Spanish Love Songs - No Joy

Spanish Love Songs - No Joy

Tracklist:
1. Lifers
2. Pendulum
3. Haunted
4. Clean-Up Crew
5. Middle of Nine
6. Marvel
7. I’m Gonna Miss Everything
8. Rapture Chaser
9. Mutable
10. Here You Are
11. Exit Bags
12. Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse

It may not immediately obvious on an album called No Joy, but I’ve grown bored
with the darkness.
I’ve spent three years finding out that all of my grand plans cannot stop the world, my
complaining doesn’t make me happy, and the happiness I do find is finite. This is an album about making peace with that. It’s a foolish attempt to hold onto what I love as tightly as possible. An album of songs for the people miss and am going to miss for the rest of my life.
The band has reconvened with the same energy. We’re holding onto this as long as we can. We’ve torn the band down and built it back up to record the exact album we’ve been wanting to make. And we’ve ultimately arrived at the next stage of the band’s evolution.

Every album we make is largely a reaction to the previous, and a cataloging of the
intervening events. No Joy isn’t really different in that regard, except that typically the
albums are born out of the noise and chaos of our daily life, but it was created during a
period of stillness.
We released our last album in Feb 2020. All of us had given up our day jobs and apartments in anticipation of being on the road for most of 2020 and 2021. Then all at once, we were quite literally back home, with nothing to do really except worry. Our big plans were dead.
Maybe that period from Feb to Mar was it for us. The time off the road — back to a 9 to 5 job, not chasing any sort of big dream, writing songs for the sake of the exercise — was maybe the stillest my life has been since I was 15. In the stillness, there was no grand epiphany. Just boredom. Bored with a quiet life. With work. With my scattered friends. Nothing to look forward to except the creeping feeling that the world was in a death spiral. The impending doom. That quickly got boring too. By the time we started talking about a new album, and were back on the clock, I’d grown bored with the band and the songs I was writing. The hoping that this would be the one for us. With the endless list of grievances. The stories in the songs. Bored with the darkness.

So this album is a reaction to the previous, the outcome of trying to destroy the boredom. An attempt to throw out expectations and just chase down the things that excite us. We’ve torn down what we do and and tried to hold onto the best parts. The songs are more expansive.
The stories try to be more optimistic. This is the first time we’ve made the exact record we set out to make. And we’ve ultimately arrived at the next stage in the band’s evolution.
It’s founded on a sense of gratitude. We’ve re-learned that nothing is given, that happiness is finite. It tries to make peace with that. It’s a foolish attempt to hold onto the things we love as tightly as possible.
It’s really an album of love songs for the people I’m going to miss. We’re finally living up to our name.