Our recurring Track by Track feature gives artists the chance to break down the inspiration and stories behind each song on their latest release. Today, Joywave’s Daniel Armbruster offers a deep dive into the band’s new album, Cleanse.
Joywave have returned today (February 11th) with their fourth studio album, Cleanse.
Frontman Daniel Armbruster tells Consequence that the story of Cleanse picks up right where the Rochester rock trio’s last album, Possession, left off. Released on March 13th, 2020, it dropped the same day that the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had been on tour in Europe while the virus was spreading there so I knew it was going to be bad,” Armbruster recalls. “I was scared, but I was also actively fighting the idea of writing new music. We had JUST released a record we had spent years making. Everything I had worried about on Possession was coming to fruition at an astonishing rate.”
Despite Armbruster’s best efforts, he wound up in his home studio anyway. “I have always been a ‘music is my therapy’ type of person and eventually I had tried everything else,” he explains. “No one asked me to make another record. It just happened. And unlike albums of the past, we weren’t compiling 40 demos and talking about what songs should make the cut, etc.”
He continues, “A body of work emerged that was a true snapshot of this (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime moment. Reminded of my own mortality by every headline, I began to think about the things I’d want someone to know about me or what advice I’d want to leave behind if this record was the last thing I got to share with the world.”
