It’s the most wonderful time of the yeeeeeeear! Yes, the Joyzine Advent Calendar is back once again to bring you 24 days of fantastic free music downloads from a amazing array of our favourite artists. This year marks the 21st edition of our online calendar making it (as far as we’re aware) the longest running on the net (though we’re always happy to be corrected). As always, every track is completely free to download and we don’t require you to sign up for a mailing list (though you can if you want to) or hand over your personal data – it’s our way of saying thank you to everyone who’s visited the site during 2024 and to hopefully bring a few more listeners to some very deserving artists.
However, if you do enjoy the tracks we would love you to consider making a donation to our chosen cause, which this year is the wonderful First Timers Fest, a brilliant grassroots DIY organisation helping people take the first step into making music. Alumni include Joyzine faves Big Joanie, Panic Pocket, Charmpit and Breakup Haircut, with many more great bands coming through every year. We asked First Timers for a few words about what they do:
First Timers Fest is all about supporting new people into music! Yes that’s right, we mean you! We demystify the music making process through a series of beginners workshops that encourage people to try something new, no pressure to start a band after. The festival is open to everyone, but we particularly want to encourage people from marginalised groups to apply.
Next year we will be hosting our workshops at the Cavendish in Stockwell but following a sell out festival at the Victoria in Dalston we have decided to host the festival at a much bigger venue: The Oslo Hackney! This will take place on 4th May 2025. See you there!!!
Make a donation to First Timers
We’ve got a sleigh-full of fantastic tracks for you again this year, including some festive tunes, plenty of exclusives and some of our favourite songs of 2024. Let’s get crack(er)ing!
2024 has been somewhat of an eventful year, with wars raging in Sudan, Ukraine and the Middle East, political turmoil in France and Germany, the end of 14 years of Tory rule in the UK, the overthrow of the brutal Assad regime in Syria and of course Donald Trump returning to power in the United States. With everything changing at a terrifying pace and nothing seeming certain any more, we need bands, writers and artists more than ever to help us make sense of what on Earth is going on – mopey songs about broken relationships (much as we love many of them) just aren’t going to cut it. We need a band with the guts to get down in the gutter and rake through the mire of 21st Century society to help us see the world outside of our ever more algorithmically sealed bubbles.
Enter The Indelicates and their seventh studio album Avenue QAnon. Part alt-musical concept album, part immersive documentary, the eleven tracks take us Stateside into a world of characters, each of whom have fallen down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole for one reason or another. Some of the people we meet over the course of the album are sympathetic and relatable, some are simply awful, but all of them provide a window into a subculture that seems almost incomprehensible to most outside of it, one that has become sufficiently influential to tip the balance in the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world.
Today’s track is an acoustic demo of ‘Mom Is Waking Up’, one of the pivotal tracks on the album that follows a seemingly ordinary American mother, disillusioned with a life not living up to the ideal she’d been sold since childhood, which leads her down a very different path.
Avenue QAnon is available now on all the usual streaming services and in a huge array of physical and digital packages here.
We caught up with Simon and Julia to find out more.
Tell us a little about your track please
‘Mom Is Waking Up’ is a song from our new album, Avenue QAnon about a redpilled Gen X Q follower – kind of based on Ashli Babbitt who was shot and killed during the January 6th insurrection – but also an amalgam of the many otherwise sensible and relatable people who have spent the last six years going completely insane. This acoustic demo of it was mostly recorded live to a bass guitar backing track and was on YouTube for a little while before being removed for promoting harmful conspiracy theories. We did appeal, pointing out that this was, in fact, the exact opposite of what the video was doing, but to no avail – so in a very real sense, this is a BANNED SONG TOO EXTREME FOR YOUTUBE THAT *THEY* DON’T WANT YOU TO HEAR.
What have you been up to in 2024?
Having succumbed to the hibernatory impulses of post-lockdown malaise, we finally released our record and played some proper headline shows, as well as supporting some old friends to keep our hand in. We spent every waking hour in our discord oversharing with the best darn fans in the business. We are also trying to reinvent ourselves as pushy stage parents and made a great christmas single with our weird home educated children – find out more and listen here.
And what do you have planned for the next 12 months?
Mainly hiding in The Winchester and waiting for all this to blow over.
Christmas songs – love them or hate them? Why?
We are appalled at the idea that there might exist people for whom the answer to this is ‘hate them’. Christmas songs are the best! Even ‘Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime’ is good, and that’s objectively terrible. I suggest your readers take in our increasingly worthwhile YouTube playlist of christmas songs that we were involved with and then move straight on to the classics. Did you know that there’s a specific chord that makes christmas songs christmassy? The minor seventh with a flattened fifth – it’s crazy because within Christian organist circles they call it the ‘word of the father’ chord and love it so much that they print it on T-Shirts and in pop music they call it the Mariah Carey chord and write blogs about it – but almost no one makes the connection between these broadly unconnected parallel communities despite the fact that they are both obsessed with the SAME CHORD. Look, Christmas music is the greatest. Even Carols. We’re great at carols, if we go to a carol service people come up and ask us if we’ve thought about joining the choir.
Download ‘Mom Is Waking Up (Acoustic)‘
Make a donation to First Timers
The Indelicates: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bluesky: Simon – Julia / Discord
Catch up on all of this year’s Advent Calendar Tracks so far:
1: Piney Gir – Reindeer
2: Gabriel Minnikin – Said Information
3: LOUD WOMEN ft. Smallways, Butterknife, Daddy Issues, Witch Spit, R.U.B, Vipersnatch, Worm Girlz, Lady Lazarus and Stabbitha & The Knifey Wifeys
4: First Timers Fest ft. Gay Skeleton Club and Skutterfly
5: Goo Records ft. Jopy, The Stanford Family Band, Owners Club and The Roebucks
6: Dead Horse – Historic
7: Gemma Rogers – Never Have I Ever
8: Umarells – Closer
9: MJ Hibbett – Moshi Twistmas
Check back tomorrow for another free festive download!
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