No Joy / Sonic Boom – “Slorb”
After touring No Joy’s 2015 album More Faithful, Jasamine White-Gluz felt like she had to explore something different next. That impetus led to her collaborating with Sonic Boom, aka Peter Kember of Spacemen 3. The two traded ideas back and forth between their respective homes in Montreal and Portugal, which eventually came together into a self-titled EP. We’ve already heard one track from the EP — the throbbing, deconstructed synthpop of “Obsession.” Today, the duo returns with another preview in the form of the memorably-titled “Slorb.”
Like with other material from the EP, the track began with White-Gluz working with a vocal melody and synths before sending it off to Kember, who crafted a dense atmosphere around it. Here’s what White-Gluz had to say about the track:
The song was influenced by 90s trip hop such as Sneaker Pimps and was written mostly in laptop while on tour in Europe in 2016. Influences include: not sleeping because you are on a long tour and the drives are crazy, using your voice as a main instrument instead of relying on volume or guitars, and that weird time of year when it’s almost spring but in Montreal you never know if it might snow again.
Fittingly, “Slorb” has the amorphous feeling of something on the cusp of something else. Compared to the pulse of “Obsession,” “Slorb” is a ghostly and ruminative piece of music. White-Gluz’s layered vocals wrap around each other in spectral tendrils, all of it underpinned by aqueous beats and synth textures. Check it out below.
No Joy / Sonic Boom is out 3/30 via Joyful Noise Recordings. Pre-order it here.