THE JUNGLE GIANTS TURN HEARTBREAK INTO A DANCE FLOOR AT TULIPS.
The Australian indie-dance heavyweights arrive in Fort Worth on October 21 with a new album that had to fall apart before it could feel joyful again.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
The Jungle Giants have spent the better part of fifteen years making the sort of indie-pop that seems almost genetically engineered for a crowded room: enormous choruses, elastic basslines, guitars that know when to get out of the way and enough electronic pulse underneath everything to turn a rock show into something closer to a dance party. On Wednesday, October 21, the Australian quartet bring all of it to Tulips, a room intimate enough that a band accustomed to festival stages should feel almost comically oversized.
This time, though, there is considerably more going on beneath the surface. Their fifth album, Experiencing Feelings of Joy, arrived in May following one of the most difficult periods of frontman Sam Hales’ life, written after the end of a decade-long artistic and romantic relationship left him wondering whether he wanted to make music at all. Instead of disguising that collapse, Hales slowly began building songs out of it, allowing the record to move through grief, confusion, nostalgia, loneliness and eventually something resembling optimism.
The clever part is that very little of it sounds miserable. “Tell Me How It Feels” immediately throws open the windows, while “Where Can I Put All My Love” places genuine melancholy inside the kind of four-on-the-floor rhythm that makes standing still increasingly difficult. “How Can I Replace You,” “Are You Seeing Anyone?” and “Is It Love?” keep circling the messier questions that arrive once a relationship is over, but The Jungle Giants refuse to turn any of them into slow-motion breakup songs.
The Jungle Giants understand that dancing and sadness are not opposites, and Experiencing Feelings of Joy pushes the idea further than anything they have made before. These are songs about trying to find your footing again, delivered with the precision of a band that knows exactly how to make several hundred people move at once.
It also makes Tulips an unusually good place to see them. There will be no enormous festival field separating the band from the crowd, just a stage, a packed room and songs built to keep expanding until there is nowhere left for them to go.
If Experiencing Feelings of Joy is the sound of Sam Hales learning how to enjoy music again, Fort Worth gets to experience the considerably easier part: dancing to it.
