Rising from the ashes of personal tragedy and self-exploration, Pflames unveils his most personal and triumphant project to date: “The Joy Algorithm.” Out now on Bandcamp, the 19-track “album is a reckoning, a reflection, and, ultimately, a road map back to joy.
Put together in the wake of intense personal loss and self-doubt, this album doesn’t hide from its scars. But rather than wallow in melancholy, Pflames constructs, in effect, a sonic code for emotional survival, turning trauma into melody and sorrow into soulful resilience. The result is an album that doesn’t simply recount adversity; it crackles with the energy of rediscovery.
Over the course of its nearly hourlong runtime, “The Joy Algorithm” nimbly bends genre boundaries. Soul, hip hop, and some experimental frills meld under Pflames’ unwavering emotional direction, with each track functioning like a chapter in a narrative where the pain is never the last word.
Two off-the-bat highlights in “High Anxiety” and “More Heartbreaks (feat. Mike Notes)” reveal the emotional scope that permeates this collection. “High Anxiety” conveys the racing thoughts and hollow ache of grief, while “More Heartbreaks” wallows in heartbreak with a candor that is both harrowing and cathartic. Mike Notes’ feature provides another poignant depth, making for a soulful conversation you can’t shake for quite some time after this song finishes.
What elevates this album is its humanity for all of that heaviness. The Joy Algorithm never loses its focus: hope. It aims for truth. Pflames doesn’t welcome us into a slick studio fantasy but into a raw, potently imperfect world where happiness is won gut-grindingly, not God-given.
If you’ve ever had to put yourself back together, “The Joy Algorithm” could be the album that holds a mirror up to your post-trauma healing. It’s that sort of record that grabs you by the collar and says, “I’ve been there too.” It is a survival guide for the heart. Through sound, Pflames has encoded his healing, and now, "The Joy Algorithm" is ours.