Joy on the surface, heartbreak underneath – The Jungle Giants’ brightest record might be their most hard-earned yet.
Australian indie-dance outfit The Jungle Giants return with Experiencing Feelings of Joy!, a record that does exactly what it promises, delivering euphoric, dance music while quietly carrying the weight of everything it took to get there.
Bright, expansive and effortlessly propulsive, yet threaded with an emotional depth that lingers beneath the surface.
At the centre of The Jungle Giants is multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Hales. The band’s creative engine and constant reinvention point.
Experiencing Feelings of Joy! arrives in the wake of a period of intense personal rupture for Hales. One that reshaped both his life and his relationship to music entirely.
What unfolds here isn’t just an album, but a narration of heartbreak, burnout and creative disorientation transformed into something luminous and strangely celebratory.
By mid-2022, Hales found himself confronting a series of life-altering collapses at once. The end of a decade-long relationship, a serious jetski injury that left him physically wrecked, and–perhaps most disorienting of all–a sudden and unfamiliar creative block after years of relentless output.
“I was going through heartbreak, right? And then I started to get writer’s block, which was such a foreign concept to me,” Hales reflects. “I’d always thought it wasn’t real. But my value system had changed.”
That rupture became a turning point, and Hales began rebuilding his creative life from scratch.
Therapy and a 12-week course through The Artist’s Way became key tools in re-establishing not just productivity, but to feeling, memory and intention.
What emerged is an album that moves fluidly between emotional catharsis and pure physical release.
Tracks like ‘Where Can I Put All My Love?’ and ‘All The Time In The World’ sit in that familiar sweet spot. Uplifting, rhythm-forward production layered with emotional contradiction, euphoria and ache coexisting strangely peacefully.
Across Experiencing Feelings of Joy! Hales also pushes the project’s sonic palette outward.
Live strings and more cinematic textures weave through the record. Expanding its scale while still anchored by the rhythmic precision and dance-floor instinct that has defined The Jungle Giants’ sound since the beginning.
Despite the emotional weight embedded in its origins, the record never settles into melancholy.
Instead, it moves toward something brighter and more defiant: a reassertion of joy as something earned rather than given.
“I really found myself,” Hales says. “That’s where the joy comes from—having this unwavering hope even after experiencing adversity. I’m so in love with it and I’m so addicted to music again.”
The band will take the record on the road this summer across Australia and New Zealand, with further international dates planned for 2026.
For The Jungle Giants, Experiencing Feelings of Joy! is a reclamation. A reminder that joy isn’t the absence of struggle, but what sometimes emerges after it.
