Tag: No Joy Bugland

Top 25 albums of 2025: #’s 5 – 1

This is always a tough decision, although my number one album of each year tends to arrive early and not leave. This trend continued in 2025.

#5: Sextile – yes, please.

Thrilling electro, sexy bass, erotic lyrics, club bangers, provocative cover, you name it, this album has all of it. It shot up into my top ten of the year as soon as I heard it and was one of the hottest records of 2025.

#4: Lonnie Holley – Tonky

Beautiful, soulful, and powerful, Tonky has soul legend Lonnie Holley encouraging us to all come together in turbulent times, “protest with love,” and embrace our neighbors. This is an album that rings true in any year, but we needed it in 2025.

#3: No Joy – Bugland

I hadn’t heard anything from No Joy in a while, so it was great to hear from them again and with such a good record. It mixes shoegaze with psych and pays tribute to the healing properties of nature and presence. I didn’t realize how much I missed No Joy until hearing this.

#2: DITZ – Never Exhale

These fiery post-punk Brits seemed to come out of nowhere (to this Yank, at least) and unleashed one of the loudest, wildest records of the year. The album is about anxiety and panic, but it never goes completely off the rails. It keeps you on the edge of your seat or helps you burn off aggression, depending on which track you blast.

#1: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Death Hilarious

As soon as I saw that album cover, I knew Death Hilarious was going to be a monster of a record. My gut was right. This is another heavy stunner from Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs in a line of material that has yet to miss. The topics of loss (friends, creative energy, relationships) and satire are biting and empowering. You’ll growl, stomp, and roar along with this record. You’ll laugh at the absurdity of our times with it, and then dive into the mosh pit with glee.

There’s already a lot of good stuff lined up for 2026. Let me know what you’re looking forward to the most!

Keep your mind open.

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Review: No Joy – Bugland

Jasamine White-Gluz got out of the city to make Bugland, the newest No Joy album, experimenting and collaborating with Fire-Toolz (AKA Angel Marcloid) for an record that is difficult to categorize, but why should we even bother to try? Why not just sit back and enjoy it?

Starting with electronic bloops, bleeps, and beats, “Garbage Dream House” gets things off to a weird, wonderful start – mixing buzzing guitar chords with synths and processed drums while White-Gluz’s voice bounces off the back wall at some points and nuzzles your ear the next. The title track crunches and munches like an early Garbage track and White-Gluz’s reverb-soaked vocals practically lift you off the floor.

“Bits” has more 90s electro-rock vibes to it, practically begging you to blast it on your headphones as you hit the mid-mark of your treadmill workout. “Save the Lobsters” is based on a true story of White-Gluz smashing open lobster traps washed up on beaches so she could get the creatures back into the ocean. Her vocals are often drenched in distortion or echo effects, seemingly putting you under the water with the freed animals.

“My Crud Princess” not only has a great title, but also a sparkling energy bursting through the slightly sludgy (cruddy?) drum beats. “Bather in the Bloodcells” reminds me of My Bloody Valentine if they turned down the volume a bit and covered Elastica.

“I Hate That I Forget What You Look Like” is a stunner about grief that, for some us, is all too relatable. The snappy drums and synths grow like a mind almost spiraling into panic, but catching itself just before toppling into madness. The psychedelic closer, “Jelly Meadow Bright” is almost eight minutes of trippy bliss, nearly fading out halfway through it and then returning with a wild saxophone-led acid-jazz / industrial freak-out.

Again, I’m not sure how to describe Bugland…apart from it being one of the best releases of 2025 so far.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media!]

No Joy announces new album out August 08, 2025 – “Bugland.”

No Joy is the project of Jasamine White-Gluz. First coming to wide attention as a three piece band around the release of their 2011 debut LP Ghost Blonde, the project has morphed into Jasamine’s solo project, and she has consistently evolved in unexpected ways over 4 LPs and a handful of EPs. Her most recent LP, 2020’s Motherhood, which featured Tara McLeod of the prominent early ‘oughts nu metal band Kittie, was perhaps the most critically-acclaimed of No Joy’s career, receiving an 8.0 from Pitchfork who described it as “a shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.“

Today, No Joy is back with another re-invention and another unexpected collaborator, as she announces her follow up to her 2020 LP. Produced with the much buzzed about Chicago experimental artist Fire-Toolz, No Joy’s latest album is entitled Bugland and will be released on Hand Drawn Dracula and Sonic Cathedral on August 8th. To mark the announce No Joy is sharing the album’s titled track “Bugland.” 

In some ways, Bugland feels more like a collaborative album than a producer/artist relationship, with both Jasamine and Fire-Toolz pushing each other to find new horizons within the other’s sonic world. It takes the adventurous genre mashing of No Joy’s previous album as a starting point, but pushes so far beyond any genre’s accepted confines, and in such imaginative ways, that it feels like it creates something entirely new.

“The collaboration really felt limitless,” says Fire-Toolz (aka Angel Marcloid). “I didn’t have to adhere to a certain vision in a way that made me feel like I couldn’t be Fire-Toolz. I could easily relate to this album because Jasamine and I liked a lot of the same music, and I was able to be creative in ways that were freeing as if I was making my own album.“

The album’s title track was also the genesis of their collaboration, and neatly encapsulates the way their styles have melded. Some of the heavy elements of Motherhood remain, but are tempered by a tapestry of glitchy electronics that make up the track’s constantly shifting arrangement.

White-Gluz says of the track:

This was the first song Fire-Toolz & No Joy produced together, initially without any plan to ever release it. Our production styles melded so well together on this track that we decided we should make a whole album. The song came together super organically, from the Korn-esque bass lines to the earworm vocal, it’s the welcome sign of the album letting you know you’ve officially entered our world.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]