Featured Image Photo Credit: Hannah Hall
SPANISH LOVE SONGS
ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM NO JOY
DUE OUT FRIDAY 25 AUGUST VIA PURE NOISE RECORDS
NO JOY AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW
Spanish Love Songs, have revealed details on their upcoming new album No Joy – the highly anticipated follow up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Brave Faces Everyone. No Joy will be released on August 25, 2023 via Pure Noise Records.
The track carries the saltwater-kissed vignetting of an Asbury Park summer, awash in Boss-inspired nostalgia and percussive acoustic guitar that build to some of the band’s biggest hooks yet. The video, directed by Hannah Hall, is a quirky view into a bar-band scene where everyone’s just looking for a good time.
“Haunted is a reintroduction of sorts for us,” explains vocalist and guitarist Dylan Slocum. “It lays out exactly the band we are at the moment, and after 9 months of writing and recording we knew it had to be the first to come out. We were ecstatic to bring it to life with Hannah”
Brimming with new wave pastiche, fluttering synths, shimmering walls of chorus guitar, and four-on-the-floor rhythms, No Joy isn’t an exclamation point follow-up to the emotional catharsis of the landmark Brave Faces Everyone as much as it is an exhale – the sound of vocalist and guitarist Dylan Slocum, his wife and keyboardist Meredith Van Woert, guitarist Kyle McAulay, bassist Trevor Dietrich, and drummer Ruben Duarte finding peace in quieter moments and embracing the negative space.
“This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to figuring out how to translate what I hear in my head with more clarity,” Slocum says.
Produced by the band and Collin Pastore (Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Illuminati Hotties) and mixed by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, M83, Best Coast), the 12 songs on No Joy continue to find Spanish Love Songs grappling with the messiness of what it means to be alive in the modern age – unsure of the answers themselves but confident that together, we can all come a little closer to the solutions.
If Brave Faces Everyone was about mustering up the strength to barely break even in an increasingly bleak world, No Joy is finding the internal peace required to stay in the black. As Slocum says, “it’s an album about finding happiness in what you have and your current moment. It might be your best moment, or it might not, but you have to find joy in it.”
The band, at Sold Out shows this week in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia hosted exclusive listening sessions of No Joy in its entirety, prior to their appearance at Slam Dunk Music Festival on May 27 in Hatfield, UK and May 28 in Leeds, UK. They also recently announced an upcoming UK/EU run in August and September with Hot Mulligan, with more global touring to be announced soon.
Since 2013, the LA-formed indie-punk quintet Spanish Love Songs have made hay on the backs of a string of beloved albums – 2015’s Giant Sings The Blues, 2018’s Schmaltz and 2020’s Brave Faces Everyone – lauded by critics and fans alike for their richly personal, no-holds-barred lyricism awash in existential dread, hyper-personal cultural ruminations and attempts to answer life’s big questions.
01. Lifers
02. Pendulum
03. Haunted
04. Clean-Up Crew
05. Middle of Nine
06. Marvel
07. I’m Gonna Miss Everything
08. Rapture Chaser
09. Mutable
10. Here You Are
11. Exit Bags
12. Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse
Photographer and Editor/Founder of AllMusicMagazine.com. My love of live music has taken me to incredible experiences with the top bands of all time in stadium shows to the smallest venues with equally inspiring musicians. Using the medium of photography and my publication, these memories will last forever.
