No Joy & Fire-Tooz – “Barking At The Sun”

In 1983, Ozzy Osbourne released Bark At The Moon, the album where he's on the cover looking like a werewolf. That was awesome, and you couldn't ask for a better twist on the whole Ozzy thing. Yesterday, the Montreal fuzz-pop auteur No Joy dropped a new track called "Barking At The Sun." I don't think she was necessarily trying to flip that Ozzy title, but the inversion still makes sense, at least to me.

No Joy teamed up with experimental Chicago producer Fire-Toolz to make her excellent album Bugland last year, and then Fire-Toolz recently released her own opus Lavender Networks. Next month, No Joy will follow Bugland with the three-song EP Big Life, Big Leaf, which she once again co-produced with Fire-Toolz. We've already posted the title track, and it was gorgeous. The EP's opener "Barking At The Sun" is another piece of dazed, ecstatic beauty, with some characteristically loony Fire-Toolz touches like DJ scratches and double-bass judders. Ozzy wasn't even using those! Here's what No Joy says about the song:

This song is driving through empty corn fields with the windows down on the first warm days of spring. During the last solar eclipse, I drove my car to the fields and watched the sun disappear and reappear, feeling like it was both the beginning and the end of the world.

This was the first song Angel [Marcloid] and I worked on after Bugland. The song grew out of a very old demo where I played around with Drop C guitar tunings. With this opening guitar riff, I collaged bits and pieces of other demos together to make a patchwork of a song. Angel then took that into her world and made it more technicolor. 

Check out the Jeremy Dabrowski-directed "Barking At The Sun" video below.

The Big Life, Big Leaf EP is out 8/21 on Hand Drawn Dracula.