‘The Worse The Better’ by Gold & Youth | New Album, ‘Dream Baby’
Gold & Youth announce their brand new LP ‘Dream Baby’, and share its first singe ‘The Worse The Better’.
A bright, uptempo alt-pop melancholy underscores Lyall’s croons through early 21st century malaise on the verse: “As our beauty starts to fade in our grand decay/The boujie boys high-fiving us all through one big last parade.” The chorus bursts with dazzling synths and glittery guitars beneath Lyall’s conviction: “The worse the better is coming our way!”
Are dreams the stuff of liberation, of beauty and freedom and life and future? Or are they a dose of painkiller that enables normalcy, a carrot perpetually dangling on a miles-long stick?
This is the anxious central tension of ‘Dream Baby’, the long-awaited second full-length record from Vancouver’s Gold & Youth. “Is it a positive or a negative that we can kind of delude ourselves?” asks front person and primary songwriter Matthew Lyall. “It’s both.”
“The Worse the Better is a fun little bop about water-sliding into the abyss. A woozy anthem for the downwardly mobile about the crushing banality of evil rendered by the acid vat of late-stage capitalism as we work dead-end jobs at the end of history and pray for some technocratic savior to build us a biodome on Mars. Loud and fast and then sputtering and wheezing, kind of like a dream machine going kaputt as it runs out of gas. Truly the feel-bad hit of the summer! Tell your friends.” Gold & Youth
‘Dream Baby’, due out November 5 via Paper Bag Records, maps these complexities over a sharp, saccharine web of sounds: Bowie-ish art-rock, Leonard Cohen’s sardonic piano wit, throbbing new wave, and alt-pop that darts between arena ambition and bedroom cynicism. Lyall’s vision here is sprawling and maximalist with a healthy hint of the apocalyptic and the absurd—an aesthetic and tonal match for our times. It’s a fitting melange for a record that ricochets, dazed, past the horrors of extraction capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy, but all the while clinging for dear life to the comfort and power of interpersonal relations and the possibilities they suggest. ‘Dream Baby’ is about the myriad systems we’ve devised and implemented to damn our world, but it’s also committed to cultivating and protecting hope and resistance amidst it all. Against Raytheon, Amazon, heat waves, and state violence, we have each other and our collective dreams for a better world.
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