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To be released on CD, cassette and digitally on June 20th, 2025. CD packaged in a gatefold digipak. Tape is a C42 on a transparent pink shell with full color labels packaged with a 2-sided 4-panel J-Card. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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Chicago-based composer/producer Joey Meland makes music under the moniker Cocojoey. Treating genre conventions and ostensible barriers between disparate musical vocabularies like playthings to gleefully smash and reshape at will, Meland channels decades of experience as a polymathic professional musician adept in styles like metal, jazz, synthpop, and experimental sound design into their infinitely combinatory compositions. STARS, their first album on Hausu Mountain, follows the self-released COCOJOEY’S WORLD (2022) with a spellbinding burst of heart-on-sleeve self-expression. The album finds Cocojoey indulging their most adventurous impulses in production and technical instrumental performance, launching into a constantly morphing program that contrasts day-glo earworm hooks against cathartic moments of screaming intensity. Describing their work as an outlet to navigate difficult emotions and negative experiences through overwhelming bursts of absurdity, Meland’s music exudes warmth and finger-wagging mischief as it exhumes the depths of their psyche with the pure-hearted goal of making their audience smile — when those listening find a chance to breathe within the ecstatic overstimulation.
Hearing Meland detail their musical background sounds like a fantasy protagonist’s origin story taking place in an elaborate role playing game. They started composing classical piano pieces at age six in their hometown of Madison, WI, fell in love with video game music and nu metal as a tween, and progressed from a one-person black metal project in middle school into extreme metal bands and noise projects in high school (don’t worry: recordings exist of all of these). After getting a degree in music composition and realizing they didn’t want anything to do with academia, Meland spent around a decade playing in bands as either a contributing songwriter or a hired hand, getting the chance to explore everything from jazz fusion to funk to folk/Americana to handling production for pop artists. Throughout this journey they often felt like an outsider, loving the communal aspect of music-making but always having to code-switch to match what was appropriate for projects involving other artists and songwriters. It took the COVID lockdown to give them the space to spiritually refocus and reject the musical aimlessness that had gripped them, all while coming to terms with their nonbinary gender identity and participating in therapy to develop coping mechanisms for depression and anxiety. Newly inspired to make music according to their own vision, Meland began to compose without thinking of fitting into any given aesthetic, but rather synthesizing all their experiences into the composite of Cocojoey. As if the universe had smiled upon this new arc, the project gathered steam as more and more opportunities arose to showcase their mind-melting live performances across the Chicago scene, leading them to meet friends and collaborators in the overlapping communities of cybergrind, metal, hyperpop, and the experimental grab-bag of the artists under the Hausu Mountain umbrella. By now in 2025, Cocojoey has been on multiple US-spanning DIY tours and continues to play throughout Chicago and the midwest with a passion and frequency that would leave most musicians gasping for air.
With STARS, Cocojoey more than lives up to the promise of their journey of musical self-realization. The album’s tightly constructed song cycle blasts the listener with moment after moment of novel juxtaposition, both in terms of genre and emotional energy, that keep us reeling in a state of delirious whiplash. Warp-speed piano solos over bossa nova-inflected chord progressions segue into detonations of death metal that front-load Meland’s ferocious screaming vocals and meticulously programmed double-kick drum patterns. Cocojoey pulls off the magic trick of harnessing their dazzling hands-on-keys dexterity and production wizardry only in service of big feelings and sincere sentimental payoff, while knowing exactly when to dial back the pyrotechnics to highlight the immediacy of their voice and their harmonically complex lead melodies. A strain of iridescent prog emerges in the sheer overload of notes and ideas, as drum n’ bass breaks collide with labyrinthine multi-time signature keyboard lines and bright flashes of clean vocals. Meland attests to their busy schedule of live performances (and to regular attendance at local karaoke spots) as the impetus to present their voice throughout STARS in more “naked” fashion, with less reliance on effects manipulation than their previous output, cycling through peppy toplines and vocal cord-tearing shrieks or settling into passages closer to spoken word that cram syllables into double time cadences. Their lifelong love of video game soundtracks shines in their whimsical synth arrangements that swirl with effervescence like the background music to discovering a hidden fairy grotto in an adventure game for Nintendo 64. Despite whatever contrasting styles might hit within any given Cocojoey song, Meland returns again and again to the upheaval and release provided by extreme metal — though that idiom lands with joyful exuberance, an abrasive yet heartwarming flavor whose positive energy carries through even to those who might not encounter screams and hyper-technical drum breakdowns in their typical listening regimen.
As often as we hear an album described as the artist’s “most personal work to date,” STARS finds Cocojoey unable to remove themself from the state of personal reflection, to the point that their lyrics often address the specificities of their own moods and mindsets. We hear an artist analyzing the fickle nature of human emotion itself, trying to come to grips with its strange intricacies and contradictions. Because Meland has developed the production and performance acumen to sonically mirror any feeling that they choose to address in their lyrics, we encounter moments of confusion paired with scrambled noise, or moments of joy coupled with euphoric synth arrangement. We hear them revel in the delight of spending time with their friends or their romantic partners or their beloved cat Coco (co-namesake of their project) and that feeling of bliss reaches us through the sounds that they choose to highlight. Meland takes their work seriously enough to compose music infused with such head-spinning complexity in each sudden transition or dextrous keyboard workout, but they make it clear that it’s not meant to be self-serious. We laugh and smile along with them as they leap off the stage into the crowd to howl like a demon with hands cupped around the microphone before scurrying back to their gear just in time to hit the next lustrous piano lead. STARS attains the ideal that Hausu Mountain strives for as it balances pure party-ready funtime energy with the capability of dropping jaws and inspiring awe with each unpredictable structural left turn. By composing music with so many moving parts and diverging skills necessary to bring it to life as they envision, Cocojoey presents us with the rare happiness of witnessing an artist pushing themself to their mental and physical limits — not only for our entertainment, but to convey to us the giant, messy clump of emotions that makes them who they are.
