JoyWire

Itʼs an oft-used cliché to describe music made by passionate, free-spirited artists as “timeless” but on visiting the songs of JoyWire, itʼs hard not to think of them as complete outsiders. These unique, prescient, zealous songs resonate with basic realities about the human condition and seem to exist beyond the perishable boundaries of fashion and style.

Listen closer, however, and it becomes clear that JoyWire songs are not so much time-less, as time-full; packed with an awareness of precious moments, vanishing hopes, urgent social pressures, fervent memories, so that they might better be thought of as melodic time- bombs, primed to go off at any time.

Thus, JoyWire is an American Indie-Rock-Tronica band hailing from Chicago Illinois and formed in 2022 by Leroy Bocchieri.

JoyWire is, and always has been, Leroy Bocchieri. Though his creative life was nurtured under the sober glare of the Midwest in the late 70ʼs and early 80ʼs, reacting to punk, Disco, thereʼs a vast scope within the material. His genre is all his own. It is music of long shadows, high hopes, channeled frustration, feverish passions, and sweetly disturbing poignancy. It is pop and rock, blues and dance, soul-ish with scrappy pop.

The glaring, jarring wonder of Leroyʼs catalogue is the fundamental underlying assumption that songs matter, music matters, lyrics matter, and they should be firmly built upon urgent truth, with truth on top. Everything sounds like it HAD to be made, which may partly explain why there have been comparatively few Leroy/JoyWire records over the years. Indeed the absences in-between releases became the fertile ground for his evolving sonic palette.