“Joy” is about waking up on the kitchen floor and suddenly the anxieties of everything that’s happened, everything you’ve done and said, the problems of the world you’ve been trying to forget, all of the sudden come flooding back in, and then you get a phone call from that one person who can set your head straight. I guess sometimes redemption can come from the smallest, most innocuous pieces of human contact, and also I wanted to touch on the irony that we’ve looked at phone addiction earlier on the album, but ultimately it’s the thing that pulls you back from the brink. In these bizarre, weird, complicated times, it’s easy to be nihilistic and pessimistic and I’m like that very often, but I wanted the album to have an arc. It would have been easy to end in a super-negative way, but forcing ourselves to have a little bit of optimism felt important to the album.

Dan Smith via Billboard

The album is set over a night out, and this song comes at about 8:30 in the morning. Having passed out at some point and everything is blurred out into oblivion with the previous song, which is called “Those Nights.” “Joy” is waking up on the kitchen floor, which is never fun, and after this big night out during the apocalypse—which is what our album’s about—is waking up on the kitchen floor and I guess realizing where you are and all of the things you were avoiding on the night out and all of the problems in your life, and the problems of the world all coming flooding back in.

I’ve definitely woken up in some weird places, but maybe not actually a kitchen floor. It was sort of nodding to Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ album, where she talks about crying on the kitchen floor and it was super evocative. In my house, where a lot of nights seem to end up in London when we’re home, the main room is the kitchen so that’s where we hang out.

I think this chorus just kind of arrived in my mind at some point and I would have sung it into my phone, probably when we were on tour. I was probably looking like a complete weirdo ducking off into a corner somewhere to whisper-sing into my voice notes.

I remember making the demo in my room at home, which is where a lot of our songs kind of start their life. I came up with the beat and the chorus at the same time. And the chorus felt like it needed loads of vocal so I layered up, like a big choir of me. It was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It felt sort of uplifting which is kind of our place on this record that is relatively dark in a lot of respects.