On Tuesday, October 28th, Jasamine White-Gluz will perform as NO JOY at Berlin’s 8MM Bar — the band’s only German concert this year.
Since its founding in Montréal in 2009, NO JOY has remained a project defined by sound rather than personality. Early releases such as “Ghost Blonde” (2010) and “Wait to Pleasure” (2013) established a dense, guitar-based style that balanced melody and distortion.
White-Gluz started NO JOY together with guitarist Laura Lloyd. The group gained attention for its combination of shoegaze textures and experimental precision. After Lloyd’s departure following “More Faithful” (2015), White-Gluz continued under the same name, working with changing collaborators and focusing on production.
Her working method has remained consistent: an emphasis on layered sound, precision, and the avoidance of spectacle.
Bugland
The new album “Bugland” (2025), co-produced with Angel Marcloid of FIRE-TOOLZ, expands this approach into a more electronic and rhythm-heavy direction. It combines guitar distortion, synthetic percussion, and sampled elements into compact, high-contrast tracks.
White-Gluz told The Quietus that her move from Montréal to rural Québec influenced this shift: “There’s a trope where you move to the country and your music becomes folk or more organic sounding, but for me it was the opposite. It was so much more maximalist, just because that was what nature was giving me.”
White-Gluz described her approach in several interviews as one of close observation. In Read Range she said: “I was fascinated by all the details; the colors, the grossness, the shapes. Everything is so unique and delicate and purposeful … I tried to connect these things to music.”
She explained to 13th Floor that she tests her mixes by listening in everyday conditions: “We would get in our cars and drive around the countryside listening to the mixes … If you’re skipping or changing the volume in between songs, you gotta go back.” “Bugland” builds on these principles: it is detailed, deliberately overloaded, but tightly organized. The album has been widely praised by critics in North America and Europe as White-Gluz’s strongest work.
For the first time, she has publicly expressed interest in wider recognition. In early October 2025, she encouraged listeners on Facebook to support “Bugland” in the Grammy consideration process for Best Alternative Music Album. In that post she wrote that it felt “strange to imagine something that personal in that system,” adding, “but if people are hearing it, maybe that’s the point.”
Across fifteen years of activity, White-Gluz has avoided the career narrative typical of alternative acts. She works quietly, treats each record as a continuation of the previous one, and rarely appears in public outside her music.
In the same Quietus interview, she said she likes “when sound keeps living after you stop.” The sentence describes the persistence that defines her output — consistent, methodical, and uninterested in image.
The sound is the statement.
Tuesday, October 28th
Doors: 19:00 | Show: 20:45
8MM Bar, Schönhauser Allee 177b, 10119 Berlin
Tickets: available via Resident Advisor
Still from “Bits” video by No Joy
Out now via Hand Drawn Dracula & Sonic Cathedral
