No Joy, No Album: Montrealers Scrap Raveonettes-Aided Record, Start Over

It takes a lot of time and effort to record an album. It also takes a lot of will to destroy it before it gets released. And yet a year ago, that's exactly what Montreal's No Joy did.

"Last year at this time we wrote and recorded an album and were going in all kinds of weird directions and experimenting," No Joy's Jasamine White-Gluz tells Spinner. "We mixed it in New York City with Sune [Rose Wagner] from the Raveonettes."

New album. Weird directions. Mixed by a Raveonette. Sounds good up to this point.

Except it wasn't, apparently.

"There was something sort of missing from the material," says White-Gluz. "We weren't really excited about it."

In a move that most artists probably wouldn't even consider, the old album was scrapped and started anew. And what some would call perfectionism, or will, White-Gluz refers to as a kind of selfishness.

"I think we are a pretty selfish band," she says. An example? "Live we're really picky, but about onstage sound. We generally don't care what it sounds like in the room.

"Onstage if the sound isn't right we have a bad show. Sound guys across the world always tell me, 'Why is your amp so close to you?! You should put it up!' And I'm like, 'Fuck that. It will fuck up the stage mojo.'"

The commitment to recommit spawned a new, as-of-yet-untitled album that will be released in or around April, 2013 on Mexican Summer -- the label that released No Joy's debut Ghost Blonde in 2010. A smattering of the new material was on offer at M for Montreal last week, where No Joy offered fans a taste of the fruits of the new labors. First impressions: the new material is more controlled, tamed even. This was ostensibly the point.

As opposed to Ghost Blonde, which was recorded in the band's jam space with "cheap mics," White-Gluz says that the new No Joy record benefited immensely from the expertise of producer Jorge Elbrecht (Lansing-Dreiden, Violens) and a "huge selection of mics, amps, [and] reverb chambers." White-Gluz refers to the whole ordeal as the first time the band had recorded in "a real studio." She also calls the new material progressive.

"The new one is a progression because we've developed as a band and we also were less referential in our songwriting," she says. "It wasn't about having a 'shoegaze' guitar sound on this new one. It was just about songs and having those songs be memorable.

"On Ghost Blonde I was really unaware of any musical revivals or anything like that. I just loved '90s music and I guess it showed through in the production."