No Joy are back with Motherhood, their first full-length LP in five years. Here we bring you the second single off the record: a catchy, synthy, funky tune accompanied by a video that is as ready made for karaoke as it is a masterful display of 90’s clip art functionality.
On first listen, “Nothing Will Hurt” feels like a straight-forward pop jam, with beautifully sung vocals layered over dancy instrumentals. Yet the more you listen to it, the more layers of not-quite-identifiable sounds you uncover. Unconventionality and fearlessness is an approach No Joy take to everything, having toured with bands from an array of genres and citing influences from 90s trip hop to No Doubt to that terrifyingly off-limits genre title “nu-metal”. According to vocalist Jasamine White-Gluz “…our mission in the studio was that no idea was too weird to try.” White-Gluz goes on to describe “squishing Bananas into expensive microphones” and “shoving kitchen knives into guitar necks” for that “perfect slide guitar sound”, and finding slap-bass inspiration from Primus.
The Primus influence is out front, and I think I can hear that banana, though I might be tricking myself because I just like the story. Either way, like all good music, “Nothing Will Hurt” offers something new every time you listen to it.
Motherhood is out August 21 via Joyful Noise and Hand Drawn Dracula. You can sing along to “Nothing Will Hurt” with the lyric video here:
