“If you never hear from me, all the satellites are down,” George Miller, known to the music world as Joji, murmurs through walls of heavy distortion and reverb. The satellites, in fact, have been down for a while; 2022’s Smithereens and its ensuing tour, cut short for health reasons, offered the last glimpse anyone would get of Joji for the next three years.
In the meantime, the world kept spinning, and the landscape surrounding (and heavily influenced by) Joji has shifted. New monarchs of sad-boy music have been crowned and dethroned as the electronic lo-fi pop space grew oversaturated with the likes of Artemas and sombr and the genre itself drifted from teenage bedrooms into TikTok feeds. In this new context, a Joji drop almost felt like a peculiar time capsule straight from youthful solitude — the one you tiptoe around for a second too long, not quite sure how to approach the encounter with the iPod playlist-shaped past.
But nostalgia is a fragile currency and, in a strange relief, Joji’s first new release sounds nothing like his older work. Assertive and mature like a gut punch, yet vulnerable in the sense of decay rather than gentleness, “Pixelated Kisses” expresses itself like an opening of a new sonic era, still hallmarked with the signature breathiness of a man perpetually unsure if he is allowed to speak — a quality that resonated so universally with young adults all around the world. The absence of any deeper compositional ambition on this track, however, is almost remarkable. “Pixelated Kisses” offers little beyond a gritty, catchy, but ultimately repetitive loop of sound and about four new lines of poetry. There’s a quiet greed to it, too; a reminder that music is still a business: the track’s runtime, not even reaching two minutes, makes it the ultimate replay bait, artificially scoring twice as many streams as a full-length composition would get.
The same philosophy unfurls further on the second release of this era, “If It Only Gets Better” — an almost-ambient snippet of soft instrumentals drifting in space for a minute and eight seconds, blissfully unanchored by a beginning, an ending or the very notion of a chorus. If it packs a bite, it’s the soft and sleepy kind, too discernible to be fully overlooked yet not quite developed enough to warrant a closer inspection. Taken together, the two singles resonate more as album teasers and less as songs, leaving the listener wondering whether the decision-making behind them is rooted in clever design or something more akin to laziness.
But if “Pixelated Kisses” reads like a fresh current and “If It Only Gets Better” lingers in the liminal filler space, neither elevating nor drowning the upcoming record, the third single, “Past Won’t Leave My Bed,” lands squarely in the unsettlingly familiar territory. It’s the only track of this rollout that could pass as a full-length song, and yet, somehow, the least interesting. The energy that once felt introspective now rings recycled: the same stuttering melancholy shrouded in the same mid-tempo haze, but without the bent-but-unbroken backbone of feeling that made Joji’s earlier work ache. This release cycle, having started with an imperfect but confident step forward, slipped into a muted decrescendo long before the full album had a chance to face the world. It is, however, unclear what would stand better as the first post-hiatus release: a collection of snippets optimized for short-form content or a mixed bag of old emotions pacing the same room, still hoping to sound profound. Across his three new singles, Joji tries to offer bite-sized samples of both — and none of them quite land.
While one is allowed a dose of cautious optimism, the recently announced runtime of the upcoming record hints at more of the same. Clocking in at 45 minutes that somehow manage to contain 21 vacuum-packed tracks, the album promises to be compact — perhaps too compact for a post-hiatus long-play with ambitions to fulfill. It’s true that music does not operate in a rule-driven space and not every record needs to compete for a Guinness record in duration, but it seems that Joji, while breaking away from the shackles of radio replayability, voluntarily situates himself in a digital purgatory of soundtracks for YouTube shorts. Is becoming background music to an attention economy an inevitability for a 21st-century artist, or does it sometimes take the shape of a personal and voluntarily made choice? For Joji, joining the digital fatigue war on the side of digital fatigue seems to be the answer.
Arina Zadvornaya is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. She can be reached at az499@cornell.edu.
