An album called Bugland with a snail on the cover is the kind of sly misdirection that feels almost too on-brand for No Joy. I mean, a snail’s not technically a bug anyway, but when you’re neck-deep in a record this sprawling, nitpicking minor details feels beside the point. The snail metaphor works because it’s both fragile and alien. A slow traveler that wears its home on its back, it spirals in patterns that make perfect sense if you stop trying to rationalize them.
That’s Bugland and, by extension, No Joy in a nutshell.
No Joy’s been around long enough to have worn multiple skins. The early days featured sharp-edged shoegaze, thick with spacey reverb and direct guitar lines. Then came the heady bliss of Wait to Pleasure, followed by the exploratory beats and trip-hop drifts of Motherhood. Now, Jasamine White-Gluz helms the project alone, pausing only for multi-instrumentalist Fire-Toolz to fill in the empty spaces and enable a relaxed evolution.
It’s been five years since the last No Joy full-length, but Bugland doesn’t feel like a comeback so much as a reinvention. Much like the eye of a hurricane, it balances post-storm calm and the sudden, dizzy chaos swirling around it. The trip-hop leanings hinted at before are fully realized on this go-around. The beats smack through the haze, and guitar lines break formation at strange angles. Yet everything still hangs together with this weird, seamless flow.
No Joy understands the importance of connective tissue and how tension can feel as satisfying as resolution.
The album hits its peak with “Jelly Mellow Bright,” a multi-part track that jumps between styles without warning. It begins with reverb-heavy shoegaze, shifts into airy ambient sections, then showcases warped beats that push and pull at the rhythm. Sharp bursts of noise cut in and disappear almost immediately, and there’s even a brief moment that feels like a nod to jazz. It’s ambitious but never bloated, held together by the same raw, DIY mindset No Joy’s carried since the start.
Bugland doesn’t bother with sticking to one genre or following a clean, predictable structure. It’s intentionally messy and layered, built to feel lived-in. Like the snail on the cover, it’s compact in form but constantly shifting inside, with new textures and ideas sliding into place just as others fade out. One moment, it leans into dense shoegaze; the next, it breaks into something more electronic or experimental. Yet, those shifts never feel forced.
You could pull it apart piece by piece and figure out how each section works. But honestly, it’s more rewarding to let the whole thing unfold and watch how it moves from one mood to another.
Bugland is now available on Bandcamp and Hand Drawn Dracula.