REVIEW: No Joy - Bugland

2 cool 4 swarm

33:39 // August 8th, 2025 // Hand Drawn Dracula / Sonic Cathedral

If there were ever a shoegaze-adjacent band that could be deemed cool without being, like, Ozean or something, it’d be No Joy. They’re no obscure ‘90s outfit, they’re something potentially better: after having achieved semi-conventional gaze peak with Wait to Pleasure in 2013, they eventually arrived at the pandemic-era oddball project known as Motherhood. This criminally overlooked record blended trippy textures, disco beats, psyched out riffs with the haziness of their previous gaze-inclined work, and solidified itself as one of the most genuinely forward-thinking releases in the realm of the genre. Find me a cooler song than “Four”, I dare you.

Anyway, being cool means sorta disappearing for half a decade before dropping eight more tracks of, uh, No Joy music. Lucky for us, those five years have passed and the music of Bugland is here alongside its adorable cover art. It’s an album that takes the oddities of Motherhood and stretches them to their limits, giving the whole thing a palpably boundless feel. Sure, there are eight songs here, and if you pay close attention you’ll be able to roughly identify where they start and end, but this is very much an… album album (find me a better term, I dare you). In fairness, it’s both a strength and a weakness: while it’s on, Bugland is an absolute trip, but once it’s over, it’s a little hard to pinpoint precisely where that cool beat came in or which song featured that delightfully crispy riff. No worries - I’m here, I did my research (I listened to the album many times, lol). Here’s a list of the absolute coolest moments on the new No Joy album:

• “Bugland”s punchy beat blends with a crunchy riff before descending into a frenzy of Jasamine White-Gluz’ psyched out vocals

• “Bather in the Bloodcells” might be the most grandiose No Joy song of all time, until it switches gears about halfway through its three minutes to bask into a softly glitched-out meltdown of whatever synths were laying around in the studio

• “My Crud Princess” features a riff that feels so fucking timeless it’s like you’ve known it for years: it’s the album’s most… normal song, placed perfectly in the middle, and feels… weird (if delightful) because of it

• “Jelly Meadow Bright”: this eight-minute, Fire-Toolz-featuring closer takes up approximately 25% of the record’s runtime, and bleeds from hazy gaze to confused-as-fuck trip hop to sludge metal including what I think is a lovely and equally confused sax

It’s all pretty glorious. And way too short. There’s not a dull moment to be found on Bugland, but I sure wish there were more of its hilariously excellent weirdness. It’s a marriage of sounds that is hard to find elsewhere, and entirely immersive and commanding all throughout. Find me a cooler 2025 shoegaze (?) album than Bugland, I fucking dare you.

8.5/10