Welsh alt-rockers The Joy Formidable have unleashed a powerful comeback single Into The Blue – their first new release in three years. Replete with a pulsating bass line, driving rock guitars and ferocious drums; Into The Blue is an arena-ready statement of intent from the Flint outfit. The Joy Formidable’s sound has never lacked for a sense of scale and ambition, and there’s an added edge of Killersesque desert-rock grandeur here – perhaps linked to the band’s decision to partly relocate to the remote reaches of the Utah in the 2010s.
Lyrically, the track seems to embrace the notion of hurtling headlong into the uncertainty of the future: “Don’t fear the move out of the past/ Let time take your hand and guide you/ It’s time to move/ Into the blue once again.” In an interview with American Songwriter, singer Rhiannon ‘Ritzy’ Bryan noted: “‘Into The Blue’ is about surrendering to love and magic, having the courage to enjoy a new journey and the mystery and excitement of something unexpected. It’s about opening your eyes to beauty and love again, making it to the other side. Whilst not conceived as a metaphor for the times we all live in now, it certainly turned out that way.”
Formed in their native North Wales in 2007, the Joy Formidable burst onto the scene with their debut EP A Balloon Called Moaning (2008), with a first full-length LP following three years later in the shape of aptly-titled The Big Roar. The album repurposed several songs from the debut EP – notably previous singles Austere, Cradle and Whirring – and brought them to a new transatlantic audience, with the record landing at number #8 in the influential Billboard Heatseekers Album Chart in the US. In keeping with the theme of bringing their melodic noise-rock stylings to a new cohort of listeners, later on in 2011 the group’s track Endtapes made its way onto the soundtrack for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, appearing alongside hit singles from the likes of Bruno Mars (It Will Rain) and Christina Perri (A Thousand Years).
Two further Joy Formidable records would follow in Wolf’s Law (2013) and Hitch (2016), with each LP enjoying scaling the top 20 of the US Billboard Alternative Charts. The band’s fourth and most recent album AAARTH (a stylised version of the Welsh translation of ‘bear’ – ‘arth’) arrived in 2018, spawning two new singles in Dance of the Lotus and The Wrong Side.
The LP was well-received, with Glide Magazine hailing its “aggressive collection of pulse-pounding hard rock that deftly combines raw power with melodic hooks”, while DIY called it a statement album “of compositional daring and fierce experimentation.” Elsewhere the Indiecator wrote “By the time ‘Hitch’ was released, the Joy Formidable already felt like a multifaceted band. They could repeatedly blow your speakers, show off some totally unexpected rhythms, and even occasionally take things down a notch. ‘AAARTH’ takes all of these skills and stretches them even further towards their breaking point, once again showing the band’s dexterity. With something for everyone, it might not satisfy all listeners all the time, but its new reaches and complexities show that the Joy Formidable have earned their place as one most intriguing indie rock bands out there.“
