Album Review: ‘Swish’

Joywave releases new album ‘Swish’

By: Ashley Moor

Label: Cultco Music/Hollywood Records

Release Date: March 11, 2016

Rating: 5/5

When Joywave released How Do You Feel Now? in 2015, I thought that it was pure magic. With songs like “Tongues” and “Somebody New” on the record, they were keeping audiences all over the world dancing and thinking “wow.. this is good.” Admittedly I had never heard of this band before the album was released early last year, but they had two perfectly good albums released in the few years leading up to the album that made them famous. I officially joined the Joywave bandwagon when I saw them perform live at the New Orleans Voodoo Fest in October. These guys were charming and nerdy in such a cool way – sort of like the Black Keys. You could tell that these were the guys who ditched parties in college to create beats in the basement of their mom’s house. And man, Joywave has some amazing beats.

In the past few months, Joywave released a few singles that eluded to the fact that all of the songs on the album sounded the same – or, to be precise, they actually are the same. It turns out that every song on the album begins the same way, remixed and altered to sound just a little different than the others. The original song is amazing – or I guess what you could consider to be the original song, “Destruction”. It’s also important to notice that the track list basically spells it out for us:
1. Destruction
2. Why
3. Be
4. Credible
5. When
6. You
7. Can
8. Be
9. Incredible?
10. Life in a Bubble I Blew
This move is undoubtedly arrogant – and so genius. Joywave has taken the power that we have given them as artists and thrown it back in our faces with this album. Is this the album to play when you’re hanging out on a Friday night? Maybe not – but it does give us something to think about. I think it’s incredible.

Listen here