JuJu released their fifth album, Apocalypse Is God’s Spoiler on March 15th, 2024 via Manchester’s based label Sister 9 Recordings, celebrating it with a successful UK tour.
Their latest offering features two exceptional guests: Chad Channing of Seattle majesties Nirvana and Luca Giovanardi from Italian psych combo Julie’s Haircut.
Sicilian multi-instrumentalist and producer Gioele Valenti is a key figure of the European underground music scene.
He is one half of acclaimed Occult Psych project Lay Llamas (Rocket Recordings) and the man behind Herself, a folktronica project that involved the likes of Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, John Fallon of The Steppes and Amaury Cambuzat of Faust and Ulan Bator.
He was also the guitarist of Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation. Chiefly, he gave rise to the genre-defying project JuJu, championed by the likes of Goatman and Capra Informis of GOAT.
JuJu’s latest album, ironically named Apocalypse Is God’s Spoiler, appears to encapsulate a clear-eyed and disillusioned perspective on our current era, reflecting a world saturated with mass-media, terminal hedonism, and pervasive total war.
From the debut album (Sunrise Ocean Bender on Fuzz Club), where African influences held sway, to the subsequent Fuzz Club releases (Our Mother Was A Plant, Maps And Territory), where the blending of shoegaze and psychedelic elements evolved into a post-punk fusion reminiscent of Joy Division, with an increasingly pronounced noise trend (particularly in the fourth album La Que Sabe), JUJU has now achieved a more mature formal balance, characterised by a pure and distinct identity.
With Apocalypse Is God’s Spoiler, JuJu once again redefines the game.
This album not only signifies an evolution from their established sound but also marks a return to their roots and a more pronounced embrace of “western” imagery.
If La Que Sabe sparked an irresistible vibration, enticing sacrilegious disco rituals entwined with shoegaze guitars, the new LP embraces that blend of western Post Punk, Shoegaze, Darkwave, Industrial, Synthpop and then anchors it to the Tribal and Occult Psych elements of JuJu’s origins.
JUJU is the alter-ego of Gioele Valenti, flanked by band members Vincenzo Schillaci and Andrea Chentrens.
Palermo, Italy
Sister 9 Records
(Past: Little Clouds / Fuzz Club Records)
Tribal Psych
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PRESS QUOTES
“You enter into a cathartic form of music, heavy stoner, psycho-funky rhythms, tribal, incandescent, and dirtier as it can get. Think of Monster Magnet on one of their superjudge trips.”
London Calling – Shades of Rock
Live review of London’s gig at The Victoria Dalston, March 17th, 2024
“It’s psychedelic but skewed away from the purple haze and flowers into spinning shards of concrete and broken glass. It’s a dense, massive sound that is completely absorbing me.”
Fighting Boredom (UK) – Live Review
“‘JuJu’ is an album of sweepingly melodic music that still retains a strange kind of intimacy. Just when you thought you might never want to hear another ‘psych rock’ album again in your life, along comes an artist who resets the co-ordinates and makes the past seem startling new again.” —The Quietus
“…JuJu fuses elements of psychedelia, glam, prog and post-punk into a propulsive, melodic art rock. Valenti describes JuJu’s self-titled debut long-players as “my personal tribute to the big music I’ve always loved, regardless of genre.” But the album also has a more serious intention, sourcing the refugee crisis as its primary inspiration: ”Where I live in Sicily, we literally see children die among the waves.” For Valenti, the music and words “conspire with ancient symbols and arcane memory, something buried deep in the collective unconscious of the Mediterranean, to give voice to a ‘drowning’ culture.”” — MOJO Magazine
A GIANT LEAP 