album review: 'no joy' by spanish love songs

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I don’t throw around the term ‘classic’ lightly, even with the very best that might drop in any given year. A big part of that is because while I might be inclined to call something a classic in a moment during a review, I’ll hold because how am I supposed to know how something will age or stick with me over weeks or months or years, or if the popular consensus winds up aggressively turning on an act or just never getting onboard, or if just the world changes in a way where it just doesn’t hit the way it should.

All of these thoughts have been on my mind in the three years since Brave Faces Everyone, the third album by Spanish Love Songs and one of a very limited list of perfect scores I’ve given, the project that felt like a crushing landmark in underground pop punk and emo that still floors me to this day. And among a certain subset of critics, especially on YouTube, it was embraced with just as much acclaim and topped a bunch of year-end lists beyond my own, even by some folks who don’t go to those genres in the same way… but I also wouldn’t say it ‘broke through’. The larger outlets didn’t really go near it, a lot of critics didn’t cover it - the emo stigma can still feel real especially alongside pop punk’s painfully short-lived revival in that year or two, and as it was an album pre-lockdown in 2020 that dealt with systemic traumas, a lot of folks were not in a hurry to revisit it and I get why.

But if 2018’s Schmaltz was the Spanish Love Songs album that tripped the radar for folks in the know, Brave Faces Everyone was the project that put enough on notice in the scene that it prompted the band to get a larger profile for their upcoming album No Joy this year, with the singles getting more attention for the folks who would say they missed Brave Faces Everyone but heard enough buzz to be paying attention this time around. And this buzz was also suggesting the band was going to be expanding their sound with a pivot towards more synth-inflected Americana-inspired indie rock… and I’ll admit that concerned me a bit; there were synths on Brave Faces Everyone but they were peripheral, more for texture than driving the tune, and while that meant the album could feel a little uniform in compositional structure, it was a formula that worked so goddamn well to provide a stable backdrop for the lyrics to rip your guts out, and I didn’t want the sound to become a distraction. I also had to temper my expectations - most acts do not repeat a perfect score in my books, even my absolute favourites, so while I was going in hoping for high quality, I was prepared to not be as blown away this time - so what did we get with No Joy?

So let’s get this out of the way first: yes, this album is absolutely excellent, the sort of stylistic expansion for Spanish Love Songs that show they’re just as equipped to take their emo into an indie rock palette and pull it off amazingly well, and I’ll be plenty comfortable calling this one of the best albums of 2023. It is not better than Brave Faces Everyone, and no, not just because it’s embracing more synthetic elements, although I’d be lying to say it wasn’t a small factor. The reality is that No Joy is trying to do something very different, in that there’s a distance built between the heart-rending trauma that felt like it could swallow the world in 2020 and where they’re at here, which is more focused on what they try to extend to someone else going through the same hell. The initial comparison that came to mind, especially sonically, was The Wonder Years’ Sister Cities, but probably the better one is Panorama by La Dispute, but where that album was extending to a partner, this is a friend or family member, and that produces a very different brand of heartbreak and angst.

But by definition, this means right from the gate, this album isn’t going to be as punishingly visceral: not only does the scope feel smaller, the personal angst is less at the forefront. It absolutely is here and is key to how the album develops thematically, and if we’re being fair, some of the best moments on Brave Faces Everyone had the protagonist as an observer to the downtrodden hell around him. But it also means that No Joy is a slower, more melancholic burn that allows more atmosphere to manifest, especially in the production where frontman Dylan Slocum has admitted that over the past few years he’s been experimenting with ambient soundscapes, which you might recognize from the 2022 remix album Brave Faces Etc. And I remember what happened with Sister Cities - the sheer slowdown and embrace of more washed out, gauzy textures that were more midtempo and less driven by crushing frenetic groove, where it’s less pop punk and more alternative in a vein closer to bands like Deaf Havana - especially that last album from 2022 - you’re going to lose some of the punk crowd right out of the gate there, especially as this album does not have the sheer momentum of Brave Faces Everyone, especially in the basslines and percussion. I blame part of this on the choice to bring in Carlos de la Garza for mixing engineering - it’s very similar to the issue I found with Paramore’s This Is Why, the drumwork has complexity and verve but especially the snare and cymbals feel weirdly muffled, they don’t crack as strongly as they should. Kind of a shame because the guitar and vocal mixing can feel much sharper - the electric guitar picks up considerable muscle and distorted texture on cuts like ‘Middle Of Nine’ or ‘I’m Gonna Miss Everything’ or ‘Mutable’, the acoustic guitar is a great accent to nail that choppy texture on ‘Marvel’ and ‘Here You Are’, the basslines have sinuous punch, and Dylan Slocum’s trembling bellow with the benefit of more backing vocals from the band only seems to get more power.

