This may be the latest golden age of shoegaze, but make no mistake about it — there’s also an unnecessary amount of shoegaze and shoegaze-adjacent cliché super-saturating the new listen landscape these days, so you have to excuse these pages if it’s become more discerning toward it all. The downside? This means that sometimes, even the best of it gets lost in the mix. It’s a shame, but let’s not forget that album cycles and press coverage with deadlines attached to them are made-up things invented by industry gatekeepers and big streaming algorithms which sites worried about incoming revenue need to worry about. We as the truly free and independent can create our own timeline, right?

To defy that, who better than No Joy, the moniker of songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz. The Montreal-based artist has been a progressor of the sound’s outer limits well before it became in vogue to do so. It’s been an actual joy to hear her latest effort, Bugland — her fifth full-length and a production collaboration with the experimental producer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid of Fire-Toolz — being so well received and celebrated as a long-overdue coronation for her contributions towards its future which many of her peers haven’t even broached a proximity to.

Tracks like “Bits” are reason why. The listen is a thing of songwriting created from distinct, lived-in ideas which only the person whose vision they sprout from could put them together in sonic, sensory form. Just take a read of White-Gluz’s own words on it — they’re something no other creative brain on this Earth but her could have conceived:

This song was inspired by excerpts from a letter I wrote to the music media as a child in 1994 defending Courtney Love, urging them to leave her alone, is the spoken word heard towards the end of the song. The original demo was built around me blowing out my guitar distortion using the Earthquaker Devices Bit Commander guitar pedal. Thematically I wanted to capture the feeling of running through tall grass, playing hide and seek behind big trees.

But then you also got something like “Jelly Meadow Bright”, which literally has allusions to those tall grassy knolls the previous listen mentions. It’s one of the tracks on the album to feature Fire-Toolz more so prominently on vocals, and together, they layer dimension upon dimension into No Joy’s soundboard which takes the listener through several left turns, from peaceful new age ambient reprieves to almost-metal breakdowns that gristle against cosmic brass, all while the psychedelic tapestry spooled from silken synthetic strings weaves all of these sounds together in a way that sounds eerily natural.

Paired with its earth-alternating music video directed by Jeremy Dabrowski, No Joy’s music reaches its full potential as being an A/V delight that can’t just be consolidated into some branded, broad-genred playlist alongside two dozen other slightly tangent artists. It demands its own attention while offering you the space to let your mind explore beyondness with it.

Similarly, the album’s title track and the Maxwell Zikakis-helmed lyric video for “My Crud Princess” want to invite you into an altered zone. Alongside “Bather in the Bloodcells”, they’re three of the more cohesively-shaped highlights brim full of dense texture and color which pull you into No Joy and Fire-Toolz’ melted nature collage world. Bluffs of dream-pop, ultraviolet digital corrosion that leaves a playful synthetic stickiness, and shrapnel from nu-metal guitars organically converge onto the same plane. They succeed at piquing the senses with their brilliance, brightness, and contrast turned up to the max and pop weirding out hard, as if your ears touched one of those hallucinogenic frogs that sends you onto an absolutely wild mind trip.

There’s so much more to be discovered than what’s written here, with the listen revealing more textures and musical Easter eggs upon surrendering your full immersion and commitment to repeated listens. Perhaps that’s why a shoegaze-indebted album like this is neither here nor there on the timeline just as well. We live in a world where attention spans are split into a hundred different directions and art is reduced to mere “content” that becomes “old nes” within hours of being released. This might explain why the less interesting examples of modern shoegaze have become so commonplace since familiarity and a lesser demand for your focus breeds flatness in a sound. No Joy’s Bugland is far from a flat Earth, however, and only those who embrace its truly singular nature can escape falling into the pitfalls of one.

Highlights: “Bugland”, “My Crud Princess”, “Jelly Meadow Bright”

No Joy’s Bugland is available now on Hand Drawn Dracula / Sonic Cathedral.

Buy | Stream