Broken Dreams Club Interview: No Joy

Photo Credit: Samuel Fournier

No Joy,  the creative brainchild of Canadian musician Jasamine White-Gluz, is currently on tour behind the band’s excellent 2025 album “Bugland.” A captivating collection of IDM, shoegaze, 90s alt rock and metal, the album quite simply sounds like nothing out there at the moment.

Despite the various electronica elements to the record—there are beeps and bloops aplenty—“Bugland” feels strangely organic and earthy. White-Gluz attributes that natural sensibility to the recording process of the album, which she made in the rural hinterlands of Quebec along with her collaborator, Angel Marcloid, better known as Fire-Toolz.  

Prior to No Joy’s November 11 show at Thee Stork Club in Oakland, White-Gluz answered questions from Broken Dreams Club via email:

The band just wrapped up a tour of the UK and Europe. How were those shows?

So amazing! It had been forever since we played over there and it was such a warm welcome. I can't wait to go back. 

And now you have this string of West Coast shows coming up. How are you regrouping and preparing for this new tour?

We have about 72 hours in between tours so I am trying to get over jetlag while preparing for the next jetlag. I love sleeping so this is a challenge for me.

The No Joy sound is very dense and layered, with so many moving parts, digital snippets, samples and other elements usually perfected in a studio. How do you all translate that sound to a live setting? Is that part of the fun of performing these songs—deconstructing them to the point where a band can play them in front of audiences in an engaging and interesting way?

It's always a work in progress. “Bugland” wasn't created with a live set in mind, truthfully, so we spent the last year testing out the new songs to see what worked. The setup depends on so many factors, but for now we keep the set pretty rockin' and loud, giving the songs a different life in the live setting. Some songs off “Bugland” aren't ready to "hatch" live so to speak, so we'll be saving some of the album songs for the next tour.

“Bugland” is the first No Joy release in five years, and your first with Hand Drawn Dracula. What was it like working with the new label and was there any particular reason it took five years to write and record “Bugland”? (Not like five years is that long of a time now, with the recording industry model not really functioning anymore.) 

We actually released “Motherhood” with Hand Drawn Dracula in Canada as well as the Wait to Pleasure re-issue so we are very familiar with the label and they are like family now. I take my time creating - I have phases where I am in writing mode, production mode, etc... and don't like to release anything that I am not 10000% confident in. I took my time developing my demos before even bringing them to Fire-Toolz, and then from there we spent many months working on them and getting them to the place where we were happy with them. I also spent time doing non-music related things, for the first time really. I started open water swimming, spending time in the garden, and really just getting inspired by new things. There were five years between “More Faithful” and “Motherhood” too, so that's maybe the length of time I need to take to make something I'm happy with.

This album is marked by your amazing partnership with Fire-Toolz. How did you and Angel first meet, and what made you want to work together with her for “Bugland”?
 Angel is quoted as saying “the collaboration really felt limitless”—what about this pairing made it so special? 

I discovered Angel's music and was just blown away by how both melodic and psychotic it was. It is a perfect blend of so many genres and evoked such visual imagery. I cold emailed her and asked if she would want to try working on some songs I had lying around. Whenever I collaborate, I really want everyone to push themselves and just do their thing, and it just happened that she and I were always on the same page and inspired each other a lot. She is an amazing talent, and I'm so fortunate to have been able to create with her.

This album seems to be inspired by everything from Caribou to Boards of Canada to 90s alternative rock acts. Was there a band or artist who had a particularly outsized impact on how this sound was shaped? Or was this completely the result of a couple of artists ensconcing themselves in the studio and shutting out all the noise? (It really sounds incredibly unique and timeless, in so many ways.)

I was not taking much inspiration from other music for this one, more so being inspired by the nature around me.  I would say if any music inspired me during the process, it was more abstract; For example, we said, "let's make this song as if Boards of Canada were a noise band"  and created from there. Angel and I had both respectively moved out of the cities we had lived in to more rural settings and really took inspiration from the new places we were in. Cheesy to say, but it was more inspired by the bugs, trees, weather, water, birds, fields around me.

“Garbage Dream House” is this really inspired track to lead off the album—within the first 40 seconds, you get a glimpse into the range of sounds and noises you’ll hear on the album. When you were recording that track, did you know immediately that it would be the album opener? Garbage seems like one of the bands that might have inspired this album—was that title a reference at all to the group?

While I absolutely adore Garbage (Shirley Manson is the icon!) I wasn't really listening to them when making this record. I was really just making sounds, trying not to be inspired musically by any particular band or era or anything. So maybe somewhere deep in my psyche there was an influence but it wasn't intentional at all. I love how this song feels like you are scanning the radio or something and it's almost as if there are two different songs that somehow clash together at the right time, one electronic and one rock, to make this new sound. It felt like the right opener to introduce the Fire-Toolz collaboration and it's a really fun one to play live.

“Jelly Meadow Bright” is this absolutely epic album closer. Similar to “Garbage Dream House” being a perfect opener, this just feels like a great way to leave the record. Again—did you know that this particular song would make for a great final track?

“Jelly Meadow Bright” was the last song we finished mixing for the album, and it just felt natural it should be the closer. I like how in Garbage Dream House there are these hints of Angel being there with the bleeps and bloops, and then the album culminates with her really taking more of a center stage of the performance. When she sent me the final mix, I was driving and out the window there was a double rainbow. What more of a sign do ya need? 

So many of these songs have a collage-like feel to them. When there are so many different elements to each track, how do you know when something is a finished product? 

It's hard to explain, but it's a gut feeling. There's no real way to quantify it, but I just get a sense that it's ready.

Ok—looking ahead to this show in Oakland. Are you excited to come back to the Bay Area? Do you feel like you get a nice reception when you play here?

Bay Area is definitely one of those "second home" places for me. I have so many friends there and that area was a spot that embraced No Joy early on, so I'm always happy to be back.

Show Details:
No Joy with Shaki Tavi
Where: Thee Stork Club
When: 8 p.m., Tuesday, November 11
Tickets: $18, available here.