“I can be sweet as candy” is the opening line on Joyer’s latest EP, I See Forward and Back. The delivery is timid but sincere, like most of the gentle vocals on the project, maintaining a warmth throughout the three track stringing of hazy, slowcore melodies and contorted soundscapes. I See Forward and Back is both an extension of Nick and Shane Sullivan’s fifth album, Night Songs, and an entity entirely its own. Though unified as a collection of songs conceived in late hours, where Night Songs toys with catchy pop hooks and vocal-centered tracks, I See Forward and Back strips down to the themes of Joyer’s earlier work, with gentle vocals drowning in and out of an abraded, DIY production.

Along with offering a more home cooked annex to Night Songs, I See Forward and Back highlighted Joyer’s range as multidisciplinary artists. The brother duo strung all three songs into one video, a collaging of black and white clips. Akin to the EP’s sound, the visuals are texture heavy, ranging from the soft print of a thumb to brutalist scenes of a scrapyard.  

Recently, the ugly hug caught up with Joyer to discuss their tour, the power of shelving projects, and I See Forward and Back. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Manon Bushong: Your EP, I See Forward and Back contains songs that were written in the early stages of your album Night Songs. Do you often revisit music once you’ve fleshed out a project, and how does that distance affect how you feel about your work, and what you want to do with it? 

Nick Sullivan: I guess it’s kind of new for us. I feel like we let songs hang for a while, a lot of times we won’t really go back to them. A lot of these songs started with Shane, so I feel like he could speak to the distance. 

Shane Sullivan: I started writing them a while ago and shelved them because I never really expected them to go anywhere, but I always really liked them. It was unique to revisit them, and it was cool to have Nick jump in and add new ideas, like a bunch of cool percussion that I hadn’t thought about when I was initially writing them. It definitely was a new process for us, but I’m glad we did it and might be something that we continue to try to do just because I tend to write something, but then my attention span is kind of short and I move on to the next thing. It was a cool exercise, forcing myself to revisit and put out older stuff. 

MB: There’s also a visual element to this project, you put all of the songs all together for one video. What was the process for that and what made you want to pick those three songs specifically? 

SS: Honestly, I started working on these as a part of a class project back when I was in college. I was always interested in doing a visual EP, or a visual component to a collection of songs. I was in a class where I had to make a video, and at that point I was realizing how much I liked making music, so I would come up with any excuse to write music and songs for other projects I had to. So it started as a class project, but I ended up really liking the songs and the video work and I felt it was really interesting having them inform each other. I hadn’t done anything like that before, so it was a really fun way of making something –  sitting on it and releasing it all these years later gives me a new appreciation for them.

Further on the topic of visuals, the EP’s cover art has a bull/cow, similar to Night Songs, but the image is also a bit simpler and in black and white. What was the story behind the cover art for I See Forward and Back, and how it ties to Night Songs?

SS: I think we definitely wanted to highlight the link between this EP and Night Songs since it’s an extension of it. So similar imagery, it’s a still from the video – our grandma had a painting that I shot little fragments of. I remembered that being a frame that I really liked, and felt suited the songs, and also matched the album art of Night Songs. So we just wanted to highlight that link, since this was all birthed out of the Night Songs songwriting process.

MB: So these were all collectively part of the writing process for Night Songs, but while it is an extension, it also feels like its own body of work, and I think that a lot of that comes from different production styles. How did you go about production differently, and how do you think that it affected the overall feel?

SS: I feel like it’s a fun glimpse into how we approach the songwriting process because we usually demo a bunch at home, and the songs change a lot in the studio. Usually we’ll write a ton of songs and then pick a solid 15-ish to bring to the studio, and then from there cut it down to 10 to 12. These were ones we liked the way they sounded lo-fi, but in the past when we’ve tried to bring songs that we like lo fi into the studio, it doesn’t really capture what we were going for originally. It made me kind of nervous because it is a little bit more vulnerable, but I thought it would be something cool to highlight the home-recorded and stripped down nature of where our songs usually begin. Another thing about Night Songs is we recorded close to 20 songs, even though it ended up being 12, and there were a lot of different styles of songwriting within those 20. I think we ended up picking the track list that we have now because that was what fit, so it’s interesting to me because the whole album could have sounded more like this EP, and it’s cool to see what it could have been if we went forward with that. 

MB: I know you explored some new sounds on Night Song, how has it been playing that album live? Do you think you’re going to incorporate some of these off the EP in your touring as well? 

NS: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. I feel like Night Songs is way more fun to play live than some of our older stuff, so we’ve been really enjoying it. It’s louder and faster but also has some quieter moments. We will hopefully include the songs off the EP into our live set eventually – we never really thought about it, so a day or two ago, before we left for a tour, we were like ‘damn I guess we should have gotten those ready’. They’re a bit trickier because they’re so stripped down, and have a lot of ambient noises interlaced within them. It’s like a fun puzzle for us to figure out how to make live versions. We’re just excited to get on the road again, we’re touring with some of our favorite bands, so, I think it’ll be a blast. 

You can now stream I See Forward and Back and Night Songs on all platforms as well as purchase a cassette of Night Songs here via Hit the North Records

Written by Manon Bushong | Featured Photo by Juliette Boulay