Gold & Youth Share ‘Blush’ Video + Single
Today, Gold & Youth finally unveil their new album ‘Dream Baby’ (via Paper Bag Records), alongside its focus track/video, ‘Blush’.
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.”
‘Dream Baby’, due 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.
On the focus track, the band wrote:
“‘Blush’ is about the power of love, baby! Actually, though. It’s about finding some semblance of purpose and meaning and ability to make things better through our love for each other. We’re surrounded by these cascading crises caused by the systems we’ve allowed to take the reigns of our world. And perhaps the most sinister part is the sheer banality of it all, the slickness and efficiency with which we can be dehumanized and alienated from each other. And we’re constantly looking for ways to assert our humanity, to reclaim that, but it so often feels meaningless or futile, because we’re flailing, uncoordinated and individualized, in the only ways we know how, as disenchanted consumers filing customer complaints. But we’re fighting back against systems that thrive on our struggle as individuals, as we pour trillions of dollars into walls and bombs and drones and guns to maintain this farce that we all know, on some level, is complete bullshit. And the cracks that are showing now, I think more than anything, are because our willingness to coerce ourselves and each other is dependent on enough of us believing the myths, believing that maybe the emperor does have clothes, and believing in the seduction of the self above all. If we are going to make a more humane world, it’s not going to be through space colonies and flying cars dreamt up by megalomaniacal conmen. It will surely only come from collective action and humanity, and as daunting (and trite) as that sounds, that begins, in a very real way, with love. ‘Blush’ is about saying “sure, the world we’ve created is full of bullshit, but that’s not some inevitably, it doesn’t actually have to be this way, and we have an antidote, and it’s each other.
From a slightly less bong-hit philosophy perspective, we basically wanted to make a song that sounded like Stevie Nicks singing on top of a shoegazey version of ‘Heroes’ (although there’s a good argument that Robert Fripp’s guitar on Heroes is the true proto shoegaze part). A very special shout out on this song to my friend Matthew Cardinal (Nêhiyawak), who is a wildly creative and talented songwriter and musician. He added a bunch of incredible synth, guitar and ambient noise parts all over the record, and his work on Blush is my favourite.” Gold & Youth
Gold & Youth Live
December 9 (from Oct 22) – Capital Ballroom, Victoria (with Yukon Blonde)
December 11 (from from Oct 23) – Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver (with Yukon Blonde)
Gold & Youth Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter
Paper Bag Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / SoundCloud / YouTube
‘The Worse The Better’ by Gold & Youth | New Album, ‘Dream Baby’
