Spanish Love Songs’ “No Joy” contains brutally honest depictions of adulthood and a pop-punk soundtrack to uplift Dylan Slocum’s pessimistic storytelling. The singer wears his heart and vulnerability on his sleeve as he sings about how depression and addiction affect the lives of himself, his peers, and many other individuals in life.
This five-piece from Los Angeles gained a cult following after their 2020 release of “Brave Faces Everyone.” Spanish Love Songs has accompanied The Wonder Years and the Menzingers on tour, which helped them share their 2020 album after the pandemic ended. They also earned some fans by covering The Killers and Jimmy Eat World, which gave the band a chance to show off their creativity, and ultimately got new and old fans excited for their latest album.
There are notes of folk and alternative throughout “No Joy” which sets aside Spanish Love Songs from many of the pop-punk bands that they accompany on tour. Synthesizers and acoustic guitar, along with the fast-tempo songs, help make this album more hopeful sounding than their last album, “Brave Faces Everyone,” which was one of their goals in writing this record. The band has become much more experimental in their instrumental and lyrical composition.
The album starts off strong with the songs “Lifers,” “Pendulum,” and “Haunted.” “Pendulum” starts off without a buildup. The acoustic guitar has a swinging melody that matches the song’s name. The lyrics of the song speak about how hard it is to fall in love and to form a relationship with someone when the narrator has a hard time loving himself. The “pendulum” that the song refers to is the cycle of depression, and the narrator is desperately waiting for his mental state to return to its happier state of mind.
The songs “Haunted” and “Marvel” speak up about how mental health can take over an entire personality; how even though depression and anxiety can be controlled, it is possible to live with them at bay. “Haunted” is hopeful and delicate, lyric wise, but powerful and dynamic with the instrumentation. The song starts with a melody of synthesizer notes and a steady drum beat. The distortion in the guitar gives the chorus an extra umph. Like most Spanish Love Songs, it is relatable, but the singer’s trembling, but never weak voice lets the listeners know that there is always someone that loves them and roots for them during their darkest times.
The album closer “Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse” shares the recent epiphanies belonging to the narrator about the awful state of the world around him. The narrator wants to forget about things such as misleading religious institutions and protests unnecessary violence, and how the solution to a lot of the world’s problems is to solve violence with violence. The repetition of the phrase “We’re a part of the equation” gets repeated several times at the end of the song, which hammers in the idea that in order to help rid the world of its sorrow and dread, it starts with the erasure of ignorance towards these events and occurrences.
Lyrically, the album is not the greatest pick-me-up album for anyone who is struggling with their mental health. It is the perfect album for emotional people who are yearning for something else in life and need a break from adulting for a little over 45 minutes.
