Chasing Fridays: No Joy Q&A, The Armed, Fine, more

Every year when August arrives, I realize that I forgot to make a post that only myself and maybe four other people would find amusing. Which is to quote the lyric from Nai Harvest's 2013 emo song, "Distance, etc.", that goes, "August is coming up/faAAasst/and soon summer will be a distance." For a decade now, I've thought of that lyric every time I glance at my calendar and see how few days are left in what still feels like the beginning of July. This year, it persuaded me to listen to another Nai Harvest song that pops into my head from time to time: "Ocean of Madness," from their 2015 record, Hairball. It's a song that's better in my head than in actuality. They were going for a Stone Roses/JAMC thing and didn't quite get there. Oh well.

In between revisiting a British emo band from 12 years ago that no one thinks about anymore, I wrote about some other, more contemporary music this week. I put down some thoughts on that new Armed album, wrote about my latest dream-pop obsession, and then recommended a smorgasbord of recent releases – hardcore, shoegaze, screamo, dream-folk, the usual suspects – that've been on frequent rotation over at Chasing Sundays HQ. Lastly, I did a little Q&A with Canadian shoegaze weirdo No Joy, whose first album in five years, Bugland, is out today (August 8th). Enjoy.

The Armed - THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED

Last year, I wrote about my long, winding relationship with The Armed. A band who I once counted among my favorite bands, and then started to get the ick from when their gimmick began to overstay its welcome. With their 2021 album, ULTRAPOP, The Armed asked: "what if we actually tried to become a huge band?" (both figuratively and literally, as the group famously got jacked in the lead-up to that press cycle). This was an amusing proposition because up until that point, The Armed were an anonymous collective of post-modern tricksters pushing the square peg of noisy art-pop through the round hole of Convergey hardcore. They wrote amazing pop-rock songs and then caked them in abrasive hardcore muck. They wrote amazing hardcore songs and gussied them up in a garish outré-pop sheen. They were a weird band, and I loved them for that.

With ULTRAPOP, the band got a little less weird, but for The Armed, being a little less weird was actually the weirdest thing they could do. Then, The Armed jumped the shark: they became legitimately normal. Their 2023 record, Perfect Saviors, was considerably less heavy, bracing, and confrontational than their prior albums. They weren't joking about becoming a big band, they were actually trying to will that into existence. They toured with Queens of the Stone Age, removed their mask of anonymity during the press rollout, and got a bunch of indie-rock musicians (Julien Baker, Illuminati Hotties) and bigwig rockers (dudes from Jane's Addiction and The Red Hot Chili Peppers) to play on their record. The Armed were trying to force a fluke hit. As we all know, flukes can't be forced. The record was limp and forgettable. The Armed didn't get huge.

The most refreshing quality of THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is that their desperation to crossover is entirely absent. The Armed don't need flashy features from boring singers to make their music interesting. The Armed made great records as The Armed. THE FUTURE... is just an Armed record, which makes it the best Armed record since 2018's Only Love. A song like "Grace Obscure" contains everything that makes The Armed great. It's a massive punk sing-along that's impossible to sing along to. In the chorus, your ear can't pick out the words being sung, so you're left trying to pitch your voice up five octaves and chirp along to that scalding-comet synth. You sound ridiculous. The Armed are at their best when they make you sound ridiculous.

Elsewhere on the album, The Armed lean into what made them a unique band to begin with. Guitars that zap like electric fence shockwaves on wet fingers. Yelps and squeals and howls that are processed through so much distortion that they function as yet another textural element in The Armed's cacophonous maw. The barbed grunge of "Sharp Teeth" and the razory post-punk of "Local Millionaire" retain the alt-rock tunefulness of The Armed's last two records, but in the context of an album that's otherwise bristly and scabrous, they don't feel like pick-me pleas for indie-rock approval. They just sound like great songs. I went into THE FUTURE... expecting The Armed to have fully lost the plot. I was wrong. They found it again.

Fine - "Run"

I heard Fine's debut LP, Rocky Top Ballads, when it came out last year, and for some reason it whizzed in one ear and then out the other. After seeing her latest single, June's "Run," shared online a bunch, I went back to Rocky Top and fell deeply in love with it. Songs like "Coasting" and "Remember the Heart" waltz with a woozy strut that's totally mesmerizing. "Losing Tennessee" is the best Mazzy Star impression I've ever heard, not just replicating their winsome balladry but also channeling the band's forlorn spirit with an ouija-like uncanniness. Fine can also do spectral trip-hop ("Days Incomplete"), murky slowcore ("A/B"), and sprinkle shards of Dido into a glimmering carafe of milky dream-pop ("Smile?").

Everything brilliant about Rocky Top Ballads carries over onto "Run," truly one of the greatest songs I'll hear in 2025. Slinky and sumptuous, each instrument touches down gracefully like gloved fingers pressing into Mercedes Benz leather. Its chord progression gestures toward radio pop gold until her voice suddenly shifts key amid the hook's second go-around, melting into the swell while the whole song shakes suggestively like a dashboard bobblehead during a moonlit rendezvous at Makeout Point. This is designer pop with an old-money demureness. It's supple. It's gossamer. It's positively divine, darling.

flowersforpersephone - a temporary stay

I saw this band play with a few other screamo acts in a room full of teenagers the other night. They were the only band on the bill that I hadn't checked out prior to the show, and I was beyond stoked to see that they're doing the sassy/emoviolency/metalcorey variety of screamo that I've been fixated on all year. The guitarist in this band had an actual I Love Boobies bracelet on their wrist, the masc drummer wore a lingerie tuxedo t-shirt, the bassist had the raccoon-colored bangs my female friends did in high-school, and the femme singer was oozing meep energy, rolling around the floor, rocking a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, and ordering the nubile pit warriors to mosh with an uwu vocal fry.

