SPANISH LOVE SONGS

“I pitched this new album to the band as a group of love songs,” laughs SPANISH LOVE SONGS singer/guitarist Dylan Slocum. “They immediately said, ‘You’re so full of shit.’”

Despite their name, the LA-formed indie-punk band aren’t known for forays into the uplifting. Since 2013, the quintet have instead made hay on the backs of a string of beloved albums – 2015’s Giant Sings The Blues, 2018’s Schmaltz and 2020’s Brave Faces Everyone – lauded by critics and fans alike for their richly personal, no-holds-barred lyricism awash in existential dead, hyper-personal cultural ruminations and attempts to

answer life’s big questions.

So when presented with NO JOY, their fourth full-length and second for Pure Noise Records, it’s easy to understand the reaction of Slocum’s bandmates – at first blush, its title alone another rain cloud in a sky of perpetual impending doom. But for all its foreshadowing, the LP actually marks, in its own unique way, the most joyous collection of material Spanish Love Songs have ever released.

“Every record is a reaction to the previous one,” Slocum says. “I imagine people thinking, ‘If they were pissed off before the pandemic, imagine how angry the songs are going to be now!’ I can yell at the world for being awful, but that’s not going to change anything when the people I love are dying.”

It’s these sorts of professions from Spanish Love Songs – whether they’re rallying the broken healthcare system or simply trying to show up for those they love – that have endeared them to an ever-growing worldwide fanbase, bolstered by powerful live performances with bands like The Wonder Years and Rise Against and profiles in Kerrang and Alternative Press.

Brimming with new wave pastiche, fluttering synths, shimmering walls of chorus guitar, and four-on-the-floor rhythms, No Joy isn’t an exclamation point follow-up to the emotional catharsis of the landmark Brave Faces Everyone as much as it is an exhale –

the sound of Slocum, his wife and keyboardist Meredith Van Woert, guitarist Kyle McAulay, bassist Trevor Dietrich, and drummer Ruben Duarte finding peace in quieter moments and embracing the negative space.

“This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to figuring out how to translate what I hear in my head with more clarity,” Slocum says.

Songs like first single “Haunted” carry the saltwater-kissed vignetting of an Asbury Park summer, awash in Boss-inspired nostalgia and percussive acoustic guitar that build to some of the band’s biggest hooks yet – while not losing an ounce of Slocum’s razor- sharp storytelling that Kerrang hailed as “bruised but big-hearted songs, filled with humanity yet also with subject matter hewn from life’s darker edges.”