As White-Gluz continued to explore her new scenic surroundings, much like any great song, she started to discover that taking a closer look heralded complexities beneath the surface. Without any urban distractions, the details started to reveal themselves – some beautiful, some messy, some scary, some endlessly intricate. No Joy has always been a band celebrated for taking typical shoegaze formulae and turning them upside down – Bugland contains new elements as diverse as bright synth lines, a sax solo and metal-inspired vocals – so the natural world proved to be an inspiration in perfect alignment with her musical tendencies.

“I was fascinated by all the details; the colors, the grossness, the shapes. Everything is so unique and delicate and purposeful,” she says. “I tried to connect these things to music. A beetle shell will have these spots on them and I thought ‘What if I took the shape of those spots and put it in MIDI?’ What reverb feels like a moth wing? What guitar distortion is crumbly like soil?”

Bugland, like 2020’s Motherhood before it, took five years to fully develop. White-Gluz will tell you that the length is because of a desire for her creative process to be entirely different each time, learning new instruments, finding new sources of inspiration, and linking up with new collaborators. “If you stop moving, you rust,” she says.

There would likely be only a select few collaborators who would not only understand, but enthusiastically respond to the questions she poses at the end of that previous quote. Chicago experimentalist and producer Fire-Toolz, whose genre delineations on Wikipedia include jazz fusion, extreme metal, vaporwave, emo and cybergrind, was certainly one of them.

“I would bring in a demo, then I’d literally hand it off to Fire-Toolz and say ‘go crazy,’” she says. “Some songs she basically mixed and added some extra synths and guitars. Others she tore the songs apart and stitched them back together totally different. She is a genius with such a vast understanding of music from both a technical and a pop perspective. We both also were recording in our homes in rural settings, so we were both living these parallel lives in a way, and I think she understood my perspective on this record even more deeply because of that.”

One of White-Gluz’s favourite Fire-Toolz-induced studio hacks involved the sampling and remixing of a crackling, broken-down old mic cable into that delightfully all-encompassing shoegaze fuzz. An unexpected source of inspiration for the bonkers sound of Bugland, however, came from one of history’s most successful rock bands – even if it was their most experimental effort. White-Gluz has spoken a lot about her admiration for U2’s electronic odyssey, 1993’s Zooropa.

“‘Numb’ is one of the best U2 songs and I will die on that hill. Maybe because Bono is barely in it,” she says. “It’s such a funny record to make when you are the biggest band in the world, coming off a series of the biggest “rock” records ever. You can hear they were deeply exploring electronica and trying to push traditional rock songs into weirder directions. Sonically, though, I tried to avoid being too overly inspired by any one thing. I would instead be like ‘What if Boards of Canada were a four-piece noise band?’ and use that as a launching point to build on.”

While it’s just about as subsumed in the mix as most of the other lyrics on Bugland, ready for fans with the sharpest of ears to discover, there’s a voice memo near the start of the track “Bits” that has quite an interesting backstory – proving even further that White-Gluz has always been an activist. It’s a recording of White-Gluz reading a story she wrote at age 12, reimagining the life of Courtney Love.

“In my story she emerges as this celebrated genius, she is redeemed instead of vilified as she was and has been by the media,” she says. “I found a copy of this ‘novella’ and was pretty amazed at such a young age I had such criticism for music industry sexism. As you can imagine, it’s pretty hilarious in some ways given I was a child trying to write about some complicated topics, but also a very valid criticism of the treatment of women in general in the music industry.”

Whether she’s rallying her passions behind a noteworthy cause or her musical output, you can trust White-Gluz to throw herself fully into anything she does. And where she goes next will be an entirely new musical world to venture into.