I just think it's breathtaking that the weirdo scene kid culture I came up in 15 years ago is being studiously regenerated by contemporary teen bands. Except flowersforpersephone are so much cooler than my era's groups because their singer, in between gurgling like iwrestledabearonce and shrieking like Tears of Avarel, spoke passionately about Palestine, and the inclusion of queer folks in this scene (most of these bands, as far as I can tell, have queer members) is taken as a given. Musically, flowersforpersphone's lone EP, a temporary stay, is a little rougher than other bands of this ilk, but this style of music needs a certain degree of sloppiness to be enjoyable. Ignore the illogical particulars of the song structures – screamo arpeggios hitched to 808-boosted breakdowns with a Scotch tape amateurishness – and marvel at the cartoonish eccentricity of the greater picture.

forever ☆ - "Heat Seeking Missile"

A friend put me onto this band forever ☆ – gimmicky name? Maybe, but I think it's charming – who sound like Medicine for the Fleshwater generation. Is shoegaze getting fun again? Between Magic America and forever ☆'s recent single "Heat Seeking Missile," I think there's finally a visible light at the end of the gloom-gaze tunnel. There's a heavy butt-rock riff at the core of this song, but I love how the Kansas City duo stomp all over it with rattling breakbeats, whirligig sampler ruckus, and a heaping layer of hissy, trebly distortion that really underscores the Medicine influence. Another song of theirs, "Competizione," has a more wheel-jerking d'n'b beat and some chopped-up vocals that remind me of that band Drook. There's something novel percolating 'round these parts, and forever ☆ are a part of it.

Erode - Devout

Daze Records has been on a tremendous tear this year (Mongrel, Balmora, Unmoved, Azshara, Final Resting Place, plus a couple crucial reissues) and this Erode record is vying to become my favorite of the stack. There's a certain strain of late-2010s metallic hardcore – Sanction, Division of Mind, Queensway – that was kneecapped by COVID before it fully took off, but has now come back into favor in a major way. Erode fit right into that pocket of psychotic mosh music, where every breakdown makes me wince while imagining how feral it'd go in the live setting. Devout has enough death metal riffs and grindy blasts to keep your ear interested, but every fast sprint has a destination in mind: a knuckle-sandwich dance part that Erode force-feed their listeners with a cruel glee.

Dovetail - "raining here, too"

I'm amazed by the debut single from this duo Dovetail, a couple of Vassar College students who showcase a more fully-formed musical identity in one song than most bands do after their second album. "raining here, too" is a near-seven-minute dream-folk ballad that has the rocking chair nod of Mojave 3 and the psychedelic dewiness of Big Thief's first few records. Both singers have a little bit of Lucy Dacus's bassy ache in their weary deliveries, and I love the way they sing over each other for a while and then turn away from the mics to let their guitars exhale plumes of ambience that hang like bonfire scent on flannel. If this is their first song, I can't imagine how great their second will be.

Chasing Down

JASAMINE WHITE-GLUZ
of
No Joy

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Of all the new bands reinterpreting shoegaze through fresh vectors, no one's doing it quite like No Joy. The long-running Montreal band helmed by Jasamine White-Gluz have been on the genre's cutting-edge for 15 years now, filtering shoegazey sounds through psychedelic prisms and coming up with some of the form's most bonkers experiments. No Joy's 2020 album, Motherhood, is something of a cult classic in certain music nerd circles, and her new album, Bugland, has an even more quixotic allure. Made in collaboration with Chicago experimentalist Fire-Toolz, Bugland deconstructs shoegazey psych-pop and builds it back up into an unrecognizable yet primitively familiar figure.

For this week's edition Chasing Down Q&A, I asked White-Gluz about psychedelia, the shoegaze revival, her go-to "wow, music is amazing" album, working with Fire-Toolz, and the motifs behind Bugland. Her responses were funny and thoughtful. Read the full interview below.

Much hay has been made about the so-called shoegaze revival over the last five years. As someone who's been working within that genre for a long time now, what do you make of the newer bands working within that idiom? Do you feel a kinship between what No Joy has evolved into and how shoegaze has developed in recent times? 

I find the revivals pretty funny because with every new revival, the same bands are getting cited as influence. It's cool younger people are discovering MBV and stuff but where are the new shoegaze bands who sound like Deerhunter or A Sunny Day In Glasgow? The shoegaze lexicon needs to be expanded. I know Deftones are maybe the most cited now, so it's cool that bands like Nothing are more recognized for their influence in pushing the genre.

The album is called Bugland and there's a big snail on the cover. Tell me about the bug motif and some of the lyrical themes you were working with on this LP. 

Moving out to the country, I was inspired by everything around me like birds, trees, flowers and of course bugs. I hadn't intended for the bugs to really be so center-stage, the album started as just an observation on my life in nature. There's a trope about moving to the country and going folk or stripping back, but for me it was the other direction. Nature pushed me to make things louder, brighter, more complex.

I liked the idea of zooming in super close on this tiny thing, like a bug, and discovering all its intricate details. I tried to recreate that in sound. I wanted the album to be natural but unnatural, big but small, gross but pretty, textured and evocative.