The Jungle Giants

To live in the world of The Jungle Giants, you really have to live in Sam Hales’ head. That’s usually a riotous place to be; slammed full of big dance tunes, multiple bands and electric live shows all over the world.

The Jungle Giants have been at it for fifteen years and are on the cusp of five albums. But when you are the band—in the most Kevin Parker sense of the word—and the world as you know it starts falling to pieces, the music inside your head might start to sound a little different. That is, if you’re even hearing music at all.

Experiencing Feelings of Joy is an apt title not only for the listener, but its creator. Careening from crushing personal loss to hopeful exuberance, it’s an album Sam Hales could only write after thinking he’d never be able to write again.

By mid-2022 the cracks were starting to show. “There were a couple years there where my accountant told me that I'd done more shows than there were days in the year,” he laughs. Hales had reached a creative apex—playing in and writing hits for two globetrotting dance bands simultaneously, with the second, Confidence Man, booked to play Glastonbury. He was also engaged to their singer. Then everything happened all at once.

In a few months Hales tore up his leg in a jetski accident and was confined to a hospital bed, played Glastonbury on crutches after intense rehab, split up with his fiancée and parted ways with Confidence Man. “I had to reform what my life was,” he explains. “In all honesty, I experienced a lot of depression over that period because unfortunately I’m one of those people who process things on delay.” Back in Australia he found himself floundering for the first time.

“I was going through heartbreak, right? And then I started to get writer's block, which was such a foreign concept to me. I’d always thought it wasn’t real! But my value system had changed. I'd left this band and I'd left my fiance and it was all enveloped by music. So for a while there, music was really painful.”

He ended up in therapy and enrolled in The Artist’s Way, a 12-week creative program that helped him uncover what was blocking his ability to make music. “I had to dig. I had to really bring up these emotions, so that I could start writing these sad, hopeful or joyous songs. When I was just making a dance banger, I felt reasonably capable. But it didn't feel good. It didn't feel like it was about what was in my heart or head. These are songs that were about the ending of my engagement. About loss, missing my partner.”

Things you may not know about Sam Hales: he was a competition-winning flautist at school, was raised by a single Irish mother, turned to music partly to escape her abusive ex-husband, adopted his falsetto after hearing Bon Iver, and curates mini-rave listening sessions for his band with “laser lights and smoke machines” once he’s finished an album.

Before this record Hales kept the wheels spinning fast enough to avoid deep reflection. In that respect, Experiencing Feelings of Joy is different. It is the best music Hales has written that took him the longest to write, precisely because he managed to overcome one of the darkest periods of his life.

The most enduring dancefloor tunes are often tinged with melancholy, which Hales channels on tracks like the thumping earworm “Where Can I Put All My Love?” and the 90s acid-jazz orchestration of “All The Time In The World.” He writes from the rhythm section up and pushed himself further on this record, commissioning live strings (“they provide this natural emotion, it just sounds like a warm blanket on a cold night”) and opening with a song for his mother, the sing-rap opener “Tell Me How It Feels.” Closer “The World’s Getting Smaller” is an atypically sparse number that details the slow unravelling of his relationship: “even though the world's getting smaller, why do you feel so far away?”

With a record big on feelings and even bigger on floor-fillers, Hales has naturally refocused his sights internationally. “It just feels good to just be spreading joy and love on a global scale,” he says. He credits his immigrant mum from Ireland for an international outlook. Having previously taken on the Americas, he now has his sights set on Europe. “It’s all built off love and obsession. I will never stop making Jungle Giants music; it’s who I am and it's only going to get bigger.”

Whether he’s getting a taco before a show in Mexico or kicking back with friends in Melbourne, Hales is glad he’s managed to tap into something dormant but very real. “I'd overextended and kind of cooked it, but I really found myself,” he says. “That’s where the joy comes from, having this unwavering hope even after experiencing adversity. This record is what everything culminated in for me, because I'm so in love with it and I'm so addicted to music again.”

Morning Silk is an alternative indie rock/pop project based in New York City, led by producer and multi-instrumentalist Frank Corr. Known for crafting immersive soundscapes, the project fuses lush synths, heavy guitar textures, and big drums into a signature sound that sets it apart in the NYC music scene.

Corr first emerged as a producer for artists such as The Drums, Liam Benzvi, and Yuno before channeling his cinematic instincts into Morning Silk. His 2023 EP Dark City Silence captures the pulse of New York at night—blurring the lines between club euphoria and urban solitude through a mix of electronic atmosphere and gritty guitar work.