Let the noise crawl in -- Bugland is nature's glitchy gorgeous breakdown.
Over a decade into her sonic evolution, Montreal's Jasamine White-Gluz, better known as No Joy, delivers her most ambitious and genre-melting record to date with Bugland. If past records hinted at a desire to escape shoegaze's hazy confines, Bugland breaks the door down entirely. It's experimental, disorienting, occasionally serene and frequently overwhelming -- in the best possible way.
With the concept of nature, noise and memory, Bugland is rooted in White-Gluz's move from the urban sprawl of Montreal to the insect-rich rural quiet of Quebec. But this isn't a pastoral record in any traditional sense -- it's a chaotic, textural soundscape that mimics the tactile weirdness of the natural world.
"What guitar distortion is crumbly like soil?" White-Gluz asks -- and Bugland tries to answer in every track.
Bugs here aren't just creatures -- they're metaphors, sonic colors, mood triggers. The result is a record that treats sound like dirt, like chitin, like wings beating against fluorescent lights.
"Bather in the Bloodcells" sets the tone early with its subdued vocals and synthetic textures. A pulsing bassline leads the charge while programmed, robotic sound fragments creep across the edges. There's a sense of unease here -- like a radio transmission from a place that's half-organic, half-machine.
"Garbage Dream House" is one of the album's more haunting cuts. Here, robotic tones drift like broken radio signals, paired with faint alarms that suggest some distant emergency. It's eerie but captivating -- like wandering into a dream that can't be fully remembered.
"I Hate That I Forgot What You Look Like" is a slow, spectral standout. Vocal effects -- something like a talk box inside of a glass orb -- float above a droning bed of sound, while drums emerge halfway through like a heartbeat returning. It's a meditation on absence, rendered with cybernetic sensitivity.
Bugland doesn't just blur genre lines -- it dismantles them entirely, reshaping No Joy's identity in the process. It's messy, erratic and deliberately uneven, but that unpredictability is exactly what makes it so compelling. Think of it as a sonic terrarium -- buzzing with life, distortion and decay. Whether one is drawn to the comfort of shoegaze or the chaos of digital experimentation, Bugland rewards those willing to wade through the weird and let the noise crawl under their skin.