JOY by JOY

Joy sounds – to me – like Fugazi, The Mob, Shopping, The Slits, Chicks On Speed, and NOLA neighbours Special Interest. Joy also strike me - who admittedly has a tin ear for these matters - as a band who could get seriously popular, and far beyond where this column normally treads. It seems daft that I appear to be writing their first review, frankly.

- Noel Gardner, The Quietus


Launching with forceful, haunting vocals amid minimal post-punk drumming, super-fuzzed-out bass, and atonal but brutally intentional guitar flourishes, this tape is exciting from the first moment. The next tracks venture more toward a danceable post-punk sound, folding in synth drums and vocals that duel rhythmically with the driving, syncopated instruments. JOY nods to the legacy of anarcho-punk bands like LOST CHERREES and CRASS’ Penis Envy, while also echoing the post-punk sensibilities of bands like DELTA 5 and ESG. They apply an expansive sense of imagination, breaking genre rules and creating songs that embody duality: enraged yet disciplined, sweetly harmonized yet unnerving, viscerally human yet mediated with electronics. Definitely not to be missed.

- Heather Blotto, Maximum Rock and Roll


Seriously delightful Vice-Squad-via-Revolution-Summer type shit. Sounds like angry ghosts trapped in the Coney Island bumper cars. Who knows what they did to deserve their internment on this mortal plane??? But, whatever, that’s not my problem. Or yours. Because what these New Orleans weirdos have given us, the living, is a wailing, weirdly catchy cacophony of kilterless groove punk perfect for throwing a brick through a Starbucks window, or just getting cigarette burns on your older sister’s Pylon shirt.

- Zachary Lipez, Abundant Living

JOY was a three piece from New Orleans Louisiana