If you’re willing, place yourself back in the year 2020, February. The new Roaring Twenties have begun, and ambitions are high; figuring out what resolutions you may undergo is a source of joy. But Spanish Love Songs aren’t feeling starry-eyed. They’ve just released their sophomore album, Brave Faces Everyone, an album centered around the many hail-mary attempts at keeping oneself together through endless setbacks. And just a month later, the concept proved to be topical globally. Brave Faces Everyone would soundtrack the pandemic years in its personalization of helpless suffering, providing some interconnectedness while it was at an all-time low.
Now, the Los Angeles quintet are back with plans to soundtrack the mid-2020s as well. No Joy, their highly anticipated third studio album, is a feat of the emo and alt-rock they’ve gained a following because of, but they’re attacking it from new angles. The band headlined this album release cycle with ‘Haunted’ in May, followed by ‘Pendulum’ in July. Guitarist and lead vocalist Dylan Slocum described ‘Haunted’ as “a reintroduction of sorts for us … It lays out exactly the band we are at the moment, and after nine months of writing and recording we knew it had to be the first to come out.”
‘Haunted’ is unequivocally Spanish Love Songs, but with a different aura. The song opens with a twinkling synth, which underlies the chorus, making for a dreamy, summer-soaked listen. Slocum still retains his shaky, on-the-verge-of-tears-feeling vocal style, the band’s primary bridge between past iterations of their music and the present. The music video, directed by Hannah Hull, brings home that newness, featuring a fantastical, unfamiliar figure growing accustomed to a night out at the bar as Spanish Love Songs perform. ‘Pendulum’ features an acoustic lead guitar as its opening, interplayed with early-aughts-inspired distorted synths, before introducing a reverberated electric guitar on the chorus. The music video places the band in an underground bunker, waiting for “the light,” as it’s named in the chorus, to take them away—be it death, or a new beginning.
‘Lifers’ opens the album, starting off subtle and guided by Slocum’s vocals before springing guitars kick in. In its closing moments, Slocum is joined by a harmonized chorus, with everything slowly fading into silence. “Clean-Up Crew” is unapologetically groovy, featuring a clean drum beat from Ruben Duarte. The track explodes into a full-on pop rock song by its chorus, inviting listeners to thrash out their everyday jitters. ‘Middle of Nine’ sets itself up as an acoustic ballad, transitioning into an ambient echo chamber after the first verse; as if alone with one’s thoughts while night driving. ‘Marvel’ is one of the most emo-infused tracks on the album, but with flashes of keyboardist Meredith Van Woert’s synth work that gives it a unique edge. “I’m Gonna Miss Everything,” nestled in the middle of the tracklist, and despite its simplicity, has the album’s ethos coursing through it. The power behind Slocum’s vocals is amplified, yet accompanied by Kyle McAulay’s guitar. The five-and-a-half minute closer, ‘Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse,’ opens with Van Woert on keyboard, before introducing ecstatic guitars into the mix. Each melody lands on a final note before once again fading into quiet.
No Joy and Brave Faces Everyone are inverts of each other, possessing content that contrasts their titles. While Brave Faces Everyone made optimistic promises, its lyrical matters felt more hopeless. Meanwhile, No Joy sounds about as bleak as it gets, but the album has some positive messaging behind it. While the band, and most others, aren't living under the most ideal conditions, or haven’t quite yet escaped their hardships, No Joy amplifies the value of the present. As Slocum states, “it’s an album about finding happiness in what you have and your current moment. It might be your best moment, or it might not, but you have to find joy in it.”
It takes the album’s entire runtime to get there soundly, crossing plenty of heavy thresholds in the process. Like during an earthquake and its aftermath, fearing the next one, then the one after that, No Joy searches for the stability inherently promised in “joy,” often giving up hope that it’s out there. Its lyrics look for answers in settling down into a quiet, “normal” life, or supernatural fantasies, two opposite concepts united under their escapist outlooks. Slocum, and those he sings to, long for out of body experiences on “Lifers” and “Here You Are,” as they either want out altogether, thus becoming a spirit, or to inhabit someone else and the better life that entails. One of the most scathing lines comes about halfway through “Here You Are,” where Slocum writes, “There’s a kid with a trust fund asking me why I’m not famous / I wonder, if I take his fucking skin, if I could stay in my apartment.”
No Joy wrestles with insignificance, as it relates to instability, throughout, with the question of being left “out of the equation” encircling the tracks, with a variation of the line appearing on “Lifers” and “Apocalypse.” There are multiple instances where someone isolates themselves to suffer, like on “Haunted,” purposefully attempting to render themselves “insignificant.” They attempt to find answers in getting married, having kids, and building a home, as told on “Clean-Up Crew,” but it’s considered a farce, as they would be settling down only to go through the motions, susceptible to any sudden disruptions—either internal, or external, conflicts not yet reckoned with: “Settle down on a quiet street and hope you don’t give in.” No Joy grapples with not making enough of an impact during their short time on earth. “Middle of Nine” and “Marvel” talk about cementing a legacy, both as an artist and as an empathetic person. However, Slocum acknowledges that “chronic empathy” might be what’s pushing out the joy. By the closing track, he finally urges listeners to make room for each other, stating “we’re a part of the equation,” encouraging mindfulness towards others and their struggles, but not to let it become another form of self-destruction.
Spanish Love Songs can rest assured they’ve made their impact with No Joy, and done the emo scene, and their audiences, their due diligence. The album may not be joyful throughout, but it really shouldn't be. Rather, it showcases, with brutal honesty, the unspoken pains and empty corners of adulthood, but it is learning to decorate them, and accept when it’s lost balance trying to reach the next empty space.
