The Joy Thieves Go To Hell with DJ Darryl Hell

The Joy Thieves are a Chicago-based industrial collective built around producers Dan Milligan and James Scott. Rather than a fixed lineup, the project functions as an ever-shifting roster of 80-plus contributors drawn from across the industrial, rock, punk, darkwave, hip hop, and experimental worlds. Since signing to London's Armalyte Industries in 2018, the band has delivered eleven releases, threading a fiercely political, unapologetically anti-fascist sensibility through music that manages to stay cohesive despite the sheer number of hands involved.

Their latest full-length, "Apocalypse Pending", finds the collective turning its own process inside out. Instead of assembling songs from finished contributions, Milligan and Scott gathered hundreds of unrelated musical fragments and reconstructed them into new tracks, drawing heavily on the sampling techniques of late-80s and early-90s hip hop. Fronting the record is the unmistakable voice of Chris Connelly, who moves between seething rage and coolly delivered beat poetry across a dense sonic collage aimed squarely at corporate impunity, state violence, and public desensitization. Aggressive yet precise, confrontational yet refined, Apocalypse Pending plays less like a set of songs than a single evolving piece of political and emotional commentary.

In this video, DJ Darryl Hell (Furnace Records) met with fellow Joy Thieves members Dan Milligan, James Scott, Jane Jensen, and Chris Connelly, to talk about their new album "Apocalypse Pending", their musical roots, defending one's ideals in artistic communities, and the importance of making music without compromise.