ILLUSTRATION BY RAF SPIELMAN
Mope Grooves’ Joy was one of 2017’s most beautiful and necessary albums. Despite its title, it isn’t exactly a cheery record, but it’s infused with a weird kind of enervated bliss, and perfectly captures the feeling of crawling out of depression, of starting to remember what light and life are like. It’s beautiful because it’s true. It’s necessary because it makes the violence of depression seem bearable, maybe even beatable.
In the liner notes accompanying the Portland band’s wonderful follow-up, Vanished, Mope Grooves founder and chief songwriter Stevie Pohlman writes that her second album is more “honest” than Joy because it is “a load of melted doll parts I have no control over.”