Vancouver's Gold & Youth are storming back with rose-coloured glasses in full-force on their new album Dream Baby, which arrives today via Paper Bag Records.
It follows the quartet's debut album Beyond Wilderness, which came out back in 2013 after the band formed following the demise of Matthew Lyall, Murray Mckenzie and Jeff Mitchelmore's previous project the Racoons. Gold & Youth's lineup is completed by veteran singer-songwriter and producer Louise Burns, who's been recording professionally since she was a member of teen all-girl band Lillix.
On Dream Baby, they probe the unconscious mind to explore liberation, maladaptive escapism and everything in between. "Is it a positive or a negative that we can kind of delude ourselves?" bandleader Lyall asked in a statement, before answering his own question: "It's both."
But it's also about our collective dreams for a new world in a moment of crisis. Lyall's maximalist vision leads to larger-than-life soundscapes that hearken equally to Leonard Cohen's poetic sardonicism and David Bowie's sharp art-rock stylings — meshed together with synth-driven new wave sensibilities all Gold & Youth's own. And of course, it's all "Placated by the soothing tones of some future chillwave renaissance," as Lyall puts it on "'90s Night."
Led by the singles "The Worse the Better," "Maudlin Days (Robocop)" and "Dying in LA," the record feels like coming in and out of a dissociative daze, ricochetting between sombre realizations of how deeply we're bound to systems of oppression and unadulterated bursts of heavenly hope; feather-soft tethers that keep us dreaming of a better tomorrow.
Stream Dream Baby on your platform of choice below.
Exclaim! recently interviewed Burns about how she and other women producers are transforming a field once dominated by men.
It follows the quartet's debut album Beyond Wilderness, which came out back in 2013 after the band formed following the demise of Matthew Lyall, Murray Mckenzie and Jeff Mitchelmore's previous project the Racoons. Gold & Youth's lineup is completed by veteran singer-songwriter and producer Louise Burns, who's been recording professionally since she was a member of teen all-girl band Lillix.
On Dream Baby, they probe the unconscious mind to explore liberation, maladaptive escapism and everything in between. "Is it a positive or a negative that we can kind of delude ourselves?" bandleader Lyall asked in a statement, before answering his own question: "It's both."
But it's also about our collective dreams for a new world in a moment of crisis. Lyall's maximalist vision leads to larger-than-life soundscapes that hearken equally to Leonard Cohen's poetic sardonicism and David Bowie's sharp art-rock stylings — meshed together with synth-driven new wave sensibilities all Gold & Youth's own. And of course, it's all "Placated by the soothing tones of some future chillwave renaissance," as Lyall puts it on "'90s Night."
Led by the singles "The Worse the Better," "Maudlin Days (Robocop)" and "Dying in LA," the record feels like coming in and out of a dissociative daze, ricochetting between sombre realizations of how deeply we're bound to systems of oppression and unadulterated bursts of heavenly hope; feather-soft tethers that keep us dreaming of a better tomorrow.
Stream Dream Baby on your platform of choice below.
Exclaim! recently interviewed Burns about how she and other women producers are transforming a field once dominated by men.
