Jools

Violent Delights, the debut album from UK punk collective JOOLS, ends exactly where it begins. “These violent delights have violent ends,” sings co-vocalist Kate Price on both the album opener ‘The Pleasures’ and its climactic, curtain-dropping title track. “And violently you’ll see, nobody decides it’s over for me, but me.” It’s an echo that bookends Violent Delights by deliberate, poignant design. “Those words encapsulate everything we’re saying on the album,” Price explains. “We’ve always known exactly who we are, and whatever has been thrown at us in our lives, we’ve always known where it is we’re going. Those words don’t just define the story of Violent Delights. They define JOOLS.” JOOLS – comprised of Price, co-vocalist Mitch Gordon, guitarists Chris Johnston and Callum Connachie, bassist Joe Dodd and drummer Chelsea Wrones – has been a name on the lips of clued-up fans and tastemakers since its collective of musicians found each other in the earliest days of 2023. Quickly gaining a reputation for their cathartic, unpredictable and specular live performances, the band have been consistently championed by BBC Radio One, including two ‘Tune of the Week’ placements on Daniel P Carter’s esteemed Rock Show. Recent single ‘Guts’ – the world’s first glimpse into Violent Delights – was supported by leading tastemakers at Kerrang! and DIY, the later celebrating the track as an “extravaganza of sound” from a band “who have morphed beautifully into something very special”. Violent Delights, described by Price as a concept record, tells the individual and collective stories that have brought JOOLS to this moment in time. It’s an anthology of stories that meanders through themes of grief, rage, desire and identity. There are stories of the toxicity of addiction (‘Dunoon’) and growing up around religion (‘Mother Monica’); stories of overwhelming obsession (‘Limerence’) and isolating abandonment (‘Violent Delights’). There are empowering anthems of identity (‘Cardinal’) and stark laments about sexual violence (‘97%’). They are each lived experiences, laid bare, reclaimed with every syllable whether dripping in spite or swagger, anger or anxiety. That duality is a central feature of both album and band, whose live experience was once described to the sextet by one onlooker as leaving you unsure whether you are about to be kicked in the face or kissed on the cheek. ‘The Pleasures’ speaks of “the delicious and demonic together”; the album’s title track of the “bestial and celestial”. JOOLS is the embodiment of such contrasts. Price and Gordon’s disparate yet interwoven vocals – Gordon describes their collective style, somewhere close to spoken word, as “like a conversation between twopeople; there are parts that we come together in support of one another, a form of protection, but then there are tangents we each disappear on our own paths” – delivering both harmony and contradiction; a sense of control, as Gordon says, and for Price, a frantic lack thereof, where the expelling of long-held emotions is as suffocating as it is liberating. “We are all of these things, and more,” Price says. “I have always loved the Walt Whitman quote: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ We’re showing ourselves at our very best and our very worst. But everything we say is authentic and real. The topics we write about demand and deserve that. We couldn’t write any other way.” It’s a truth that informs Violent Delights’ variegated sonic style, too. The album was recorded across two week-long stints at Southampton's The Ranch studio in August and December of 2024, with Lewis Johns helming production and mixing duties. “He’s a man who just gets JOOLS, which is no mean feat,” says Price in tribute to their collaborator. “It was really important to us that if Kate and I were going to have freedom with our lyrics, then we as a band had to have a freedom to our sound that represented everyone,” Gordon says. “I feel that making Violent Delights helped us understand ourselves better than we ever have.” When pressed, JOOLS may identify as a punk band – in its truest sense that punk is a mentality, rather than a sound – but Violent Delights equally lends from the worlds of metal, rap, post-hardcore and hip-hop as much as it does the post-punk of its surface layer. Gordon and Price are as likely to point to Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy and Amyl & The Sniffers as influences on the record as they are to Little Simz and The Streets’ Mike Skinner. “We don’t necessarily look at music in sounds or structures,” nods Gordon. “Instead we look for attitudes.” The attitude of Violent Delights, Gordon notes, is confrontational – be it towards someone or something. ‘Cardinal’ draws on his own experiences of “being looked at in every room I’ve ever walked into” in its unapologetic celebration of embracing your truest and purest identity. “I’m piss wet through with Boulash spirit,” swaggers Gordon’s vocal, an ode to the drag queen Bimini Bon Boulash. “You might have the loudest bark, but a boy with bangs bites harder.” ‘Live Deliciously’, meanwhile, metaphorically reframes an internalised war between the masculine and feminine as a cowboy bar brawl, playfully opening with the lyric “With a fist I’ll kiss every inch of you the sun missed.” “It's an album about being challenging and curious,” Gordon says. “At face value, this record could read like a tragedy, but I want it to feel like a celebration. It’s about confronting tragedy.” He points to ‘Dunoon’, perhaps his most personally harrowing moment on the record, in which he relives the pain of growing up in the shadow of alcoholism. “I don’t want people to hear that song and feel sorryfor me,” he says. “I want people to hear that song and find it empowering enough to share their own experiences, and find some connection and recovery in that.” He looks, too, to ‘Knee Injury’ – one of the band’s earliest demos, the track served as both a precursor to and creative direction for the thematic concept of Violent Delights. “I’ll define this moment or this moment will define me,” he spits on a song, the writing of which he reflects “allowed me to breathe again”. “Cover me in shit, I’ll come up smelling like roses.” “Loss is a central theme of the album,” Price continues. “For us, we have our own specific version of what that is in these songs, but for anyone listening, it could be the loss of something else – a loved one, a relationship. But we’re never mourning loss. We’re celebrating it. Loss is almost universally looked at as a negative, but we’re finding the positives in those moments. We had to go through hell to get to heaven. Violent Delights is about looking back with gratitude, and even fondness, the closing of one chapter and beginning of another.” On the evidence of Violent Delights, it’s one that for JOOLS promises to be nothing short of thrilling. —-- JOOLS is Kate Price (vocals), Mitch Gordon (vocals), Chris Johnston (guitar), Callum Connachie (guitar), Joe Dodd (bass) and Chelsea Wrones (drums).