Spanish Love Songs
No Joy
PURE NOISE
If you’re surprised by the new sound established by Los Angeles quintet Spanish Love Songs on their new record No Joy, you should go back and revisit last year’s Brave Faces Etc. Far more than an acoustic curio, it was a radical reworking of 2020’s Brave Faces Everyone LP, itself as much a white-knuckle examination of the failures of a particularly American flavor of late-stage capitalism as it was the sound of Dylan Slocum and his bandmates trying to “keep their heads above the nonsense,” to quote album track “Self-Destruction (As a Sensible Career Choice).” “It won’t be this bleak forever—yeah right,” Slocum sang, unsure which side the band’s unflinching lyrical outlook would take.
A month after Brave Faces Everyone was released the pandemic turned the world upside down. In trying to find their way back into being a band, the five-piece also found their way forward. So no, No Joy isn’t an entirely unexpected leap for them. Their hard-charging emo-punk hybrid sound has become increasingly grandiose in scope since they arrived on the scene with 2015’s Giant Sings the Blues and made their first real statement with 2018's sophomore step-up Schmaltz; so it’s a departure, sure, but it makes sense in context—a logical next step. Some things have changed (the introduction of some synths here, some pedal steel there, co-producer Collin Pastore as an honorary sixth member) and some things haven’t; lead single “Haunted” suggests that Spanish Love Songs still love their lyrical and thematic throughlines (“It’ll be this bleak forever, but it is a way to live”).
Finding a way forward in everyday life is the driving force behind much of No Joy. The album title is a bit of a red herring; this isn’t an album that goes off the deep end into despair like some would have expected, given the intervening three years since its predecessor. Slocum’s lyrics put the “intense” in “intensely personal,” to say the least, but writing on a relatively smaller scale has given the band more room to breathe. It’s an album about finding the strength to carry on in an increasingly bleak world. “Stay alive out of spite,” he advises on the propulsive “Marvel,” a song that’s swept along by the quintet’s muscular rhythm section. It’s a song that reminds the listener to find joy in the small things, because sometimes that’s all we have: “Some days there’s just so much to marvel at / And other days you’re at the bottom of a pit.”
Slocum has come into his own as a lyricist, making a career out of getting people to sing along to some pretty horrible stuff. Equally at home describing a car crash in harrowing detail on the bridge of scene-setting opener “Lifers” as he is crafting moving character studies (“Rapture Chaser” and the equally touching and devastating tribute to his grandmother “Middle of Nine,” in particular), there’s something compelling about his writing style that meshes perfectly with how Spanish Love Songs want to sound in 2023. That step forward, with Brave Faces Etc. as an anchor, is what he calls “the closest we’ve ever gotten to figuring out how to translate what I hear in my head with more clarity.”
“Clarity” is the key word here: they’ve been a quintet since the addition of keyboardist Meredith Van Woert, but the sense of space granted by expanding the lineup is the most audible it’s ever been on songs like “Mutable” and “Pendulum,” whose expressive arrangements and mastery of dynamics drive home just how much growth the band’s experienced in the past year, never mind the last three.
It’s only now they’re fully capable of pulling off some of these songs. “Clean Up Crew” is the place to start for those looking for a way into this record, an unashamedly big song about adjusting expectations and hoping for contentment. “Here You Are” and wide-ranging closer “Re-Emerging Sounds of the Apocalypse” are similarly huge in scope with extremely satisfying payoffs, the latter tying up lyrical themes explored throughout the course of the record with one final burst of power.
No Joy is an album that takes refuge in small moments in hopes that they can add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. It would be fitting if, after being cheated out of their moment three years ago, this album propelled the quintet toward bigger and better things—this isn’t the moment they wanted, but it’s the one they’re getting after making a record about exactly that, so you fully expect them to seize it. It may be a lot to take in, but the band’s latest is never anything less than a joy to behold.
