2011 was a watershed year for The Joy Formidable. The trio, made up of Ritzy Bryan (lead vocals, guitars), Rhydian Dafydd (bass, backing vocals) and Matt Thomas (drums, percussion) released their debut album The Big Roar. The blueprint for their worldview was laid out on that debut album and the live shows, which accompanied it around the globe. As venue sizes increased, the band’s sound developed. Songs were reworked over time and all of that work has come to fruition in their new album, Wolf’s Law.

An unashamedly intricate record, lyrically, the new album touches on politics of both the personal and global type. A case in point is ‘The Leopard And The Lung’: focusing on Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai while ‘Tendons’ is, according to Ritzy, ‘the closest we have ever got to a love song, albeit a very peculiar, fucking love song’.

Initial recording took place in the band’s home of North Wales. The bulk of the album was recorded in a cabin in Portland, Maine in midwinter with snowstorms and drifts of up to 9 foot blocking any contact with the outside world. The extremes of the natural world were bound to play a part. The recording sessions were an enclosure described by Ritzy as like ‘being in our recording bubble with no concept of time or day and night. It gave us the solitude to concentrate fully on the album that wouldn’t have been possible elsewhere’. So it should come as no surprise that the plight of the natural world in an age of rampant consumerism and consumption should make itself felt.

For Rhydian, the very existence of their music and lyrics is the way to engage with these issues:

‘How do you voice your frustration with an ever growing material world, with so much focus on celebrity culture, the trend of simplifying and celebrating one dimensionality because it’s more marketable. For us, it’s to demonstrate through our album, our art, that there are also other ways, other things that are important and be true to our vision’.

With further recording sessions in London and mixing in New York with renowned mixer Andy Wallace (Jeff Buckley, Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana) the flip side to the rural isolation of recording was the atmosphere of two of the world’s most built up commercial cities. Throughout the album the band engage lyrically with their sense that we live in a world where greed and materialism are becoming pervasive but no more so than in ‘Maw Maw Song’, a thundering piece of electronic tinged rock that replicates sonically the sense of over consumption that seems to epitomise elements of the modern world. These lyrical concerns tie into the artwork for the album, commissioned from artist Martin Wittfooth, a Canadian whose recurrent themes are the pressures of human progress on the natural world and the loss of environment in the name of progress.

The band’s reconnection with the natural world was strengthened by an increasing interest in Native American mythology and practice, an area which encompassed the art of Carl Ray and the creature legends that populate American Indian stories. Thus the album title ‘Wolf’s Law’ is both a reference to the wolf, which populates Native American mythology and the medical theory that states stress on a certain body part changes and strengthens that part to cope with the stress. As a one shot of the thinking behind the record it couldn’t be closer, both adapting to new realities and finding a spiritual mindset have been part of this record.

This can be a dangerous path for the modern band, to attempt serious discourse within the confines of (in its widest sense) pop music. To their credit, the band both recognise this and dismiss it. For them, the purpose of The Joy Formidable is to both instigate thought and move heads, considerations of ‘cool’ for cool’s sake’ are far from their minds), Rhydian again:

‘To me, being cool is not about pretending, not worrying about fitting in. As a band we are not going to change ourselves for anyone. All our favourite artists are and were unique, they led the pack, and they didn’t try to follow. Music is a discourse, and we want to challenge people to get involved and invest, to react and feel. We want to be a catalyst.’

‘Wolf’s Law’ is out now through Warner Music.

ENDS