"We do not wear earplugs and as a result are deaf which leads us to turn up our amps even louder," says No Joy's Jasamine White-Gluz. Fair enough, considering the intense wall of sound No Joy produces every night. With Laura Lloyd, White-Gluz's reverb-heavy guitar fill every empty space of the Montreal band's latest, Wait to Pleasure.
Coming back to Halifax with drummer Garland Hastings, a lot has happened for the band since its 2011 HPX showcase. They recorded a record, "scrapped it," says White-Gluz, released two EPs, followed by Wait to Pleasure and the subsequent vigourous tour schedule. "Touring and releasing music co-exist and you sometimes need to do both. Like it makes more sense to go on tour when you are supporting a release, you want to promote it and play it for people as much as possible," says White-Gluz. "It's just the reality of being a band nowadays."
There's not a lot of slouching going on behind the scenes. When not touring or recording, the band keeps day jobs---"that pay us a lot more," says White-Gluz---and works on new material. But the process involves some alone time, perhaps informed by No Joy's early days, when White-Gluz lived in LA and Lloyd lived in Montreal. Their email collaboration led to the band's formation in 2009. Just don't ask them to work on the road. "We're barely able to dress ourselves on tour let alone write new music," says White-Gluz. "I tried writing stuff on the last tour with METZ but got distracted by Candy Crush. We each write in our own way but I think we definitely need to be in our own environments to be creative."
The latest No Joy offering, "Last Boss" a track from the upcoming EP Pastel and Pass Out (out November 5), was put together in a more free-form way than Wait to Pleasure, in a weekend, "without any plan or anything," says White-Gluz. "As a result though, a lot of those songs were just sort of slapped together---the B-side is all scratch vocals. It would have been nice to be able to spend a lot of time working through the songs like we did on Wait to Pleasure, but at the same time it was cool to just do one take of everything and not overthink the songs too much."