Now the synths… they have an analog oiliness to the pickups that has more body and blends better than I expected - absolutely recalls how some of these textures would creep across 80s Americana with a more uncanny edge, which fits given the thematic arc of this album - but they’re also the biggest stylistic diversion and I can see how they might feel distracting on cuts like ‘Mutable’, or how they blend across some guitar tones on ‘Rapture Chaser’ or the opener ‘Lifers’, and that’s assuming you don’t mind the atmospherics that creep across songs like ‘Pendulum’. But I should stress that none of this takes away from what has always been Spanish Love Songs’ greatest strength: huge melodic hooks and a phenomenal sense of groove - the tempos may have slowed, but the sense of immediacy to get the choruses to pop is absolutely still here - lead single ‘Haunted’ is an incredible splash of new wave that almost reminds me a bit of The War On Drugs, 'Clean-Up Crew’ has a terrific groove to underscore its breakdowns, ‘Marvel’ is one of the catchiest songs on the entire album, and the closer ‘Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse’ is probably the closest to a triumphant punk anthem that the album assembles, and it’s a fantastic way to end the project; the momentum might slow on cuts like ‘Middle Of Nine’ or ‘Exit Bags’, but they’re breathers that this album really needs and do wonders for the atmosphere.

And you need that atmosphere to do some heavy lifting when we move over to lyrics and themes, where of course the writing is as bruising and visceral with turns of phrase that are built to feel uncomfortably real and pull no punches, but the focus is not on our protagonists’ journey this time, but in grappling with someone close to them battling depression and for the most part losing, where much of the album is overshadowed by a car accident with barely enough plausibility to be called that and not a suicide attempt. And what’s interesting is that this isn’t just a straightforward narrative or story - the event itself spills over several songs but it’s also peppered with flashbacks and flash forwards and shifts in perspective, where you get details around this friend where the depression and struggle to get out and succeed might be a common bond, but the protagonist is dreaming bigger and isn’t giving up in spite of rational common sense and everything telling him it’d be easier to live a smaller, more normal life like on ‘Clean-Up Crew’, another echo of Deaf Havana’s The Present Is A Foreign Land. And keep in mind that Spanish Love Songs are still acutely aware of the poverty and systemic rot in which they still have to live, so the added context now becomes seeing their success reflected in eyes and faces that weren’t nearly so lucky, which adds a different shade of grey to this bleakness.

And the frustration is palpable - ‘Pendulum’ has its protagonist grapple with being seen as an enemy or deviant for their queerness where even if they find love, it’s hard to find joy in a world that would trod you underfoot, where you pray the pendulum swings back in your direction. And ‘Middle Of Nine’ gets even darker, as they watch someone consumed by sickness and alcohol abuse and gambling and conspiracy theory rot which may be more deeply rooted in trauma, and the genuine fear that said impulses to go out might be shared. And it leads to songs that are emotionally messy - ‘Haunted’ is one of the more uncomfortably realistic portrayals of trying to help someone with depression I’ve heard on record since, well, Jason Isbell’s ‘Death Wish’ earlier this year, and this song also explicitly calls back to Brave Faces Everyone with the hard reality of ‘yeah, it’ll be this bleak forever… but please try to keep living’. And some of this album’s most poignant moments are its justifications of life - the most memorable one is on ‘Marvel’ with its line ‘stay alive out of spite’, a song that gives the double bird to late capitalist self help toxic positivity, making it to the end of the world just to piss off everyone who said you wouldn’t, and we’ll come back to some of the other implications there. But that context of ‘the end of the world’ and time also lingers over this album, not just in the context of ‘so much of my past and future has value and deserves to not be forgotten by my early exit’, but also in ‘Rapture Chaser’, which in coming with the reality that pain is everywhere, are you searching for more of that or do you want to try and get better to escape; for as crushingly heavy as this album can be, it doesn’t wallow. It knows the work is endless and painful and that you probably won’t figure it all out by the end and still backslide, but as they see life reflected in their dying friend on ‘Exit Bags’, if you can keep dreaming for the impossible, you shouldn’t stop. It’s why the final song is so powerful, because like across so much of this album it’s a re-engagement with the mundane, and a strident point that not everyone has the systemic or emotional ability to cling to optimism in the same way; on the bridge, Slocum delivers a question whether he deserves to be happy - and is basically told ‘no’, because there’s a whole lot of folks who do not have that privilege and space to be free. And what’s powerful is what happens next - he wishes he could kill that optimist and be more doomer-pilled… but he can’t, and won’t allow himself that nihilistic freedom; he’s not going to romanticize his dreams; he’s lived too much of them to do that, but he’s not going to take himself out of the equation that we’re all in, and his plea is that you don’t either.

That said, it’s the sort of plea that can feel all the more helpless - Brave Faces Everyone had the jolt of driving for action because we’re all in this together; this is a different kind of pain mingled often with guilt, where even the trace elements of success you find - most of which you question are worth it at all - are placed sharply in contrast with folks going through it worse, so it’s not just maintaining joy and hope for yourself, but for those who can’t. It’s getting out the other side, but knowing there are those behind you that you want to help and ultimately won’t be able to do much because on some level, they have to be the ones that choose to keep going on. And it can’t be as anthemic because there’s a sharp limit on how much you can really do, which makes for a difficult listen. But again, I’m an optimist at heart… and I fucking love this album. The performances are electric, the writing is spell-binding, and a greater diversity of sound is pulled off remarkably well, even if I know a project like this is not built to cross over; it’s way too raw, even with the backing of indie rock to do it. It’s not my favourite project this year, but it absolutely fits in the pantheon of projects that try to do the difficult work of healing, grappling with one’s own self-destructive tendencies, and find a reason to keep going anyway, even if it’s just out of spite. If that’s not worth your attention, I don’t know what is - check it out!