No Joy share video for Deftones "Teenager" cover.
No Joy, the genre-defying project of Jasamine White-Gluz, has shared a video for their cover of Deftones' "Teenager (From Heaven)" from their upcoming EP, Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven.
"I have never been shy about my love for Deftones. White Pony is one of my favorite records of all time and the track Teenager was proof to me that they were a band bigger than any nu-metal confines they were trapped in. It's such a sensitive and delicate song sequenced right in the center of a very heavy album. We recorded our version completely remotely. Nailah's harp, Tara's lapsteel, and Ouri's experimental cello really capture the emotional feeling I had when I first heard the song as a teenager."
As a companion & contrast to themes presented on both 2020's Motherhood and upcoming EP, White-Gluz was interested in the aesthetic tradition of cinema-verité & youth-directed expression. While the video for the previously released single "Kidder (From Heaven)" was created from the perspective 7-year-old director Sloan, the video for "Teenager (From Heaven)" was directed & shot by 15-year-old Kevin in Arizona.
"I took the videos cause I want something to remember when I grow up. It's always the small moments like skating around with your friends or walking around your high school campus that means the most."
says the video's director.
"It's gonna be really cool when I get older and see these old videos with all my old classmates and friends.''
On 2020's Motherhood, Jasamine White-Gluz's first full-length as a soloist and No Joy’s first album in five years, her guitar returned for a genre-agnostic, maximalist treatise on aging. fertility, family, death, birth, her voice heard loud in the mix, White-Gluz became a commanding force among the many-splendored sounds of trip-hop, trance, nu-metal, dance rock, and, of course, shoegaze, delivered through banjo, vibraphone, scrap metal, slap bass, even kitchen appliances. Who knew chaos could have such lucidity?
Now, White-Gluz’s ever-expansive evolution has brought forth Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven, an EP reanimation of five songs from Motherhood, transformed by new orchestral instrumentalists: an opera singer, a cellist, a harpist, French horn musician.
A close listen to all five songs will reveal the absurdist influences behind the EP: Disney’s 1986 DTV Valentine special, which set tracks like Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel” to classic animation, live reimaginations of ‘90s alt-favorites like Bjork performing “Isobel” with a live orchestra, and inventive instrument expressions of the same era, like steel drums and acoustic guitars on Jane’s Addiction's “Jane Says.”
“Some of those late 90s electronica trip-hop acts involved strings in their live performance. I was interested in that, and with some of them, I was like, ‘Let’s go full Little Mermaid,”
White-Gluz says.
It is unusual, then, that a band called No Joy found inspiration for their latest release in the joys of childhood, on an EP that tackles maternity and bodily limitation, but since when has No Joy been interested in predictability? Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven is an eccentric dream—a visionary concept, delivered with the beauty of an orchestra, punctuated with post-metal. It is alive.
Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven out May 19th via Hand Drawn Dracula (Canada)
and Joyful Noise (ROW).