Some recent music industry analysis revealed plenty of stark truths about its new model.
Firstly, physical sales are no longer necessarily the key to success; the numbers for 2021’s best-selling album of the year to date – Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour – were more than 80% streaming derived.
Secondly, as listening habits change and late adopters join in via their smart speakers, ‘Catalogue’ (that means old) outfits litter the top end of the charts, as many reach for the comfort blanket of familiarity.
All in all, that means if you’re not fresh faced or weren’t ever on Top Of The Pops back in the day then you need to fight harder than ever before to make your voice heard.
For The Joy Formidable this has meant doing more with less, setting the TJF Music Club up in 2018 – a scheme which gives fans access to exclusive music, online shows, the purpose, ‘forging part of a much-needed new culture of direct artist support’. In the wake of the eighteen-month moratorium on playing live, it’s looked like a particularly shrewd decision.
Into The Blue is their first album in three years following 2018’s self-released, politicised AARTH; originally formed in Wales, singer/guitarist Ritzy, bass player Rhydian Dafydd and drummer Matthew Thomas have subsequently relocated to Utah.
The last few years of existing in the grey space between marginal success whilst still needing to create inspired the album’s title and much of its turbo-guitared thrust, a renewal of purpose which sees them skating through moods, in the process rediscovering the energy that made their debut The Big Roar so viscerally great.
Most importantly of all, they’re playing with a sense of freedom: opener Into The Blue is about pushing off from safety into something out of control, that can’t be planned, with riffs casually piled on top of each other in layers much like the Wolf Alice of years ago.
Elsewhere, Gotta Feed My Dog finds Bryan in retreat from a destructive relationship, whispering, ‘And I make it for myself, I will find you blown like snow/’cause nothing settles this far away from home’, whilst itchy grunge and squalls of feedback damn it all to some unspecified hell.
It would be difficult to live surrounded by some of the natural artscapes of her adopted home without being affected by them, and this manifests itself most directly on Interval, where the singer channels the perma-shifting background of the Coral Pink Sand Dunes into an escape from the shackles of self-limiting beliefs and negativity within.
Meanwhile, the righteous throb of Sevier is named after a local river, the choice to go with the flow and maybe drown or try to burst its banks; without apology, there’s meaning everywhere.
If some of this comes across as being all too new age for a rock n’ roll band, the counter is that Into The Blue is as packed with tunes as it is good advice; Chimes does everything but, closer Left Too Soon is an epic, pounding encore waiting to happen and Farrago has all the sex and sleaze of The Kills, a slapped face of an anthem that threatens to eat its compatriots whole.
Regeneration, re-evaluation, rejuvenation; The Joy Formidable have looked the music industry’s latest raw deal in the eye and come out fighting, telling us who they are and proud of what they do.
Into The Blue deserves to be heard in person, the plectrum scraping down your back, rather than transported by some zeroes and ones that don’t care about the love it was made with.