolsey”, Boucher slumps around aimlessly like a teenage dirtbag, before a surprising barbershop harmony leads into a glorious explosion of symphonic guitar.
The guitars tend to speak more directly than Boucher himself. Whereas Modern Baseball will just flat out admit to staying at home on Friday night, “wishing you were still my girlfriend,”Boucher strives to find more convoluted, pungent ways to make the same point—he wants to be “the heroin that keeps you warm enough,” “the smoke too clear to see,” “in bloom for you.” Instead, he’s “the autumn wind that blows your hair and the hand that’s out of reach,” “a boathouse, alone on a lake,” and “the reason your leaves are withering.” It’s hard not to wince for a split second, but once the initial sting wears off, the underlying emotions are relatable. Much of Joy, Departed occupies an awkward space of figuring whether “love” means being of service or being validated, of wondering whether poetry enhances honesty or obscures it.
And yet it’s the fairly standard palm-mute/pedal-stomp dynamics of “Using” where Sorority Noise’s mania is most convincingly expressed. At the outset, Boucher gives into any number of things: pills, drugs, cigarettes, the like. It’s an inventory of self-negation until a group yell of, “I stopped wishing I was dead!"—the excitement of living again (or for once) expressed with redlining distortion, a surge of joy that’s so overwhelming and unfamiliar it still feels like rage. That lyric pops up a second time, during an ankle-breaking pivot to a new key.
Boucher claims it’s the first song that he wrote while trying to take ownership of the his battles with addiction and mental illness and turning it into something positive. After a friend recently committed suicide, he told Alternative Press, “Depression is not a trend...Stop glorifying sorrow and start lending a helping hand to those that need it the most.” You can tell it wasn’t the first song he wrote for Joy, Departed and that his revelation didn’t come easily: after “Using”, Joy, Departed concludes on its two most despairing tracks. It results in a perhaps unintentional but honest point about the fleeting nature of all emotions and that when the instinct for self-preservation kicks in, it should be grasped upon like a matter of life and death, because it may be exactly that.
