Joywave’s vocalist Daniel Armbruster speaks with Atwood Magazine about the band’s journey over the past decade and a half in light of their latest album, ‘Permanent Pleasure’!
Stream: ‘Permanent Pleasure’ – Joywave
Joywave’s first tracks were produced on a laptop with a singular microphone in vocalist Daniel Armbruster’s parents’ basement. Armbruster and his bandmates, Joseph Morinelli (guitar) and Paul Brenner (drums), found each other through their mutual love of music in their mutual hometown of Rochester, New York. Permanent Pleasure, the band’s fifth studio album, was released May 17, almost 15 years after the band’s first single streamed on Spotify.
Armbruster, whose signature shaggy hair, mustache, and thick-rimmed glasses have been abiding features since 2011, says not much has changed in terms of the band’s album-making process since those early days. With a few extra microphones and a real studio to work in, Joywave show that, while change and Armbruster’s mustache remain life’s only constants, they certainly know how to create an album that is perfectly of the moment.
Permanent Pleasure is introduced by a recording of the 1984 mayor of Rochester, Mr. Tom Ryan, from the city’s sesquicentennial celebration. The politician shares his hopes that the upcoming musical journey “fosters a spirit of working together to make Rochester a truly great city.” Armbruster found the 150th anniversary vinyl featuring “The Mayor,” as Armbruster has endearingly refers to him, in a thrift store during the pandemic. He flips the phone camera on our Zoom call to show me the record’s black and white cover with “Our Spirit Shows” splashed across the middle in red, white and blue font.
“The compositions are silly,” he says. “Some of these were actually written in the 1800s. So, some of the songs are more playable in public than others.” He grins as he continues, “but it’s a time capsule, right? It’s baked into the first song, ‘Graffiti Planet,’ very deliberately.”
Armbruster is fascinated by the age-old dichotomy between those who hate change and those who fight their entire lives for it.
“People seem to forget that none of their marks are permanent, like, the entire world is an illegal graffiti wall,” he explains. “So you get here, you say, your piece, and suddenly, somebody else is behind you. And they’re writing some shit that you don’t like.”
The band uses The Mayor to underline reality, playing into the fact that, while Mr. Ryan used to be the guy running Rochester, he is now largely forgotten – just like we all will be one day. “Put on the final touch (cover up, cover up, cover up, cover up, cover up), yeah, somebody’s watching me from behind,” Armbruster sings, inviting the listener to embrace the freedom that comes with accepting the ever-swinging pendulum of history.
The Mayor appears again on the album’s aptly titled concluding track, “Here To Perform The Final Song From Their Album ‘Permanent Pleasure,’ Please Welcome… Joywave.”
“I like to give people the keys in the title,” Armbruster laughs, “the song is directly to-camera.” The song was inspired by a bucket list performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert a few years back. In his late teens and early twenties, Armbruster worked at Staples before Joywave saw any sort of material success. Rochester, while home to a “unique and varied cultural history,” is no music industry hub.
“We didn’t know anybody. We don’t have family in the music business or rich parents,” Armbruster says. “We felt really alone and isolated, making the kind of music we wanted to make.” During those defining days, he would sit on his parent’s couch after his shift and watch The Colbert Report, forgetting reality and finding humor if only for a half hour. “So playing The Late Show, it was a really big deal for me,” he admits. “And realizing I was inside the TV that night for my younger self is kind of the perspective, but so much of this record highlights how far we’ve come.”
The remainder of the album is stylistically eclectic, with some songs that make good company for a sunny mid-afternoon walk and others that set the tone for bedtime rituals. Among Armbruster’s favorites is “Scared,” an indie rock heavy track that blends rhythmic guitars with dynamic verses:
I wanna touch you but I’m scared
I really love you though I swear
I had another nightmare
Covered in sweat and unprepared
“Swimming in the Glow” marries similarly upbeat melodies with an earworm of a chorus, playing on the Gen-Z favorite phrase, “when you know, you know” (see: TikTok favorite “Margaret” by Lana Del Rey and Bleachers). “787 Dreamliner” leans into Joywave’s more polished, electronic side, with groovy beats and pronounced percussion. The lyrics paint a picture of a celestial fever dream, with Armbruster finding himself on a foreign jet with “Aircraft exit information in French, non merci / Detailed instructions on the card written in Japanese.” The track is perfect for a late-night apartment party, or spicing up your nighttime skincare routine – I can picture the lead in an indie film dancing to the tune in front of her bathroom mirror while brushing her teeth.
