'In Retrospect' / Daniel Joshua [EP Breakdown]
We are thrilled to celebrate Daniel Joshua releasing his highly anticipated debut EP, In Retrospect. Through four years of hard work Joshua has produced a genre-blurring and electrifying coming-of-age EP which explores the challenges of growing up in a capitalist Western country.
In “Future Past Present”, the fifth track of his new EP, In Retrospect, Daniel Joshua says, ‘This is how we walk on the moon’—the society that has been built is so foreign to our basic human needs and so unsustainable that we might as well be walking on the moon. There might as well not be any oxygen. Of society under capitalism, Bertrand Russell asked: ‘can anything more insane be imagined?’.
Built to accommodate not the majority, but a slim minority of white, ‘able-bodied’, heterosexual men, society is undoubtedly insane. The social model of disability theorises that people do not hold inherent disabilities—social structures disable them. And what’s more, this disabling is necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. Having taken so much away from so many, capitalism seeks, in its endless search to commodify, to fill the void it created with pre-packaged identities, and ‘micro-identities’. P.E. Moskowitz in their article ‘The Buzzfeedification of Mental Health’, says:
“The more capitalism wants us to feel scrambled so that we are isolated, automatised, and susceptible to replacing our own needs with the needs of capital, the more quickly capitalism needs to sell us an ever-wider array of identities to feel secure and logical within.”
During the coming-of-age process, our thinking is overwhelmingly occupied with our developing identities: our online presence, the people we associate with, status, career, sexuality, and so on. Each and every one of us has been asked to find our own sense of self in a society that, for the majority, could not feel any more fractured and disabling.
Joshua sings in second track “On and On”:
“Who’d have known the young and old, See colour differently”
The problems that the younger generation are required to navigate are unrecognisable from those of the generation before them. Julie Fenwick says in a Vice article concerning young people entering into the housing market that, ‘In inner-city Melbourne, the increase has seen the average house skyrocket from $44,000 to a blistering $962,250 over the last 40 years … More startling, the average wage has only multiplied six times in that same period’. Evidently the yard stick of buying a house in your early thirties set by our parents is no longer realistic.
For Joshua, In Retrospect reflects the strained interactions a young person might have with their uncle or an older family friend at a barbeque—a patronising interaction which invalidates their sense of developing identity on those crucial, formative years; perhaps their decision to pursue something in creative field, or even something so simple as the way they dress.
The EP also explores how an essential element of neoliberal capitalism is its capacity to isolate us—to make us feel like joy can only be found through means of private consumption. The constant inundation of headlines and negative news reports has been so overwhelming for some that ultimately it has only stood to encourage disengagement and apathy around social issues.
“Poison spilled from pixel screens,
Has taken its toll on me.”
The bombardment of billboards, and FOX FM radio air-horns, is enough to drive people to find quiet refuge in their phones—but maybe you’ll just find more poison there. So, as we become more isolated, and divided into our micro-identity factions, I ask the uncle at the barbeque, sneering at your creative career choice, what could be more valuable than a coming-of-age EP that not only provides an important critique of society but helps others to not feel so alone within it?
In our interview Joshua and I discussed the way that words tend to become homogenised—terrific, splendid, wonderful, awesome, and so on. I want to be clear that when I say that In Retrospect is awesome, I mean to say it inspires awe. Like Grimes’s 4ÆM, songs like “From Everything” are futuristic-sounding and skilfully genre-blurring (containing exciting pop and drum and bass elements). Yes, In Retrospect does seem to hold a similar dystopian thermality to Miss Anthropocene, only this release has the advantage of being more sensitive to real world adolescent experience. And additionally, while Grime’s release seems rooted in a sci-fi meets fantasy future dystopia, In Retrospect perceptively acknowledges the ways in which society is already dystopian.
To liken In Retrospect to Grimes is even potentially misleading, when discussing his inspiration, the artists Joshua mentioned were Floating Points, Jon Hopkins, and Thom Yorke. Though this EP is so of its own class that it feels arbitrary to try and draw too many comparisons with these artists—with sounds that seem to resemble some kind of weird, futuristic fax machine, or dial up internet, this EP is undeniably in a class of its own.
In Retrospect has all the appeal of clever pop music, but unlike pop music it is not initially easy to sing along to. The phrases and chord progressions often end in a way that subverts the listener’s expectation. And it is here maybe most we can see the jazzy Floating Points influence shining through. This combination of expected and unexpected musical elements has the effect of making this release both desirable to more mainstream pop audiences while ensuring that the uncanny musicality reflect the themes of confusion and uncertainty. This uncanniness, while partially due to the jazz influences, can also be attributed to Joshua’s use of the pentatonic scale, and his willingness to play around with the vocals. Joshua has incredible range and hits some amazing high notes seemingly without ever slipping into falsetto. Joshua knows exactly when a note needs to be held or when it calls for use of melisma and though this is only a small detail, it a huge part of why this EP feels so beautifully controlled and purposeful.
Another purposeful aspect, and one of In Retrospect’s greatest strengths, was Joshua’s effort to produce something that can encompass growing up from so many different angles. Taking inspiration from some of the ambiguity in William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, Joshua has managed to write lyrics that everyone is sure to get something out of—a quality that is always indicative of good art. This EP recognises the difficulty of emerging into adulthood in this debilitating and chaotic society, and states that this adversity is something that unites us. In Retrospect reassures us that it is fine that we are not meeting the milestones of the generation before us. Many of us have finished an undergrad only to realise what we were studying is not something we are interested in pursuing. If the EP hopes to impart anything at all, it is that we should feel ok with where we are now—even if it is not where we had hoped or thought we would be by this stage in our lives. Instead of worrying, pat yourself on the back for having made it this far and smile at where you are now.
Words by Jack Long (@patrick.di_henning)
Artwork by Samuel Byrnes (@samuelbyrnes)
Photos by Mathew Stanton and Henry Griffin (@mathewrstanton) + (@aybner)
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody
Firesticks Alliance - who campaign for Indigenous land management, cultural burning and looking after Country