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"It's…normal sorrow" is a description I once gave to a new therapist, after approaching the end of an unsuccessful hour trying to describe where I was at. The clock was running. Good band name. ‘Joy’ is both sarcasm and a statement of intent.


1) The Best Day Ever

A table setter that borrows heavily from The Mountain Goats output and early Smashing Pumpkins. Written after a day out that cleaved a month of despair in half. Is it something to hold onto? A pleasant anomaly? A weird joke?

"Tomorrow is a balancer / because yesterday was grim / But this day is the best day I’ve ever seen"


2) The Queen Of Salt

A potentially horrific genre combination of Metal and Motown which somehow just about works. It's a scrappy and fuzzed up version of both. It attempts to weld the galloping rhythm of old British Heavy Metal to the kind of melodies and instrumentation found in Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Streets’. It’s about things that seem like they belong together, but really cannot.

"You step left and I'll step right / either it's closer or it's bye-bye"


3) Brother

Moulded in the style of Spencer Krug’s solo piano work at the beginning, and glitch musicians like Cornelius by the end, the song was written as a semi-parodic look at toxic anger. Deliberately sparse piano, as I only had one non-swollen hand at the time.

"Lost in a prism of Steptoe AI / no-one knows where I've been"


4) Health & Safety

As the medication troubles progressed, estrangement from family and friends became inevitable. With the lyrics, there was an interestingly perverse urge to juxtapose decadent, glutinous imagery with pointers of decay or punishment. You can see it in the line below, and the middle-8. Isolation followed quickly afterwards.

"Shallots and ebony / whitened dates and penury"


5) Mans Best Friend

Harkening back to the orchestral pop of Andrew Bird and Owen Pallett, this song considers what it takes to remain functional while the black dog is rifling through your pockets.

"When you're surrounded only by reasonable people / and all you want is to explode"


6) Austerity

This was written because I was tired of easily marketable nostalgia, and how it seems to distract us from rising up to fix real issues, like more than a decade's worth of austerity as UK policy leading to a situation where the 6th largest economy in the world has nurses using food banks. My stance on nostalgic culture has softened a little, because of how godawful the world often is. A little escapism is not really a crime.

"If you feel, just feel it / That ol’ Blitz spirit/Let’s all fall together for King and gantry"


7) Giving Up (On Not Giving Away)

Another entry in the Metal and R&B canon. Ray Charles would not be amused by the jacking of his 1-2-1-2 Stride rhythm.

Feeling so consistently low for so long that you start to understand why people are attracted to the certainty, and (seeming) safety cults can offer is a strange feeling, especially when you weren't raised with any religion at all. Still, as Aubrey Plaza once memorably said, "I could get sucked into a good cult". 

"I'm looking for a bargain basement church/I don't have much to sell, just my body, soul and worth"


8) joy / joi

Joy/joi is a song of persistence in a landscape of otherwise complete devastation. The panned drums are deliberately panned to the left, partially in a tribute to 60s stereo field techniques, but also to irritate people who seem to enjoy telling me that all my production choices are incorrect. There is also noticeable hiss I've chosen to leave in.

"If I’m a zombie until I’m finished / at least I was around to let you in...ish"


9) Still

Love as a prison. Stealing the guitar thrust of Billy Bragg and refracting it through ‘Fell on Black Days’.

"Replace the hood / transport me"


10) Zoetrope

Repeating mistakes to traditional English folk backing. Written on the way to an open mic, because I needed something to play.

"Lighting a smoke / in a shower of flaming ends / a viper's confusion / never seeing the trend"
 

11) Killed

The longest track on the album, which takes its cues from artists like DJ Shadow, Forest Swords, and Phantogram, before it collapses into a clatter of superfast drums reminiscent of electronic artists like Amon Tobin and Arca. The lyric is a tautology.

"When I killed you / I did not see / I did not know you'd be a witness to the deed"


12) You Can Drive

The later-in-life response to Arcade Fire's 'In the Backseat'. In that, Regine Chassagne sang about learning to drive "her whole life". This is when you want someone to take your life back off your hands.

"Screaming in the fields / it carries / but does not penetrate / I do, but do not feel"


13) The Problem Is Nothing

I don’t have much new to say where heavy music is concerned, so this is the only heavy track on my album. The intersection is supposed to be where old school trip-hop meets downtuned guitars, so it’s a little like Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’ newer, dub-lead stuff like King Krule, Corrosion of Conformity’s ‘Wiseblood’, and a tiny bit of Neptunes influence mixed into the more electronic passages. It owes more to dub than modern metal production.

After a while, you run out of excuses to get back to living.

"In the middle of the carnival / I melt down / And it's getting old  / and the problem is nothing"