As you might expect, it was with great joy that It’s All Happening heard the news that The Joy Formidable would be releasing their sophomore album. Having spent the last couple of years gathering rock celebrity fans with their intense and angsty music, they are back with Wolf’s Law, an absolutely stunning album, full of celestial grandeur and mountainous brutality.
Things kick off in traditional Joy Formidable style, with swirling orchestral sounds and crashing drums, bubbling up to an impressive and dizzy beginning in the form of This Ladder Is Ours. Second track Cholla was released as a teaser back in 2012, and its spectacularly fiery riffs and mixture of tempos and temperaments were not deceptive. The Maw Maw Song is an earworm if I have ever heard one, it’s syncopated beat and twang compulsive rollicking along, its dominant riff simplistic yet powerful. Coming just after the slower Silent Treatment, it marks the start of side 2, as the artistic packaging informs us. A beautiful end to the album comes in the form of The Turnaround, an immensely epic, brooding, yet unsentimental song, foreboding and formidable.
Ritzy, Matt and Rhydian have done it again.