No Joy's ceaseless sonic shifts are a testament to frontwoman and principal songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz's insatiable desire to evolve. The Montréal-based project began a decade ago with riffs exchanged via email; subsequent albums displayed a penchant for delay-saturated jangle, industrial distortion, and sludgy drones over disco beats. Feeling too reliant on her main instrument, White-Gluz ditched the guitars and turned to modular electronic sounds for a 2018 EP composed with Sonic Boom (Pete Kember of Spacemen 3).
For No Joy's first full album in five years, White-Gluz took what she had learned from synthesis back to the guitars and produced an album that is not a departure from No Joy's early shoegaze, but a stylistic expansion that flows into trip hop, trance and nu-metal. Motherhood is the result of years of composing outside their comfort zone and a return to DIY recording with an improved production skill.