JOJI - Piss In The Wind

Joji – aka George Miller aka the famous Pink Guy, meme celebrity and star of countless deranged videos in the 2010s, most notably the one tied to the Harlem Shake phenomenon – is back with a new album, tellingly titled “Piss In The Wind”: a title that evokes irony but also melancholy, a mocking image that also suggests isolation and abandonment. And that's more or less the new direction of his art, at least since he ditched his various YouTube alter-egos to devote himself full-time to music.

The formula he plays on, by now well-tested, is that of dark love songs with maudlin, grotesque touches, like the already-classic “PIXELATED KISSES” that opens the record: a heavily distorted backing track and a simple lyric about the inability to communicate and to experience love in the modern age (“If you never hear from me, all the satellites are down/ Yeah, they're all fuckin' down”).

It's not that Joji strains to be all that poetic, since most of the work is done by the “fifty shades of sadness”, so to speak, explored across songs with different influences and characters, an eclecticism kept within the bounds of a single style. “Cigarette”, for instance, is a catchy, cadenced rap built on a melody that manages to be melancholic while still getting your foot tapping. “LOVE YOU LESS” heads in a completely different direction, with a dirty, muddy lo-fi guitar psychedelia that sounds like Mac DeMarco gone just a bit more grunge – minus the voice, obviously. “If It Only Gets Better” takes on the shape of a bedroom pop ballad with a decisive rhythm, but stops after just a minute.

“Sojourn” shifts gears again, with a hyper-distorted electronic wall of sound accompanying a track that sounds like it was written by an A.I. in the midst of an existential crisis. “DYKILY” hinges on a frantic jungle beat that feels completely out of place, and “Horses To Water” shines with a light of its own, with classical, baroque touches and a certain exotic flavor that make it one of the album's best tracks.

Halfway through the record explodes the power ballad – so to speak – of "Past Won't Leave My Bed", with an immediately memorable refrain that instantly earns its place alongside "Glimpse Of Us" among the singer's sentimental hits.

But the peak of "poetry" is probably reached with the eloquent "CAN'T SEE SH*T IN THE CLUB" (yes, the title really is censored like that), so alienating that it lands its punch regardless of any sarcastic intent – at this point, especially with someone like Joji, it hardly matters whether he's joking or being serious, because the two amount to the same thing.

Many of the album's songs run under two minutes, built on lo-fi noise arrangements, expressing (deliberately) mawkish love laments with shadowy, desolate tones: Joji comes across as an improbable post-ironic crooner, a love balladeer for the digital age who can only entrust his outbursts and his tears to adulterated, jarring, elusive sounds, searching for a solitary corner in which to stand apart and serve as the ideal echo chamber for his deepest emotions.

Don't be fooled, though: even if many of the tracks sound bare and essential, that doesn't mean there wasn't a precise sonic research behind them, one that shuns computers and synths to take refuge in skeletal guitar arpeggios and hints of hesitant piano. Against this, often with full force, come fast and/or forceful rhythm sections plus rumbling, wall-to-wall bass, reminding us that we're in 2026 and not on some alternative album by a misunderstood singer-songwriter from the '90s.

In any case, Joji continues down the path taken with the previous "SMITHEREENS" (2022) and also seems to reconnect with his early, murky and shadowy work from 2018, leaping straight over and seemingly rejecting more and more the "commercial" experience – featuring Diplo, Lil Yachty and Yves Tumor, just to name a few – of "Nectar" (2020). In fact: out of a 21-track tracklist, at least a dozen if not more sound as if they were deliberately recorded with the quality of demos or unfinished experiments handed over to print exactly as they were. And the point is that somehow it all adds up to a work that, all things considered, comes off well, because however much Joji tries to build himself an "alternative" artist image, the songs are, despite all the distortion and echo and muffling and roughness of the whole, hopelessly enjoyable to listen to. It's hard to picture, say, a 60-year-old listening to this record in the car to keep themselves company on a road trip; but a 30-year-old? They could do it easily, without needing to belong to any kind of alternative crowd. Joji is a mainstream artist, and "Piss In The Wild" confirms it. He's just mainstream in his own way. A well-tested way.

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28/02/2026