THE JOY FORMIDABLE

MCD presents

THE JOY FORMIDABLE

+ guests

The Joy Formidable have announced a Dublin date on their upcoming tour at Whelans on Sunday 16th October. Tickets priced €15.00 inclusive of booking fee are on sale this Friday, 17 June at 9am from Ticketmaster outlets and online at www.ticketmaster.ie

Some things are just meant to be. Thus it was that Ritzy Bryan and Rhydian Dafydd met at school and discovered their shared love of music. The pair, opinionated and deeply in love with the whole idea of being in a band, started to spend time at North Walian music mecca The Buckley Tivoli, gaining inspiration and experience from the procession of touring and local bands that took to the stage. With Ritzy’s parents enormous, exhaustive record collection delivering an encyclopaedic library of popular music in all its forms the die was cast. Nevertheless, in an otherwise provincial, sleepy setting, itchy feet and a fleeing were inevitable; Ritzy to Washington DC and Rhydian to Manchester, where they enjoyed separate but strangely parallel journeys as singer songwriters. It was a single phone call that reunited them, this time they would write and record together.

Back in North Wales a flurry of early recordings revealed a voice emerging; the beauty of their surroundings against the sadness of personal circumstances tugging conflictingly in their songs and selves. They decided to move, choosing London as their new home and a base for their live aspirations.

With Matt Thomas on drums, a conjoint surrealist and raw, forceful drummer, The Joy Formidable thrived on the live front. Soundscape layers spiked by the nakedness of a 3-piece, gargantuan, clamorous bass and guitars that come in waves laid down a musical bed on which Ritzy’s voice could seethe and coo in equal measure. Little wonder that early shows gained the band a well deserved reputation as a band you had to see, pushing The Joy Formidable into the public consciousness from the very beginning. With a sound that melds the huge expanses of their native Mold countryside to the hectic nature of their new domicile, The Joy Formidable create a music that is by turns sublime and gothic, punctuating passages of sheer beauty with shards of dissonance and anger, a new loud quiet dynamic for a new decade.

Having sold out multiple UK tours throughout 2009 and taken to the road in this country in support of the likes of Editors, this self contained band, recording studio, label and design company in one has also made their mark across the globe, touring Europe with The Temper Trap and visiting the US with Passion Pit, where support dates were supplemented by their first two headline US shows, both sold out and the subject of high praise amongst the cognoscenti of New York City and the US music scene.

The Joy Formidable released their debut album The Big Roar in January. Tickets for their Whelan’s headliner on October 16th are on sale this Friday at 9am

TICKETS:

€15.00 inclusive of booking fee are on sale this Friday, 17 June at 9am from Ticketmaster & WAV Tickets [Lo-Call 1890 200 078].