Joyer is the project of brothers Nick and Shane Sullivan who, as we described in a short feature last year, make “richly textured songs […] that draw inspiration from slowcore, 90s-era slacker rock and contemporary bedroom pop.” With two albums and numerous charity compilation contributions (including a song on Late Homework – The Songs of David Berman and a Bernie Sanders benefit they curated themselves) already under their belt, Joyer have carved a niche of their own in what could be considered a crowded field—their bedrock of leaden, lethargic slowcore and imagery-heavy writing skewing things toward the weird.
The pair have been writing on new material since the spring of 2019, and teamed up with producer/engineer Bradford Krieger at his Rhode Island studio to make their third full-length, Sun Into Flies. Continuing along the same path that they tread on last year’s Peeled, the new record again focuses on “climate change, interiority, and the complex relationship between the two,” but does so on an increasingly personal level. Sun Into Flies is preoccupied with this relationship between the personal and the global, how individual mistakes and decisions leak out into the surrounding ecosystem, what Eli Zeger describes in the blurb as “the ways in which greed poisons relationships and, ultimately, the surrounding world.”
Exploring such complex themes is no mean feat, and as with previous releases Joyer achieve it via a combination of atmosphere and imagery. Downbeat melodies and mumbled delivery combine with opaque but evocative writing, conjuring a lingering feeling of disquiet. The band cite filmmakers Luis Buñuel, Harmony Korine and Andrei Tarkovsky as influences, and the startling image of opener ‘Gond’ lives up to the sense of visual spectacle. The ordinary rendered surreal with careful placement and lingering focus.
“Rotten fruit hanging from the ceiling fan
broken glass from the TV,
spill your wine
it’s okay to feel alive”
Sun Into Flies sees Joyer expand their sonic palette too. Tracks like ‘Astray’ and closer ‘Even Here’ embrace poppier sensibilities, standing in contrast to ‘Concrete’ and its laboured, weary progression. There’s even an electronic element, the instrumental ‘Windswept’ glittering as synths shiver and ache behind a menagerie of percussive samples.
‘Forget’ is something of a halfway house, alternating between lulls of morose simplicity reminiscent of early Trace Mountains and relatively heavy rock sections, particularly the hectic catharsis of the opening. This sense of juxtaposition is key to the Joyer sound, and forms the spirit of Sun Into Flies. A record that combines the organic and inorganic, the natural and not, collecting these images and placing them side by side. A record for our time, in fact, a world driven to death by its own mortal fears, nature’s collapse all watched over by machines of loving grace.
The album is released tomorrow (28th August), and we have the pleasure of presenting it in full a day early:
