No Joy, Hawaii, and the Warm Hum of Nothing in Particular
No Joy make the kind of noise-pop that Montreal seems to produce almost by accident—guitars dissolving into each other at low speed, vocals buried somewhere beneath layers of reverb and distortion, the whole thing hovering between disorientation and a strange, comfortable warmth. Their track Hawaii doesn’t deliver on the name’s tropical promise, which is precisely the point. There’s nothing sunny here, just a thick pleasant haze and the vague sensation that something beautiful is happening just beyond the range of clear perception. Their best work functions less as music you listen to and more as a texture you exist inside for a while, and Hawaii is that.