[Cover photo credit to Olivia Luz Perillo]

New Orleans-based multi-disciplinary artist jess joy has released her new LP, Won’t Be Kicked Out The Garden, via Joyful Noise Recordings. She has also shared new single “dreams,” as well as a video for the track. On the new song, joy asks: “Do we possess, or are we possessed?” She will be playing a record release show in New Orleans on June 8th, 2025.

Produced by Greg Saunier, the new album discusses “holding onto love in a world on edge.” The album follows the concept of an original sin and our narrator, joy, is “possessed by chaos and impulses of the id—she is/they are the rebel child expelled from paradise, the fallen angel.” 

A description of the album includes:

“joy dips in and out of fantasies, fragments into sparring personalities, goes on a discordant bender in Berlin, glides on the heels of saxophones, takes a folk-baroque flight to the moon, and wrestles with dying synthesizer dreams before being called back to Earth by kin, where the only way to return to one’s body is through feeling the pain of grief. There, joy is faced with the trial of re-membering love before the world was split by the binary of good and evil. Your author is inspired by the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.‘”

Since their solo debut in 2023, jess joy has released two albums. Patreearchy, which examines the “roots and fruits” of patriarchy, then Sourceheiress, a visual album she directed and released in 2023, which tells a story of reclaiming her power and spirituality. The music was a collaboration with producer and instrumentalist Mike Byrne (ex Smashing Pumpkins). 

Produced and mixed by Greg Saunier of Deerhoof (save the vocals and three songs produced by joy), the album was made with main collaborators Laura Fisher and Alex Brownstein, who traveled to Tucson to record with Saunier.