Therapy?
Joy
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Therapy? slap us awake with ‘Joy’, inspired by a line from Samuel ‘wreck it like’ Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. So, once again, the band sweeps everything off the desk to start afresh for album sixteen, Hard Cold Fire.
Cairns’ vocal takes the lead, accompanied by a muted riff that soon snarls into life alongside thumping bass and precision energetic drums. ‘Another day, another deadener, another dull routine,’ the song conjures the poetry of ‘The Head That Tried to Stangle Itself’ while elements of the song reference different layers of the highly striated Therapy? back catalogue.
The song has Cleave appeal, reminding us how great that album was. There’s also some High Anxiety rock ‘n’ roll with a One Cure Fits All hypnotic chorus. The sound is thick yet precise – heavy and classy. I love it.
One of the reasons I’ve been enamoured with Therapy? for so long is their lyrics. If this were the 1700s, this would be a band of philosophers. The 1800s would have seen them as romantic poets, hanging out with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Randomness provided us with musicians. In the case of ‘Joy’, the band explained the inspiration alongside the official video:
Joy started with a term from ‘Waiting for Godot’, by Samuel Beckett, this wonderful line: ‘habit is a great deadener’. I just love that word, ‘dead-en-er’. It’s an amazing word. People get themselves into these habits, and the next thing you know, their life is over and they’ve only lived in a very small circle of experience, often through choice, which is scary.
‘Joy’ is a riffy delight, with a jumping chorus with a hypnotic tail. Hard Cold Fire is released on 5th February 2023 through Marshall Records.
Joy Lyrics
Another day
Another deadener
Another dull routine
The same grey ritual
Tethered to the pantomime of Western ennuiAnother day
Another deadener
Another dull routine
The same grey ritual
Tethered to the pantomime of Western ennuiNothing seems to make you happy
Nothing seems to bring you joy
No Joy
No JoyI don’t know
How much you want it
But you want more than you need
I don’t know
How much you want it
But you want it all for freeNothing seems to make you happy
Nothing seems to bring you joy
No Joy
No JoyYou realize
That you’re stuck with what you’vе got
And that noise?
Is the gates of thе dream factory slamming shutNothing seems to make you happy
Nothing seems to bring you joy
Nothing seems to make you happy
Nothing seems to bring you joyNo Joy…
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