Armbruster and I spend a good amount of time diving into “He’s Back!” The song is his first musical attempt at unpacking his religious upbringing and current relationship with Christianity. “My parents took me to church, and I grew up on a lot of those stories,” he says. “What that has turned into in this country is like, the opposite of what I took away from those stories when I was a kid.” Throughout the track, Armbruster describes a hyper-American second coming of Christ, singing, “Jesus Christ is back again, two for one on fish and bread at the Olive Garden tonight.”
He’s quick to clarify that he is not making fun of religion itself, but of those that completely misunderstand it. “I’ve never brought that perspective into a song or a Joywave record before,” he states, “but I think it’s really important to get upset when you see crazy from your own corner” – he reconsiders for a moment before continuing – “or maybe not your own corner, but a place that you know and understand.”
Armbruster will be the first to tell you that he’s no expert on religion, but he has noticed a marked shift in many Americans’ interpretation of the Bible. “Magical, history,” he sings, “Generate what I need / Magical, history / Accommodate my belief.”
Permanent Pleasure feels different from previous Joywave albums.
The band spent a long time making this record – probably the longest they’ve spent on any album, Armbruster postulates – revising, editing, and taking much needed breaks. “I think the more breaks you take, the better,” he says. “You need to go away from it and come back and then you see it clearer every time. It’s like a shower idea that comes to you because you’re just letting your brain wander.” When asked to distill the work into just one sentence, Armbruster responds stoically, “I have noticed, and I feel.”
He elaborates upon request, explaining that some previous records fall under “I notice,” while others fall solely under, “I feel.” He does his best to fight the urge to get hung up on perfection and have fun with the process, pointing to the likelihood that there will always be another album (until there isn’t). The greatest obstacle to recording Permanent Pleasure, he admits playfully, was figuring out where to eat lunch each day. We then veer off on a tangent discussing decision fatigue and the merits of a dating app style food delivery service where you can swipe left or right on meal options (patent pending on the latter), before returning to Armbruster’s philosophy on his life’s work.
“Each album is like a CT scan of your artistic insides,” Armbruster says. “Or like a polaroid of your career.”
I probe him further on the CT scan comparison, asking him to pinpoint major differences between a scan of the band in high school and a scan taken today. “I think the doctors would be very concerned because there would be a lot of growth,” he comes back quickly. “People can decide if it’s good growth or bad growth, but it’s there to cut out,” he continues. “Yeah, it’s there.”
As we wrap up our conversation, Armbruster takes me back to his vinyl cabinet, where he shows me the record for Permanent Pleasure. The vinyl is accompanied by a cat figurine that is meant to be placed over the center label and spin as the record plays. “I find, you know, we’re thinking all the time. And it can be very exhausting,” he says, walking diagonally across the room as he continues his thought. “And I’m sitting and scrolling and getting more and more upset. And then I look at this guy right here,” he says as he pans the camera to his actual cat. “And I think, ‘how can I be like that?’”
With well over a decade of experience in the music industry, Daniel Armbruster has come to the realization that, while it’s important to try to make the world a better place, sometimes it’s okay to be the cat sitting in the sunbeam. The cat, still in the camera’s view, stretches to a crescent shape, absorbing heaps of sunlight in its black fur. Armbruster looks at his beloved pet as he throws around the notion of becoming permanent pleasure.
“You know what?” he says, “I’m just going to let go. I’m going to be more like that too.”
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Watch: “Permanent Pleasure” | A Film by Joywave
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© Grant Spanier 🖼 © Reuben Dangoor
© Grant Spanier
🖼 © Reuben DangoorPermanent Pleasure
an album by Joywave
